History Headscratchers / Defiance

* Apparently Datak has become the Castithan equivalent of a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist...why, exactly? Because the writers thought he wasn't enough of an asshole already? Dramatically it doesn't seem to make much sense.

* Apparently Datak has become the Castithan equivalent of a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist...why, exactly? Because the writers thought he wasn't enough of an asshole already?

* Apparently Datak has become the Castithan equivalent of a Bible-thumping Fundamentalist...why, exactly? Because he wasn't enough of an asshole before?

* Unless the mechanics of Castithan gender is different, then how did Stahma "learn" a trick that she then uses on Dalak? Dalak mentions that only one other woman (Kenya) has performed such a trick, but again, how would Stahma (a female) learn a trick done on a male with another female? How would this have been demonstrated on another female?

*** It's exactly this. Von Bach is the source of personal shielding for player characters. It's not technology that's available to the masses, war hero or not - if you aren't VBI (or one of the other above factions) then you're not in a position where the resources are available to you.

*** Okay, then how did a Hellbug get there in the first place? Was it sleeping under the bed?
**** The eggs were found outside and lured by the pheromones. Hellbugs hatch and mature ''extremely'' quickly - coupled with the pheromones Rynn was using and it wouldn't take much to use a newborn in that way.
***** So it actually hatched and grew large enough to kill a man in the span of that one scene?
****** Yes, as I said they mature extremely quickly. The Skitterlings aren't intended to be little more than fodder.
****** One possibility is that the egg was placed on the floor (as in the building floor, not that specific place) at the same time that the guy was covered in pheromones. Knowing that he had a food fetish (or whatever), that might have provided enough temporary substance for it to grow. It fell asleep under the bed and was woken up by the ruckus at which point, it detected the pheromones and attacked.

*** Not only is it likely some cultural items survived (Alak has access to records and Nolan and Irisa are introduced listening to music) but Berlin makes films and it is possible that PR wasn't just a job she was given but that filmmaking is an interest to her. She may well have studied films like the Star Wars series as part of her film studies.

* According to the backstory, Nolan was born in 2003, Amanda in 2011, and who knows how young Berlin is. Are they really old enough to remember (and appreciate) the original ''Film/StarWars'' movies? Or the work of Music/{{R.E.M.}}, for that matter? Is everybody on post-terraforming Earth a retro hipster?

** It could be as simple as position; Castithans might have no tradition of havin sex vertically, while we're shown pretty explicitly that Stahma pushes Datak against a wall and starts to ride him and make out with him. Stahma, presumably, could easily have learned this from Kenya; she wouldn't need a penis for Kenya to push her against a wall and start grinding against her, and Stahma's certainly clever enough to figure that out. (Or she and Kenya played against a wall with a strap-on at some point...) Either way, she exuberantly pushed herself on her husband, and he later connected the dots.

** Tradition is a very strong force, especially for Castithans. Alak wants to be the good son and does what his father tells him. It's only been recently that he's begun to seriously question things. As for being married to a human, well...Castithan society seems pretty patriarchal. His possible he just doesn't listen to Christie, because he doesn't think a woman's opinion matters.

** A combination of several factors: (A) Datak probably won the overwhelming majority of the Castithan vote thanks to being landlord and mafia don to them, as well as having recently engineered a situation wherein a human Lawkeeper (Nolan) atally shot a Castithan youth (the idiot) who had an essentially harmless (well, non-lethal) paintball gun, and compounded that by both getting Amanda on record as having fully supported Nolan, and then getting access to sealed E-Rep records from the Earth Military Coalition of a time when, in the midst of war, Nolan aggressively defended his own choice to vigorously shoot a Votan youth with a blaster before said youth could hurt him or his men. (B) He probably won the Irathiant vote thanks to having previously arranged matters so that humans - specifically Rafe and his miners - aggressively rounded up the Irathiants and murdered one of them, and furthermore humans took the blame for murdering the Spirit Riders who escaped custody during that, and it was on his order that the Irathiants were set free. (C) He pursued an aggressive, and evidently effective, "Get out the vote" strategy, to the point of sending his campaigners into the town's votan skid row to rouse the chemi-heads because "their votes will be counted!" (D) As Colonel Marsh suggested, he "had to have some stuffed ballot boxes around somewhere," and given his character, Datak isn't the sort to lose a fair election when he can win a rigged one, so it's not entirely improbable that Datak managed to sneak in some falsified votes, too. Even so, he was shown as desperately scraping for every single vote he could get, to the point of even specifically mentioning to Stahma that despite the fact that Castithan law called for him to spill her guts the moment he learned she'd been unfaithful to him, she hadn't yet cast her vote, and so he wouldn't. It's likely that the episode with Nolan shooting the Castithan kid may have swayed some human voters as well; if not to vote for Datak, then at least to abstain altogether. Altogether, he wound up winning by a margin of a few hundred, out of a vote count of about 5,000.

[[folder:Stahma and Dalak]]

[[folder:Nolan]]
* Why, oh why did Nolan confront Stahma? He seems GenreSavvy enough to not tip off a potential enemy, that he ''himself identified as the "dangerous one,"'' yet that is exactly what he does. It seems like an extremely dumb move to inform a dangerous rival that you are watching them, again, ''especially as he identifies her as the more dangerous of the two.'' In this troper's case, the "I'm just a dumb monkey that can't understand what just happened" defense would have been the one used, with a careful (and secret) eye on the "dangerous one."

