You do not want to be taking a drink at the 14-minute mark of Monday’s two-hour pilot episode of Defiance, on the SyFy channel.
A beaten wanderer is granted access to a city that suddenly appears on the horizon. “That Arch,” he asks in wonder, “is this St. Louis?”
“It was,” explains the crusty sheriff, “now we call it Defiance.”
It’s just too campy, at least for a viewer from St. Louis. You’ve been warned: If you happen to have a mouthful of soda, you’ll spit it all over the sofa.
Our defiant descendants, circa 2046, are characters in the new, post-apocalypse adventure drama from the SyFy Channel. The story imagines that no less than seven alien races have converged on earth, and waged war amongst themselves and with and against humans for a good 30 years. The wars are over, and now anarchy reigns.
A scruffy Han Solo-type human named Nolan and his adopted alien daughter Irisa wander the hilly “terraformed” landscape, gradually making their way to the supposed pristine paradise once called Antarctica.
They’re attacked by a band of marauders and then by a group of Land Rover-sized, spider-esque beasts in the forest. Their lives are saved by a small group led by that sheriff, who escorts them back to Defiance, a city protected by a laser-like “stasis net.” When the stasis net drops, our own Gateway Arch, beaten but unbowed, appears in the distance, and we are treated to the exchange above.
The giant cliff formations behind the Arch will cause head scratching for Mound City residents—the riverfront looks nothing like that. It must be the “terraforming,” a landscape-altering technique that pops up in sci-fi tales with some regularity.
Noland and Irisa promptly find themselves embroiled in all manners of intrigue in Defiance. There’s a bunch of tough-guy barfights and man-drama, a Romeo-and-Juliet subplot, a murder mystery, and a battle scene. Many genres are sampled, if you will. The writing owes a debt to the classic Western, and a greater obligation to The Road Warrior, from which it borrows liberally.
There are seven races of aliens, many of whom are portrayed by actors in various kinds of colored contact lenses. A good number of the aliens are towheaded blondes, like the kids from Village of the Damned all-grown-up.
There is expensive-looking CGI, stunts, explosions, fighting, and lovemaking. There is also an accompanying video game that SyFy is pushing hard.
Anyway, by setting the drama in St. Louis and peopling the town with rough-and-tumble types, including miners, “holo” brawlers, and a certain prostitute with a heart of gold, the creators of Defiance seem to be trading on the idea of the hearty Midwesterner. In the end, we don’t care. There’s a TV show with the Arch. In the pilot episode, there’s a brief shot of the skeletal remains of Highway 40, too. Even if it’s derivative, it’s about us, and whenever St. Louis is spotlighted on a national stage, we get a rise out of it.
Here’s hoping Defiance gets even more St. Louis-ey. We wanna check out the action at the post-apocalyptic Ted Drewes, staffed by cyborg teenagers.
Defiance
8 p.m.
Monday, April 15
SyFy Channel
