DEFIANCE: "Game Over, Man!"

Episode 103 “The Devil in the Dark”

Seriously, I expected someone to say it.

This week we got the Alien mashup with more Romeo & Juliet, along with Force visions. And I fully expect Deputy Tommy to be dead by the end of the season.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

This week, another murder mystery, with loooonnnnnnnnnnnggggg scenes showing us the victim before he’s a victim at the beginning. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence his hoodie is read. But seriously, you’re going to go jogging through the woods after the pilot episode establishes that there are Rodents of Unusual Size living there now? Really.

OK.

The murders of two men in Defiance — seemingly random, but we eventually find out they’re connected — has everyone in a tizzy, especially after we re-create Alien with a bloody chest-bursting scene in Inara’s Kenya’s brothel. Nolan has to figure out why these two guys were targeted with hellbug pheremone so they’d be bug lunch. It’s especially important after McCauley’s daughter becomes a target — for no apparent reason.

Let’s cut through it. A Spirit Rider named Rynn is killing these guys because she wants revenge for the murder of her parents. They were killed so the mining operation could get the land, apparently. McCauley figured the transaction was on the up-and-up, crippled intellectually by the fact that Google crashed in the holocaust and no one remembers what a card catalogue is…

Rynn splatters targets with the pheromone — how, exactly, we never see — and why she goes after McCauley’s daughter instead of McCauley himself is beyond me, but it gives us a chance to watch Datak Tarrs go all DeNiro with his mini-lightsaber up against the hellbugs.  And seriously, these bugs look like they just came out of the video game — and that’s not a good thing. Video games are a little more forgiving in their resolution. Players don’t expect everything to be photo-real. But in a science fiction television show, when you have creatures that are supposed to be in the environment, they’d better look like they’re actually in the environment. That means the environment reacts to the presence of the creatures.

I miss the days of practical effects. I really do.

The other half of this story has Irisa gaining her Force vision powers, and she somehow is able to deduce just with her mind that Rynn’s the guilty party. And she leads a posse down into the mine tunnels (here we go again) and into the hellbug nest, where Rynn is preparing a pheromone feast that will destroy the town. And the CG on these bugs don’t look any better. It really looks like someone on the video game side went to someone on the TV series side and said, “Hey! Let’s put these constructs into the show!” as-is with no more finesse. I’ve seen better stuff come from students out of the Dave School.

And the other llooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggggg scene gives us Irisa having some kind of out-of-body Spirit Walk to … I guess get a handle on her Jedi powers? I don’t know. Lots of writhing and chanting from the leader of the Spirit Walkers. Irisa is the Emissary? Prophet? What?

Like previous episodes, this one cribs elements from other series and films, and cobbles them together in a narrative very much like reality show writers build a plot out of all the different pieces of footage they have available to them. We get Alien, Starship Troopers, Chakotay’s spirit walk from Star Trek: Voyager. Plus they rip off the original Star Trek with their blatant episode title lift.

It’s not super bad yet, but it borders on the eye-roll-worthy. The sad part is that Syfy has hung so many hats on this project. You’d think that with so much on the line for their new “flagship” (ahem) series, they’d go for more quality in the writing and effects rather than try to overwhelm everyone with spectacle. We’re not the “Bread and Circuses” crowd. They’re watching MTV.

Calling it now. It’s another Terra Nova. The show won’t last past the first season. The video game will probably be around for a while.

[Official site on Syfy]     [Previous Recap: “Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go”]