DEFIANCE…Bombings, Assassinations and Murder, oh my!

Defiance 202, “In My Secret Life”

[photos: Ben Mark Holzberg/Syfy]

To start the episode, Nolan (Grant Bowler) and his daughter Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) have returned to Defiance and, to the great surprise of no one, immediately run afoul of the E-Rep guards who throw Irisa in jail while Nolan goes to meet the new mayor to sort it all out.  There he is reunited with Amanda (Julie Benz), but their reunion is interrupted by a shrill bomb explosion in the marketplace (a shrill bomb being full of shrill bugs, weaponized parasite technology from the Pale Wars).   In the aftermath of the bombing, Amanda weasels Nolan back in as Lawkeeper to track down the bomber, leaving a put-out Tommy (Dewshane Williams) to guard Irisa.  Those two reconnect after what they shared last season, but they are not the same people as they were 9 months ago.

Meanwhile, the Tarr family has their own troubles as Stahma (Jaime Murray) is leaned on by Mayor Pottinger (James Murray, no relation) to end her “Blue Devil” drug business, in the interest of morale and safety of his men.  He just happens to keep all her leftover stock.  Back at the prison camp, Datak Tarr (Tony Curran) and Doc Yewll (Trenna Keating) plot the assassination of Mayor Pottinger, as the set-up for an escape.  However, things do not go as planned; Pottinger is more cagey than they expect, and not everyone leaves with all their fingers…

Back in Defiance, Nolan soon finds himself on the trail of the bomber with the help of E-Rep soldier Berlin (Anna Hopkins), who also happens to be romantically involved with Tommy.  This doesn’t sit well with all the denizens of Defiance, whose last memory of Nolan was him shooting a teenage boy last season.  Our stalwart heroes find out there is a second shrill bomb in play, placed by Skevur (Michael Dyson) on Stahma Tarr’s car, in retaliation for  the beating he received at the hands of the Tarr family last episode.  Nolan defuses the bomb, saves the day, and finds himself back in the good graces of wildly fickle townspeople of Defiance in short order.

In the aftermath of the attempted bombing, Stahma pushes her son Alak (Jesse Rath) to remove Skevur from the board permanently for his treachery.  After Nolan’s successful good deed, Irisa is freed from jail and goes to Tommy, to open up to him about what’s in the mine, but is stopped short when she witnesses Tommy and Berlin share an embrace.  And in yet another surprise to no one paying attention, Nolan accepts the Lawkeeper position permanently at the behest of Amanda to help keep Irisa safe.  To celebrate, Amanda and Nolan hook up at the NeedWant while the pervy new mayor spies on them.

This week’s ending montage song is Dire Straits’ “On Every Street”.

Again, another busy script this week, most of it just to put Nolan back in the Lawkeeper seat.  The thing that sticks in my craw the most about this episode specifically and the season in general is the undoing of various changes from the end of last season (Irisa leaving Defiance, Nolan quitting as Lawkeeper) in record time.  If those changes weren’t that important, why introduce them in the first place if you’re going to minimize them immediately?  Seems like lousy, padded script-writing.  And I have no idea what the title of the episode has to do with anything the episode as it seems likely absolutely zero of our cast of characters has any secret that they haven’t already shared with at least one other character in this show.  Even Irisa, possibly touched by a goddess and key to giant super-weapon…can’t WAIT to tell everyone she knows about it.

Also this week, we don’t get much of the McCawley family, with Rafe (Graham Greene) and company seen mostly in passing, if at all.  This episode has me torn.  Part of me wants something new and fresh with a new season, new character arcs and journeys, but thus far, we’re retreading what already happened.  But there’s also a certain comfort to that as well, I suppose.  Hopefully the creators of “Defiance” will start to take some risks soon.  I mean, it is Syfy after all and you never know when you could get cancelled for any reason.  Still, it made me want to watch more.

Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”

[Defiance web site at Syfy]   [Previous Recap – “The Opposite of Hallelujah”]