Defiance s01e00 Episode Script

I have no memories of how it started.
I was born into the world that came after.
After the arc falls began.
After the Terraformers changed the world forever.
When the destruction finally ran its course, it wasn't exactly Earth anymore.
Something new had been created.
Hi, I'm Grant Bowler.
Over the next half hour, you'll go behind the scenes of the biggest entertainment event of 2013 with the people who are bringing it to life.
Watch the show, play the game.
This is the making of Defiance.
In present day, arcs appear in orbit around planet Earth.
We've come not to attack it, but to find a new home.
Things go terribly wrong and war ensues.
And then there is this cataclysmic event.
The alien arc ships explode.
When those pieces of arc plummet to Earth, they resurface the planet in this massive geological event.
What's left of the human race and what's left of the alien visitors find themselves on a planet that's neither Earth nor alien.
Aliens and humans are learning to coexist together on a really strange new planet.
Welcome to Defiance.
Drop the net, we're coming in.
That arch! Is this St.
Louis? Once.
Now we call it Defiance.
St.
Louis has been buried under hundreds of feet of earth and debris.
This new town has been created on top of the old town.
But the one familiar element is the famous St.
Louis Gateway Arch is still standing.
It's a really eye-popping, jaw-dropping environment.
It's a hybrid between alien culture and human culture.
This is quite the party town you've got here.
The show is essentially a show about hope.
We live in a great place.
It's a place where the eight races live together as equals.
There is that post-apocalyptic Western and Sci-Fi element to it.
You're new in town.
How can you tell? The characters and the dynamics are so rich and the story is so kind of It sounds weird, anything with aliens in it, but human.
Every time we get ahead you blow it for us.
This is different.
People in this town are aspiring to rebuild and not just survive, but to really live in this world.
I do this So Alak can aspire to a better life than was available to me.
If this event really happened and we were making the show 35 years in the future, when we just point a bunch of cameras at the drama that is unfolding, this is the idea of how the show is going to feel.
I'm starting to like this place.
What would the survivors try to make this world into? In any successful science-fiction show, you need to create an environment that transports the audience.
The key to the show visually is the juxtaposition of the utterly strange and bizarre, different with the familiar and earthbound.
You all know what to do! One of the unique elements is that we're introducing a lot of alien flora and fauna.
Even though there's been a devastating war, that environment is very rich.
It's filled with life.
The world of Defiance does come to life when you walk on set.
We actually have a back lot the size of a football field.
The colours that we chose are brighter, blues, some spice colours, to define the hope that is in this town.
When I came here and I saw this huge set with such detail, it was amazing.
I've worked on films that aren't as ambitious as this.
What you see at the end of the day should be cohesive and believable and real.
Fire! What people are going to see when they tune in to Defiance is epic world, this extraordinary landscape that's both familiar and unfamiliar and unusual alien characters, big action and intimate character drama.
There's a big sweep to it.
There is a real heart to this piece and there's real drama to these characters.
No one has ever tried to do anything this complex in a television series before.
The possibilities are absolutely limitless.
The population of Defiance is really a melting pot.
Castithans are sort of the supermodels of the Votan races.
You have the Irathients, who are a feral race, they tend to be wild.
You also have Indogenes, who are the technical geniuses and the intellectuals, your Sensoths, who look like Wookies, the Liberata who are kind of a serving-class race.
And then of course you have your humans.
Our story begins focusing on two characters, Nolan and Irisa.
He found her as a child.
He's basically adopted her and taken her under his wing.
Projected impact at 20 clicks.
Nolan's an outsider and not particularly good with people.
He's not a joiner, he's not a follower, he's not the cutest and cuddliest of creatures.
You only see his soft side, really, when it comes to Irisa.
They have a really close bond.
They're fiercely loyal towards each other.
We live and we die together.
Irisa is a complicated character.
She's an alien, but she has many human qualities.
She's great with a knife.
I don't know how good she is with her feelings.
If someone wrongs her, let's just say you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Irisa.
She carries many weapons all over her body.
She's ready for anything.
She's a fiery one, watch out.
Two other characters that are central to the drama of Defiance are the sisters Amanda and Kenya.
They have a deep love for each other.
Amanda protected Kenya from a very young age.
She and her sister fought their way through the Pale Wars.
They lost their mother, and Amanda basically became the primary caregiver.
Now Amanda is the mayor of the town.
She's an idealist.
She really believes that humans and aliens can live together peacefully as one, and she fights for what she believes in to a fault sometimes.
I'm going to stand up to what's coming, and I hope that each and every one of you stands with me.
With Kenya, what you see is never what you get.
She's somebody who has a lot of secrets.
Kenya is running the NeedWant, anything you need, anything you want, which is sort of a bar hangout, gambling establishment.
It's a place where anything you want, you can get, sexually, spiritually, socially, and Kenya is at the epicentre of all of this.
Oh, God.
We have two families that represent the two poles of power in the town.
There's the Tarr family and the McCawley family.
Rafe McCawley is the richest man in town, and he runs the mines that are sort of the lifeblood of Defiance.
Rafe is a tough guy, he's grown up tough, he's learned how to be tough.
Drop the blade, or I drop you! Datak is essentially the town's mobster.
Datak Tarr is the kind of individual that, if somebody's in his way, they had better get out of his way.
