rowan kaiser from "the a.v. club" gave a c grade to the episode saying that despite there were some cool moments and interesting ideas on it, it was not serving a larger purpose. "“good bye blue sky” isn't notably worse than several previous episodes of "defiance", but it frustrated me much more than those did. there are some cool moments, some disjointed ones, a lot of interesting ideas, and a famous song covered at the end. i normally enjoy that. but my problem with this episode is that it doesn't serve a larger purpose."