The Defiance Thread - News about the Show and Game

[Guy Gardener]

In the beginning on Buffy the Vampire Slayer she was so beautiful I didn't notice what a ham she is.

Miss Benz is still gorgeous, but it's been 17 years since Julie was dressed as a naughty school girl in the pilot to Buffy and I'm building a mild tolerance.

Also, if you're watching Scandal, which is just like Greys Anatomy if you swap spies and politics for medicine and mansluts (Because they're both produced by the same woman.) one of the contingent plots to that story is also focussing on a town called Defiance, so I'm finding it hilarious whenever they're shouting about the moral ambiguity of what happened in Deiance, or that what happened in Defiance will haunt the country forever...

 

[The Wormhole]

Pretty good episode. We seem to be getting something of an ongoing mystery with whatever the hell is in the restricted area of the McCawley Mine, Datak and his wife are getting increasingly manipulative and increasingly interesting. Datak showing Nolan around and explaining the people was a pretty cool scene, as was the end when Nolan finally figures out the wife (what is her name?) is the real power in the Tarr family.

The Bio-man even gets some interesting development this week. Despite the fact he's a near unbeatable brute, it seems he is somwhat simple-minded. Not simple-minded as in a complete idiot (though I doubt he is very smart) but simple-minded in that all he really wants is to spend time with his friend Robin Dunne. A shame both were killed, that would be a firendship that would be interesting to watch.

 

[Ayelbourne]

Amanda is totally boring! She's just all beige. Beige hair, beige clothes, beige lust for Nolan, beige jealousy, beige office.

It's Julie Benz. Your argument is invalid.

 

[jayceee]

This week's episode seemed ok. Somewhat better than the previous two episodes.

But overall, my interest has been waning somewhat on this show. I'll dvr the next several episodes (or maybe even the rest of the season) to see whether things get better or not.

At the moment, most of my regular tv shows will be finishing their season runs over the next several weeks. Besides Defiance and Continuum, there's not much else on the summer tv schedule which has caught my interest so far.

 

[Mister Fandango]

I felt the same way about Farscape when it first started airing. The premiere had a lot of interesting ideas, but the first half of the season was pretty poor. I didn't even like most of the characters (with the notable exceptions being Crichton and Rygel). Then it hit its stride and became one of my all-time favorite series, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a single character I didn't like at least somewhat. Grayza is about the only one, in fact, and even she had some interesting potential.

Defiance seems to be the same way so far. Cool premise, promising potential, and characters I don't really care that much for (with the notable exceptions of Irisa and Datak and Stahma Tarr). There's clearly a metaplot developing, and I'd like to know more about the whole Votan story post-crash, so I'm willing to go through a few more medicore episodes just on the off-chance that the same thing that happened with Farscape happens here, too.

It's not like the story or characters are blatantly awful, unlike say Revolution, so it's definitely worth a try.

 

[Unicron]

That seems far too vague a connection. And to what end? Just to favor the immediately previous episode over earlier ones? Why is that even a thing to aspire to? The point is to remind viewers of plot points they may have forgotten or fill them in on relevant events from episodes they may have missed. I don't see how "We've explored a similar theme before" is something viewers need to be reminded/informed of, unless they're doing a critical analysis or something.

It's not a matter of favoritism in my perspective. The last episode gave a little development to the Spirit Riders (a good thing) and their relationship with Irisa because they're the same species. I got the impression there's some potential for them to develop into a group that is a valuable ally to Defiance and not just token bikers, and that's kind of hard when one of your members is holding a vendetta against all humans for the actions of a few. This week's episode has a similar theme, in that it's about Nolan and Datak having to work together regardless of their differences, and that ultimately everyone is going to have to learn to live with each other.

If the goal of the recaps is inform viewers of how the story's progressing (I agree with you it should), I feel this is how they should do it. Not just use some random clips from a few episodes ago because they happen to feature a character who's not necessarily a main focus. As I've said, perhaps it's just nitpicky, but if I'd missed the previous episodes and watched this one first, I wouldn't have gotten anything useful from the teaser because Ulysses isn't the point of the episode. I'd be left wondering why that teaser was shown and not something from an ep I got to catch up on later. * shrugs * That's just me.

