Violet recaps Season 2 Episode 5 of Defiance, titled Put the Damage On, where Datak tries to become part of the family again. Meanwhile, there’s a whole lot of hallucinating going on. Following the recap, both Violet and Josh share their thoughts on the episode.
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Episode Recap of Defiance, Season 2 Episode 5: Put the Damage On
- A masked man attacks Amanda in her room, but she is able to fight back and push him out the window. She confesses to Nolan that she thought it was the man who attacked her in New York.
- Yewll sees an old friend, Liv, in town, who tells her that she’s dying.
- Amanda gets into an argument and is attacked by Nolan, but then she realizes she hallucinated the encounter. She asks Pottinger if he’s had any side effects from the Adreno, but that’s not it. Pottinger orders her to be brought to Rafe’s house for protection, which has now been taken over. Nolan tells her he found no signs of foul play at her place, and suspects the Adreno caused her to hallucinate.
- Rafe stays at the Tarr household now that he’s been kicked out. Stahma confronts him in the bath, and clarifies that she is the figurehead of the family business, not Alak. Datak stops by and performs a Castithan rite which earns him visitation, though Christie isn’t happy about it.
- Amanda thinks she sees someone outside, and Tommy and Irisa investigate. Someone comes inside, and Amanda shoots them. It turns out she shot Tommy and Irisa, and she runs off. Irisa’s wound heals itself.
- Datak conspires with an Irathient man from the Votanis Collective at the NeedWant under the guise of being his customer. Nolan finds a disoriented Amanda at the NeedWant, where she collapses to the floor, and begins seizing and foaming at the mouth.
- Pottinger hallucinates seeing Connor Lang, who it seems he was in love with. Nolan discovers a defective ego implant in the back of Amanda’s head, which were used in the wars to provide intel. They bring her to Doc Yewll’s office, but she’s off with her friend, who it turns out is dead, and has been a hallucination this whole time.
- With Yewll gone, Nolan proceeds to operate on his own to get the implant out of Amanda. Yewll shows up at the last second and finishes the operation. Later she tells her friend that helping these people is her penance.
- Datak tells Rafe he’s been talking with the Votanis Collective about weapons, and proposes an alliance with Rafe to take back their town from the E-Rep.
- Nolan wonders who infected Amanda with the ego implant. It appears that Yewll and Pottinger were working together, and that they have all of Amanda’s memories uploaded from the past week. Pottinger and Yewll were accidentally implanted from residue when they inserted Amanda’s ego implant. Yewll removes Pottinger’s, and lies about already taking hers out.
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 2 Episode 5 of Defiance: Put the Damage On
This was a pretty trippy episode, with all sorts of things going on that were not as they seemed. Or, to be more precise, with people hallucinating other people. It was weird how Amanda hallucinated Nolan, and the things he said to her. While the other people that the others saw seemed to have things to say that sounded like genuine conversations based on truth, Nolan was just mean. Not to mention, he was the only hallucination that was actually still alive. (Well, there was the initial attacker that Amanda saw, I guess we don’t actually know his status.) I suppose the things Hallucination Nolan said had a ring of truth to them as well, but it sucks for Nolan that he’s not actually the one who said these things to her, and it’s likely that he doesn’t think those things at, and yet it seems like Amanda is punishing him for saying those things to her, and treating her like she hallucinated that he treated her. This looks like it could be the end of their short lived relationship. Or maybe just a rough patch while she gets over it and sobers up. We’ll see.
I like when this show brings in futuristic aspects. Even though a lot of the time it seems like the setting is kind of “back in the stone age,” every so often we are reminded that this is actually the future. So the aspect of the ego implant was interesting. What exactly do Pottinger and Yewll want with Amanda’s memories from the past week though? What is this super secret project they’re working on? Only time will tell, apparently. The defective ego implants sure gave us quite a lot of insight into the pasts of both Pottinger and Yewll. I thought Pottinger was really into Amanda, but as it turns out, he is gay and was in love with none other than Connor Lang, Amanda’s ex?? Never would have guessed. I find it odd that even in this futuristic time that people still feel like they have to hide the fact that they are gay. Before now, it never really seemed all that taboo on this show, other than when Datak was pissed off about Stahma hooking up with Kenya, but I thought that was more about jealously and a woman’s place in a Castithan marriage than the fact that she was a woman. As for Yewll, we hear more about the horrible things that she did, and to children, and how her partner was unable to live with herself for doing those things.
I’m getting tired of Datak slowly worming his way into getting things back to how they were before he left. First he gets out of prison, now he’s found a Casti loophole that allows him to visit the family home? I hope Stahma can figure out a way to leave him out in the cold, where he belongs. I also hope that Rafe doesn’t get buddy buddy with Datak now.
Josh’s Thoughts: Defiance, Season 2 Episode 5: Put the Damage On
This was an interesting episode. Pottinger seems to have some game plan going, and it involves Amanda a lot. Apparently Pottinger is not afraid to mess with Amanda’s head for the sake of his own causes. The big question is–does he actually have feelings for Amanda? From the visions of his that we see, it would appear maybe not so much.
Ywell has an interesting story arch this episode as well. She seems to feel like she “owes” humans something, for something she did in the past, presumably during the Votan wars I would imagine. But considering how she continues to sneak around and do unsavory things, I am curious to know what her endgame is. So far I can’t see where she is helping!
As for Datak, we see that he is trying to weasel is way back into his house. He doesn’t seem to be wanting to go quietly. It has to be a pretty big embarrassment that he has been ejected from his own house by a woman, considering how male dominated his culture is. We’ll have to see how this continues to play out.
Scenes from Defiance, Season 2 Episode 6: This Woman’s Work
Here are scenes from the next episode of Defiance, titled This Woman’s Work:
