Defiance season 3 episode 7 review: The Beauty Of Our Weapons

This review contains spoilers.

3.7 The Beauty Of Our Weapons

At best, The Beauty Of Our Weapons is a mediocre episode that ends with potentially a pivotal moment. 

The plot, a meandering collection of character interactions, has three threads none of which involve Rahm Tak going crazy and extending his head collection.

There’s the fate of Datak, after he gets black-balled by the leadership in Defiance, including Doc Yewll, disturbingly. There’s the chaos that Stahma’s arrival with the Omec creates, expectedly. And, old 90210 alumnus Ian Ziering turn up as Berlin’s love interest, charismatic weapon salesman, Conrad Von Bach.

You know from the point that he disables the weapons he’s given them with a single word that he’s going to betray them at some point, the question is when? Would that be when Sharknado 3 finally wraps production, and he’s needed elsewhere? Who knows, but I’d lay a side bet that it is Berlin that ends up killing him, when he does reveal why he’s really in Defiance handing out free weapons.

In Berlin and Conrad’s ‘romantic’ scene, there is a very interesting choice of movie playing in the background. It’s Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) Starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. The subtext, possibly, it that it’s about two people portraying something that isn’t real and never could be, if you factor in Hudson’s sexuality. A more likely point, given the political overtone to most things Berlin-related, is that director Douglas Sirk made movies for the Nazis before leaving Germany in 1937 and making anti-Nazi movies in America.

Even before he’d turned up, Berlin had taken to wearing an unusual combination of combat fatigues and bondage accessories, to the point where you’d think someone might comment. But that’s her all over, sexy, a bit fascist, and a huge fan of Irisa, Amazing Goddess of the Badlands.

I’m not sure where they’re taking Berlin this season, but she’s unlikely to win any awards for charm or tact whatever she’s dressed in. She’s one of the many characters who don’t have a plan, but there are a number who do.

Those include Rahm Tak, who has Indogene forces disguising themselves as human, and burrowing under Defiance. He clearly still has very good intelligence about what is going on in the town even with his best spies no longer featuring.

Datak also has a plan, you can tell, even if it involves having his limbs pulled out of their sockets. I guess in his mind, being outside and not instantly dead at the end of a rope gives him a chance, even if it is a slim one. However, if he’s banking on Stahma getting him out of the shtako then he might be badly disappointed, because she has her own issues with Kindzi, who hasn’t taken well to her appearance at the mines.

Given how resourceful and lethal Stahma can be, it’s nice to see that she’s definitely met her match with Kindzi. In many respects they’re complete opposites, because where Stahma is all subterfuge, Kindzi is in your face from the outset. When T’evgin heads to town and leaves them together, pretty much anything could happen, though what does seems bizarre even by Defiance’s standards.

So what happened in the end? To say that plenty was left to interpretation is putting it mildly. For what it’s worth, my guess is that Stahma’s consciousness got transferred to the ship, so that Kindzi can remotely control it.

A question that’s being nagging me for a while is that if the Omec can’t get back up to the ship, then how are they going to get the Gulenite there? Perhaps the ship can do something from orbit, now it has someone at the helm, so to speak.

It was definitely a good point to end, because leaving your audience wondering what happens next is never a bad thing.

Read Billy’s review of the previous episode, Where The Apples Fell, here.

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