The Defiance Thread - News about the Show and Game

And there's very little dog meat in hot dogs (or is there????)

 

I've had them with tomato sauce/marinara.

I wonder if they're going to do anything with the have vs. have not situation. Some of them are living in shipping crates and the McAwley's are living in a nice house.

I hope they do. Thanks for the information. I realize the show is still new and they don't want to do too much exposition, but I feel something like that should warrant a little bit of dialogue. At least we learned a little about the effects of terraforming this past episode.

Gulanite. They mentioned it in the episode. The website showing the links between the game and the show that was posted here had a write up on it. It's what powers the alien technology we've been seeing.

 

^^^Unfamiliar word, missed it. Thanks.

The bit about a crystal structure formed under nonterrestrial conditions sounded right. Good touch. (Skip over imagining gas giant conditions on the face of the Earth.)

 

"Toasted ravioli" is just a colloquial name stuck onto them to differentiate from traditionally boiled ravioli (can't really call 'em "fried ravioli" because as mentioned, they can also be baked). I've been in St. Louis all my life and I've never known anyone (or any restaurant here) that actually toasts them. They'd burn.

 

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered "bubble tea" is neither.

 

Bubble tea is made with tea, unless you get one of the fruit flavours.

 

As for the whole animals thing, they originally wanted to have the characters riding horses on the show, but the game maker told them they couldn't do horses so they weren't able to include them. So at least at one point in the development they were still going to have some Earth animals around. Have we seen any dogs in town?
The who thing with the game not being able to have horses seems weird to me though, we've gotten tons of games over the last few years with the characters riding interactive horses, including all of the Assassin's Creed games since II, and Red Dead Redemption. Would it be something to do with the fact that it's an MMO?

 

There are lots of MMOs with horse riding, EQ, EQ2, WoW, LotR to name a few. My guess is the devs were stretched and wanted to focus their time on making the off-road vehicle driving experience really slick rather than split time working on essentially two different types of transportation.

 

Maybe a terrible fallen ark horse plague wiped 'em all out. An Equuapolypse.

 

Ah, I guess I got one of the fruity ones.

 

I found that I did end up enjoying the pilot by the time it was over - but I forgot to catch episode 2, and feel strangely unbothered.

I think the reliance on having to be familiar with the other media bits is really the "why bother" dealbreaker for me... Still, I'm sure it won't be long after the season finished before there's a rerun.

 

Episode 2 was a lot better than the pilot, I felt.

You don't have to be. Each piece of the franchise is designed to be able to stand on its own and appeal to its own distinct audience. The interconnections are just a bonus. Like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

For instance, in the pilot episode, there were just a couple of throwaway lines that connected to the game. Nolan saying "Do you know what we went through to get that?" about the blue crystal he had at the start was a reference to the introductory adventure in the game (in which your player character retrieves the crystal and then Nolan comes in afterward and steals it), and Amanda's speech referenced a past attack by "Ninety-Niners," which are a bad-guy faction in the game. Just Easter eggs that aren't significant to the real story in any way.

 

I've had absolutely no exposure (or desire to be exposed to) any of the alternatives, and I've also had absolutely no problem keeping up with the show. Not sure where that faulty idea is coming from at all.

 

I come across it all the time in discussions of Trek literature. Because the novels share a common continuity and Easter-egg cross-references, there are a number of readers who assume that you're required to read them all or you'll be lost. People are constantly asking, "Do I need to read X to understand Y?" They never seem to get that we're not deliberately trying to confuse people, that we want each individual story or series to be able to function both as a satisfying standalone work and as part of a greater whole.

 

Exactly. I haven't paid any attention to the game, but just took the throwaway references to offscreen stuff to be the usual random bits of jargon you run across in scifi universes.

Take the original STAR WARS, for instance. None of us knew what the "Kessel Run" was, or could look up the infamous "spice mines" on the internet. Heck, we didn't even know what a "Hutt" was (as in "Jabba the Hutt"). We just accepted that that the writers were trying to convey the sense of a larger universe and that it didn't really matter if we didn't know what exactly the "Clone Wars" were . . . .

It's like when STAR TREK does the trick of invoking "Galileo, Einstein, and Curcovissox." You're not actually missing anything if you don't know who "Curcovissox" is. You just go along with it . . ..

The only difference here is that maybe Curcovissox showed up in the computer game at some point, but you don't really need to know that to enjoy the show. I'm sure that if the TV audience ever needs to know who Curcovissox is, the TV show will be sure to provide us with that info.

 

Christopher, toasted ravioli is AWESOME. Don't knock it until you've tried it. And yes, it's most often served with a marinara dipping sauce.

But this, of course, begs the question: If toasted ravioli has survived, has the other St. Louis specialty, Sicilian-style pizza (a.k.a. St. Louis-style pizza, a.k.a. Imo's) survived?

 

And then there's my favorite example, "The Cage." The very first Trek story ever written, impossible for anyone to refer to any prior works set in the universe, yet it's still heavily built around references to past events like the recent battle on Rigel VII and the death of Pike's yeoman. Every story references things beyond itself, but that doesn't make the story incomprehensible by itself.

 

Sicilian-style pizza has a much thicker crust than St. Louis-style pizza and isn't traditionally cut into squares, but it does have a slight Sicilian influence, though. By 2046, it probably has a Castithan influence now...

 

St. Louis-style pizza is a bit of a hybrid - the cracker-style crust (baked without yeast) and the use of "provel" cheese, lots of oregano being the main characteristics.

It's absolutely fantastic. Just talking about it makes me wish Imo's was available in Atlanta ...

 

As I speak, I am directly situated between two Imo's--both within a ten-minute drive from my house.