Series / Defiance

"When I was a little girl, Nolan liked to say that this world has no natives, which means it belongs to everyone."

— Irisa, "Pilot"

Defiance (2013—15) is set on 2046 Earth, badly damaged from a war with alien colonists called Votans and continued bombardment by the wreckage of their ships. The Votans are a loose alliance of seven species from multiple planets in the Votan solar system, whose sun has gone nova. The Pale Wars started when they arrived at Earth seeking shelter and were refused, and ended when soldiers on both sides gave up fighting out of disgust at the pointlessness of it, and set about rescuing the civilians caught in the cross-fire. The series takes place in a settlement named Defiance built on what used to be St. Louis. The town of Defiance is inhabited by both humans and Votans, in a tenuous state of coexistence. Planet Earth's environment has been drastically altered and filled with alien flora and fauna by the terraforming equipment that crashed when the Votan spaceships were mysteriously destroyed during the war.

The TV series stars Grant Bowler as Chief Lawkeeper Joshua Nolan, Julie Benz as Mayor Amanda Rosewater, Tony Curran as Castithan community/underworld leader Datak Tarr, Jaime Murray as Stahma Tarr, Stephanie Leonidas as Deputy Lawkeeper Irisa Nyira, Mia Kirshner as town madam Kenya Rosewater, and Graham Greene as industrialist Rafe McCawley.

The show has a rather novel approach in that it was developed alongside a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, also called Defiance. While the game is set in the San Francisco Bay area in California and the show is set in the remains of St. Louis, Missouri,^note about 2000 miles apart they did acknowledge each other occasionally.

After only four episodes, the show was renewed for a second season, which consists of 13 episodes. It was then renewed for a third and final season, being cancelled as of October 16, 2015. The game was shut down on April 29, 2021.

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This series provides examples of:

• Abortion Fallout Drama: Amanda had an abortion years ago. The abortion itself is treated as an understandable choice given the overall situation, but her handling of it — not even discussing it with the father, Connor Lang, beforehand, even knowing he would have a problem with it — led to the destruction of their relationship. It's later revealed that her pregnancy was a result of her rape by a stranger, but she had allowed Connor to believe otherwise.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Irisa implies this of her biological parents, saying that Nolan saved her by killing them, and that (at the time) she couldn't do it herself. We later find out that her parents were members of a Votan cult that performed unnecessary surgery on her with the intent that she would bring about the end of the world. However, before they could finish the ritual, Nolan and his squad broke in, killing the majority of the cultists, including Irisa's parents.
• The Ace: Joshua Nolan, through and through. Accomplished fighter, war hero, scavenger, survivor, marksman, and leader. He's completely unflappable, never once panicking even when surrounded by giant mutant bug-wolf-things while out of ammo. And as if all that's not enough, he's also a loving father and role model. But he's not a good guy. Just a decent one.
• Action Girl/Dark Action Girl: Pretty much a requirement for any lady living outside a major metropolis, but especially true of Irisa.
• After the End: Most nations have fallen after the war and the changes caused by the terraforming machines. It's a brand new world, to the point that anything from human culture prior to Arkfall is referred to as "Old World".
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Kaziri's Ark Brain, which poses as Votan gods in order to manipulate and control its followers, and is planning to spare only them when it terraforms the world, killing everything else.
• Alien Blood: Castithan blood is Pepto-Bismo pink, and Indogenes have silver blood with blue organs and flesh. The other alien species avert this by having red blood.
• Alien Food Is Edible: Food on Earth is wholly edible by Votans, even though a slight difference can mean death or severe allergic reactions just for creatures here, let alone from another planet.
• Alien Invasion: Subverted. The Votans aren't so much invaders as desperate refugees trying to find a new home. Negotiations were almost complete for their peaceful settlement on Earth when the Votan ambassador to the UN was murdered on live TV by a human assassin. People on both sides believed that the other side set it up ^note The game reveals fairly early that the assassin was actually part of a conspiracy by human and Votan representatives that wanted a war, and were working together to start one for reasons unknown, causing fighting to break out worldwide. Thus, the Pale Wars began.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Played With. We do meet a lot of decent Votan characters, but they all seem to be those who've assimilated into Earth culture. The ones who keep their own traditions and customs include ruthless crime lords, fundamentalist cultists, and insane terrorists. That's not to say all humans in the show are saints, mind...
• Aliens Speaking English:
  • Justified. It's been thirty years since the Votans first arrived on Earth, so all of the older ones have had plenty of time to learn human languages. Many of the younger ones born on Earth grew up bilingual. During the same time, many though not all humans have learned how to speak Votan languages, or at least be basically conversant in them. A few Votan words became common street-slang even among humans that don't know their languages (i.e. "jaja" means "money", "sthako" means "shit!", etc.)
  • The showrunners developed two entire alien languages, Casti and Irathient, before the show even started shooting, and a third, Omec, was developed for season 3. So it's not like there's any shortage of aliens speaking alien languages.
• Aliens Steal Cable: The Omec found Earth by following broadcasts of Elvis that they picked up when they were around Gliese 581.
• All Atmospheres Are Equal: Votans are entirely capable of living here in Earth's environment with zero problems regarding air (Liberata are said to breathe nitrogen, yet never need breathing apparatuses^note They wouldn't necessarily, as Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, although if it were not the precisely right amount it could still be difficult or dangerous for them.).
• The Alliance: The Votanis Collective was a loose coalition of alien species from the same solar system, and still exists on Earth in some form (Datak helps facilitate relations with them in Defiance). Most of their territory is in South America with a capital city in Brazil. The Earth Republic is another powerful alliance on the new landscape, basically consisting of what's left of the Eastern half of the USA. In practice, though, it's clear they are either terribly corrupt or extremely forceful in their recruiting, given they pretty much sanctioned their ambassador arranging a murder in order to force Defiance to join them. Their capital city is New York.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Syfy allegedly had pretty in-depth guides that expand on the world of Defiance. Unfortunately, none of them exist anymore, and all we have are the loading screens from the game. However, thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, it allows access to the website and the in-depth guides once again.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The seventh and eighth Votan races, the Volge and Omec, are both extremely hostile and war-like races, and are generally hated by the other six.
• Ambiguous Gender: Nolan has difficulty telling male and female Liberata apart. It's to the point when the Liberata teacher at the school thanked him with a kiss after he fixed the roof, he told Irisa later he hoped the teacher was female. In his defense, both genders have a large amount of body and facial hair. In fact, three of Liberata who have appeared on the show (both male and female) were played by Jessica Nichols.
• AM/FM Characterization: Our first encounter with Nolan and Irisa, the two main characters of the show, has an awkward silence broken with Nolan turning on the radio, only to hear Johnny Cash and June Carter singing 'Jackson', which, in the year 2046, is more than a bit country and old-fashioned.
• And This Is for...: After Churchill is killed by a Gulanee, Pottinger insists on delivering the killing blow.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • The show seemed to keep killing off main characters, at least one every season finale: first season we got Kenya, and second season, Tommy.
  • In the third season opener, the showrunners went full Red Wedding and killed off half of the cast.
• Apocalypse Maiden: Irisa. As a child, her parents were part of a religious cult that surgically implanted her with one of two keys to a sentient genocidal alien spaceship. By the end of season one, she has acquired the other key, and the ship pretends to be Irzu, an alien god, in order to make a deal with her and trick her into becoming the angel of death. Season 2 ends with her gaining access to orbital superweapons and destroying major cities.
• Appeal to Tradition: Datak tried this with Alak in "The Bride Wore Black" by telling him how Alak's grandfather stayed on their homeworld to ensure the scrolls in the holy temple were still taken care of because the man made a promise to Alak's great-grandfather. The moral of the story being to honor the elder's wants and promises to the elder. This is his reason for expecting Alak to follow his order about canceling the wedding. However, Alak sees it as a Senseless Sacrifice and points out how he isn't like his father. He may be Castithan of blood, but Earth is his home, not that dead world his parents grew up on.
• Artifact of Doom: There are certainly plenty of these, from Terraspheres to the two keys that control a 6,000-year-old sentient genocidal alien spaceship.
• Artificial Human:
  • Biomen are, in Nolan's words, killing machines made up of stem cells and spare parts.
  • The Indogene were engineered by the Omec, hence the hexagonal skin.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: A lot of characters tend to be generally careless with their firearms. One particularly egregious example is former soldier Eddie in "Brothers in Arms" pointing his pistol directly at Nolan while handing it over to him.
• Ascended Extra: Sukar. Although intended as a one-off character, he was given a more prominent role because the creators were impressed by the contributions that Noah Danby made, behind the scenes, in defining the Irathient race. And then happens to Sukar again as he was also then supposed to die during season one but Noah's performance impressed so much that the character lived.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Even before being introduced, Kenya's former husband Hunter Bell certainly doesn't seem like the nicest guy. When it's revealed he was an abusive spouse and Datak's predecessor (of sorts), Nolan isn't terribly interested in finding his murderer, convinced that he had it coming.
  • While the characters in-universe may have differing opinions, no viewer is going to feel sorry for Nicolette Riordan.
  • Deidre Lamb was a manipulative bitch who tried to ruin a married couple and steal the husband (who she was planning on blackmailing into going along with it). When Christie throws her off the arch after she tries to poison Christie's unborn baby very few people care (just Amanda and her co-workers, really).
• As You Know: At the beginning of "Goodbye Blue Sky," Nolan radios back to Defiance about the approaching Razor Rain storm...and proceeds to explain exactly what Razor Rain is, just in case anyone who's grown up in this post-apocalyptic world just happened to forget what it was...
• Ate His Gun: Irisa does this to stop Irzu from making her kill more people. Too bad Irzu isn't inclined to let her stay dead.
• Back for the Dead:
  • Daigo reappears in the Season 2 premiere, and ends up gunned down by Nolan for his comments about Irisa.
  • Olfin Tennety reappears late in Season 2, only to be crushed to death when a section of the mine collapses.
• Back for the Finale: Rynn returns in the last scene of the penultimate season 1 episode, and plays a role in the season finale.
• Badass Biker: The primary mode of transportation for the Spirit Riders, and they more than qualify for the badass half when they ride through a group of Volge guns blazing.
• Bad Boss: While not the worst example in the world, Datak stands out against Stahma. Some of the reasons his former crew is so loyal to Stahma is because she provides them with opportunities their caste system would not allow, she doesn't fly off the handle at seemly random times (and killing them/getting them killed), she's actually a very competent business person, and she's a mob boss who listens and confers with her lieutenants.
• Bad Humor Truck: In one episode drug dealers abduct people off the streets to process them into Blue Devil. Their ride of choice is an ice cream truck.
• Bathtub Scene: Castithans traditionally practice communal bathing, so there are many scenes of the Tarr family in their indoor bathing pool (along with some Human guests at times, though Christie is uncomfortable with the idea and thus declines, to Datak's disapproval).
• Be Careful What You Wish For: A non-magical version for Datak Tarr. He accepted E-Rep's help in his campaign for mayor, which symbolized his ultimate goal of achieving respectability and recognition. It bites him when on the night of his mayoral victory, E-Rep takes over Defiance, making Datak look like the mere puppet he is and costing him everything he's worked for.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Niles Pottinger became mentally unbalanced due to his rape, and ultimately raped Amanda himself.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Tommy in "The Serpent's Egg". As in the previous episodes, he doesn't say much. But when he gets a chance, he comes out swinging and ready to the kick the shit out of Daigo.
• Big Applesauce: New York is the capital of the Earth Republic. When a genocidal AI gets access to superweapons, guess which city gets to feel the bite first.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Hellbugs, dog-sized insects that suck the marrow from their prey. Then there's the queen, a house-sized bug factory.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Tarrs, of all people, saving Rafe, Berlin and other prisoners from a firing squad of panicked E-Rep soldiers in the Season Two finale. Berlin can only laugh at the absurdity.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Tarrs and the McCawleys both have dysfunction to spare (organized crime and Madwoman in the Attic, respectively), and it only gets worse when their kids get married.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Implied when a hostage-taker tries to guess which of Olfin Tennety's husbands is her favorite, and thus a more useful hostage, by grabbing their crotches.
• Bilingual Backfire: Datak insults Christie's cooking in Castithan, unaware (or possibly aware) that she has at least a passable knowledge of the language. He attempts to smooth it over by claiming it's a "Castithan saying", but Christie leaves before he can finish, clearly not buying it.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Ex-Mayor Nicolette Riordan, who was behind the Volge attack.
  • Stahma Tarr as well. She plays the part of the dutiful Castithan wife but secretly plans the murder of Rafe McCawley and subtly implies that she murdered her intended fiance so she could marry Datak.
    • In the second season, with Datak in jail, Stahma takes over the "business" and rules with an iron fist. And then blames her harsh actions on her son's "weakness" (i.e. compassion). All the more impressive since Castithans are a very patriarchal society.
    • Then later on she frames a conservative religious figure for murder, and has some wonderfully undertone-laden dialog with Datak afterwards.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Liberata breathe nitrogen instead of oxygen, and can die of oxygen poisoning with similar symptoms to nitrogen poisoning in humans.
  • Castithans apparently have their hearts on the right side, as taught by Nolan when he told Irisa to kill one.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Datak gets a hidden one built into his cybernetic arm, which he uses to stab an Omec warrior through the skull and later wound Kindzi to save his family.
• Blessed with Suck: See Typhoid Mary below for how rough it is to have an Irathient's immune system.
• Blofeld Ploy: In "Beasts of Burden", Datak wants Alak to pick someone to die as an example to the rest, all of whom betrayed him while in prison. Alak picks himself, so Datak just slashes the throat of one of his mooks.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • The Votans come across this way to the humans.
  • The fact that Stahma loves Datak because of his ambition and cruelty is totally incomprehensible to Kenya.
  • The Omec find it very offensive to be called cannibals. Technically they're right: they don't eat each other, but any other sentient species is fair game.
