I watched the premiere of the new show the other day, and I have to say that, though it is a relatively derivative mash-up of Star Trek, Mad Max, Thundarr, and Shakespeare, it has caught my attention. A few things that come to mind on where the story is coming from are noted below…
Mad Max meets Thundarr...
It must be noted that the Votans cannot be from the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy; the Perseus Arm is no less than 6,000 to 13,000 LY distant from Sol, which is in the Orion Arm (which may be a spur of the Perseus Arm). They have to be from somewhere in the direction of the Perseus Arm. They traveled for 5,000 years on slower-than-light arks. They must have been slower-than-light arks; otherwise, with their ability to Terraform (Votaniform?) planets, there was no reason for them to travel more than a few score light years away from their own system (the Votanis/Sulos binary system). So they must be within, say, 100 light years…
I’d say they were from the Algol system, around 95 LY distant, in the direction of the Perseus Constellation and the Perseus Arm. Algol is (today) a trinary system, linked with “ominous legends” going back into ancient history. Let us say that prior to 5000 years ago, it was a binary system; when the stellar disaster struck, the rogue star remained in-system, transforming it into a trinary system. The Votanis system was not destroyed, though the planets around Votanis (Algol B) were; Casti, around the star Sulos (Algol A) was almost destroyed...
My theory is that Casti, and more than enough of the Votans living on Casti, survived…
So now you had two populations of Votans – those on the Ark Fleet, and the survivors on Casti.
The survivors on Casti had every reason to hate those who left them behind…
To sum up, there are many odd things mentioned and seen in the first episode:
First, the St. Louis Arch. It is no coincidence that it resembles the shape of the Votan Ark Ships…
Second, the fact that there is an alien “artifact” buried in the mines in Defiance (St. Louis)…
Third, the fact that humans and Votans can, apparently, interbreed with minimal problems (at least, in the case of the Irathients and Castithans)…
Finally, the Votans did not expect to find *any* civilization on Earth when they arrived. Their observations from 3,000 BC would not have seen much of any sort of civilization, perhaps primitive villages at best. But no real “civilization” as they would have known it…
So what ties all this together?
See, what happened is that the surviving inhabitants of Casti developed some sort of space drive that let them get around the light-speed limit. Not a true FTL drive; more of a worm-hole drive, or a jump drive, that let them get from star to star.
And so, as part of spreading to the stars, they also gained their revenge. They arrived on Earth millennia before the Ark-based Votans (whom they could not interrupt, as their way of getting to the stars required jumping from star to star). Once on Earth, they set about building a civilization to fight against the Ark Fleet. These are the aliens of Erich Von Däniken… it is no coincidence that the Indogenes look not unlike the Grays, nor that the Castithans looks not unlike the Nordics (or elves, for that matter), or that the Sensoth look not unlike the Sasquatch… the Votans already arrived, thousands of years ago. They were Zecharia Sitchin’s Anunnaki of ancient myth and legend. They used their technology to interbreed with and uplift the humans of that era, and started them on the long climb to civilization. Perhaps they even built a high civilization long ago, a Votan-Atlantis, and lost it all in their own hubris…
But even after that disaster, they remained, and have guided Earth in the millennia since. What the artifact found under the Votan-like Arch in Defiance is… I’ve no clue… but there’s a bigger conspiracy wrapped in an enigma going on here…
