I just don’t understand you Sci-fi fans sometimes.
Eureka get praised as the best thing ever, (which I like Eureka, but I do feel it’s a little bit on the campy side.) But Defiance is crap? Why? Because you don’t like the make up or set designs?
I just finished watching the latest episode and so far my only complaint is that they killed off one of their more interesting characters. If you ask me (and I know that you didn’t. :)) the writing is on par with Eureka. This series is developing rather nicely I think.
I’m convinced the “albino mom lady” is some sort of evil genius and I can’t wait to learn more about her.
It’s using a bunch of pieces from other series that didn’t do well in spite of being fantastically popular with their fans, particularly Firefly.
It’s fallen prey to the same fault of most of the 1st-person shooter games (Half-life, Skyrim, Rift, Doom) in that its palette includes brown, dark green, gray, and all the colors used to make drab, utilitarian boring things. When they do introduce something made with some color in it, rather than thinking “yay, color!” I tend to think “how the hell do they keep that clean?”
People are complaining that the aliens are just TNG aliens, with mostly just bumpy foreheads. The few wookie or ewok type we see may well be the same actor over and over again, because we can’t tell, even though that worked out fantastically well in Stargate: Atlantis.
Freakin’ elves, man. Can’t trust 'em.
All that said, for me, it’s entertaining and reasonably-well written. I’ve seen a big tendency in SF fans to want every single show to be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT because mainstream TV is perfect, with the cop shows and the family comedies and the medical mysteries.
Haven’t heard about any hate but the show is recycling some tired material. I missed Firefly the first time around and thought I’d get in on the ground floor with Defiance. It’s all about the characters and not many of them have grabbed me yet.
Stahma Tarr is one of the interesting ones. Its fun to watch her manipulate her overbearing husband.
I don’t hate it, and I wish it well. I’ve found myself letting it lie in my Hulu queue, though, so it hasn’t totally grabbed me. I’ve only watched the first 3 episodes, I think.
My only complaint is the history hasn’t been really filled in, and I don’t get the feeling it will be. I don’t understand why an alien race powerful enough to resurface the planet (By the way, that isn’t what is usually meant by the term ‘terraform.’) would decide to populate it wih a bunch of humanoid races, then take off. I get that isn’t the point of the story, but it’s still something I think is lacking.
On the other hand, I quite enjoy the characters and how they’re written. I’ll eventually watch the entire season, and probably keep watching after that. I kind of wish I had the time and inclination to play the game.
I’ve been DVRing it. I watch some episodes all the way through—the one before this last one, for instance. But some I speed through the soap-opera-ish parts, like the one where the alien girl kidnapped and tortured the dude that tortured her. It’s okay, not a must-watch though.
Reading the recaps over at Television Without Pity, it seems that a lot of background info is available on same-time iPad apps you can download. Some of it is available in realtime as you watch the episode as it initially airs, which might enhance the immersion somewhat for some viewers. There may also be a bucketload of exposition available if you buy the game.
Yeah, the exact sequence of what happened is still unclear to me, too (spoilering the history for people who don’t want to know):
[spoiler]
Ancient civilization flees homeworld in a rag-tag fleet (okay, brand-new and shiny, and LOTS OF SHIPS). Five species are supposed to be included and there’s a lot of contention as to who gets to go. Much crying and bloodshed. Apparently somebody also brought along the Volge in his spare suitcase without telling anybody. 5,000 years ensues.
Fleet arrives at Earth and sends down a landing party. Goes much better than you’d expect, until somebody (Earth-Human supermacists) assassinates the alien ambassador to the UN. Combat ensues.
The war is mostly over due to attrition when Very Weird Stuff starts to happen: most of the ships still in space are kinda blowed up, and Something starts to terraform the earth, mostly the cities: the land rears up and swallows them whole, leaving behind mineral deposits of some glowy alien rock that can be used to power things and blow things up, sometimes at the same time. The terraforming gets stopped, mostly.
Enough humans have been killed off that we’re now on an even par with the other races, population-wise. Ships still fall from the sky from time to time. Nobody seems to have problems running out of ammunition.[/spoiler]
I’m certainly not pleased that apparently they’ve sucked up so much of Syfy’s budget that Warehouse 13 wound up getting canned (following the rest of this season and a ridiculously short final season to come).
Also, other than the first episode (where it’s clear most of that ill gained budget got spent) there’s just nothing particularly interesting or exciting here. I don’t hate the show, but I really wouldn’t care if it went away either (especially if it meant better shows didn’t have to go away).
The main complaint I’ve heard is they took the resources to make either a great game or a great TV show and made a pretty good game and a pretty good TV show, and they’re hoping that both of them stay popular enough that the game brings in enough cash to keep them afloat, rather than making a spectacular TV series, letting it run for a year, and then releasing a pretty good game based off a year’s worth of TV show content.