After one episode, I had some complaints about NBC’s Revolution (and yes, I tried another episode after that and it was just as hard to watch). But so far, the only thing I really don’t like Defiance is that it’s only available on the web version of Hulu, which makes it much harder for me to find time to watch it. Luckily, Syfy took my advice (in the second to last paragraph of that post) and (according to Wikipedia) are only having 12 episodes in the first season.

The show starts off in kind of a typical way: Hero and his sidekick run from danger and stumble onto a secure community of survivors. From there they introduce a lot of characters and a lot of potential conflicts between them. For a show that hints at 8 alien races inhabiting Earth alongside humans, I was impressed and pleased with the lack of explanation and “As you know, Bob” going on. Clearly Syfy knows that this isn’t their audience’s first time watching a show with aliens. It also gives them a lot of room to expand on conflicts between the aliens and the humans (since each alien race could have a different issue with Earth’s natives) and also between the aliens themselves. I’m actually more interested to see how that all plays out more than the overarching plot of “Who’s trying to destroy Defiance and why” …

Also, they totally got me with the “Come As You Are” cover at the end of the second episode. I generally love popular music when used well in TV shows, and this was a cool cover of a great song which fit the idea of the montage it encompassed (almost a little too “hit you over the head with the theme” well).