Lost Girl: Season 1 Blu-ray Review
Re: Fae Tale Theater
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 18, 2012
Television is currently enjoying a renaissance of one of the oldest genres in the storytelling canon, the fairy tale.
Network television has seen sizable audiences for both ABC's
Once Upon a Time and NBC's
Grimm (filmed in my
hometown of Portland). But before either of those shows debuted, a Canadian production called
Lost Girl was
exploring the same sort of territory, especially with regard to the dark world espoused by
Grimm.
Lost
Girl deals with a race of so-called Fae (obviously etymologically related to "faerie"), specially powered folk who
move among us regular mortals.
Lost Girl is just beginning to gain some traction in the United States via its
airing on Syfy, and viewers who like
Once Upon a Time or
Grimm may in fact warm to this often quite
entertaining series that combines a kind of police procedural (shades of
Grimm again) with a developing
mythology where a Fae, in this case female Bo (Anna Silk), attempts to ferret out the secrets of her past (again, highly
reminiscent of
Grimm). The series has a kind of daffy sense of humor at times, and is considerably edgier at
times than either of those perhaps more mainstream efforts. The show has some occasional lapses in logic and doesn't
always strictly hew to the traditional fairy (or fairie) world (Bo is a succubus, hardly a spritely little winged creature), but
over the course of its first season it manages to create a nicely crafted alternate world where creatures (whether true
"fairies" or not) have managed to coexist with their human counterparts since time immemorial.
We first meet Bo working as a bartender, doing her best to avoid a pretty obvious pass by a lecherous male customer.
When Bo refuses his advances, he quickly turns to a kind of punk looking young woman named Kenzi (Ksenia Solo), not
realizing the girl is actually a pretty skilled pickpocket. The tables are turned, however, when the guy slips Kenzi a date
rape drug and then accosts her in the building's elevator. He seems about to force his affections on her until the
elevator
doors open and Bo steps in, pretending to be amorously interested in the pretty disgusting man. As they kiss, Kenzi
falls
to the floor but is just barely conscious enough to see what she thinks is Bo literally sucking the life force right out of
the
would be rapist.
Bo manages to rescue Kenzi, but she leaves a rather dessicated corpse in the elevator, which draws the interest of two
guys we initially think are cops, Hale (K.C. Collins) and Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried), but who it turns out are Fae
themselves. The two cohorts seem to be quite concerned that there's an unknown Fae out there leaving dead people
lying around, and it soon becomes apparent that Bo is a kind of mysterious figure, one who has never been part of the
established Fae subculture, a group which has splintered into two competing factions known as Light and Dark. Bo is
taken prisoner by Dyson and Hale, who deliver her to an Inquisition of sorts where she's poked and prodded by a
human doctor and then is thrust into a "test" where she must defeat two under-evolved Fae warriors, one with a huge
set of Thor like hammers and the other who is able to enter her mind and hypnotize her into ending her own life.
Since Bo is the focus of this series, it's probably no great surprise or spoiler to state that she makes it through the
gauntlet relatively unscathed, but she refuses to throw her lot in with either the Light or Dark camps, and instead tells
her Fae kin that she's joining with the humans, specifically Kenzi. Bo and Kenzi ultimately set up a sort of Fae-Human
Detective Agency, and the show settles into a groove that is reminiscent at times of several other series, including Syfy
staples
Haven and
Sanctuary. The banter between Bo and Kenzi is in fact rather reminiscent of some of
the back and forth between Audrey and Nathan in
Haven, while the glut of weird characters with mythological
origins could have come out of any given
Sanctuary episode. There's also a lesbian subtext (actually a bisexual
subtext) that may remind some viewers of a distaff version of a certain spinoff of
Doctor Who and one Captain
Jack Harkness.
Without comparing
Lost Girl to
too many other properties, one of the recurring elements of this first
season is Bo's attempt to track down her past, as she was raised by humans and until the series' first episode had
been unaware of her status as a Fae. This is a regular gambit of many series, going back to the dawn of television, and
it tends to color the first season with a too predictable arc where Bo (along with Kenzi, who rather frequently becomes
the "damsel in distress") must complete some task in exchange for which she is given some little tidbit about her
history. One would think with her powers she could simply threaten to suck the living daylights out of people if they
weren't more forthcoming with her, but one of the series' conceits is that other Fae are immune (or at least
mostly immune) to her spiritual vacuuming tendencies.
Lost Girl is both oddly entertaining and absolutely maddening, sometimes within mere moments of each other.
The show settles into a fairly predictable rut within just a few episodes, but even as it journeys through territory it's
already visited (regularly), it can suddenly energize the trip with some fun humor. There are frequent asides and little
one liners (some of them fairly profane—this show would never have made it to the major broadcast networks in its
current form) that are very effective and give the show a little jolt of added energy. In one late first season episode,
when Bo is battling with her long lost succubus mother, she takes off through Mom's vast mansion, at which point she's
chided by her parent, "No running in the house!" It's little moments like these that help
Lost Girl find something
distinctive in a premise that is about as hoary as, well, a fairy tale.