• Body Horror:
  • "In My Secret Life" has the shrill bomb. It's an improvised explosive filled with earthworm-like insects. If the explosion doesn't kill whoever's nearby, the bomb-proof bugs will finish the job when they burrow their way into the unfortunate victim.
  • "The Cord and the Ax" has Irisa blow off the entire left side of her cheek in a suicide attempt, complete with loving shots of the wound as the nanotech within her slowly repairs her.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger: See Downer Ending for how the first season finale winds up like this.
• Boldly Coming: A lot of Humans and Votans have little compunctions about having sex with each other, not to mention full-on relationships, including marriage. Some have children too.
• Bond One-Liner: Datak after killing two Hellbugs that invaded his home during dinner:
  "Perhaps we should dine out."
• Book Ends: When we first meet Nolan and Irisa in episode 1, they start singing along to Johnny Cash's version of "Jackson" (see AM/FM Characterization above). Nolan's last line before leaving Earth and Sol at the end of Season 3 is a whispered "We're going to Jackson...".
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Pottinger uses Yewll's severed finger to access her safe in "The Cord and the Ax".
• Bottle Episode: "The Serpent's Egg" is this after the big-budget special effects of the last four.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: Irisa seems to be trying this in "Doll Parts". She brings up all his past sins in an attempt to drive him off, but Nolan emphatically believes she's being coerced into doing so by the Kaziri. Since she's adamant that not killing him is part of her deal with Irzu, he's probably right.
• Brick Joke: In "Down in the Ground Where The Dead Men Go", Nicolette says she's going to take up golf as a retirement hobby, since she's the only one left who remembers the rules. In "Everything is Broken", Black Jonah threatens to scalp Yewll's "golf ball" head if she double-crosses the E-Rep, causing Yewll to ask what a golf ball is.
• Bulletproof Vest: The VC infiltrators in "My Name Is Datak Tarr and I Have Come to Kill You" wear head and body armor that proves completely impervious to Nolan's Hand Cannon. He ends up having to aim for the gaps in the armor point-blank for a quick kill, and that was after they had successfully taken everyone in the NeedWant hostage because he couldn't stop them the first time.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Datak goads Nolan into a fight in "Past Is Prologue". Note that he does this after he revealed Nolan's unsavory soldier past and knows exactly how much of a badass Nolan is. Needless to say, it did not go well for Datak.
  • In "Beasts of Burden", Josef holds Nolan at gunpoint in Rafe's house. Rafe asks Nolan not to be too rough on Josef. Before Josef can fully question why Rafe is asking such a thing, he finds himself disarmed and kissing the floor.
  • Shigustak Kurr, a Castithan religious fundamentalist, boycotts the gambling hut because Stahma is running it, even though Stahma points out she has a loyal army of hardened criminals with which to retaliate. He sticks to his guns, so Stahma murders his wife and two other women who refused to side with her, then frames him for it.
• California Collapse: Los Angeles (now called AngelArc) is no longer a single city, but a series of islands. Since the haywire terraformers were raising mountain ranges in other areas, at least it makes sense this time.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • A "Lawkeeper" is just a not-at-all-fancy word for a Sheriff. They're even popularly elected. Usually.
  • There are no cars or trucks. They're called "rollers". Possibly justified In-Universe by the amount of robotic "walker" vehicles that are also seen.
  • "Jaja" is presumably a Votan word for money that has been adopted by humans, and "shtako" is used in place of "shit,"
  • A hailer is basically a cellphone/walkie-talkie combination with a little extra options.
  • A landcoach is a bus that also carries mail.
  • Amanda uses the term "night porter" to describe the prostitutes at the NeedWant, possibly due to the NeedWant previously being a hotel.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The plated spiky creature Christie cooks for the Tarrs is referred to as an "otter".
• Call-Back: From the series finale to the very first scenes.
  Nolan: I'm goin' to Jackson.
• Calvinball: The Votan card game Ivali.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Omec gain strength from feeding on the other races. Kindzi implicitly gains her father's considerable strength by devouring his heart after killing him.
• Card-Carrying Villain:
  • Pol Madis, a Mad Bomber whose sole joy in life is to kill people.
  • General Rahm Tak, whose sole objective is to commit the mass murder of as many humans and Votan human-sympathizers as he can get his hands on.
• Caught Up in the Rapture: The Kaziri's plot is a technological variation of this. The people Irisa has been infecting are stored within the Kaziri, protected while terraforming technology wipes the Earth clean. Nolan actually refers to it as a "Votan Rapture", explaining the comparison to Tommy.
• The Cavalry/Gondor Calls for Aid: Though Defiance doesn't know about it, Irisa has a change of heart and comes back with the Spirit Riders to help fight the Volge. Fittingly enough, they even come riding bikes and other vehicles, the spiritual successor to the original horse-based cavalry.
• Cerebus Syndrome: From the start, it was a show about a world that is not easy to live in and is far from having Black-and-White Morality, and we got to see some rather unpleasant ways to die, but season three is so dark it makes season one look like Sesame Street.
• Character Blog:
  • There seems to be twitter accounts for many characters including relatively minor ones like Sukar.
  • Also a tumblr called "Defiance News" that posts canon backstories and "news accounts" or journal entries describing the Pale Wars.
• Child by Rape: Amanda turns out to have been raped in the past, leading to a pregnancy that she terminated.
• The Chosen One: Sukar believes Irisa has been chosen by their people's god for some greater purpose. Daigo also believes she's been chosen... but to be a Dark Messiah.
• Clean Food, Poisoned Fork: Stahma offers Kenya a drink from her flask when she is threatening to tell everyone about them sleeping together. Kenya is smart enough to realise that it may be poisoned and doesn't take a drink. Unfortunately, the outside of the flask was coated in poison.
• Closest Thing We Got: Amanda makes Nolan the new Lawkeeper at the end of the pilot because he's the only one remotely qualified. He snarks a bit about her lacking sales pitch.
• Closer to Earth: Stahma to Datak. Almost literal in fact, since most of the time she's trying to curb Datak's sheer irritation at others for acting non-Castithan and his expectation that people will automatically respect him due to his caste. Datak even expects this from Humans, apparently forgetting whose homeworld he currently resides on.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: In "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", Nolan reluctantly tortures a Votanis Collective agent by having shrill burrow through his limbs one at a time. He doesn't crack.
• Color Motif: Practically everything the Tarrs have is a flawless perfect white. Even the interior and exteriors of their house, which is impressive considering the ragtag state of the world.
• Conlang: Linguist David J. Peterson (best known for the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones) has created full languages for the Castithans and Irathients, as well as outlines of languages for other Votans.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: Both Nolan and Irisa go back to help Defiance defend against the Volge, though Irisa takes a bit longer to come around.
• Continuity Nod: In "The Bride Wore Black", just before Datak storms in to his house completely pissed off, we see Stahma writing in a journal to which she quickly and almost embarrassingly covers up when Datak arrives — the poetry writing Kenya convinced her to take up again.
• Convenient Coma: Mayor Amanda's traitorous assistant falls into a coma shortly after he's caught, staying conscious just long enough to indicate a larger conspiracy but not to name names.
• Cool Car: Classic cars apparently survived the wars, since Datak and some weapon smugglers from the Votanis Collective have them. Nolan also has a Dodge Charger courtesy of his Lawkeeper gig.
• Cool Shades:
  • Birch wears a pair with the lenses slightly detached from the rims.
  • Irisa is shown wearing a pair in "The Bride Wore Black", with extra lenses on the sides.
  • In "A Well Respected Man", Datak wears more ordinary-looking (but still cool) shades. Could be considered as an Actor Allusion, this is the same kind of shades that Skinner wear in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Cosplay: "This Woman's Work" shows that humans dressing as Votans is apparently an exotic fetish. For extra disturbing points, the two examples shown are Viceroy Mercado and Christie, with the former flirting with the latter. Then "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes" goes and tops it by showing that the really committed cosplayers go the extra mile and pay for stolen Votan organs (corneas, in this case) for that extra bit of realism.
• Couch Gag: Starting Season 2 of the series, when it comes to the title card, it flies over the town and ends with a shot of the Gateway Arch. Depending on the weather of each episode, the title card reflects it. In one episode, the opening credits showed a day to night transition for a difference in the opening scene and the following scene. When it comes to Season 3, the arch is shown to be damaged after it is bombed by Datak and Stahma, with the weather still reflected with each change seen in the episodes.
• Cowboy Cop: Both Nolan and Irisa, on account of being former Disaster Scavengers trying to adapt to the politics of a city.
• Creepy Child: The little Irathient girl Irisa sometimes sees in her visions. Identifies herself as Irzu, one of the key Irathient gods. This is not necessarily the truth, however; Sukar believed he was kept alive after being impaled by razor rain, and directed by the will of Irzu, but Doctor Yewell identified it as the arkbrain shard that had lodged in Sukar's neck, transferring nanites with an agenda into him. Irisa unquestionably has Indogene manufactured nanotech in her, and what better for a thinking nanite colony to get a sapient whose actions it can't actually control to do its bidding than by impersonating a deity?
• Cruel Mercy: In "The Serpent's Egg", Irisa lets Daigo live despite him being responsible for the abuse she suffered, because being forced to live a normal life is far greater a punishment than any torture or execution she could give him.
• Culture Chop Suey: The Tarr family, our main viewpoint on Castithi culture combines traits of the Italian Mafia, the Hindu caste system, and Japanese bathing rituals. This is taken to the point where a Castithan word is translated as "Capo". Increasingly Irathients are coming to stand for a hodge-podge of historically oppressed races.
• Culture Clash: A key part of the series are the difficult interactions between the different races.
  • Irathients don't trust inoculations for their children, partly because they're immune to just about everything (though can still be carriers), which ended in a slaughter when Defiance was first founded.^note The game reveals that they might be justified: they were literally being killed with intentionally bad inoculations before the Pale Wars started. Nolan also mistakes Irisa's visions for PTSD, though the fact that she does have issues with her past confuses the matter.
  • Crazy Cultural Comparison: For Castithans, bath time is a family bonding ritual, and the kind of naked physical closeness they demonstrate seems almost incestuous by human standards. Bathing alone is actually considered deviant, or at least eccentric, behavior. In one scene, Datak is annoyed that Christie insists on bathing alone.
    Datak: Who does that, I ask you?
    Stahma: Humans.
  • Culture Blind: Somewhat justified as some races or individuals simply don't care to learn about other races customs.
  • Castithans see nothing wrong with parents kissing their children on the lips. In the second season, when Stahma kisses Nolan, everyone instantly understands that she's basically calling him family.
  • Christie has shown an increasingly harder time with Casti customs. When Stahma attempts the familial kiss on her, she is extremely uncomfortable and refuses. Though given that Stahma may or may not be trying to seduce her (bearing in mind that she's her daughter-in-law), a little awkwardness on her part is warranted.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Nolan versus the Bioman, a Pale War-era Super-Soldier. Played with in that while it looks like this is going to (Painfully) happen to Nolan, each of Nolan's attacks are designed to hit the Bioman's off-switch. He just had a bit of trouble remembering where on this particular model that switch was. Turns out, in a moment reminiscent of Dr. McNinja, it was the butt.
• Cut Himself Shaving: In a flashback, Kenya uses an excuse like this for the latest sign of abuse from Hunter Bell. Amanda, naturally, isn't buying it.
• Cyborg:
  • It's apparently commonplace for the Indogene to have some sort of cyberization, though they're not immediately obvious. To go with that theme, their skin even has hexagonal 'scales' rather than more organic shapes. It's revealed in the third season that the Omec engineered them.
  • Biomen are another example, though they lean more heavily to the machine side of things.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: There seems to be the belief that one of the reasons Indogenes are so emotionless is because they have a lot of cybernetic implants.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Irisa and Rynn are both war orphans, for different reasons. Irisa's parents were killed by Nolan when he rescued her from a bloody cult ritual, while Rynn's were murdered for their land.
  • Dr. Yewll did several unpleasant things in her past which are alluded to throughout the series. These include murder, experimenting on humans, and making sleeper agents to kill high-ranking earth officials.
  • Eddie comments suggest that Nolan did some dark things as well. "No Man" shows that in his younger days he participated in a massacre that saw almost two hundred civilians, Votani and human, gunned down, and even boasted aggressively about killing a child at his own court-martial. Anti-Hero he may be, but when you consider what a monster he was back then... Amanda even says, when she hears about this, that that's who he was, not who he is.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Neither Rafe McCawley or Datak Tarr are happy that their daughter and son, respectively, are dating. Datak is willing to go along with it due to the business opportunity it presents, not to mention the fact that he knows Rafe will be much more uncomfortable with it. Rafe is willing to disown his daughter, though Quentin tries to talk some sense into him. Some charitable story-telling from Stahma and Datak help smooth things over between them by painting Alak as a heroic protector, allowing the rift between Rafe and his daughter to fully heal while simultaneously getting some respect out of Rafe for Alak. That being said, once Rafe realises that Alak is not merely an entitled punk like he'd originally thought, he quickly becomes far more accepting and supportive of their relationship. His real issue is more with Datak and the fact he's clearly attempting to use their children to inherit the mines.
• Day of the Jackboot: Season 2 opens with a nine-month Time Skip, during which the Earth Republic has taken complete control of Defiance.
• Dead Person Conversation: Quentin has this with Luke early in Season 1, it is actually a ship's AI masquerading as Luke.. It happens again in season 2 when Dr. Yewll and Pottinger talk to dead friends in the episode 'Put the Damage On' which is also caused by errant technology interfering with people's heads.
• Death from Above: Razor Rain, a storm of small Ark fragments that can cut right through anyone standing outside.
• Death of the Hypotenuse:
  • The minor one of Conner/Amanda/Nolan is resolved in this way, courtesy of Datak, though Nolan is unaware.
  • The slightly more major one of Amanda/Nolan/Kenya is briefly derailed when Kenya apparently dumps Nolan for Stahma but is ended via this trope when Stahma apparently murders Kenya.
