Defiance Season 3 Episode 4 Review: Dead Air
Jim Garner
at
.
Updated at
.
Never let it be said that Defiance doesn't know how to start things off with a bang!
Sorry, I couldn't resist slipping in one pun.
As a rare and unexpected treat, Defiance Season 3 Episode 4 featured the the unquestionable final ending to one of the story arcs introduced last season between Amanda and Pottinger, and man was it an explosive ending – OK, maybe two puns.
Let's start with the elephant in the room – the arch explosion. The visual effects (FX) of the arch explosion were some of the worst I've ever seen on TV. When it started exploding, I thought it was all going to come down, as that would allow them to stop having to digitally add it into external scenes. Imagine my surprise when only the middle section was lost.
OK, Show of hands, who else enjoyed Amanda's questioning of Pottinger way more than we should have? Of all the recent character purging that has happened in our beloved Defiance, none deserved their fate more than Niles Pottinger!
Pottinger started off as a mildly interesting character when he was first introduced, but he quickly developed the creepy-stalker-rapist vibe as he watched Amanda secretly during Defiance Season 2. In fact, when I saw James Murray was no longer listed on SyFy's cast page for Defiance Season 3 I did a little happy dance.
That leads us to Pottinger's death. I'm confused over one thing about the dead-man switch Samir wired into Pottinger. Samir said if his heart stops beating, then it triggers the bomb. Knowing that fact, wouldn't your first idea be to do chest compressions on Pottinger until you've gotten away from the blast zone of the bomb?
Then again, maybe the switch would be able to tell the difference between an external heart pump and internal self-pumping beat. And of course if they had done CPR, we might not have gotten to see Pottinger's bullet ridden corpse sucked into singularity, which I think we can all agree on is pretty damn final.
Good riddance!
Meanwhile, back in Defiance we got to see Berlin and Irisa hiss and growl at each other like a couple of cats while they started trying to piece together who blew up the Arch. I'm so tired of the "you killed Tommy" back and forth between them.
The rest of the town seems to have accepted that Irisa wasn't in control of herself when the Arc-brain hijacked her body. Why cant Berlin get it through her head? I wish these two would just get drunk, fight, kiss and make up already.
Speaking of "making up," Stahma wasted no time seducing T'evgin. I actually wondered for a moment if she actually knew what would cause him to have a heart attack. Of course, given that they've just introduced T'evgin and his rarely seen daughter, I felt fairly certain that he would survive whatever she gave him.
Of course, I was not expecting him to make her breakfast and then bluntly confront her about it. Their breakfast conversation will be one of my favorites for a while to come:
T'evgin: why do you want me dead?
Stahma: actually, I don't.
T'evgin: And I don't want to be killed! So I guess that puts us on the same page, as the humans say.
So, when they are done with their post-breakfast coitus where do they go from there? Will T'evgin help Stahma rescue Alak? Will he play along like he is dead? This is one of the new story lines that I'm actually very curious about and getting left hanging is brutal. Of course, knowing that I have a huge crush on Jaime Murray and have loved her in every role she's done on Syfy, it stands to reason that I would be drawn to this storyline.
I guess I will just have to wait and see where things go. What did you think of this weeks offering? Are we seeing a return to the previous well written episodes or, are we still seeing the shaving down of characters and story lines? Sound off below and remember, you can watch Defiance online now!
Jim G. is a TV Fanatic Staff Writer. Follow him on Twitter.
