It was nice of the writers for Defiance to tackle the purpose behind Christie’s involvement with the “alien club” sooner rather than later.  Watching Deidre exploit and widen the cracks in the Alak/Christie marriage was putting the lie to the notion that humans couldn’t operate on Stahma’s level.  Christie may have thought she was the one reinventing herself, but then, that’s often how pawns end up getting sacrificed.

 

It’s not likely to end well, since Deidre is no more aware of the details of Castithan culture than Christie appears to be.  If Alak invokes even the slightest extent of his father’s perspective on women in their native culture, both Christie and Deidre are in for some very rough times.  Ironically, this could be the thing that derails Datak’s bid to return to power; much hinges on the alliance he has forged with Rafe, and that alliance rests entirely on Rafe’s concept of “family”.

 

Meanwhile, Irisa is being pushed by her “possession” to do even more questionable things, even as she tries to get help from Nolan when there is no other choice.  I’m still aligned with those who suspect that “Irzu” is some kind of nanotech construct, and I now have to wonder if Cai/Reimlu unknowingly has something similar in his own body.  Since Irisa clearly wasn’t old enough to do any of the things in the flashbacks, I’m wondering if this is some kind of memory within the technology of the original Irzu and Reimlu, at some point far in the Irathiant genetic past.

 

Mercado continues to scheme in the background, and I can’t decide if his activities at Janus (the “alien club”) are a sign of identity crisis or just the Defiance version of cosplay dating.  Whatever the case, putting the moves on a Castithan’s pregnant wife seems a bit odd, but I wonder if he knows exactly what he is doing and just feels like having fun along the way.

 

What’s a bit odd is that this episode was pushing the relationship angle so much, to the point of overshadowing the case at the center of the story.  One would think that a black market for alien eyes would fit into the theme of “identity” that has been saturating this season, but beyond the suggestion that there was a high demand for humans to acquire alien body parts for questionable purposes, the point wasn’t quite there.

 

Oddly, there was a preview not just for the next episode, but for the rest of the season.  It contained a number of seemingly important spoilers, which I won’t get into, for obvious reasons.  On the plus side, though, it all but underscored how this season is going to all come down to “identity”: who characters really are inside, how they perceive themselves, and what part of their psychology rules over them.