• Death World: Terraformed Earth. With the destruction of the Arks, the terraforming equipment onboard was severely damaged, causing massive geological and ecological devastation when it was accidentally deployed. Another result, is that there are now very large, very hostile and very mutant animals everywhere. The woods near Defiance are home to creatures that looks like a combination of a bear, a spider, and an armadillo. The Hellbugs are dog-sized crab/bug monsters, and their matron is the size of a house. This is on top of the constant Colony Drops from Ark wreckage, deadly storms, Always Chaotic Evil Volge, and the raiders, criminals, and so forth common to an After the End setting.
• Deconstructed Trope: In the video game, fighting a Gulanee is just another boss battle. The series, however, shows what it's like to deal with such a thing when you don't have an experimental EGO or fantastic future-tech weaponry that might not be out of place in Borderlands.
• Deep Cover Agent: A rogue faction of Indogenes ran a project dedicated to this during the Pale Wars, kidnapping humans and transferring their memories into Indogenes who were then surgically altered to match the captured subjects. Gordon McClintock turns out to be an imperfect prototype; Nicolette Riordan appears to have been one of the final products.
• Depopulation Bomb: The white and gold artifacts are revealed to be keys to an ancient Votan ship beneath Defiance. Its weapons could either purge all human life or all Votan life.
• Did You Actually Believe...?:
  • ...That Stahma Tarr was really in love with Kenya and finding solace with her from her own abusive marriage? It does seem like she had feelings for Kenya but not in the way a human would define "feelings".
  • Colonel Marsh also gives Datak this treatment for thinking he and the Earth Republic would be equal partners.
• Disaster Scavengers:
  • A common profession among nomads is "ark hunting", which involves scavenging technology from pieces of the arks that crash into Earth every so often. The remains of the alien arks in orbit are extremely valuable and useful for a large variety of reasons, and everyone wants a piece. Players in the tie-in game are all ark hunters as are Irisa and Nolan before settling in Defiance.
  • Amanda and her mother were more general scavengers during the war.
• Disney Death: Nolan is gunned down in "Everything is Broken", only for Irisa to somehow bring him back with the Kaziri.
• Disney Villain Death: In "Doll Parts", Deidre is thrown from the top of the Arch by Christie in a fight after Christie finds out about her attempts to steal Alak.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Stahma reveals that Berlin smells like Nolan in front of Tommy, he asks if the two are dating. She balks at the idea, but adds that they are having plenty of sex.
• Doctor Jerk: Dr. Yewll is extremely good at what she does, but she does not brook any kind of resistance to her orders, and has no problem speaking her mind and calling people idiots.
• The Dog Bites Back: At the end of "Beasts of Burden", Stahma unites Datak's gang against him for the actions he took to reassert control after getting out of jail, beating him senseless and throwing him out on the street.
• Domestic Abuse: Kenya's husband, Hunter Bell, beat and possibly raped her before he died.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. It is taken very seriously when Nolan is raped by Kindzi. It's true Kindzi's female and pretty, but she's also much stronger than a human, a murderer dozens of times over, armed, and she sets new records in Ax-Crazy. When she took Nolan from the VC caravan by slaughtering them, restrained him, and described her intentions to make him her 'pet,' then had forced herself on him, no part of the situation was treated as a minor thing due to Nolan being male.
• Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male: Averted. Pottinger's Rape as Backstory by VC soldiers is taken just as seriously as Amanda's by some random assailant (who turned out to not have been random at all, but actually also Pottinger, who became obsessed with Amanda after Connor had left him for her, stalked and later raped her).
• Downer Ending: Hoo boy, the first season finale. Datak wins the election, then learns that he's going to be nothing but a puppet for the Earth Republic. In a fit of rage he kills Colonel Marsh, signing his own death warrant and giving the Earth Republic the pretense for moving in and taking over the town. Meanwhile, the affair between Stahma and Kenya is revealed, and Stahma poisons Kenya to save her own skin. Rafe has the mines taken from him by the E-Reps and is shot in the struggle, possibly fatally. And Irisa basically sells her soul to Irzu in order to save Nolan's life, accepting her destiny as the activation key for the kaziri and possibly dying herself.
• The Dreaded:
  • Jonah Keller, aka Black Jonah, is this, due to the Torture Technician skills he developed during the Pale Wars. Just look at Yewll's face when he introduces himself.
  • Rahm Tak, aka The Beast, a leader of a Votanis Collective death squad, slaughters any humans in his path and mounts their heads on pikes.
  • The Omec are another Votan race feared by the others as devils. They enslaved the other races, using them for labor and food. And even among them, Eksu Tsuroz T'evgin is particularly feared by the other Votans.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Irisa tries to take her own life after she gets tired of being forced to kill. Unfortunately for her, it's rather difficult to successfully do this when your body has nanotechnology that can repair most injuries.
  • Yewll's lover killed herself during the Pale Wars, implicitly because she couldn't stomach the experiments they were performing on humans.
  • Zero's father hangs himself after his son is incinerated by Rahm Tak's mole.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Kenya actually seems to use it in place of a bra, at least during her session with Nolan. She does have more conventional lingerie when walking about (this is a bad idea in real life, especially when done regularly, as it compresses the ribcage around the lungs and can lead to pneumonia and other problems).
• Dumb Muscle: Biomen are extremely tough, but not very bright. When Ulysses is trying to keep a low profile while rounding up victims to be drained of adrenaline, he kidnaps Kenya Rosewater—who, in addition to being one of the most important women in town in her own right, is also the mayor's sister and the lawkeeper's girlfriend. In his defense, though, she had caught him red-handed and letting her report him would have been equally bad. The second season shows that this isn't typical, however, as Pottinger's Bioman assistant is at the very least reasonably well-educated.
• Dying Town: Following the events of Season 2, the Gualanite mines are forced to shut down and Defiance loses its economic and strategic value. Most of the unemployed miners leave or turn to crime. By the season 3 premiere, the town is lacking essential resources to maintain its infrastructure and does not have the power to keep its stasis net up or light its streets at night. Without a working stasis net it is an easy target for raiders.
• Earth That Was: The Pale Wars left the Earth in a pretty bad way. Global infrastructure is toast, mutated animals and falling spacecraft are daily threats, and polio's making a comeback. The closest things to fully developed nations are the Earth Republic (shady and borderline fascist) and the Votanis Collective (associated with a lot of terrorist tactics).
• Easily Forgiven: Irisa is actually pretty pissed that Nolan keeps screwing up their chances to get ahead due to his stupidity or unrelenting altruism, but never for very long.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Nolan is called "No Man" by Eddie and Nolan tells Irisa that it was from an incident during the war where he got stuck in No Man's Land. It's later revealed that it is a reference to "No man left alive" - as in, kill everyone and let God sort out who is innocent.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Irisa recruits a band of Irathient raiders, the Spirit Riders, to help defend Defiance against the Volge, reasoning that they held greater disdain for the latter. They are later shown enjoying a drink in the town brothel after the battle is won, and as of "Devil in the Dark" they are openly welcomed again in Defiance as well as gifted their original settled land back to them.
  • Minor (and not very nice) one but when Datak starts up a talk about how Irathients are, in more flowery words, dirty plague-ridden mongrels in the eyes of other Votans, you can see Rafe in the background nodding and gesturing in agreement.
  • Seven years earlier, Dakak and Rafe allied with each other against Hunter Bell, a powerful local businessman who had it in for them both. It quickly fell apart after their "common ground" died.
• Energy Beings: The Gulanee, who have to wear suits to contain their essence.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: There is a lot of sex in the series. Many characters get laid at least once on-screen (not all that explicitly). There's a lot of diversity as well-at least three of them are bisexual, there's also an alien lesbian couple, a polygamous human woman, and various interspecies pairings (both human/alien plus also some alien/alien).
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Defiance was named for the Battle of Defiance, which occurred in the San Francisco Bay area, when soldiers on both sides called a cease-fire to rescue children trapped inside a building, ignoring the orders of their superiors to keep fighting. That one incident eventually led to peace when news of it spread. Nolan, one of the Defiant Few (the soldiers who participated in that battle), is not especially impressed when he's told that the town is named after the battle, pointing out that pretty much everything is.
  • The Spirit Riders are another example. On one hand, they come into conflict with Nolan and Irisa over some salvage. On the other hand, they also help defend Defiance against the Volge after being convinced by Irisa. Several of their own were also killed by these particular Volge not long before, which probably aided their decision.
  • Datak is a power-hungry, manipulative crime lord, but he's still disgusted by Madis. He also supports Amanda in what seemed to be a hopeless defense of the town against the Volge, promising to forgive the debt of anyone who chooses to fight. He could have easily tried to pack up and leave with his family and servants. Indeed, during the battle, he does not hide behind others and does his share of the fighting, calling another Castithan a "shtako coward" for running away.
• Evil Gloating:
  • Pol Madis would have likely lived to see that nice mansion and pool given to him by the Earth Republic if he hadn't gloated to "No Man" Nolan.
  • Ditto for Daigo telling an already pissed-off Nolan what he wants to do with Irisa. Nolan has no problem killing him in front of the guy's wife.
• Eviler than Thou: Colonel Marsh makes it clear to Datak that he's just a puppet ruler for the Earth Republic... and is promptly killed in rage.
• Evolving Credits: The title card reflects the current time of day and the state of the town, such as the arch being blown up in season 3.
• Expy: Irisa isn't human, doesn't talk much, has professional combat training, was raised solely by a man who is not her biological father, and as a teenager, was part of a religious ritual intended to bring about the end of the world, which ended up partially succeeding. Does that remind you of anyone?
• Eye Scream:
  • Alak's Blue Devil cook, Skevur, gets beaten so badly for disrespecting him that one of his eyes is hanging out of its socket when he comes to beg pardon.
  • "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes" is just all over this trope. Jalina gets her eyes taken by a back-alley doctor, Rynn loses one of hers to the same, and Datak uses his fingers to gouge the man's eyes out when he catches him.
• Fainting Seer: What occurs after an Irathient with "The Sight" has their vision. Most notable when Irisa convulses after being brought to the field where her visions kept leading her.
• The Fair Folk: The Omec are this to the other Votans. Stories of their interactions include Votans being taken by the Omec back to their homeworld, treated as lovers and/or pets...and then eaten when the Omec get bored with them.
• Fallen States of America: Compliments of several decades of global warfare and uncontrolled terraforming technology obliterating pretty much all pre-Votan arrival nations.
• Fan Disservice: "Where the Apples Fell" demonstrates a very good way to make a sex scene instantly unsexy: intercut it with shots of severed human heads.
• Fantastic Caste System: Castithans are organized into "liros", though the system fragmented somewhat when they arrived on earth. Part of Datak's motivation stems from being born into a low-ranking liro, while Stahma was a bit higher on the ladder. In season 3 Rahm Tak regularly insults Datak for his low-liro birth and Alak for his mixed heritage.
• Fantastic Drug: The first season episode "A Well Respected Man" introduces "Blue Devil", a neurotransmitter enhancing drug developed by the E-Rep during the war for soldiers, one of its ingredients is human adrenaline, in that episode obtained by scaring people and extracting it from their blood. After the E-Rep occupation of Defiance in season 2 many of its citizens have become addicted to Blue Devil sold by the Tarr syndicate, but Alak makes his suppliers use synthetic adrenaline instead of the real thing.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • While Rafe McCawley does not like the Tarrs, it appears to have less to do with the fact that they're Castithans and more to do with the fact that Datak is an underworld crime boss and rival. He certainly does not have any racism against Irathients considering he's leaving the mine to them in his will.
  • Irathients get a heavy dose of this from everyone, on account of being thought of as just savages and plague carriers, to the point that dogcatcher devices are used when 'escorting' them to the mines 'for their own good'. It's rather... unsettling to watch.
  • Colonel Marsh displays a lot of this; he tells Amanda the Earth Republic can help protect against "alien bandits," and later comes up with a way to get the mines from the Irathients, by claiming they are not the original inhabitants of the land, and thus it never belonged to them.
  • Ironically, though he loathes humans and is contemptuous of lower-caste Casthinans, Ram Takh is the only Castithan character we see who's all for Votan unity (though it's not that surprising as he's with the Votanis Collective). He's even married to an Irathient (they also have children).
• Fantastic Slurs: Castithans are sometimes derisively called "Haints"^note A Southern US term for "ghost"; literally a "haunting spirit.", because of their pallor. The Castithan ambassador from the VC refers to Datak as a "Haint", then says it's okay when she says it.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • The Spirit Riders are pretty much Plains Indians only with motorcycles and ATVs instead of horses.
  • Castithans come across as nonspecific "foreign immigrants," with all the positive and negative stereotypes that come with them^note With its strict class system and its emphasis on family and tradition, Castithan society has a vaguely Asian or Middle Eastern vibe to it. Datak Tarr is basically a mafia don, a poor man back in the "old country" who became wealthy and powerful doing whatever he had to do. On the other hand, he loves his family and dreams of a better life for his son, and he will go out of his way to, ahem, "protect" his fellow Castithans if need be.
  • Like a mafia don, Datak is determined to maintain a legitimate facade, such as when a poor Castithan runs up to him on the street offering money that he owes Tarr, and the usual collector hasn't shown up. Datak's bodyguard nearly breaks the Castithan's arm for such a public display, while Stahma distracts the poor guy's children with some treats, so they don't see their father in this position. Datak orders the man to return home and wait for the collector.
• Fiery Redhead: The Irathients are a whole race of them. Every time Irisa does something typical of a Fiery Redhead, like stabbing Sukar, Sukar says this proves that she is a true Irathient.
• Fingore: Yewll loses a finger when she refuses to cooperate with Pottinger.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In a subtle example, the jogger from "The Devil In The Dark" is seen wiping at his red running shoes just before he's attacked in the woods. Presumably they're a bit damp from the hellbug pheromones that Rynn applied to them.
  • Quentin seeing Luke and carrying a conversation with him, despite his brother being dead. Suddenly, Sukar and Irisa seeing their 'god' isn't coming out of left field.