 

[Aeolusdallas]

200 is a guess.

I haven't seen thousands in any of the town meetings, and we're assuming every able body assembled for the big fight and that looked like dozens not hundreds, but now we find out that 4 times as many of them died as was ever seen on camera.

200 is a stupid guess. The city clearly has a population in the thousands.

 

[Guy Gardener]

First, the entire city of Defiance is under the St Louis Arch.

That's fuck all.

And why when they want to declare anything to the town, they stick their head out the window and yell.

The town's economy is supported by the mine. The mine pays taxes and the miners who then pay for whatever the hell they want which is supplied by the rest of the town.

(Are we counting the elderly, women and children?)

Small mine, few miners, tiny support and ancillary systems.

That's a few hundred people.

If they had 2000 armed citizen soldiers, the Volge attack wouldn't stand a chance.

That's not a modern city.

Defiance is straight out of the 19th century.

Maybe earlier.

It's basically a camp.

How many people do you think lived in Deadwood?

 

[Aeolusdallas]

Then why when they want to declare anything to the town, they stick their head out the window and yell.

The town's economy is supported by the mine. The mine pays taxes and the miners who then pay for whatever the hell they want which is supplied by the rest of the town.

(Are we counting the elderly, women and children?)

If they had 2000 armed citizen soldiers, the Volge attack wouldn't stand a chance.

That's not a modern city.

Defiance is straight out of the 19th century.

Maybe earlier.

It's basically a camp.

How many people do you think lived in Deadwood?

Well if you used your eyes you would clearly see it's a rather large town but lets skip to the chase\
From the official wiki

Overview

Defiance's main entrance area, Bissel Pass, is protected by a large Stasis Net.
Society
Defiance has a population of about 6000 people, 40% of which are Votans; mostly Castithan, Indogene, Sensoth, Liberata and Irathient. Some residents of Defiance use Hailers to communicate.

http://en.defiance-wiki.com/wiki/Defiance

Do you really think a town with a downtown like this only has 200 people?

More pics showing the size here
http://www.defiance.com/en/series/the-town

 

[Guy Gardener]

That's not downtown, that's probably the entire town.

It's nice that the Game has a large town you can run through and shoot people in but, the tv series is in no way supporting the existence of anything greater than a shanty town.

Do they hire thousands of extras each week, or are all those buildings empty?

And half those "buildings" used to be public transport.

 

[Christopher]

I'd say there are nearly 200 people visible in that one photo. And no, it's obviously not the entire town, since the buildings visibly extend beyond the borders of the photo, and we've seen other angles of the town that showed it was larger.

And it's pretty silly to argue that the town can't have thousands of people just because we don't see them on camera. How many "New Yorkers" do you see on camera in a typical episode of Castle, say? I remember when FlashForward did an episode supposedly set in Hong Kong, and the streets were about twenty times less crowded than they are in the real Hong Kong. By the same token, the TNG Enterprise was supposed to have 1012 people aboard, but we typically only saw a few dozen per episode at most. TV shows can only afford so many extras, but we're supposed to accept that they represent a larger number of people off-camera. I see no reason that should be any different here.

 

[Aeolusdallas]

That's not downtown, that's probably the entire town.

It's nice that the Game has a large town you can run through and shoot people in but, the tv series is in no way supporting the existence of anything greater than a shanty town.

Do they hire thousands of extras each week, or are all those buildings empty?

And half those "buildings" used to be public transport.

No troll that is just the downtown. In the other link I posted you can clearly look around and see the rest of the town.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I followed the link, the "town" didn't look much larger than my university campus, which is a minute fraction of the town I live, and the town I live in is tiny compared to a real city.

okay serious question.

How many citizens mobilized for the defence?

