The writers of Syfy’s Defiance must have spent their off season binge watching Game of Thrones, because the Season 3 premiere was a bloodbath.

The McCawley family – Rafe, Christie and Quentin – was decimated in one act. The only survivor is estranged wife and mother Pilar, who makes off Christie and Alak Tarr’s infant son. Pilar likely isn’t long for the Defiance world either, not only because she’s double crossed and/or killed everyone she’s met but also because Linda Hamilton (Terminator) still is being billed as a guest star.

This season brings a new threat to the town of Defiance, a re-energized Votan Collective in the form a sizable military death squad led by Gen. Rahm Tak (Lee Tergesen, who played bad guy Andrew Larrick on  Season 2 of The Americans). Tak loathes Defiance as an example of human-alien coesxistence and vows to wipe it off the map. He coerces Datak and Stahma Tarr (Tony Curran and Jamie Murray) into spying for him by holding their son, Alak (Jesse Rath), hostage.

There are new aliens in town too: an eighth Votan race called the Omec, purple warriors who are feared and despised by the other Votan species for their predatory history. So much so that the Indogene sabotaged most of the Omec ships when the various species fled the doomed Votan System.

Season 3 resumes the story seven months after the events that ended Season 2. While searching for the mineral gulanite to power their spaceship, the Omec free Nolan (Grant Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) from the underground life pod where viewers last saw them.

They return to Defiance to find Mayor Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz) back in charge. Earth Republic forces are gone, but Berlin (Anna Hopkins) remains as the lawkeeper.  Defiance faces a power shortage so acute that Amanda has had to power down the town’s defense systems. She and Nolan make a deal with Omec leader T’evgin (Conrad Coates) to share gulanite deposits underneath the town that can be mined only with Omec technology.

But with Tak’s Votan force approaching, it looks like the town may need more from the Omec than mining tech. Plus, there are hints of attraction between Nolan and T’evgin’s daughter, Kindzi (Nichole Galicia), whom Nolan later rescues from a Castithian-led mob.

Irisa continues to have issues. Honestly, I’ve gotten tired of this girl’s sometimes-deadly angst. After raining destruction down on New York at the end of Season 2, she’s now hesitant to kill, at one point letting Tak out of her grasp. Nolan has trusted his adopted daughter through two seasons of insanity, but now even he has called her out for being dangerously undependable.

Ultimately, the town’s fate may rest again on the fluid loyalties of Datek and Stahma, who are reunited with their infant grandson thanks to Nolan and Irisa.

Author’s Note

• I will miss Graham Greene’s Rafe, who was central to the Defiance story in the first two seasons.

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Stu Robinson, a college friend of the TV Tyrant, is a writer, editor, media-relations practitioner and social-media guy in Phoenix.