• Free-Love Future: Countless characters are in same-sex relationships, polyamorous relationships, or otherwise have lots of sex, and nobody bats an eye. Castithans don't even mind adulterous relationships, as long as it's men having them.
• Genre Blind: When Stahma tells Christie how she and Datak were married after his romantic rival was 'accidentally' thrown out an airlock, Christie takes away from the story how much Datak loved Stahma and his determination to win her heart, instead of taking the hint that Stahma murdered her fiance to be with him.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: In "A Well Respected Man", Kenya realizes she's trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine when she finds herself wearing a necklace she had dropped when she was kidnapped.
• God Is Evil: Irzu, the god of Irathients, seems like it actually just wants to cause death and destruction. Then subverted at the end of Season 2 when it's revealed that the Kaziri is just an alien ship pretending to be the god Irzu and it's not evil. It's just continuing the terraforming process it was programmed for.
• Godiva Hair: Stahma has this frequently in her bathing or sex scenes, either with her long hair covering her nipples, or strings of beads that she wears.
• Going Native: Alak clearly prefers humans and their culture to Castithan traditions.
• Gone Horribly Right: The terraforming machines worked perfectly, but they were deployed by accident when the Ark fleet was destroyed and so were operating totally out of control.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop:
  • Lampshaded in "A Well Respected Man". When Datak takes Nolan to a potential informant, Nolan quickly recognizes that Datak has already intimidated the man into staying quiet so Datak could play the good cop to Nolan's bad. Datak counters than he never intended to be the good cop at all, then lets the informant speak. Nevertheless, after Nolan figures out the setup, Datak makes his one liner before putting on his sunglasses and walking off. Yeah. He went there.
  • Tommy and Irisa have developed into this in "The Bride Wore Black." When standing outside a suspect's locked home, Tommy notes they need to get a warrant. Irisa just breaks the window and unlocks the door.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted with Amanda, who is one of the least ambiguously good characters and had an abortion years ago. The abortion itself is treated as an understandable choice given the overall situation, but her handling of it-not even discussing it with her lover, Connor Lang, beforehand, even knowing he would have a problem with it-led to the destruction of their relationship. It's later revealed that her pregnancy was a result of her rape by a stranger, but she refused to admit this because it would have damaged her political career.
• Good Old Ways: Because Defiance is filled with so many different cultures, an unspoken rule is "As long as your traditions don't mess with people outside your group, you can do it." This is what permits the Castithans to use the "cleansing rack". They justify this because years ago, when trying to impose a vaccination law, the Irathients rebelled and many died during the fighting.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: The show has the Castithans, who are a race of white skinned, blonde aliens. To be more specific, there's Stahma Tarr. There are also the Irathients, who have uniformly red hair and pale skin, but particularly Irisa. Both have a lot of male (or for Stahma, also female) attention in the series, irrespective of their species.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: To an extent. Was Nolan in the right to kill someone in cold blood? Was Yewll? Is Rafe really unambiguously good despite his racism and politicking?
• Groin Attack:
  • Nolan tried one on a Bioman. Though many winced, the Bioman just shrugged it off.
  • Irisa uses one on Daigo before Pistol-Whipping him unconscious, and later against a miner in "If I Ever Leave This World Alive".
  • Nolan recalls an incident where his war buddy Eddie was nearly castrated by an angry woman.
  • In "Everything is Broken", Yewll subtly threatens this to an Earth Republic scientist arguing that they remove the keys from Irisa via glorified electrocution.
    Scientist: It's survivable.
    Yewll: So's castration.
• Half-Human Hybrid:
  • Implied in the pilot. When Nolan claims to be Irisa's father, it's quickly pointed out that she's a pure-blooded Irathient, which suggests it isn't unheard of.
  • In "The Bride Wore Black", it's outright stated that Alak and Christie expect to produce a child eventually. The two conceive a child by "The Cord and the Ax", set nine months later, though Christie can't be more than a few weeks along at that point.
  • The Inside Defiance extra for "The Bride Wore Black" on the Syfy website says that pregnancies in such cases carry a great deal of risk for both mother and child. It lampshades the fact that this should only be possible with some kind of common ancestry, and says the issue hasn't been properly studied due to a general lack of medical research in 2046. Common ancestry is not surprising, given how much they all resemble each other.
• Happily Adopted: Irisa, by Nolan.
• Happily Married: Datak and Stahma. For all their Machiavellian pretensions, they are clearly very much in love with one another.
• Heroic Suicide: Irisa shoots herself to stop Irzu from making her kill. Unfortunately, the nanites Irzu placed inside her heal this.
• He Who Fights Monsters: It's implied that most of Datak's hatred for humans stems from being lorded over by local crimeboss Hunter Bell, back when he was a penniless refugee. Considering his own actions in the present, he apparently fails to appreciate the irony.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • Connor Lang gets offed by Datak for being witness to his "negotiations" with the Irathients over the cure to the plague Defiance is suffering from. Nolan almost suffers the same fate, but was unconscious from late-stage infection and Datak decided that his death would be more difficult to explain away.
  • Hunter Bell was killed by Nicolette because he discovered that she was really a surgically altered Indogene like Gordon McClintock. Jered the bartender was also killed as the only other witness besides Nicolette and Yewll to Bell's murder.
  • In the second season, Irisa cannot tell Nolan what really happened to her at the end of the last season, because the technology inside her will kill him if she does. Nolan eventually forces the issue by slitting her wrist, knowing that she'll heal and thus removing her ability to deny it.
• Higher-Tech Species: The Omec possess technology quite a bit more refined than the other Votan races. Notably, their Sleeper Starship possesses some form of a FTL drive unlike the slowboats used by the other Votans. In the season finale, after Nolan overloads the engines to make them explode, he changes his mind and has Yewl use them to shoot them randomly across the universe instead.
• History Repeats: When a plague comes to Defiance, most everyone's first reaction is to alienate and "quarantine" the Irathients. Pretty much the only reason a second uprising doesn't occur is the small number of irathients in Defiance to begin with and the E-rep barricading the town.
• Hollywood Tactics:
  • The Volge in the pilot. Faced with a broad flat valley floor with overlooking cliff faces on both flanks as the only way into town, the Volge politely march up the middle where they are then ambushed. Did their only scout get bored after being seen early in the same episode attacking Spirt Riders? Were they on a time budget? Can they only climb cliff faces while under fire? That said, it's suggested and implied that the pass is the only safe and reliable way into the city which is why the stasis field was more than enough to defend the town from outsiders. And being an army of machines with spiderbots among them, trekking through mountains might not have been logistically possible. Possibly justified since Nicollete's original plan was apparently for the Volge to have the element of surprise. If the people of Defiance hadn't known the attack was coming the Volge would have been on top of them before they could organize a defense. And in all fairness, the Volge attack probably would have succeeded anyway if it hadn't been for Nolan giving them the Core to create a jury-rigged bomb.
  • The spray and pray firing tactics of most of the defenders also fits nicely into this category although this could be explained away mostly that this is a more of a town militia and less of a defending army. People who have fired a gun before however, especially a trained soldier like Nolan or a crime boss like Datak, have no excuse.
• Homeworld Evacuation: The Votan fled their home system before it was destroyed by a rogue star crashing into it.
• Honor Before Reason: Nolan, who is willing to give up his own well-being and security for others, if not necessarily immediately. He's called on it by Irisa, as he has apparently set back their plans several times under similar circumstances. Given his background, however^note As previously mentioned, he was one of the Defiant Few, who refused to fight when innocent people were caught in the crossfire, it would be stranger if he did not do this all the time.
• Hostile Terraforming:
  • The series has an accidental example of this; when the Votan Ark ships were destroyed, the terraforming equipment they were carrying fell to Earth and malfunctioned, heavily altering Earth's environment (Antarctica is apparently tropical now) and creating entirely new species of hybrid animals.
  • In the season 2 finale, the Kaziri tries to terraform the Earth into a paradise for the Votan people. That both the humans and Votans not protected with the Kaziri will be wiped out is of no consequence to it.
• Hot-Blooded:
  • Irisa is pretty volatile when she isn't being quiet and stoic, and seemingly has no in-between.
  • Nolan as well. Irisa mentions that his hot blooded nature has ruined things for them before, and it is causing some problems in Defiance.
• Hufflepuff House: Among the Votan races, the Sensoth. Irathient, Castithan, and Indogene feature prominently and each get represented by a main character, we meet several (mostly comedic) background Liberata, and the Gulanee and Volge have the excuse of being big enough threats that they must be used sparingly. But there's only one Sensoth of note and he's a rather minor character.
• Humans Are White:
  • When the Castithan villain Datak Tarr is listing the things he hates about humans to his human nemesis Rafe McCawley, it includes "the smell of your pink skin makes me sick". Rafe, who is of Native American descent and played by Graham Greene, says "Does this skin look pink to you?", to which Datak replies that we all look the same to him.
  • The following season, when Datak's son Alak is upset about his wife Christie, Rafe's daughter, cosplaying as a Castithan, he asks her how she should like it if he painted his skin "human pink". Christie also points out that her skin isn't pink. Obviously, one thing Castithans don't have is superior vision.
  • Contextually this is played straight as while the Votan are an alien immigrant allegory, everything culturally human/"Old World" is monolithically white with just a few Token Minorities sprinkled about like Avatar instead of American Gods (2017) in cultural perspectives. To count:
    • Besides the above example, Rafe is a rich Native American millennial that misses the past yet is essentially like an old white Racist Grandpa toward the Native-like Irathients without he or the show showing any self-awareness about this.
    • For the same reasons, Christie is essentially the naïve white woman who married into an ethnic family and put on the alien-equivalent of Blackface that understandably disgusts her husband.
    • Monochrome Casting. The real/modern St. Louis is a majority Black city yet the show, alien future or not, is overwhelmingly/inexplicably white with only a token amount of Black and POC characters, made worse by the fact that all the recurring POC humans are dead before the show wrapped up. Meaning Nolan should've been the Token Minority instead of Tommy.
    • Related to the above, "pink skin" implies the majority of humans are still white despite both the expected demographic changes and the fact that humans ironically are more diverse-looking than all the Votan races combined.
    • Covered Up or not, musically, predominantly white genres and artists are played yet there is no rap, R&B, Latin, etc. meaning The Cure were played yet Black music like St. Louis's own Nelly was not.
    • And lastly, Joshua Nolan is the literal face of the show whose character arc is the classic repenting White Savior story from the casual racism to the Dark and Troubled Past to the Heroic Sacrifice for the helpless aliens.
• Humiliation Conga: "Beasts of Burden" has a band of raiders hijack a convoy which Pottinger is riding with. When he tries to resist, the leader has him strip then urinates on him to let him feel literally what he symbolically does to those below him.
• Hypocritical Humour: Yewll chides someone on smoking before smoking herself.
• I Did What I Had to Do:
  • This is Amanda's reasoning for allowing the Castithans to publicly torture a man for cowardice. Previous attempts to force the Votan races to abandon parts of their cultural heritage resulted in the deaths of the majority of their Irathient citizens.
  • Datak also uses this excuse, citing that his actions as a mafioso are to ensure that his son has a good life without having to do these things.
  • Rafe rationalizes sending away his crazy wife to protect his children as this, since she tried to kill them all with rat poison. Amusingly, when Pilar shows up, she admits he did the right thing.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All the season one episodes after the pilot are named after pop cultural references: songs, albums, movies, a Star Trek episode name, and so forth.
• Idiot Ball:
  • In "Ostinato in White", Kindzi uses a device to force Yewll to obey her commands. When her father gets wise of her unauthorized feeding, he decides to punish her, but not before she tells Yewll to "protect my interests at all costs" right in front of him. The end result is that she's stuck in stasis as punishment for a grand total of one episode because T'evgin is too stupid or arrogant to realize Yewll might bail her out (despite acknowledging in a previous episode that she has the necessary technical knowledge), after which he suffers the same fate.
  • In the following episode, Nolan is undergoing some Sanity Slippage thanks to the Votan tech in his brain. As he has already demonstrated dangerously unstable behavior, Irisa gets some medicine from Yewll to alleviate the symptoms. Nolan refuses to take it, even holding a gun on Irisa to make sure she doesn't try. Rather than warn anyone that crazy Nolan is now on the loose, she says nothing to anyone. End result? Nolan shoots the representative of the Votanis Collective because in his madness he thinks she drew a weapon on him, so he and Irisa are shipped off to the Collective so the Collective doesn't destroy Defiance.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: After learning of their relationship, Nolan tells Tommy that if he ever hurts Irisa, he'll get his answer to whether there is a God...in person.
• I Have Your Wife:
  • This is what motivates Ben to betray the town. If he doesn't, his family dies.
  • Kenya tries to set this up in the finale as a way to make Datak leave Defiance forever. Unfortunately for her Stahma is clever enough to anticipate her and poisons Kenya before she even gets her plan in motion.
  • In "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", the Votanis Collective holds Kenya hostage to get Amanda to break their agent out of E-Rep custody. Ironically, said agent is being coerced to aid in their plot to bomb New York through the same method.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Nolan and Tommy try this with Irisa in "Doll Parts". While she is in there, she can't fight off the Kaziri's influence, except to keep from killing Nolan. Tommy gets a knife to the gut.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Stahma is quite loud while having sex with the Omec, whom she is about to kill.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Fittingly played straight by the Earth Republic soldiers in the episode "Everything is Broken". Nolan and Irisa even take advantage of this and kill quite a few of them. Although this trope is immediately subverted after Black Jonah shoots Nolan.
• Implausible Deniability: Irisa's activities in the second season get increasingly hard for her to explain away, to the point that the only thing Nolan doesn't know about it is the motivation.
• Improbable Weapon User: Rynn in "The Devil in the Dark" murders people by painting them as targets for Hellbugs using pheromones.
• The Ingenue: Christie has shades of this, particularly how she seems completely oblivious to the fact that Stahma all-but admitted to having thrown her former fiance out of an airlock so she could marry Datak. Instead she believes the story was about how "Love Conquers All". Though as Season 2 goes on, she's growing out of it, culminating in Killing Dierdre / Treasure Doll without any apparent remorse. Stahma's influence is clearly getting to her.
