Lost Girl – Fae-ge Against the Machine
On Lost Girl, we learn of the existence of the fae X-Men while Bo goes off on a MacGuffinQuest and Lauren gets a trophy.
My notes for this episode look like a list of random terms and names. The plot was total nonsense, yet it was still fun. It felt at times like Bo was in the middle of a game of Zork. “You are standing in a random field holding a fortune cookie. There is a tall, blonde valkyrie here. She is looking really, really hot this week.”
>KISS VALKYRIE
Things start out with Bo undergoing Jedi training with Stella the Lodestar. Blindfolded Bo can’t find the hidden cricket, and thus fails her way to the next stage of the Dawning, which is to hang tight for a bit until they send you your official Dawnvitation. This comes in the form of a steampunk looking device that Bo absent-mindedly activates while she’s on the phone.
Bo wants to go home and nap, but Lauren shows up all excited because she’s won the Moses Gomberg Distinguished Award for Contributions in the Field of Free Radicals (Gomberg was a real person, and actually studied free radicals). Lauren’s nerdy excitement about her sciencey stuff is cute, but sometimes I feel like the writers lay it on too thick. So in case you weren’t clear on this, Lauren is super nerdy and loves science stuff and is a nerd. Science nerd. Capisce?
Tamsin happens by and invites Bo for a liquid lunch so she can warn her about how hardcore this Dawning thing really is. Tamsin looks amazing, somehow wearing a sparkly tank top and still coming off as a bad-ass. They’re hanging out at a dark fae bar, and a bunch of dark fae dudebros start throwing static their way. Tamsin performs a hilarious punch that knocks down all three like some kind of dudebro carnival game, and they escape out a back door at the urging of some other guy.
Other guy turns out to be a spriggan, and he tricks Bo into shaking his hand, sealing her into an agreement to help him out. A spriggan! An actual fae creature! As in, from Cornish faery legends. Although Lost Girl gloms the whole deal making aspect onto the folklore spriggan, which was more of a basic “steal your babies, blight your crops” kind of evil fae. Sadly, no grue.
From there it’s a series of goofy quests with very little logic. They steal a fortune cookie, get a creepy tarot reading, visit a fae trailer park and raid a fae meth lab. There are cowboys and a magical shootout and a squonk. It was all a bit ramshackle and poorly paced, and it suffered for all being part of the Dawning, but overall it was a fun little adventure. I only wish they’d turned the weird up to 11 for this.
By the way, the spriggan totally works for the fae Professor X. He calls himself a bounty hunter for “The Demetrius Institute for Higher Learning, a training center for rare, outcast dark fae.” More than almost anything else I want to see on Lost Girl (almost!), I want episodes based on a team of dark fae mutants fighting to save a world that fears and shuns them.
While all this is happening, Trick and his new ladyfriend, Stella, have discovered the device. It turns out to be some kind of game that Bo must win to get her invitation, but Trick can play in her place since he’s a blood relative. The game itself is terrible – make a bunch of arbitrary, binary decisions with no real evidence on which to base your choice. I’m calling the device the Dean Martin Engine, because it keeps asking Trick to feed it martinis.
One effect of this crappy game is that Bo gets drunk while she’s out on the wrong side of the dark fae tracks. She’s running late for Lauren’s award banquet, and an ill-timed phone call leads Bo to insult Lauren’s career. Later, a handsome, friendly scientist stops by to take Lauren out for drinks.
Bo is successful at saving the squonk (in folklore, an ugly warthog-like creature), a naïve young girl who cries tears of fae crank and wants to join the school to meet all the unusual fae boys with special powers. In celebration, Bo and Tamsin make out, because in fae land the default mode for female characters is bisexual.
And honestly, Bo and Tamsin make a much more interesting couple than Bo and just about anyone. Lauren is like the Walking Dead farm of Lost Girl – pleasant and safe, but boring. Dyson just needs to stop in now and then, take his shirt off, and make you want to run your fingers through his hair (even if you’re a hetero dude like me, just admit it). But there’s a push-pull with Bo and Tamsin, an antipathy that they work around, plus whatever dark fae mission Tamsin is on. I think a lot more sparks fly for valkcubus than doccubus.
When the two of them meet up briefly at Lauren’s place, check out Tamsin’s awesomely awkward exit when Bo sort of comes onto her. She reverts to her sarcastic mode, gives Bo a little pat on the arm, and practically runs out the door. I read that all as, “I need to get out of here right now or I’m going to do sexy things to Bo that are illegal in 37 states and five provinces.”
Finally, Lost Girl picks this week to start dabbling in the tarot troubles trope. It starts with the classic “fortune teller turns over a card and gets a look of horror on her face” scene. The card is the Wanderer, also known as the Fool, a sign of new beginnings. Bo finds that the entire deck is just Wanderer cards, and at episode’s end, Tamsin finds a Wanderer in the parking lot. She yells at the sky and then a jillion Wanderer cards come falling down. Portentous!
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Monday, March 11th, 2013. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: fae-ge against the machine, lost girl, lost girl season 3, syfy
