PhantomStranger

This was a very solid opening premiere. I like the fact that the series seems ambitious in its scope, right from the start. The decent veteran cast all were comfortable in their roles, though they did tend toward caricatures of common sci-fi cliches.

It also didn't seem as influenced by BSG as I thought it might be, I got much more of a Firefly vibe.

Ropes Pierre

at first i was like " i have seen this five times before" but then i was like "it's 5 seconds later, and i don't really care" because i was having fun watching these people, in this story. rather than play count the cliches, i went along with it and enjoyed watching it because the people felt real even when saying some obvious dialogue (the madam sister's rah rah go girl speech to her sister). i grimaced and then 5 seconds later found myself liking what i was watching.

i think there is a lot of competition for TV time these days, and i will be making time to watch this. (i say this as someone who dropped warehouse 13 and has 2-3 seasons to catch up on)

having had a chance to mull this over for a bit,

i was expecting some yojimbo/fistful of dollars stuff with the main guy playing the miners against the albino gangsters instead of the fight club way to make money. was also hoping for some...thing before he was made sheriff. some adventures in town while they earn money, something that drags things out a little, then kill the sheriff and put New Zealand's answer to Nathan Fillion in the job.

now i am feeling this has a similarity to Banshee. the main dude falls into being a sheriff, the main bad guy is a truly self made guy, not only willing to do violence, but capable of doing it himself and not relying on henchmen or stooges, like Kai; if someone gets killed with a bottle of steak sauce i am officially hooked.

Larry C.

Fuck I missed it will they replay it anytime soon?

DJariya

Re-airs Friday at 10pm ET

K&AJones

Watched it and think it'll do pretty good. You can already tell a lot of scheming, plans inside of plans and a sort of "Soap Opera" effect of the characters. Already a "bomb" of sorts was brought to life at the ending...enough said on that. Does have that Farscape look and feel but instead of all over space just in a large open world where anyone can be good and bad.

Just a note on the game...have two friends that have been playing but haven't tlked to yet on the series and how that plays in and if the two are pretty close. they like the game but so-so on the servers and a few bugs.

eXcentris

Watched a re-run today from 5-7 PM on ShowCase. Didn't blow me away but I liked it. I'll keep watching if I don't forget.

Orbi-Wan Techno

Pilot is up on SyFy.com. We just finished watching it. Not bad, certainly better than a lot of scifi these says.

DJariya

http://www.thefutoncritic.com/rating...able_20130415/

Wow, Defiance did pretty good last night. 2.7M viewers and 1.0. SyFy's ratings for a lot of their shows have been down, so that's a good start.

Fist of Doom

Tying this in with a video game had me wary, but I enjoyed this quite a bit, especially the battle near the end.

Timber

I'm not a huge SciFi fan but I'm a sucker for Julie Benz so I guess I'm in.

Larry C.

Thanks I saw it aired yesterday from 7-9pm and was able to dvr it.

Timber

Fifteen minutes into it and I might be out. It's just not grabbing me at all.

DJariya

Watched the 2 hours last night.

Interesting setup. A little slow, but it picked up in hour 2. I appreciated that they focused more on character development than automatically making it an all out space adventure.

Very weird seeing Jaime Murray play an alien, especially with the makeup and contacts on. Surprised that she was speaking in an American accent.

I kind of liked Grant Bowler as Joshua. Kind of a snarky hero with charm.

The alien attack on Defiance in hour 2 was pretty damn cool.

Not surprised the boy at the beginning from 33 years ago was Joshua.

Orbi-Wan Techno

Surprised no one's said anything about the very revealing bath wear that Albino Lady MacBeth was wearing in the bathing scene with her husband. My wife said, "What's this rated?!?" Yowza.

Ayre

I went into it expecting it to suck.

Ended up liking it a lot. The FX sometimes looked like a video game and other times looked very good. I liked all the characters and the acting was solid. I didnt think the pace was slow, but I tend to like slower paced shows.

One thing I noticed was they seemed to borrow from every show. It became a game for me to figure out where they got the idea from.

superdeluxe

Really liked the pilot, had to try and introduce many of the different characters, some of the different underlying plot points and giving us some action. I think it succeeded in all facets of this. Good veteran cast, although yes, they had your stereotypical sci-fi archetypes with the amount of stuff they had to cram it I did not mind much.

It was Visually very nice, that Volge army was pretty cool and just the look and feel of the world was great. Definitely got the 'Space Western' vibe.

Great thing is that network tv shows are starting to end, so my calendar opens up a little bit.

Red Dog

It didn't suck but I wasn't terribly impressed either. If it's just going to be a futuristic Western, I probably won't stick with it.

Lara Means

This show is worse than Cleopatra 2525.

adamblast

I liked it enough to keep going. Thought some of the rebellious daughter bits were stale, and Benz is miscast, but everything else worked for me. Love me some Jamie Murray, always a top-notch villianess, and nice to see that the old mayor is hooked into the mythology. (Tho I don't expect we'll see much of Fionnula Flanagan; she's not even listed in the imdb credits.)

And yeah, Jamie's alien bathing suit was um, a surprise. If I remember right she did full nudity in Gods of the Arena.

Flatlander

I really enjoyed this as well. The only thing that bothered me was the preview before each commercial. I really hate that.

Shady12

I thought it was pretty good. I also hate the previews before commercials. It doesn't even make any dang sense. Why would anyone want to spoil what they're about to see in mere minutes(or even seconds if recorded)? Sometimes I wasn't quick enough on the skip ahead trigger to not pick up a morsel of upcoming info I didn't want.

TGM

I thought it was a big bag of meh, quite frankly. But will give it a few more episodes due to the lack of straight-out sci-fi on TV right now.

PhantomStranger

BBC America will also occasionally run previews before every commercial and it drives me up the wall. Who exactly needs a preview for something about to occur in minutes?

starman9000

Yeah, Vikings on History does the same thing. I don't understand it.

MikahC

If we assume the people behind it aren't totally stupid, this is what I'd guess...

Ratings for shows aren't steady. They go up and down during the course of the show. There are people who start out watching an episode, lose interest, and check out. I would assume these pre-segment advertisements are meant to keep them hooked so they don't tune out. In other words, "Hey, I know you thinking of tuning out, but look at what's coming up!" There are also people flipping through channels. If they come across your commercial, you want them to stay.

That said, I still agree with the comments that it's an irritating practice and is one of several factors that actually causes me to check out of these shows (having the reverse effect from what they intended). I end up thinking, "I'll check it out on DVD."