• In Love with Your Carnage: As Stahma explains to Kenya, she loves Datak because of his cruelty, because it proves his ambition.
• Insane Equals Violent: Pilar has an unspecified mental illness. With medication, things were fine. Once its production was disrupted by the door however she had a psychotic break, trying to kill her children, for which Rafe banished her.
• Insult Backfire: Nolan tells Stahma that she's a more dangerous snake than her husband. She thinks it's sweet of him to say.
• Interrupted Intimacy: In "Beasts of Burden", Irisa walks in on Amanda and Nolan having sex. After telling him why she barged in, Amanda asks if she's heard of knocking. Irisa counters that she was raised by Nolan, which Nolan admits is a valid excuse. This must not be the first time this has happened, because Nolan just goes right back to it before she's left the room.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Christie (Human) and Alak (Castithan) get engaged, then married.
  • Irisa (Irathient) and Tommy (human) kick one off in "The Serpent's Egg". People also assume this is one possibility between Irisa and Nolan; given the state of relations between the different species, it's in their best interest not to correct anyone on the matter unless it's absolutely necessary.
  • In a villainous example, Castithan Rahm Tak is married to Irathient Volubela.
• Ironic Echo: Berlin says she "makes some films that could be considered propaganda."
• I Shall Taunt You: Nolan does this to Sukar in "Doll Parts", as he needs a distraction so Tommy can set off some EMP bombs while everyone is watching the fight.
• It's All About Me: Datak in a nutshell.
• It Works Better with Bullets: In "Broken Boughs", Nolan hands Pilar an energy weapon. When they're about to head back to Defiance, she tries to steal their roller and threatens them with the weapon. Nolan reveals he removed the actuator, rendering it useless, as he figured out who she was and figured she'd pull something like that.
• Jump the Shark: The first two seasons follow a pre-planned story arc, like Babylon 5, that concludes brilliantly and epically, tying up all loose plot threads and character arcs. Then the show got renewed for a third season, and the writers didn't have any story left to tell, so they had to write a season-long story from scratch that ended contradicting previously established continuity and had the characters act wildly out-of-character either for melodrama or to justify the characters doing something stupid/short-sighted.
• Karma Houdini: The Earth Republic ambassador hatches a scheme to steal Defiance's deposit for a railroad, then gets released by her people after she's foiled by Nolan and Amanda. Subverted in season 2 when she gets killed off rather unexpectedly in the very mine she tried to acquire for the Earth Republic in season one.
• Laser Blade: A type of Votan weapon, apparently generalized as a "charge blade". Alak and Datak have rather ornate knives which can extend into swords, and Dr. Yewll has one she uses as a scalpel. Supplementary material states they were originally developed as surgical tools by the Indogenes and adapted into weapons by the Castithans.
• Lethally Stupid: Josef, Rafe's godson, tries to start an insurrection against E-Rep but he just ends up getting a bunch of people killed, including two of his friends. He also massively pisses off Pottinger and them dumps the entire mess on Rafe's doorstep when Rafe is already under close E-Rep scrutiny. Rafe and Nolan take a great risk to keep him out of E-Rep's hands and get him out of town but he instead makes things worse by kidnapping Berlin. In the end Rafe shoots Josef dead to protect everyone involved from the consequences of Josef's actions. Even this is not enough and Pottinger punishes Rafe for what happened.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: In "My Name Is Datak Tarr and I Have Come to Kill You", Datak lops his arm off so the beacon inside will act as a target for a bomb to kill Rahm Tak, while he runs to safety.
• Light Is Not Good: Like all Castithans, the Tarrs have white skin and hair and gold eyes. They also consistently dress in white or pale gray and their entire house is white, but they are also the local equivalent of the Corleones. Significantly Alack, the son and arguably the Token Good Teammate of the family, has dark streaks dyed into his hair. Also, back before the Pale Wars when the Castithans ran the Votan Collective according to Word of God they kept the other races in subservient positions and attempted outright genocide on the Irathients, gathering them into caves and then gassing them.
• Living Battery: Being Energy Beings, a properly contained Gulanee can be used as a power source.
• Loophole Abuse: To get the mines away from Rafe, Datak and Colonel Marsh plan on using a very liberal interpretation of some of Defiance's laws to invalidate the will and have Datak claim them as Defiance's property.
• Lost in the Maize: Played with in the third episode with ankle-height vegetation in the woods, just high enough to hide the dangerous Hellbugs.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: In "A Well Respected Man", this is used as a method to induce fear in subjects, producing adrenaline which is then harvested and processed into a stimulant.
• Lovable Rogue: Nolan, prior to becoming Defiance's lawkeeper. Deconstructed by Berlin, who explains her reasons for wholeheartedly supporting the Earth Republic, despite its heavy-handedness and police state. She even compares Nolan to Han Solo (calling Irisa his "hot Chewbacca"), but beats him over the head with the argument that this lifestyle doesn't work for most people. Most people would rather have civilization, in any form, rather than lawlessness. For reference, Berlin lost her family during the Pale Wars to a bunch of Votan deserters.
• Love Triangle:
  • Between Amanda, Nolan, and Pottinger in the second season. Nolan even lampshades this by saying that he imagines high school, had he not joined the war before that, probably would have been similar.
  • There's also one between Irisa, Tommy, and Berlin. Berlin seems a little jealous but accepts that Tommy wants nothing to do with her, while Irisa just doesn't talk about it even to Berlin.
• MacGuffin:
  • The gold and white artifacts, though only the gold one has been found so far. Whatever they do, "genocidal" has been used to describe them. The silver one is revealed to be in Irisa's back, possibly being the cause of her visions and linked to her destiny as Daigo's "Angel of Death". As it turns out, they're activation keys for the Kaziri, a Votan ship buried beneath Defiance that could potentially wipe out all human or Votan life.
  • The McCawley mines are a lesser example, being the single largest supply of Gualanite. This is why the Earth Republic is so determined to fold Defiance into their ranks. Then it turns out they, or at least Colonel Marsh's faction, are really interested in the above-mentioned ship buried under the mines.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: Colonel Marsh knew exactly what Nicolette Riordan and Doc Yewll were looking for under Defiance. He waited for them to do the hard work of finding the MacGuffin and then swoops in to take it away.
• Mad Bomber: Pol Madis
• Magical Native American: The Irathients sometimes fill this role, despite not being native to Earth
• Major Injury Underreaction: In "A Well Respected Man", Miko finds himself with a slashed jugular courtesy of a beaker upside the head from Kenya. His last words are "I'm gonna kill Ulysses." in a perfectly calm voice. Might have something to do with the drugs he was on.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: In the season 2 premiere, two kids are arrested and sent to Camp Reverie. On the way, the driver stops to relieve himself and the doors just happen to unlock. The kids take the chance to flee... right into the Hellbug-infested forest. The flurry of coincidences necessary for this to happen is so improbable that even Pottinger, who orchestrated it, makes basically no attempt to deny that it was intentional when Amanda calls him on it.
• Mama Bear:
  • When Stahma finds out that Datak burned Alak's hand, she is pissed. At the end of the episode, she rounds up all of Datak's men - none of whom are particularly glad to see their old boss back after he damaged their community's standing - and invites them to beat the living shit out of him.
  • Christie throws Deirdre off the top of the Arch for trying to slip her an abortifacient.
• Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Amanda uses this in conversation with Stahma. Stahma, lacking proper context, dismisses the notion that Venus and Mars could have been responsible for Earth's two genders. Amanda clarifies that the phrase boils down to "men are dicks".
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In "Goodbye Blue Sky", while it turns out there's a perfectly scientific explanation for Sukar's resurrection and actions, the same can't be said for Irisa's visions. Later, we find out there is a scientific explanation—she had a Votan artifact implanted in her spine.
• Meaningful Name: They don't call the city "Defiance" for nothing. In addition to the incident in the backstory which helped found the city, the town remains independent despite attempts by the Earth Republic to integrate it.
• Mirror Character:
  • Rafe and Datak really aren't all that different. Rafe just knows when to control his temper.
  • Nolan and Yewll actually have a lot in common, both trying to do better after a life of sins they'd rather forget.
  • Nolan and Pottinger are both cocky, clever charmers who act like tough guys to hide their vulnerabilities. Pottinger is just a little slimier and more petty.
• Missing Mom: Mrs. McCawley is conspicuously absent. It turns out she had bipolar disorder, and when she became a threat to her own children, Rafe had her locked up, then lied and said she was dead. She's later introduced as Pilar McCawley, and was played by Linda Hamilton starting in season 2.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Olfin's surviving husband leaves her at the end of "The Serpent's Egg" after he learned she set up the hijacking and planned on killing him as part of the ruse.
• Mix-and-Match Critters:
  • Occasionally, characters will make reference to eating a creature called a "pow". While not seen in the show as of Season 2, the game establishes pows as hybrids — mutated into existence during the terraforming of Earth — between pigs and cows.
  • While not a hybrid between alien and Earth creatures (they are evidently imported directly from the Votanis system), Saberwolves look like a cross between a bear and an insect.
• Mob Debt: A sizable proportion of the town owes money to local Castithan crime boss Datak Tarr, whose Establishing Character Moment is how he responds to a debtor trying to make a payment out in the open in the streets. Datak's wife, Stahma, distracts the debtor's kids with candy, while Datak has his enforcer break the debtor's wrist as a warning not to approach him in public again.
• Monochrome Casting: The show was an absolutely egregious example of this trope for numerous reasons and only got worse with it as time went on. First, it's not only set forty years from now where one would expect a more diverse human population, it's set in St. Louis, a majority-Black city (yet filmed in Canada) yet one could count the number of Black humans appearing on one hand during its entire run and that's including extras. Second, it's immigration allegory with Rubber-Forehead Aliens whose Fantastic Slur for humans is "pink skins", suggesting humanity's gotten whiter over the years despite every species of alien put together there still having less variety among themselves as the Native American being called that snarks back by showing his wrist and saying, "this look pink to you?" Third, main character Joshua Nolan being a textbook White Male Lead and White Savior from his Fantastic Racism down to a Heroic Sacrifice for an alien race, and he's marketed so prominently you'd be remiss to think there were any cast members of color. Fourth, everything culturally human/"Old World" being depicted as monolithically white compared to the aliens being a mish-mash of fantasy counterpart cultures, so even the Native American family are more like old money W.A.S.Ps having a Culture Clash with ethnic foreigners, such as daughter Christie (who's in an Interspecies Romance with one) being stupid enough to put on the alien equivalent of Blackface without any self-awareness. By the third season, all of the original humans of color are dead, with the most prominent Black character, Tommy (and only Black character to appear for more than two episodes), being either ignored/sidelined by the show itself or shit on by Nolan for two seasons until he was killed off near the end of season two, meaning that besides the minority actors playing aliens, the show ended whiter than it started. It's possible that when St. Louis got buried, the majority of the people living there died as well, since escaping St. Louis in a hurry could be a problem—to go east, into Illinois, would require crossing the Mississippi River, and people escaping that way would bottleneck at the bridges. And they could only go so far into St. Louis County (which surrounds the city on the Missouri side) before running into a similar problem, since it's almost impossible to get out of St. Louis County without having to cross a river as well. Not to mention the people in the counties surrounding St. Louis would already be trying to get as far away from the city as possible, so anybody in the city itself would be caught behind the people in the counties. And the first-tier counties around St. Louis are still predominantly white, with the second-tier counties having an even higher white population. Once St. Louis (the city) was covered over, the people in the counties may have drifted to the new Defiance.
• Monumental Damage: In "Dead Air", the arch is bombed. While it isn't completely destroyed, all that's left is the lower structural support.
• Monumental Damage Resistance: The St. Louis arch. This is even lampshaded in the pilot, where it's used as a metaphor for the town standing firm despite adversity. Especially notable is the fact that St. Louis is buried beneath the Earth, but the arch is still above ground and upright, though this is probably aided by the fact that it's the tallest accessible building in the city and located near the water. Even the interior is still accessible, if somewhat weathered. Alak Tarr runs the local radio station from the top.
• Mook Lieutenant: Black Jonah to Colonel Marsh. Also something of an Elite Mook, given his skills as a Torture Technician.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Castithan culture is heavily misogynistic, with women expected to serve their husbands quietly and loyally while the men run the business and settle blood debts. But there is an unspoken rule: when the men can't or won't do it, the woman steps in and handles it behind the scenes. Stahma apparently tossed her fiance out an airlock to be with Datak, and Christie killed Deidre Lamb when she kept trying to get between her and Alak, including threatening their baby.
  Stahma: Once again, the strong Castithan male fails to do what is necessary, and it falls to me to open the airlock door myself!
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family/Lamprey Mouth: Hellbugs, which don't have a face so much as one giant circular mouth.
• The Mountains of Illinois: The promos depict the mountains of Missouri quite prominently. Justified by worldwide terraforming; there weren't mountains there before the Pale Wars.
• Ms. Fanservice: Stahma provides most of this for the series. Frequently she's seen wearing very little in the communal bathing pool, or during sex scenes.
• Multicultural Alien Planet:
  • A number of Votan species came from the same planet in the now destroyed Votanis system. Castithans and Indogenes were originally from Daribo (though many of the former migrated to Casti when the latter finished terraforming it).
  • The Irathients, Liberata, and Sensoths are all from Irath, and since the former two were conquered by the Castis they presumably had significant populations on other planets in the system.
• The Mutiny: The Kaziri was a Votan terraforming ship that was supposed to prepare Earth for Votan colonization. When it arrived in the Solar System it became apparent that Earth already had a primitive indigenous population (humans) living there. The ship's AI was set to go ahead with its mission which would kill off humanity. Some of the crew members opposed this, mutinied and took over the ship, causing it to crash and become buried beneath where St. Louis (and Defiance) would eventually be built.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: Played with in "A Well Respected Man", when Nolan says the line to Amanda while shirtless after a session with Kenya. He's just messing with her.
