Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Review
Dangerously sexy.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 12, 2012
They say that sex sells, but as we learned in
Lost Girl: Season 1, it can also kill.
Lost Girl is yet another in what has turned out to
be a burgeoning subgenre of series television that traffics in the hoary world of fairy tale and folklore, telling the story
of the race of creatures known as the Fae (an obvious play on the alternate spelling faerie). The heroine of
Lost
Girl is a Fae named Bo (Anna Silk, looking very elfin in the role). The first season detailed Bo's adventures not only
in figuring out that
she was a Fae (a succubus to be exact, and more about that a bit later in this review), but
also her attempts to navigate a long running internecine conflict between two "camps" of Fae, the Light and the Dark.
Bo had been raised by humans and had never known about her true background, having only been aware that she had
the rather odd and intertwined "talents" of being sexually irresistible when she put her mind to it, and could literally
suck the life out of any partner with whom she engaged in amorous activity. Bo saved a young human girl named Kenzi
(Ksenia Solo) by utilizing these very skills on a man making an unwanted pass at the human lass, and the two women
then forged an interspecies friendship that saw them setting up a detective agency of sorts. In the meantime, Bo's
activities caught the attention of several other Fae, all of whom had been quietly coexisting in the human world,
attempting not to attract too much attention. Chief among these were Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried), a wolfman who works
as a police detective, and Trick (Rick Howland), a little person who owns the chief Fae watering hole in the city and who
is a kind of keeper of Fae lore. There's also a human scientist named Lauren (Zoie Palmer) who is investigating the
genetic roots of the Fae and who has an immediate attraction to Bo. The first season developed the rather arcane back
story of both Bo and the Fae while pursuing a kind of "who am I?" arc for Bo that culminated in a showdown with Bo's
long lost (and pretty nefarious) Fae mother in the series' climactic finale.
The second season picks right up with several dangling plot points, chief of which is the relationship between Dyson
and
Bo. This very aspect points out both the pluses and minuses of
Lost Girl, a series that is often quite winning
and
wise in its use of ancient lore, but which just as often shoots itself in its fairy foot with predictable storytelling and
sometimes hackneyed writing. Without revealing too many little twists that crop up with appealing frequency in the
series, Dyson made a deal at the end of season one to keep Bo from getting decimated by her supposedly much more
powerful mother, but that deal was a Faustian bargain of sorts that resulted in a sort of magical spell being placed on
him
that kept him from feeling anything romantic toward his once very hot and heavy flame. But who are the writers kidding
here? Is there any question that Bo and Dyson are going to hop back in the sack at some point, and that Bo will find
some fantastic way (even if it's only wearing extremely low cut blouses) to re-attract her boyfriend? It's in these
needless
little bits of melodrama that
Lost Girl tends to stall its own momentum, rather than just letting the main
supernatural arcs fill the storylines.
There's an at times overly convoluted use of terms within
Lost Girl that actually becomes kind of funny after a
while. Any
given line of dialogue can include all sorts of references to various types of ghouls and goblins or even concepts culled
from the darkest recesses of the subconscious. But this is also a way in which
Lost Girl really does its
homework and provides some fascinating new takes on ancient yarns. The first episode, while teetering awfully close
to
X Files territory, dances with some pagan ideas that are somewhat reminiscent of the old Thomas Tryon
novel
Harvest Home, in terms of a people "married" to its land. It never really develops the idea as well as
might be wished, and we do get very brief sequences filled to bursting with all sorts of "technical" verbiage that is a bit
confusing to follow, but it's a great example of how this show's writers at least try to incorporate actual long existing
lore into the framework of the series.
The "
X Files meets
Grimm meets
Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets any number of other folklore
cum supernatural series that have populated the airwaves over the past several years" connection proves to
be
a consistent nature of
Lost Girl as it moves forward in this
much longer second season. That in turns
means that the series once again tends to get stuck in the rut of the "freak of the week" scenario (something I've
lamented about concerning the somewhat similar
Haven, another series featuring a lead heroine who doesn't know quite who she
is or where she came from). What keeps
Lost Girl's fairy head above the water is its often racy sensibility
(there's a none too subtle lesbian subplot involving Bo and Lauren, just one example) and frequently very funny
whipsaw smart banter, often between Bo and Kenzi.
There are a couple of intertwined and compelling arcs in this season that also help to relieve the occasional
predictability. Bo starts having visions (for want of a better word) of a scary little girl who looks suspiciously like one of
the twins in Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
, who warns Bo that she's about to become prey for some kind of evil entity. About two thirds of the way through
this season an evil group called The Garuda (a term copped from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, another sign of this
series' ecumenical approach) starts wreaking havoc, including ironically misleading Trick (for a while, anyway) about his
long ago decision to mitigate the war between Dark Fae and Light Fae. In fact the "relationship" between The Garuda
and Trick provides one of the key elements to this season's finale, which once again sees all sorts of tumult and turmoil
(as well as some evident deaths, but we know how those things tend to be resolved in subsequent seasons) unfolding.
Predictable? Yes. Entertaining? Usually.