If a thousand people showed up to defend that gorge, and only 41 people died, then a the volge have worse aim than Imperial Storm troopers, if they didn't hit the other 959 assholes drawing fire from their heavy weapons, and b 5000 other people were too cowardly to turn up, or straight out abandoned Defiance? But if a hundred citizens of Defiance showed up to defend the gorge, almost half of them dying seems about right, but they're sacrificing their lives so that over 5 thousand 900 asshats back home can whore it up and play cards ignoring the invasion?

Logically because of the pilot, it's a small town. They need to actively contradict that on screen by showing a town meeting where three thousand people show up (cgimapping), or say that 4 thousand of them fought the Volge... The real world set they are using is just one street, and frankly I was beginning to think that the town was one street.

Meanwhile in those pictures of the town that were linked, I thought those blurry shadows might be people, but then I decided that they were trees.

Arbour Day must be really big in the future.

 

[Aeolusdallas]

I followed the link, the "town" didn't look much larger than my university campus, which is a minute fraction of the town I live, and the town I live in is tiny compared to a real city.

okay serious question.

How many citizens mobilized for the defence?

If a thousand people showed up to defend that gorge, and only 41 people died, then a the volge have worse aim than Imperial Storm troopers, if they didn't hit the other 959 asshole drawing fire from their heavy weapons, and b 5000 other people were too cowardly to turn up, or straight out abandoned Defiance? But if a hundred citizens of Defiance showed up to defend the gorge, almost half of them dying seems about right, but they're sacrificing their lives so that over 5 thousand 900 asshats back home can whore it up and play cards ignoring the invasion.

Logically because of the pilot, it's a small town. They need to actively contradict that on screen by showing a town meeting where three thousand people show up, or say that 4 thousand of them fought the Volge... The real world set they are using is just one street, and frankly I was beginning to think that the town was one street.

Meanwhile in those pictures of the town that were linked, I thought those blurry shadows might be people, but then I decided that they were trees.

Arbour Day must be really big in the future.

They are clearly people but you clearly have no intent of honest discussion here.

 

[Christopher]

Defiance looks similar in size to my university campus, and it has nearly 30,000 students.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They are clearly cgi cartoony stick figures caricatures of people.

They're supposed to be people, but they don't look like people.

If I saw that on a google map, I would have to think that videogames had escaped the computer world and was attacking reality (level up is awesome.) or that my monitor needs a good clean because it's all smudgy.

So, they must be trees after all.

 

[stj]

Guy Gardener is right: What is on screen shows a fairly small village. And everyone else is right that Defiance is supposed to be at least a small town. Babylon 5 had exactly the same problem whenever they tried to stage a riot or other mass scene. TV cheap just isn't convincing.

If your interest in the show is enough to overcome these monetary trials of willing suspension of disbelief, good on you. Personally, I haven't found the episode interesting enough to finish watching.

In some respects, the notion that young people would be influenced by alien dance and music was the series' most innovative moment.

 

[Aeolusdallas]

They are clearly cgi cartoony stick figures caricatures of people.

They're supposed to be people, but they don't look like people.

If I saw that on a google map, I would have to think that videogames had escaped the computer world and was attacking reality (level up is awesome.) or that my monitor needs a good clean because it's all smudgy.

So, they must be trees after all.

And that's it. You are clearly trolling.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Defiance looks similar in size to my university campus, and it has nearly 30,000 students.

I did say it's the same size of my university campus, which also has about 30 thousand students... But Defiance doesn't have the same dense packing of buildings. Most of those structures we see used to be busses and trailers, so that's just a shit load of one story 10 by 20 by 8 feet boxes you culd uncomfortably fit one large family inside hillbilly style.

 

[Guy Gardener]

No, I'm waiting to be proved wrong.

It's easy to prove me wrong.

My argument is flimsy.

But the proof doesn't exist yet.

Because the existing episodes have been careless.

Defiance has to get up off it's ass and prove that the mayoral election isn't decided by 40 vs another 40 people people by something that can hold up against a good sneeze.

yes i too was thinking about Babylon 5's production values, but they got around that by giving the satations dimensions, weightand population in the opening credits.

"wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night."

That's fricking poetry.