• Named After Their Planet: Played With for the Votan species. They come from the Votanis system for starters. It is played straight by the Irathients (Irath) and Gulanee (Gula). But the Liberata and Sensoths were also native to Irath and the Castithans and Indogenes came from Daribo while the Volge originated on Omec. Though the Castithans had a terraformed colony planet called Casti.
• Nanomachines:
  • Ark brains have them as part of their design, presumably for self-maintenance. In a living host, they grant a Healing Factor that can regenerate severe physical injuries, including bullets wounds and large puncture wounds. However, this is merely a beneficial side-effect of their primary mission, which is to protect Votan life from potential catastrophes.
  • The two Kaziri are nanomachine colonies, able to merge with a host. They work in much the same way as the Ark brain nanites, but to a much more specific purpose.
  • The EGO implant from the tie-in game use nanites. Yewll notes that soldiers were known to accidentally receive them when they were hit by fragments of the implants, which would then replicate and form new implants in the host.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Earth Republic, which in Season 2 is directly compared to the Nazis.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In "Painted From Memory", Datak and Stahma are headed to dig up a body Stahma buried. Stahma tells Datak that she marked the grave with a small patch of flowers. Failing to consider that it's been nearly a year since then, they find that the small patch has since spread over an entire field. They found the grave eventually, but they were digging well into the night.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight: Averted in "The Bride Wore Black." In the flashbacks, Datak and Hunter Bell get into a fistfight. When Hunter draws a blade, he manages to wound Datak and the fight instantly shifts in his favor.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: In the present, when Datak got angry at Rafe, he drew his energy blade. Rafe just lifted his jacket to reveal his pistol at the ready.
• Never Found the Body: Nolan is smart enough to realize the implications of this when discussing Gordon McClintock with Rafe.
• Never Suicide: To stop her insane ambitions, Yewll murders Nicollete then makes it look like she asphyxiated herself in her car, in addition to leaving a suicide note admitting responsibility for the murder of Hunter Bell.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer for Season 2 made it look like Nolan and Stahma were kissing. In truth, she just gave him a chaste peck for saving her life from a roller bomb.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • When Defiance was first founded, inoculations were given to everyone. The local Irathients refused as it was against their beliefs and they didn't trust the humans anyway. When the mayor at the time forcibly did so, the Irathients fought back. The survivors became Spirit Riders and the relationship between Irathients and Defiance has never been the same since. Amanda wants to make amends and avoid a repeat but most seem unwilling to forgive just yet.
  • Something similar happens in "If I Ever Leave This World Alive". Though problem of the week in the episode resolves itself, the ramifications of the events of it are likely to be long term.
  • "Dead Air": Amanda could have left Pottinger alive just long enough for her and Nolan to make off with the EMC weapons (some of which surely work against Biomen) before his dead-man's switch zeroed the entire place.
• No MacGuffin, No Winner: When Pol Madis makes it clear that both major powers intend to put him to work designing weapons instead of punishing him for his crimes, Nolan murders him in cold blood rather than let his weapons be used in another war.
• Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Votanis Collective General Rahm Tak, a Castithan, is married to Volubela, an Irathient, and they have (so-far-unseen) children.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The pilot opens with Nolan trying to apologize to Irisa for an incident involving a married alien woman.
  • Similarly, Nolan seems to have a great reluctance to talk about the Battle of Defiance, despite his (implied) heroism for being one of the Defiant Few. When directly asked what it was like, he simply says "It was what it was", and moves on. Players of the game will know why he doesn't want to talk about it. As a last resort to protect human and Votan refugees from Votan extremists within their military, the Defiant Few activated a terra-spire, reducing the entire city of San Francisco to an uninhabitable wasteland of bizarrely twisted stone, horribly killing both the attacking army and countless innocents in the process. Only a handful of buildings in San Francisco survived the process remotely intact, and it's one of the more disturbing areas of the game.
  • He has another good reason. He's guilty of committing numerous acts during the Pale Wars that border on war crimes.
• No OSHA Compliance: Despite the fact that Alak has a day job up there and his family alone would be able to at least fix the observation deck, the interior of the Arch has a massive gaping hole in it. In Season 2, the show subverts and then plays the issue straight by showing that the hole was mostly patched up with old road signs and the installation of a window big enough to cover where hole is. However, the window doesn't stop Deidre Lamb from falling to her death in "Doll Parts."
• The Nose Knows: Castithans have a heightened sense of smell, evidently good enough that both Stahma and Alak can smell Christie's pregnancy. Christie ends up getting this as a side-effect of her pregnancy, at least enough to smell that her drink is poisoned.
• Not Himself: Irisa in the tail end of Season 2, as she falls completely under the Kaziri's influence, becomes a Dark Messiah. Once Cai absorbs one of the key artifacts from her, she's freed and returned to normal. Also, Nolan when the damaged Arktech in his brain is going haywire, causing him to shoot the VC ambassador at the peace conference.
• Not Me This Time:
  • In "A Well Respected Man", Amanda and Nolan confront Datak suspecting him of abducting Kenya. Datak denies it, as it was apparently too subtle. For bonus points, he practically confesses to the murder of Elah Bandik.
    Datak: When I wish to send a message, I rarely leave it unsigned. It's hubris plain and simple. A character flaw, but one my wife seems to enjoy.
  • He gets it again in "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes", Stahma thinks Datak paid Favi Kurr to boycott Stahma's businesses. He however points out Favi Kurr is far too noble to be bribed, and he wasn't involved in this.
  • The entire Tarr family gets this in "Doll Parts", with all three assuming one of them must have been responsible for Deidre Lamb's murder. Both Datak and Stahma end up agreeing that Alak wouldn't have the guts to do it, and Stahma bursts out laughing when she realizes it was Christie.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Nolan and the Votanis Collective agent have this in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". The latter even thinks they could have been good friends if they weren't on opposite sides. Nolan won't go that far, but admits he wouldn't mind him as a drinking buddy.
• Offing the Offspring:
  • Irisa's parents tried to sacrifice her in a ritual, which Nolan rescued her from (killing them both while doing so).
  • Pilar McCawley suffered from a mental illness, and when her medication stopped being produced due to the war disrupting things, she became violent. This made her try to kill her children, and so her husband Rafe banished her.
• Oh, Crap!: The Defiance armory is almost totally wrecked on the eve of Rahm Tak's planned attack on the city, thanks to shrill (which explode after a certain time) placed in there by Datak.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Dr. Yewll is not only a physician, but also a skilled engineer. Then again, this is her species' hat. "Brothers in Arms" would seem to imply she switched majors, so to speak, after indulging in less savory scientific endeavors during the war.
• One World Order: The Earth Republic seems to see itself as this, many of the world's nations having collapsed during the wars. The Votanis Collective was something like this apparently, though spread across their system.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • Irisa (played by a British actress) suffers from this very noticeably in the third episode, during the scene where she is arguing with Nolan.
  • Despite Nolan being American, Grant Bowler's native New Zealand accent can be occasionally heard to slip through.
• Organ Theft: "If You Could See Through My Eyes" has a surgeon ripping out Votan eyes to make contact lenses for interspecies cosplayers.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Season 3 introduces the Omec, another Votan race that evolved earlier than the others and enslaved them. They have fangs which they use to feed on other races.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Nolan is quickly clued in that something's not right when Datak acts polite and friendly when called upon at his house, given the usual antagonism between them. Pol Madis slipped a nanite into his food which allows him to induce severe pain, using it to force Datak's cooperation.
• Pardon My Klingon:
  • Humans and aliens alike use the term "shtako" liberally, as something of a universal swear word (and not just the "shit" it clearly is meant to translate as - for example, in the pilot, Datak at one point yells, "You shtako coward!") Datak uses the word "shtek"; it probably translates to something like "SOB". "Gwoke" has also appeared as a Castithan swear word; considering Datak's temper at the time, it probably goes past 'shit' all the way to the F-Bomb on the swear scale. "Chup" is a word for "shag", but it's unknown which species's language gave rise to this. Also, humorously, most of the swearing on the show comes from Datak.
  • Alak uses the phrase "Holy shtako!" at one point, and at another he uses "shtako from shinola", which implies a fair amount of language drift (both human and alien alike) due him being essentially a 2nd generation immigrant.
  • In "Doll Parts", Tommy actually says "Holy Shit", showing that classic human swears are still used.
  • According to background material, most of the common Votan swear words are Liberata in origin.
• Parental Abandonment: In episode 4, it's revealed that Amanda and Kenya's mother abandoned them during the war. She and Amanda were out looking for supplies, and when the fighting got close to them she wanted to merely run. Amanda insisted on going back for Kenya, and had to do so alone. Amanda told Kenya that their mother was dead, but admits the truth in the present. She was forced to raise her subsequently-their father had died in the Pale Wars already.
• Parental Incest: Either the Omec typically have sex with their children or T'evgin has an unusual relationship with his daughter.
• Parental Marriage Veto: Both Rafe McCawley and Datak Tarr separately attempt to veto Christie and Alak's relationship. Datak comes around quickly when Stahma suggests he can use it to gain control of Rafe's mines through Christie after Rafe and Quentin have an "accident" but changes his mind again after Rafe wills his mines to the Irathients in the event of his death, while Rafe comes around when he sees Alak truly loves Christie to the point where he makes sure they get their wedding in spite of Datak trying to call it off.
• Patron Saint: Kenya wears a Saint Christopher (the Patron Saint of travelers) necklace that Amanda gave to her, but believes it to be Saint Finnegan the Patron Saint of lost children. When another character corrects her, she confronts Amanda about it. Amanda reveals that she took it from a dead man named Finnegan, and told Kenya the lie to comfort and reassure her.
• Phlebotinum Breakdown: In "Put the Damage On", Amanda, Pottinger, and Yewll are infected with malfunctioning EGO devices. While the ones in the game may be entirely helpful, broken ones torment the host with traumatic visions before eventually killing them.
• The Plague: At the end of "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" Nolan goes to Yewll's clinic for one plot reason, only to be interrupted by her handling the start of the viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak (which sets up the plot for "If I Ever Leave This World Alive" and also ties in with an event in the MMOG involving the viral hemorrhagic fever).
• Planet of Hats: Each of the seven Votan races has its own theme. Irathients are warrior types, Castithans are more classy, Indogenes are scientists, Liberata are usually servants, etc. However, individuals can stand out from these generalizations^note  For every instance of a Hat-Wearer in the pilot alone, there's another instance of someone shunning it.
• The Plot Reaper: Gary Clancy, Defiance's Chief Lawkeeper, gets shot in the pilot so the position will be open for Nolan.
• Polyamory: It's culturally accepted, at least among some humans. The Earth Republic ambassador has two husbands whom she intended to kill off in her plot to bankrupt Defiance, and Nolan and Amanda have a discussion on the potential benefits of group marriage (which might have been her way of suggesting that she was interested in him, despite his sleeping with her sister). Stahma mentions that her husband frequently visits the NeedWant, and doesn't seem to care. On the other hand, when Stahma visits the NeedWant (initially to get Alak a human prostitute so that he doesn't embarrass himself on his wedding night with Christie) and subsequently ends up in bed with Kenya, she warns that they have to keep their relationship a secret lest Datak kill them both.
• Poor Communication Kills: In "Goodbye Blue Sky", Nolan shoots Sukar to prevent him from activating a device that is communicating with an incoming Ark fragment. The device actually instructs it to fire its thrusters and crash outside of town. An extreme case because even Sukar doesn't know what the device is supposed to do, since he is being compelled by Ark brain nanites to make it without conscious awareness of the fact.
• Product Placement:
  • Nolan's Dodge Charger in "Brothers in Arms".
  • Similarly in the game, one of the very first vending machines you run into sells Dodge Challengers by name. Not to mention a billboard advertising the Challenger. Dodge is a sponsor of the show.
  • There's also a commercial.
• Professional Sex Ed: Stahma wants Alak to be educated in "the eccentricities of the Human female libido" so he can impress Christie on their wedding night and tries to hire Kenya to do so since she's the best at it. But Kenya convinces her otherwise, pointing out a human like Christie wouldn't want her husband sleeping with a prostitute right before marrying him.
• The Promised Land:
  • Before settling in Defiance, Nolan and Irisa were trying to make their way to Antarctica, which has apparently been terraformed into a tropical paradise. Everyone tells Nolan it's a pipe dream, and given the current state of the world that we see, it's likely that very few people have been there to confirm it. In general, however, ark hunters are trying to make enough money to get to Antarctica, if the tie-in game is to be believed. It is, however, vaguely implied in the backstory and lore (and thought by fans) to be something more sinister. Nobody can agree on what, though.
  • Earth was supposed to be this for the Votan fleet. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that Earth was already inhabited, apparently having failed to detect any traces of Human civilization. Though that might have something to do with the fact that they launched their Arks around the same time Humans were building the Pyramids and mastering the art of writing.
• Proud Scholar Race: Indogenes, of the more scientifically-oriented variety.
• Proud Warrior Race:
  • Irathients. Not too proud, though: many of the ones we see in the pilot are bandits or scavengers. At least in context of the show, it's justified since the local Irathient population is extremely small. Other than the small group of citizens, the only ones around are the Spirit Riders, who used to be locals until a forced inoculation caused them to revolt.
  • Castithans have shades of this, as well, what with their custom of public torture for cowardice on the battlefield and fondness for bladed weapons.
• Putting on the Reich: The Earth Republic uses a bizarre mixture of clothing styles - Berlin is first seen wearing a peaked Commissar Cap, and Pottinger is seen wearing a Roman-style cuirass - though they lean towards blue/black USA dress uniforms and use equipment largely made by NATO countries. Votanis Collective troopers on the other hand make use of Warsaw Pact gear and scaled Mongolian-esque armor.
• Raised by Humans: Irisa by Nolan, after he killed her abusive cultist birth parents. Season 2 introduces Mordecai Haipern, another Irathient who was adopted by a human family and became an attorney specializing in Irathient interests.
