I liked it far more than I expected. It's a rather ambitious project for SyFy considering all they have been for a while is crappy reality shows, wrestling and the obligatory horrible mutated critter B movies, with random "SyFy originals" {more often than not, stuff from other countries} thrown in. According to GateWorld, the numbers were really good for SyFy, so that's encouraging.

I'm a sucker for Rockne S. O'Bannon thanks to FarScape and I really hope Defiance works out better for him than Cult. It's already off to a far better start than most new "scifi," which as both the Huffington Post and the GateWorld article point out, has been only barely scifi.

I think they did a good job establishing the world and characters and there's no bad casting I could see from the first episode. The manipulations and devious undercurrent of the "bad guys" reminded me a lot more of Deadwood and Rome than your standard science fiction shows, which I really liked. The "good guys" aren't totally naive goodie-two-shoes, which is also something I enjoyed. It's always a bonus when I don't want to punch the entire cast in the face for being overboard and cliché.

The only thing I think they could have done better was throw out a bit more to establish what the "outside world" is like. I didn't really get a very strong impression of what would make Nolan want to leave Defiance, though I could buy it from Irisa. In the same vein, there wasn't much of a sense of terror at the idea of leaving Defiance for the regular townfolk either. It felt kind of like they were all milling around saying "ho hum, we're getting invaded. Guess we gotta move now." It made the whole decision to stand up and fight kind of flat and hokey.