Turns out the murder was perpetrated by Amanda's assistant, one of the lizard-skinned Indogenes -- which can I just say, I hate it when alien things sound like real things for no reason? There's a Votan race called the Liberata and they look like Snarf: Why? -- as part of a larger plot by a race of Saberhagen-esque planet-killers to take over the town. Jeb figures this out in the first five minutes after getting McCawley to promise him running-off money in exchange for tracking the killer, while Irisa spends the day in custody at the jailhouse, making hilarious conversation with dead Sherriff Clancy's very excellent deputy.

It is on his way out of town that Jeb (and we) get the memo that Kenya and Amanda are sisters, which is pretty awesome, especially considering they're not estranged or anything. It's just simply, "I'm the mayor and this is my sister, the town madam. No big." After a pep talk from Kenya, Amanda steps up for her first major town-hall speech and stirringly gets everybody together under her banner to save the town. Last minute, Jeb decides to stick around and use a big piece of scavenged loot to help save the town, pissing off Irisa and putting the prettiest smile on Amanda's face.

After a qualified-successful (41 casualties) defense, Amanda makes Jeb the Sheriff of Defiance and sets up one of the seasonal mysteries: Find out who sent that killer army to take Defiance and why. Meanwhile, the Tarrs arrange a secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet, with a plan to kill off the rest of her mining family and consolidate power for good. And -- after a twist revealing Jeb's St. Louis roots -- we learn that Amanda's mentor/predecessor, dying ex-Mayor Nicky Riordan, was behind the whole murder/attack betrayal. She acts like she has good reasons and maybe she does, but she just tried to kill her beloved Julie Benz and the entire town, so... jury's out on that one.

Overall: I love it. It feels a little more on the Warehouse 13/Eureka side to me than my beloved Alphas and Being Human, but hell, Warehouse 13 didn't start out shallow, so that's not a hard-and-fast rule: Maybe this'll deepen up in weeks to come. I enjoyed the hell out of it, I love most of the actors from before and enjoyed all the actors I didn't know from before, and it "feels" right -- if not terribly organic -- but we'll see where everybody goes. I mean that I am excited to see where everybody goes. A pilot is always a little bit stilted, after all, being a marketing product.

Downsides: I loooove Bear McCreary, but his idea of pop music has always been a little Ren Faire/Marillion/nerdy for my tastes. I would imagine plenty of people, especially sci-fi fans, wouldn't notice a difference between nerd rock and regular people music, and I'm sure plenty of people will love it, but for me all I hear is diegetic nerd synth-rock, which is distracting. The subtleties of the racial harmony are sure to develop (and quickly) but for now they're all pretty tropey -- although even so, there's enough ambiguity in the individual characters that I can see that going away.

Oh, and the language. Amanda in particular uses words and phrases that a person who was a tween in 2013 would use, but because she's played by a non-tween person in the future, it comes off as "hep talk" and "down wit it" in a way that seems like a measured risk. Me, I love the fact that the mayor says "You feel me?" because it is actually what Amanda Rosewater would say -- but I don't love the chorus of nerd rage I could hear in the back of my head every time she does.

It's one of the neater, more indicative-of-depth details in the show, but ironically it's going to piss a lot of people off for being dumb, instead. (What you might call a "why we can't have nice things" problem with the genre, and what I call The Caprica Paradox.) There is also the "frak" problem -- some word that means shit that they all say ten times a minute -- and a buttload of subtitles, but since they went to the trouble to make up awesome languages in the first place I admit that's only a problem if this show wants to be mainstream, which I don't guess it really does. Which is a shame, because it certainly has the undergirdings of some pretty powerful drama.

Next Week: My beloved Michael Nankin directs an episode named after a Pogues song, so ... guessing the body count is pretty high, for starters.

Think you've got game? Prove it! Check out Games Without Pity, our new area featuring trivia, puzzle, card, strategy, action and word games -- all free to play and guaranteed to help pass the time until your next show starts.