The Tarrs are the most powerful alien couple in Defiance.
Stahma appears to be the dutiful wife.
Behind closed doors, things are much different.
She wields her power in more of a gentle and submissive way, whereas his forcefulness is much more reckless and needs to be controlled, and Stahma does control it.
Bathe with me.
Rafe McCawley and Datak essentially hate each other's guts.
Rafe doesn't like what Datak does for a living, he doesn't like the fact that he's a Castithan and he certainly does not like the fact that Datak's kid, Alak, is hooking up with Rafe's daughter, Christie.
I think when Alak looks at Christie, he sees everything that his parents would hate.
I can't believe that my boy is having anything to do with these horrid, ugly looking humans.
My relationship with Alak is that possibility, that little gleam of light at the end of the tunnel that, yes, there is hope that Votans and humans can live peacefully together.
The show is really about the survival of the human spirit.
I think what makes Defiance unique is hope, maybe it's possible to have hope and maybe it's possible to rebuild something in the world.
When I first read the script, I just got enormously excited about what the challenge of building that world would be like.
I've never done a show that's had this degree of complexity and nuance.
It's really exciting because you feel that there is a real world.
Imagine an alien civilization showing up on your doorstep one morning seeking a new beginning.
This opens up so many worlds for us to tell so many interesting stories that I think audiences are really going to be riveted.
How we're bringing Defiance to life is an enormous, enormous team effort.
The alien cultures have their own religion, songs, traditions.
It's really what it would be like if it happened.
And action! We have a lot of smart, funny people sitting around a table kind of just throwing ideas around.
Some days it feels like you're cooking with gas when you're breaking an episode, other days it feels like you're struggling a little bit.
Kevin has a great philosophy in the writer's room, which is that you check your title at the door.
Anyone can say whatever they think about any episode.
You're always free to express your opinion, you're always free at any point in a story break to say I'm not sure this works And maybe this version would work better.
Nothing personal.
Defiance has really had me use all my skills on one show.
There's so many varied looks, from the humans to the different alien races.
If I could put it this way, it's like walking into the bar in Star Wars.
Their eyes are different, the bridge of their face and the bone structure almost changes and it's really like looking at a completely different not a person a completely different being.
When an actor sits in the chair for the first time with the prosthetic makeup, it's really fun to see the character appear in front of your eyes.
My process starts fairly early.
It takes just under two hours, and I start off by going into hair, then I got into prosthetic and then back into makeup and then the very last thing to go in is the huge contact lenses, which kind of bring it all together.
It's quite a process, and I don't feel like I'm Irisa untilevery part of that process is done.
The most surprising transformation for me is at the end of the day when I pop my eyes out and I take off my wig and there's this brown-eyed girl blinking back at me, and that's where I get the, wow, where does she come from? Bear McCreary, our composer and his main title music for the show is just absolutely stunning.
He's really taken the idea of an eclectic immigrant drama and he's really run with it from a musical standpoint.
We say okay, we have this Castithan ritual scene, we have to write that.
So we write a prayer, it's translated into Castithan, that's sent to Bear McCreary, who writes a melody for it, it's sent back to us and the actors and we learn it and we actually perform it on the set.
And the beauty of that is that he's going to be weaving the melodies from the alien songs that he's created into the score and so the whole thing will have a complete melodic tapestry.
The languages are amazing.
We worked with David Peterson who did all the language for Game Of Thrones.
For Defiance, I created two full languages, one for the Irathients and one for the Castithans.
They write out the words and then they spell it out phonetically how to pronounce them and then got sent mp3 files and we record ourselves saying the word and then we send it back to them and they say, "No, that sounded horrible, say it more like this.
" Oh, shtako.
Shtako.
Shtako.
You people smell like shtako.
Tony Curran, who plays Datak, he's got it down.
(Speaking Castithan) Which is Castithan for, "That's all, folks.
" It's the first time someone has taken a network television show and a gaming platform and combined them into one shared universe.
I am so excited about the video game.
It's a ground-breaking entertainment experience.
What's unique about this show is that it is the only show on television that has a crossover video game.
We've designed the show and the game so that you can watch the TV show and not play the game, or vice versa, but it's a much deeper, more immersive experience if you choose to do both.
MMO gaming stands for massively multi-player online.
What that means is, you're playing on the same game space with thousands of other players.
The game of Defiance takes place in San Francisco.
You'll have vehicle combat but also online persistence, you can level up.
The story never ends.
It is one of the most exciting online games ever created.
This is the first time it's ever been done, where you have two portals into the same world.
You can inhabit the world as a player that's actively moving through the world of Defiance, and you can turn on the TV and sit back and watch great drama unfold.
Seeing ourselves jump from the game to the series is going to be astonishing.
Nolan starts in the game.
My character and Irisa ride into frame, so the game will launch and in the time it takes us to drive from San Francisco to St.
Louis, the show will launch, and I've never actually seen anything like that happen before.
This show's really a lot of fun, and we're having a lot of fun making it, and hopefully a lot of that fun will show up on the screen.
The concept behind it, of this sort of frontier town, trying to work together, live together, I just thought the idea was amazing.
It's science-fiction meets Shakespearean meets adventure meets romance.
There's no other show out there that really has all those components into one new world.
No one has ever tried to do anything this complex before.
The possibilities are absolutely limitless.