• Raised by Rival: Irisa is an Irathient raised by Nolan, formerly a Horrifying Hero who cheerfully massacred Irathient tribes (including her own). He's mellowed out a lot since then, casting aside anti-alien prejudice and being a good father, but sometimes she still remembers how he raised her to be a Hunter Of Her Own Kind.
• Rape as Backstory:
  • Pottinger reveals that he was gang-raped by Votan soldiers to Amanda, who then tells him of her own attack so that he'll know he's not alone, which he seems to be genuinely touched by. This is later put in another light entirely after it's revealed Pottinger was her rapist. It's likely he told her his story precisely so she would tell hers, and he later seems to think being raped spurred his own crime against Amanda.
  • In the next episode, their past experiences become part of the visions caused by the malfunctioning EGO devices.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: As the writers have fully acknowledged, it's an immigrant story WITH ALIENS!!! (the extraterrestrial kind).
• Regional Redecoration: During the Pale Wars between humans and Votans, the alien ships were mysteriously destroyed, causing their terraforming technology to rain down on Earth and begin affecting the planet.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Nolan is frequently on the receiving end of these, not that he lets it get to him. He gets one from Berlin that's actually pretty on-the-nose, where she accuses him of actually liking the post-apocalyptic wasteland because it lets him live out his childhood cowboy fantasies. Irisa gives him a brutal one at the end of "Doll Parts", accusing him of turning her into a murderous sociopath as a child and disguising it as fatherly love. Nolan doesn't buy this one, though, since he's pretty convinced she's being coerced into saying it.
  • Quentin gets one in "Bottom of the World." His mother does this after he crows about setting his father up, and she tells him that his daddy issues blinded him to the truth about why his father agreed to Taking the Heat.
  • Nolan gives a subtle one right back to Berlin in the middle of his Rousing Speech as he rallies the Defiance militia against the encroaching VC while Berlin is getting ready to leave with Conrad Von Bach. He says that it's the duty of the strong to defend the weak, the ones who can't defend themselves...or can't be bothered to care (he says this while staring right at her).
• Regional Redecoration: During the Pale Wars between humans and Votans, the alien ships were mysteriously destroyed, causing their terraforming technology to rain down on Earth and begin affecting the planet. Geography, geology, and even the biosphere were radically changed◊; the planet is covered by dust and debris, the atmosphere is saturated by electromagnetic radiation and dangerous hybrids of earth and alien life run rampant. Perhaps no better example is the establishing shot of the St. Louis Gateway arch.
• The Reveal: Niles Pottinger was Amanda's rapist.
• Rock Beats Laser: Averted. When Amanda explains an incident where the Irathients in Defiance rioted against mandatory vaccinations, she quips that they had clubs while the rest of the town had Votan blasters. Doesn't take a genius to work things out from there.
• Rousing Speech: Amanda gives one in the pilot to convince the town to stay and fight the Volge.
  • Nolan gives one in "The Beauty Of Our Weapons", to encourage the faltering citizens of Defiance to stand and face Rahm Tak's pending invasion.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Most of the Voton races, with the most blatant being either the Irathients and Castithans. In fact, Rubber Forehead would be generous... Irathients and Cassthians just have makeup, wigs and contact lenses.
• Sacrificial Lion:
  • Sukar relatively early on, and Kenya Rosewater in the finale.
  • Subverted with Sukar just won't stay dead.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Datak Tarr represents the "House" in the underground fight club in Defiance. When Nolan decides to participate for a quick buck, Datak shows some cunning and has the regular champion substituted for a Bioman, who logically no mere mortal should ever be capable of besting. When Nolan wins by hitting the Bioman's off-switch, Datak claims it's against House rules and confiscates most of his winnings (he was at least charitable enough to let Nolan walk off with a slight profit). Nolan lampshades this during their confrontation.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • The Defiant Few. Both sides of the conflict ignored their orders, stopped fighting and started rescuing civilians trapped in the crossfire. This single act ultimately led to the end of the Pale Wars.
  • In "Down In The Ground Where The Dead Men Go," Irisa rescues Elak from being tortured in a Castithan rite as punishment for deserting the battle from the previous episode, even though the rules require that all residents of Defiance be allowed to practice their own native customs unhindered. Unfortunately, Datak convinces Elak that he must die to atone for his actions. Datak then dumps the body outside the lawkeeper's office.
• Sentient Phlebotinum: The Kaziri artifact, although not directly. Rather, it manifests to certain individuals as something they can relate to (so far manifesting as the late Lucas McCawley to his brother Quentin, and showing up as Irzu (and possibly Sukar) to Irisa).
• Servant Race: All the Votan races were subservient to Castithans- Indogenes were scientists and medics, Sensoths were manual laborers, and Liberata were domestic and clerical laborers. The main exception is the Irathients, who... well, they weren't interested.
• Servile Snarker: Rafe McCawley's Liberata servant, Bertie.
• Shame If Something Happened: While trying to convince Datak to accept his son's relationship with Christie McCawley, Stahma points out that mining is a dangerous job, and if Rafe McCawley and his remaining son were to suffer an accident of some sort, then it would only be right of them to help Christie with the sudden burden of running an entire mining operation.
• Share the Male Pain:
  • While Nolan's attempt to Groin Attack a Bioman backfired, everyone in the audience was nonetheless momentarily quieted by it.
  • The Lawkeepers find a dismembered corpse that they cannot identify the gender of. Tommy and Nolan flinch when Irisa tells them it's male because of something she found near a tree.
• Shock and Awe: Gulanee are Energy Beings, and can use this power offensively.
• Shoot the Hostage: Amanda tries to invoke this in "My Name Is Datak Tarr and I Have Come to Kill You" when some VC infiltrators have attacked the NeedWant and grabbed her as a hostage. Nolan refuses on the grounds that the infiltrators, in full body armor, wouldn't be harmed even if he shot through her.
• Shout-Out:
  • To the Twilight movies: Robert Pattinson apparently played the commander of the Bravery 9 in a movie about the disaster, which results in Amanda, Rafe, and Nolan trying to remember whether he played the vampire or the werewolf. Amanda, who was apparently a Twihard in her youth, is able to give the correct answer. Also counts as an Actor Allusion since Graham Green (Rafe) actually had a part in Twilight: New Moon.
  • Walking up to a cliff overlooking fantastic molten lava, about to throw in a MacGuffin for the greater good, but then experiencing great temptation.
  • Blue Devil might be a Breaking Bad reference, with the color and sharing an ingredient ^note adrenaline, pre-apocalypse the synthetic form is widely available in over the counter decongestants with methamphetamine.
  • Terminator 2: Pilar is played by Linda Hamilton, who says to Nolan, "come with me if you want to live."
  • In "Beasts of Burden", Potting attributes "The extreme always seems to make an impression" to an Old World philosopher. Actually it's one of J.D.'s lines from the movie Heathers ^note  Impressive, since that same episode confirms that Pottinger's knowledge of the pre-war world doesn't extend to what "hockey" is . The musical adaptation had started off-Broadway a few months before the episode in question aired.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: When Pol Madis starts going on about the great deal he's going to get from E-Rep for designing weapons for them, Nolan responds by shooting him in the face.
• Sibling Triangle: Kenya/Nolan/Amanda.
• Sleeper Ship: The Votan's Arks were launched sometime around the construction of the pyramids, the colonists in "hypersleep" for millennia.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Between Datak and Stahma, particularly in the second half of Season 2.
• Solid Gold Poop: The Hellbugs produce petrohol, an essential liquid fuel, after eating Gulanite.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The opening scene of "The Devil In The Dark" has a guy jogging in the woods, listening to nice classical music, all while a Hellbug is crawling through the greenery around him unseen. Only when it actually attacks does the music shift to something appropriately dark and foreboding, at which point it is, of course, too late.
• Space Cold War: This is happening between the Earth Republic and the Votanis Collective. Very uneasy truce? Check. Regime Change on a neutral territory? Check. Recruiting war criminals for weapons technology in the manner of Operation Paperclip? Check.
• Space Elves: Castithans have the aesthetic. The older Tarrs, with their slightly decadent airs and Machiavellian tendencies come across as Dark Elf types but it's unclear as to whether this is true of the race as a whole. The Irathients arguably are Wood Elf types.
• Space Jews:
  • The Liberata used to control the banking system for the Votans, and were quite ruthless about it. However, when the banking system ceased to exist, many of them became domestic workers instead.
  • A Jewish Irathient lawyer appears in the second season, though in his case he was adopted by a human Jewish family.
• Space Western: Well, "future terraformed Earth" Western.
  • Nolan's the sheriff.
  • The NeedWant is the saloon/gaming hall/brothel.
  • The Irathients are Indians. There's a bit of irony in that one tribe was forced off their land, which ended up in the hands of Rafe McCawley, a human of actual native American ancestry.
  • Landcoaches are stagecoaches.
  • The E-Rep is the post-Civil War United States "back East," building a new transcontinental railroad.
• Speculative Fiction LGBT: Post-apocalypse humanity seems to think nothing of homosexual relationships, bordering on Everyone Is Bi. Though at least one of the Votan species, the highly patriarchal Castithans, take a dim view of either lesbianism or women cheating on their husbands (it's not entirely clear).
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Many of the people that worked on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica were involved in writing and producing Defiance and commented on the scripts being just as tight. Bear McCreary even did the music. The frontier aspect has also engendered comparisons to Firefly and Farscape. The show was developed by Rockne O'Bannon, who also created Farscape.
  • Rockne S. O'Bannon was also the writer of Alien Nation and the associated series which featured alien refugees arriving on Earth and assimilating as immigrants. The protagonists were also a human cop and his alien partner.
• Spotting the Thread: In "Broken Boughs", Nolan is able to identify Pilar because she's wearing her dead husband's boots and has Christie and Alak's baby.
• Starfish Alien: The Gulanee.
• Stealth Insult: A curious case. Nolan refers Berlin as "Barbie" a few times. This being After the End, she has no idea what a barbie even is. She eventually asks him to explain what a barbie is, so she can "decide if she should kick his ass for her calling her one."
• Stock Legal Phrases: "I take the Fifth" was discussed in "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" by Rafe, Nolan, Amanda, and Gordon. They all decide that among the things lost during the Pale Wars, that amendment was one of the worst things lost. Of course, all parties considered, it would do wonders for their life expectancy to have that protection.
• Straight Gay: A great many characters are either bisexual or homosexual, and display no stereotypical personality traits. Of course this is the future, and many of them are aliens, so Deliberate Values Dissonance may be in play.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land:
  • It's implied at the end of the pilot (and confirmed in the next) that Nolan was from St. Louis before it became Defiance.
  • Confirmed in the second episode of the first season, "Down in the Ground Where Dead Men Go," when Nolan and Rafe talk about the park they're taking a break next to in Old St. Louis, with Rafe mentioning a restaurant that used to be there, and Nolan saying, "Sounds about right."
• Super-Soldier: Biomen, complete with a number on their chest and an off-switch.
• Super-Strength: The Omec have this, capable of sending people flying in melee and tearing their way out of buildings.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Plague episode. Okay, lots of shows have that. Irathients get blamed-that's pretty normal for a show with Fantastic Racism. Then the forceful rounding up of Irathients into a makeshift internment camp (occasionally using guns, dogcatchers, and force) begins, some Irathients discuss the possibility of them being gassed to death, and one ends up dead because their captors don't like a harmless religious ceremony...
  • In the second season finale, Berlin arrives at Camp Reverie to find the panicked guards executing prisoners. Berlin relieves the Sergeant in charge of his command and assumes control of the situation. The much bigger, armed, and pissed off Sergeant simply whacks her with his billy club and continues the executions, putting her in the next batch.
• The Syndicate: Detak Tarr's crew seems to be the only game around in terms of criminal groups, which makes him the unchallenged kingpin within the underworld.
• Taking the Heat:
  • In "Bottom of the World", Rafe takes the blame for a plot to assassinate Pottinger and Tennety to keep Quentin out of jail. He also took the heat for a whole lot of stockpiled weapons, but he was actually guilty of that. Nolan realizes what he's doing, but understands and doesn't interfere.
  • In "Doll Parts", Stahma convinces a terminally-ill Castithan to admit to the murder of Deidre Lamb in exchange for taking his daughter on as a handmaiden since she'd be orphaned upon his death. Amanda, currently the deputy because Nolan and Irisa are busy, sees right through it but can't exactly prove otherwise since he has the murder weapon.
• Terraforming:
  • The Votan Arks contained terraforming technology, which was accidentally released when they all mysteriously exploded during the Pale Wars. Hence why Earth has become something of a Death World as a result.
  • The Kaziri was sent ahead of the Ark fleet to arrive 3000 years before and prepare the planet for the Votans. They were expecting a barren planet rather than a world that not only had life but sapient life.
• There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: Yewll tells Datak there are two kinds of friends: ones that will help you hide a dead whore, and her. A subtle jab at the fact that his friends currently number at two.
• Third-Person Flashback: When Nolan reconstructs Luke's death, flashbacks help illustrate his points.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Datak's romantic rival. "Accidentally", of course. Stahma pretty much admits that she did it to Alak in the season 2 pilot, when Alak shows he doesn't have the balls to run Datak's business, forcing Stahma to take over.
• Time Skip:
  • Season 2 follows from the imminent takeover of the Earth Republic in the previous season to them having established their presence in Defiance.
  • Season 3 is set seven months after the end of the second season.
• Together in Death: While suffering from visions generated by a malfunctioning implant, Yewll's dead lover tries to convince her to do this. Yewll doesn't go for it, being more dedicated to her responsibility in Defiance than her past guilt.
• Token Minority: Despite the show being set in the (former) St. Louis (majority Black city), only a few characters are actually Black or otherwise people of color, though the Native American McCauley family were prominent (they also avert common stereotypes by being the rich owners of a mine). On the Votan side, the Sensoth race only have one character in the show, with a minor role.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Gordon McClintock learns that he isn't actually Gordon, but an Indogene surgically altered to look human then implanted with the memories of the original Gordon, who was killed by the procedure that took his memories.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Going running alone in the forest with your headphones in? A bit iffy. Doing that after Earth has been terraformed into a Death World? Little surprise he got eaten, although the Hellbug that did it was deliberately set on him.