[[folder:Stahma and Dalak]]
* Unless the mechanics of Castithan gender is different, then how did Stahma "learn" a trick that she then uses on Dalak? Dalak mentions that only one other woman (Kenya) has performed such a trick, but again, how would Stahma (a female) learn a trick done on a male with another female? How would this have been demonstrated on another female?
** Maybe Kenya is just that good...

[[folder:Stowaways]]
* How did stowaways manage to hide out on the arks? Space was so limited the Votans had to decide who to leave behind. The trip is so long or dangerous that hypersleep chambers are needed to make the journey. It's not like you could just squat in a random hallway waiting for the trip to end and you couldn't just kill somebody and take their hypersleep chamber as that may attract the suspicions of their relatives or ark managers when everybody awakes.
** Not necessarily. If hypersleep chambers are set to wake their occupants on some sort of time schedule then a technically adept stowaway could maybe program their stolen hypersleep chamber to wake them a few hours or a few days before everyone else, then run and hide somewhere. It's also possible that "stowaway" in this context may also refer to people who were smuggled aboard by family or friends when they couldn't make the lottery.
** Another alternative is folks creating fake identities in order to grab as many lotto wins as possible and then selling those places off. Ship personnal might sneak people on board or mess with manifests. When it's the end of the world as you know it, the possibilities really open up. And it's not like the average person (Votan or otherwise) really thinks about the implications and cost of space travel.
** Another alternative that happened in real life is the idea of paper identities - families selling or giving away the identification papers of dead relatives (or otherwise) to others.

[[folder:Volge army stowaways]]
* How could an entire Volge army hide on the arks when space was at a premium?
** Maybe they were brought by the Gulanee from their home system? See the WMG page.
** Can Volge survive in vacuum? If so, they might have hitched a ride on the ''outside'' of the Arks.
** I suspect a rogue Indogene group.

[[folder:Bombing of Defiance]]
* Why would Nicolette Riordon send Ben Darris to plant the bombs. He is under guard and will be missed, ensuring a faster reaction to his escape and bombing attempt. Why not send Mr Birch or another trusted employee down there with a time bomb. They are not under guard or under suspicion and will provide at least a precious few minutes to hours head start before anyone realises something is wrong. If she is worried about losing inexpendible employees then the bombs can be set on a timer.
** Because they're not going to let just anyone walk into the mines. Ben had to blow up the shaft to make sure he wasn't followed. This isn't like walking into a bank or something like that. Anyone not doing their job is going to stick out like a sore thumb. Ben was expendable and had the motivation, not to mention they needed him dead anyway.
** Nicolette later admits in the ninth episode that she screwed up with these plans, having been forced to think on the fly after the Volge attack went south.

[[folder:Shields]]
* Why doesn't Nolan have a kinetic shield? Considering even a standard VBI Tech shield seems rather easy to acquire. I can understand he might have not been able to acquire one while on the road due to perpetual debt, but since he's Lawkeeper of Defiance, wouldn't have made some sense to invest in one? Only reason I can think of is plot, considering what happened to him in episode 5 could've been avoided if he had a shield.
** It may be that you need specialized armor or cybernetic implants to use a shield. The only people who have shields in-game are 99's (cyborgs), The rogue E-Rep Troops (who are fully armored), and Dark Matter and the Ark Hunters (EGO users).
*** It's exactly this. Von Bach is the source of personal shielding for player characters. It's not technology that's available to the masses, war hero or not - if you aren't VBI (or one of the other above factions) then you're not in a position where the resources are available to you.
** It could also be stubborn personal preference. "I didn't need some fancy-schmancy shield to survive the War or the wasteland. Why would I need one to survive Defiance?"

[[folder:Hellbugs]]
* How did the Hellbug kill that pervy guy (you know the one) in "The Devil in the Dark"? Did it burst out of his chest, Ridley Scott-style? Or did it tunnel up through the bed?
** Tunneled up through the bed. It's quite easy to miss but there's a brief moment where you can see it coming up through his back and out of his chest.
*** Okay, then how did a Hellbug get there in the first place? Was it sleeping under the bed?
**** The eggs were found outside and lured by the pheromones. Hellbugs hatch and mature ''extremely'' quickly - coupled with the pheromones Rynn was using and it wouldn't take much to use a newborn in that way.
***** So it actually hatched and grew large enough to kill a man in the span of that one scene?
****** Yes, as I said they mature extremely quickly. The Skitterlings aren't intended to be little more than fodder.
****** One possibility is that the egg was placed on the floor (as in the building floor, not that specific place) at the same time that the guy was covered in pheromones. Knowing that he had a food fetish (or whatever), that might have provided enough temporary substance for it to grow. It fell asleep under the bed and was woken up by the ruckus at which point, it detected the pheromones and attacked.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Clancy's death]]
* How did Clancy die, exactly? The scene was so frenetic I couldn't tell. It seemed there was a blur of knives and thrown fists and all of a sudden Clancy's lying in a pool of blood. [[WhatTheHellHero Did one of Irisa's throwing knives go awry?]]
** One of Rafe's men killed him when opening fire on Nolan. His aim was thrown off which caused the bullet to strike Clancy instead - it was a weirdly edited scene all around.
[[/folder]]

* McClintok was shown to have silverish blood. With Nicolette also being an Indogene, shouldn't she have the same blood?