You might have heard of the recent and original sci-fi drama Defiance from the internet or SyFy's fastidious marketing campaign or during sex with me because for a while it was all I was able to think about. And after finally getting around to watching the feature length pilot, a few things have struck me.
Truly, the SyFy channel has produced nothing of note since its inception. Nothing but a parade of low-budget, throwaway shite tailored for nerds without the eye for cynical, critical judgment so endemic to our kind. Let's face it, TV is not the medium for fans of sci-fi and fantasy. Barring Game of Thrones (and that's just HBO's Rome with more dragons), we're tragically under-served on the small screen. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me when I heard that a rollicking star odyssey with a little money behind it was on its way.
Sci-fi has taught us that aliens are just like us. Except with the minutest variance in face skin. Let's get the boring stuff out of the way first. I have a lot of time for the ambition on show here. It doesn't just reflect the budget; if Michael Bay has taught us anything it's that pouring a developing nation worth of cash into visual design is never a guarantee of good looks, but there's a particularly good use of color here. Too many post-apocalypses are all muddy brown and dismal grey vistas of ruined buildings and dust. I live in London; I see enough of that even without all the rapey bandits.
Sure I could go on pointing out Defiance‘s already detailed lore, decent character designs, and other ways in which it's pretty good, but isn't it more fun to just rip on it for stealing from Firefly? Of course it is, and it does. It's a Firefly clone without shame is what it is. True, there are worse programs to plagiarize from, but sadly, SyFy copied all of them as well.
"Evil" red lights, fake curse words, and rampant softcore sexuality from Battlestar Galactica.
This might get me spat on in the street (except only outside Comic-Con) but Battlestar Galactica was just Hollyoaks in space. Or, err, what do you guys across the pond have? The Brady Bunch? That should upset some people. Anyway, it was conceited, repetitive, and looked worse than Bill O'Reilly after a drunken amateur face painting session devolved into a knife fight.
No doubt it was an effort to be faithful to the original '78 version that no one remembered or cared about. But the only attempt to bring the formula into the modern day was to occasionally show Starbuck's meaty thighs while she pranced around in Ripley's cryo-sleep outfit from Aliens. Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking of rebooting classic nerd TV: they all looked like arse back then because the tech wasn't there to prevent everything from looking like arse. You're only doing it as fan service and they'll all complain regardless of what you do, so you might as well make the Cylon Centurions not look like brushed stainless steel kettles or the Raiders like Fisher-Price toys.
Don't get me wrong, Battlestar Galactica was still fun. I remember a few sparse moments with something resembling fondness and clearly so did the producers of Defiance. Main protagonist Nolan is in the titular town less than ten minutes before PG-13 screwing the madame (with a terrible misunderstanding of how brothel management works) in a sex scene with all the eroticism of Trainspotting and less nudity. Nolan has already been established as a character that thinks with his dick at this point but his doesn't have the problem-solving talent of Don Draper's. He's a clutzy Casanova now and in one season's time still will be. But maybe with a few more scars and a thousand yard stare.
Because he'll probably have seen shit, yo.
I feel like I've spent too long belittling Battlestar so let's speed this up. The Votan race's ships all have the ridiculous crimson lights that are the international sci-fi sign for "owners of this technology are evil," and the ludicrously named Irathient race of aliens have some swears that sound just enough like boring Earth curses to carry a modicum of weight when Nolan or his Irathient ward, Irisa, expel them, and to avoid the interstellar wrath of the frackin' censors.
Aliens with make-up and protagonist unconcerned by lack of Earth vagina from Star Trek.
A wise man with a sexily silky voice once said that "Commander Worf's head looks like a fanny," and not only was he right, but welcome to touch me wherever and whenever he likes. Look I get it, CGI is expensive and if you want to have recurring characters with a lot of face time that're non-human, you need a cheaper way to announce that fact to the section of the audience that's too drunk to listen to the script.
Sci-fi has taught us that aliens are just like us. Except with the minutest variance in face skin. The Irathient (Christ, I can feel my genitals taking my use of that word as proof that I don't need them) have smaller noses, dumber contact lenses, and a circular tattoo at the bridge. If you were a speciesist, it wouldn't take many space beers for you to make a terrible mistake at the town of Defiance's silent disco.
I will never blame you. Sometimes even I forget.
But of course, Nolan ain't no bigot. He adopted an alien as his daughter so it's only a matter of time before he gets space fever and beds one of the series' seven non-human races. I swear, the only reason none of the more boneable aliens have blue skin is because Shatner's legal team would fast wire down onto the set and mow down all the writers with photon rifles.
Literally everything else from Firefly.
Please, can you spare any change? We haven't eaten in weeks.
Defiance doesn't exactly play its themes close to the chest. Once you've given a grizzled stranger a "lawman" badge you've officially given Subtlety license to take the rest of the season off.
Sci-fi is no stranger to the whiskery and whiskey-soaked insertion of Spaghetti Western influences. It could be argued that it all started with the bloated father of all modern space shenanigans, Star Wars. The ne'er-do-well smuggler, the conscience-lacking bounty hunter in the employ of the nebulous invader, the damsel in distress; it might not have been intentional but the tropes of Sergei Leone were there.
Of course it was Joss Whedon who made it stylistically prevalent. The crew of Serenity are outlaws. They carry glorified six-shooters, yada yada. So when you make a sci-fi TV series with even the slightest horsey-whiff of Old West, you expose yourself to comparison to Firefly. And one of the things I oddly love about Defiance is that the creators don't give a fuck about it. They approach their Western themes with outright enthusiasm. They gleefully introduce racial disharmony amidst aliens and humans as if it's in any way original. They've created a civic society whose dynamics are so utterly derivative, it's almost charming. Almost.
I don't know about you, but I'm putting this juvenile theft down to genuine excitement that people have thrown actual money into SyFy's moldy cage for once. And you people don't have Doctor Who, so whatever anybody says about Defiance, it's worth keeping. For now.