  • Alak's friend for agreeing to carry out a plan to shoot Amanda at the debate with a realistic-looking paintball sniper rifle. Alak himself counts for not realizing how utterly idiotic this is.
  • Rafe's godson is... not exactly a paragon of foresight and good decision-making.
  • Pilar demonstrates why you should Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight. She may have survived the resulting chest shot, but that's good luck on her part.
• To the Pain: While stuck in jail, Irisa describes in great detail how she could have escaped and killed Tommy when he says she might as well make conversation while locked up. He responds by asking what the heck is wrong with her.
• Town with a Dark Secret: There's something buried beneath Defiance which can supposedly change the world, and interested parties want the town either evacuated or razed so they can find it. One of the tunnels has a bunch of cave paintings depicting an artifact Luke had discovered in the same area, and Quentin's historical research seems to suggest that Votan involvement may stretch back further than anyone knows.
• Trigger-Happy: Nolan used to be this way, and kind of still is. It's used against him in "Past is Prologue", where Datak arranges the "assassination" of Amanda with a realistic-looking paintball gun, counting on Nolan shooting first. The kid he gets to do it is killed, then Datak reveals his bloody war record to make Amanda look bad for supporting him.
• Typhoid Mary:
  • Irathients have truly Blessed with Suck immune systems; it's almost impossible for them to get sick, but they often carry numerous diseases without showing symptoms - an entire race of Typhoid Marys. It's the primary cause of prejudice against them. A few years before the series began, Defiance tried to perform immunizations in response to a plague; lacking the other races' history with epidemics, they just responded as you would expect any Proud Warrior Race to when approached with sharp objects - a riot that led most Irathients to avoid Defiance like, well... the plague.
  • On top of that, if their immune systems are that good, it's possible that they don't even need sepsis to prevent wounds from getting infected - but that would logically lead them to be less culturally concerned with cleanliness.
• Uncoffee: Tang Bark Tea, which is described as "almost like coffee."
• Under City: The actual St. Louis is mostly intact, buried under a large mass of land created by the terraformers. Other cities are indicated to have just been wiped out, making St. Louis an oddity.
• Underground City: St. Louis.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension:
  • Pretty clearly set up between Nolan and Amanda, which might get interesting since Nolan pretty unabashedly sleeps with her sister even after learning of their relation. "Brothers in Arms" has Kenya break it off with Nolan, though, leaving the path clear for development between him and Amanda.
  • Resolved as of Season Two, at least until he locks her up so she won't interfere with his plans to sacrifice her sister, and then, several episodes later, she locks him up so he won't interfere with her plans to sacrifice his daughter. I know, right?
• Villain Team-Up: Datak allies with Colonel Marsh in "Past Is Prologue" in order to discredit Nolan and Amanda and help Datak win the mayoral election. In exchange, the plan is that Datak will give the Earth Republic access to Rafe's mines (with Datak getting a sizable chunk of the profits). Then it turns out Marsh was just using Datak to take over the town and get to the ancient Votan ship buried underneath it. When Datak realizes this, he kill Marsh in a rage.
• Villainous Valor: Whatever else he is, Datak shows at the ravine battle that he's no coward (unlike one of his men who flees and whom he scorns for it). Later on he kills two Hellbugs to protect his family and fights Nolan man to man after he's revealed Nolan's unsavory past. And when sentenced to death, he asks to be put on a Castithan shaming rack, and upon the rack makes a contrite speech. His only reaction after that is his grimacing as his limbs get weighted down.
• Visual Pun: At the end of "A Well Respected Man", Nolan recognizes Stahma as a Lady Macbeth and tells her he now knows how dangerous she really is. Meanwhile, she is knitting/weaving a spider-web.
• Walking Transplant: Indogene skin can be cut off and transformed into an all-purpose healing salve for the Omec, who engineered them for that purpose.
• War Is Hell: Nolan implies as much as he and Irisa recount his memories of the Pale Wars.
• Warrior Monk: Sukar, leader of the Spirit Riders, is something like this. Though a scavenger and a rebel, he is also deeply religious and guides Irisa on a spiritual rite, as seen in "The Devil in the Dark".
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The above-mentioned Cool Car all but disappears in season 2 with no fanfare.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Irisa chews out Nolan for assuming her visions to be PTSD after they turn out to be real.
  • In "Brothers in Arms", Eddie rants at Nolan for getting away clean from the military while he went to prison for stealing a roller and knocking out some MPs so Nolan could escape with Irisa.
  • This seems to be a running theme with Nolan, as Irisa does this again when Nolan kills Sukar, not knowing that he was trying to save Defiance.
  • In an example where Nolan actually has some ground to stand on, Tommy gets on his case for his flippant attitude about Hunter Bell's murder, which happened many years earlier. Nolan counters that his job is to keep the peace, and that Hunter Bell obviously had it coming.
  • Nolan gives one of these to Amanda in the season 2 finale, when his plan to save Irisa is rejected for a plan that will kill her but also definitely work, as opposed to his running off a theory.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: With the exception of Irisa (who was raised by Nolan), the Irathient characters all speak with a vaguely Eastern European-sounding accent, in contrast to the generic American and/or Canadian accents everyone else has.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: A broader version, but Datak's overriding goal in life is getting people to recognize and respect him in any and all circumstances. He's seemingly unaware, chooses to ignore, or believes that him being rather ruthless and feared is enough to be comparable to liked and respected.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Ex-Mayor Nicolette Riordan sees herself this way, claiming that while their goals will cost many lives, the survivors will be grateful for the better world that comes as a result. This would probably extend to whoever she's working with/for.
• Wham Episode:
  • See Downer Ending above for how the first season finale qualifies.
  • In the second season finale, Tommy dies from his wounds, leaving Berlin distraught and putting away as much alcohol as she can manage. New York is destroyed by ark terraforming technology, which could be a huge destabilizing factor for the E-Rep. Several other cities are also destroyed, including at least one in the Votanis Collective. The technology is stopped by pointing it into space, destroying the remaining ark fragments. Finally, Nolan and Irisa are frozen inside one of the Kaziri's pods, along with all the others Irisa podded up while she was being controlled by it.
  • The third season opener continues the downward spiral. The destruction of New York has made the E-Rep pull out of Defiance, and the collapse of the mines has struck the town with a worse blow due to the lack of jobs and fuel. Just as Amanda decides to shut down the town's force field protection to conserve energy, a band of Votanis Collective soldiers led by General Rahm Tak go on the warpath with the intent of killing every human in the town. The Votan cross paths with the McCawleys, sans Pilar and Alak, and we get to see just how much of a monster Rahm Tak is when he executes Quinton with Rafe watching captive. Rafe breaks free and makes an attempt to reach Christie and her baby, only to be gunned down. And then Rahm Tak gets pissed over the fact that Christie knows his language, and he forces Stahma to choose between watching Datak die or slitting Christie's throat — she picks the latter. In one fell swoop, the entire McCawley clan is wiped out. Pilar later runs off with the child, abandoning Alak to be picked up by Rahm's men and used as leverage, which forces Datak and Stahma to work as spies in Defiance. And to top it all off, the ending shot shows us that there is a huge fleet of Omec hovering in hypersleep just outside Earth's orbit.
  • "Broken Boughs": Nolan and Irisa run into Pilar and rescue the child from her. Upon returning to Defiance, they learn of Rafe's, Christie's, and Quentin's deaths, and they are sent to Rahm Tak's camp to scout out the opposition Defiance is facing. The operation goes awry when Pilar ambushes Nolan, leading to him shooting and potentially killing her (though he acknowledges later that he Never Found the Body ). In the chaos, Irisa gets the drop on Rahm Tak, but cannot bear to kill him and instead knocks him out cold. Back at Defiance, Datak and Stahma plant metal-eating maggots in the town armory, destroying every gun stored within and leaving the town all but defenseless against Rahm Tak's invasion. However, the humiliated Rahm Tak decides to issue a new order to weaken the populace's morale: the Tarrs have to blow up the St. Louis Arch.
  • "Dead Air": the St. Louis Arch, Defiance's most recognizable landmark and an icon of the show, is destroyed by a bomb planted by the Tarrs at Rahm Tak's behest. Rahm Tak, or rather a hologram message from him, shows up immediately afterward to announce his upcoming invasion of Defiance. Nolan leaves Irisa in Defiance, no longer confident in her resolve, while he and Amanda follow a lead on a massive stock of abandoned E-Rep weapons. At the bunker complex where the weapons are stored, they reunite with Pottinger, who hasn't been seen since Season 2. The man has undergone some Sanity Slippage, and he attempts to seduce Amanda into staying with him forever while Nolan is beaten and dragged off by biomen. While Nolan escapes his confines with the help of a former veterinarian, who tells him that Pottinger murdered several E-Rep officials and currently has himself wired to a destructive bomb, Amanda manages to steal Pottinger's gun, forcing him to unlock a mysterious padlocked door leading to some kind of VR viewing room. It turns out that Pottinger has taped every one of his sexual encounters, including Amanda's, and that he also has apparent replicas of the mask and flashlight Amanda's rapist used. Amanda puts two and two together: Pottinger was the rapist the whole time. She attempts to force him to admit it by shooting all of his limbs, but when he refuses, he is shot in the heart and Killed Off for Real. The bomb detonates, creating a black hole that sucks up all of the weapons and supplies, once again leaving Defiance hopeless. As if things couldn't get any worse, the episode closes with Nolan and Irisa simultaneously experiencing violent seizures somehow linked to the scars from the Kaziri pods that kept them safe, and while Nolan at least has the veterinarian to help, Irisa is left for dead by Berlin. Season 3 is shaping up to be the show's Wham Season.
  • "My Name is Datak Tarr And I Have Come to Kill You": Lieutenant Bebe assumes a human guise and infiltrates Defiance as they are rallying to fight back against Rahm Tak. Bebe stages an attack on the Need/Want that ends with every hostage inside massacred, earning Nolan's trust by taking out some of the attackers. Nolan puts him in a rough second-in-command position on the strike force and takes everyone to investigate the tunnel through which the attackers have entered, only for Bebe to suddenly reveal himself, shoot Alak, stab Irisa, subdue Nolan in an extended fight, and blow up the entire task force — including Zero, a child — with an incendiary grenade. Bebe is killed by the recovered Irisa, but only she, Nolan, and the crippled Alak comprise the town's resistance. Yewll comes up with the idea to overload the town's stasis nets and vaporize Rahm Tak's camp just outside, but it will require someone to sacrifice themselves to carry the beacon that directs the energy into the camp. Datak is chosen and cut down from the shaming rack just before death, and after seeing Alak recovering in the hospital and being told of the damage if Rahm Tak enters the town, he accepts. The beacon is buried in his arm and he makes it out to the VC camp. Rahm Tak lets him in out of curiosity, and Datak bluffs for time by claiming that he wants to join the VC. To prove his loyalty and avoid his imminent death, he saws off the arm containing the beacon, then runs for his life with seconds to spare. Rahm Tak and his men are vaporized by the detonation, and Datak is left barely alive outside of the town.
  • "When Twilight Dims the Skies Above": A delusional Nolan kills the Vice-Chancellor of the Votanis Collective, who had come to town to talk peace, forcing Amanda to turn him over to the VC for punishment. Meanwhile, Kindzi usurps control of the Arkship from T'evgin and prepares to start the Dread Harvest. And Datak's back, with a bionic arm and a desire for vengeance.
  • "Of A Demon In My View": Nolan is kidnapped by Kindzi, who wipes out the VC convoy in the process, and has his Arktech removed from his brain the process. Yewll knocks Datak unconscious with a syringe, and he's later shown waking up in cages with several others who have been abducted. While Nolan escapes with Irisa's help, the weakened T'evgin tries to fight Kindzi, and ends up overpowering her. However, she makes a false promise to force him to let her go, and she proceeds to stab him in the neck, which winds up killing him. Distraught, she performs a ritual to honor his death, ending with her eating his heart and absorbing his practically godlike power. She then travels up to the ship and awakens the Omec, calling for the Dread Harvest to finally commence.
  • "The Awakening": The Omec are awakened one by one and brought to Earth to regain their strength after their long sleep. Yewll's abductees are slowly brought out and grotesquely feasted upon by the starving Omec, a fate which nearly befalls Datak before he manages to wound one and escape. Yewll attempts to drive the wounded Omec to safety, only to run into Nolan and Amanda, who tear out her implant and free her from mind control. Yewll leads everyone back to the feeding camp and assists them in slaughtering the Omec and freeing the surviving prisoners; however, Kindzi escapes, and more Omec are on the way. Back in Defiance, Kindzi suddenly attacks Alak's house, killing Andina and prizing baby Luke out of Alak's hands while he futilely tries to resist.
• Written by the Winners: Stahma and Datak tell Rafe that Alak valiantly saved Christie from Hellbugs. In actual fact, he was cowering on the floor while she held them off with a flaming torch, followed by Datak doing the actual killing. Both probably thought better of trying to put Rafe in a position where he might feel indebted to him, and it earned points for Alak.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Datak and Stahma often act like they are in an urban crime drama with Feuding Families, and suffer when it usually turns out they are in a Western or Chthuluesque sci-fi.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Everyone really. The aliens' homeworlds were wiped out when the sun went supernova, and Earth has been terraformed so haphazardly that virtually nothing remains of the original. As Nolan puts it through Irisa's opening narration in the pilot: "This world has no natives, which means it belongs to everyone."
• Your Mom: Used jokingly by Alak Tarr whilst sparring with a fellow Castithan.
  Opponent: You'll never please your bride with that shriveled worm of yours.
  Alak: Your mother didn't seem to mind.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: In "Doll Parts", Nolan pulls this on Tommy with a side order of If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!. Tommy can't bring himself to do it, then vomits up the nanites Irisa used on him to make him protect her.

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