DEFIANCE – Into the Darkness They Go
Episode 205, “Put the Damage On”
[photos: Ben Mark Holzberg/Syfy]
This season continues to get dark, dark, dark. And while it lacks the violence of previous episodes, in some ways, it’s the most disturbing.
At the Need/Want, Amanda, while high on Blue Devil, is attacked by a masked man who tells Amanda, “you’re mine” (obviously a reference to Amanda’s rape revelation last episode). She fights back and forces him out a window. After Nolan, Tommy, and Irisa arrive at the scene of the crime, the masked man is nowhere to be found and Amanda shares some of the details of her horrible ordeal with him. Nolan, who is shagging Amanda after shagging her sister all last season, vows to find the man.
Soon after, Amanda is walking on the street and Nolan confronts her in an alley (that one alley in Defiance where everything seems to happen, the one with the random ladder). He says some very unpleasant, un-Nolan-like things to her, repeating those same words “you’re mine”. She hits him and escapes around the corner only to see Nolan walking down the street with Tommy and Irisa, presumably on their search for the masked man.
Amanda becomes more and more paranoid, hallucinating and hearing noises. At one point, she even imagines that, while under lawkeeper protection, she is attacked by TWO masked men that she assaults and shoots, only to realize it was Tommy and Irisa, her protection detail. She then flees the scene.
It turns out Amanda isn’t the only person having hallucinations, as Pottinger is visited by Connor Lang, Amanda’s ex-fiancé who was murdered last season. Lang insinuates that Pottinger was in love with him, leaving Pottinger quaking in the street.
Nolan confronts Pottinger about where Amanda is getting her Blue Devil. After Nolan subtly accuses Pottinger of spiking her Adreno, Pottinger fires him. Nolan challenges him to take the badge from him, but Amanda is located before they can take their confrontation further. She collapses at the Need/Want and the true cause of Amanda’s hallucinations is revealed: a malfunctioning EGO (Environmental Guardian Online) implant, military grade technology that records the conscious and subconscious memory of the host, ostensibly for use in combat (but here it’s more memory eavesdropping), at least until the technology starts to fail. Doc Yewll and Nolan successfully remove Amanda’s implant before it kills her.
Doc Yewll is front and center here for the first time in this season. After patching up Datak from the beating he received at the end of the last episode, she is approached by another Indogene from her past (this being the first Indogene with any substantial role since last season’s Ben Daris). Lev, a female who was once Doc’s lover, reminds her of her part in human experimentation they engaged in and professes that she’s here because she’s dying. Lev and Doc spend much of the episode reminiscing, talking about the love they once shared, until it becomes very clear that Lev isn’t really there. She killed herself eight years ago, unable to live with what they had done. This memory of Lev, an extension of Doc’s own decaying EGO implant, even brings Doc to the edge of suicide, though in a much less confrontational manner than the other two victims (likely due to the way her Indogene brain is wired). Luckily, Doc pulls out of her “I see dead people” episode to save Amanda’s life.
Pottinger is revealed as the person responsible for the EGO device being implanted in Amanda in the first place, having taken advantage of her while she was passed out on drugs. It’s also revealed that due to the nature of the technology, both he and Doc Yewll were also implanted accidentally (when the technology fragments, it seeks a new host in which to implant). The EGO implant Pottinger provided was second-hand, repurposed technology which led to its breakdown and the hallucinations experienced by Amanda, Pottinger and Doc Yewll this episode.
Rafe McCawley, after being evicted last episode, is shacking up at the Tarr household. Human-Castithan hilarity ensues, including an amusing vignette where Rafe tackles (or is tackled by) the Castithan concept of group baths. The image of him wandering in with his plaid bathrobe and toilet kit is very entertaining. Stahma approaches him in the communal tub, assuring him of a place in their household, to be the father figure that Alak is now missing since Datak is on the street.
Datak, for his part, throws himself into Castithan scripture. He comes back to the family home and does a Castithan “rite of visitation” so that he may visit the family home to “safeguard his lineage”, specifically the forthcoming grandbaby. It’s a back door way for him to still have access to the household.
As his old social strata is now gone, Datak looks for new allies and reaches out to the Votanis Collective. And by “reaches out”, I mean he makes out publicly with an Irathient male prostitute at the Need/Want, to get him in private to make contact with the Collective’s spymaster. He wants their help in removing the E-Rep government. He also reaches out to Rafe McCawley, seeing as both men have been dispossessed by the E-Rep in the preceding months to varying degrees. He wants Rafe’s help to marshal the unsatisfied human element in Defiance. While Rafe doesn’t say ‘yes’, more importantly he also doesn’t say ‘no’.
After 4 episodes of Amanda’s drug use, it would be really easy to call this the after-school special episode where everyone learns a very important lesson about drug use. I think that’s dismissive because it’s ambiguous as to whether or not Amanda swears off Blue Devil by the end of the episode. It’s an anti-drug episode where the focus character is still (possibly) using drugs by the end of the episode. Indeed, it’s revealed not to be the culprit (or at least not the sole culprit) of her hallucinations, so will she or won’t she be back on Adreno? If it is indeed an “after-school special”, as other reviewers have casually thrown out, it’s a lousy, nebulous one that would not star any of the girls from The Facts of Life.
We’re learning more about Niles Pottinger, who is not nearly as confident an individual as he wishes to portray outwardly. He’s insecure, jealous, conniving, damaged, and might even have unrequited love for the late Connor Lang, all of which makes great TV and makes him, thus far, arguably the most interesting character this season (I mean, has anyone else been peed on yet on ANY other show you can think of?). And then there’s the EGO chip situation – what information is he trying to get from Amanda and why? Is it purely voyeuristic as some of his other activities have been, or is there something deeper here?
The focus on Doc Yewll was very much welcome, as 90% of the time, she comes across as a caricature, the crusty Western doctor archetype. But in truth, this season, she’s had some of the worst things happen to her. No one else but Doc has lost an appendage thus far (granted, it was given back to her, but it was still severed to begin with). And while it’s revealed that she did indeed love Lev and misses her, she does not appear to be outwardly repentant for her previous work experimenting on humans. However, if the EGO chip was breaking down in a similar manner to the others, manifesting dark secrets and fears of the respective host, was Lev merely embodying Doc’s own guilt and suicidal thoughts? If so, you get to watch a character’s subconscious, made manifest, try and convince the character to jump off a building. That’s pretty serious material and the closest tie to the Tori Amos song referenced by the title.
This is also another Irisa-lite episode, though there is a reference to her goddess-granted healing powers: Amanda shoots her while hallucinating, but Nolan mentions later that she didn’t hit Irisa, though we, the audience clearly see her get shot. So apparently the healing powers she displayed two episodes ago are still in place.
Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”
[Defiance web site at Syfy] [Previous Recap – “Beasts of Burden”]