What’s new on the tube tonight:
Defiance (Syfy) Two-Hour Season Premiere: In the Season 3 premiere of sci-fi western Defiance—a.k.a. Dystopian Future Drama No. 355—yet another agro alien race arrives to make life somehow even worse for the denizens of what used to be St. Louis. Instead of renaming it Defiance, maybe they should have called this town something more fittingly hellscape-ish—how about Detroit?
Dark Matter (Syfy) Series Debut: The writers and producers behind long-running sci-fi-lite hits Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis essentially killed the franchise with 2009’s Stargate Universe, the bleak tale of a space-exploration team lost in uncharted cosmos. Dark Matter finds another crew adrift in space—but they have no idea who they are, how they got there, or why random Scumdogs of the Universe are out to kill them. As you’d expect, the amnesiac models soon learn they each have requisite A-Team abilities (fighter, hacker, thinker, more fighters, etc.), assign nicknames (like “Boss Lady,” “Kid” and, best of all, “Slashy McStabberson”), and at least pretend to trust one another to survive. It’s nothing new, but at least Dark Matter serves up slick action-distraction, and it’s actual sci-fi in space—how often do you get that from Syfy?