If you watched last week's season premiere of Syfy's Defiance, you probably noticed that Season 3 has already taken a dark turn.
The city of Defiance is in trouble: not only is it running out of power now that the mines have shut down, but there are some new aliens on the planet that could cause problems. There's also a new baddie who's already responsible for the deaths of two major characters of the series — and this is just the first episode!
Recently, Defiance star Grant Bowler attended a press call and answered questions about the darkness of this season, in addition to talking about what this means not just for the town of Defiance, but for his character, as well.
How would you sum up the third season of Defiance?
Defiance, in Season 3, is a shell of what it was. This season is very much about getting the town back on its feet. It's very much about town survival. The town, in Season 3 – thanks to Rahm Tak – is in more peril and actually comes in a more direct attack and direct fight than it ever has before.
Defiance actually gets successfully infiltrated in Season 3 by the enemy force, and directly assaulted. It's a much more perilous place to live. It's on its last leg. There's no energy and lines for food. There are very little good things sold.
So Defiance is a bit like Soviet Russia in the 1960s. And Nolan and Amanda have to come together in order to put the place back on its feet.
What about your character, Nolan, this season — what personal challenges does he face?
This season has been fantastic for Nolan. He's vulnerable. He's falling down, this season. He has some challenges and he comes apart a couple of times. We've always dealt with a Nolan that's so pragmatic, so full with fighting, that he just tends to swallow his blood. And this season, it catches up with him.
And the other big development in Nolan this season is through that vulnerability, through that not being able to cope with everything, and through his own challenge this season, his relationship with Irisa changes. The relationship is fantastic. It's always been my favorite part of the show. And it becomes so much more full because she's now in a position where she is picking him back up, where she's supporting him, where she's trying to figure out what's going on with him.
Their entire history – all of his memories about her and bringing her up – directly challenged him this season. And he finds out that the way he parented her or what he thought was the way he parented her wasn't even close to her experience of what went on.
How does Defiance's new bad guys play into this season?
We've got three major new players. We have Rahm Tak, who we meet in the opening stanza. He's a warlord, if you like, for the Votanis Collective. And you know, Irisa destroyed the Earth Republic, who were the balancing force to the Votanis Collective. And our big threat in Season 3 initially is that this military, this force of alien-based races, was moving north from South America. And so Rahm Tak is the advance god of that Votanis Collective. And all he wants to do is raze Defiance, burn it to the ground, and kill every single human being in it.
Then we come to the other two major new arrivals, who are the Omec. Now, we established in Season 1 that there were seven races of Votan; we only saw six of them. And in Season 2, we saw the Gulanee, which we thought was the last race of aliens. And they were energy-based life forms. So that's why we haven't seen them before.
At the beginning of Season 3, we discovered that there is an eighth race that predated all of the other races called the Omec. And the reason we never heard about them before was that the Votan just wanted to immigrate and had deliberately left this race behind. They sabotaged their ships. They destroyed their means of escape, and their rocks, and they left them behind to die. It's basically the Votan shame and guilt that means that humans have never heard of this race before.
In the first episode, right and smack in the middle of town arrived these two aliens. And they don't care about the humans. They want to kill every single alien on the planet. So you've got these wonderful two kinds of groups of enemies — one hates the humans and one hates the aliens. So it's an interesting dynamic.
With Nolan being the former Lawkeeper in town, will he also play peacekeeper with the aliens?
Yes — to a degree. What's wonderful about Season 3 to me is all of the protagonists that are coming into the show this year, you can reach out and touch them. They're individuals and they have individual needs but also individual strengths and weaknesses.
Rahm Tak is a megalomaniac and is quite insane, but he's incredibly effective. The Omec are a very old, powerful and strong race but they're hubris, they're arrogant — the fact that they see every other race as, literally, a lesser race is probably their wrongdoing.
I don't know whether Nolan is as much going to play peacemaker as he is going to play politician. The key to staying alive longer than everybody else in Defiance, sometimes, is giving everyone enough of what they want to keep the whole ball rolling.
And with the Omec, they've a very dangerous proposition. We will see as the season goes along that they are very, very powerful creatures. And we're not actually quite sure whether we could get rid of them if we want to.
Defiance airs on Syfy on Fridays.
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