Lost Girl – The Kenziscale
On Lost Girl, we learn where the real Kenzi is, Bo and Tamsin make out, and a lot of feelings get hurt.
The action begins immediately where last week ended, with Bo accusing Kenzi of not being the real Kenzi and everyone else acting like Bo is crazy. They lock Bo up, worried that she’s being affected by the darkness within her and possibly even killing when she feeds.
Bo is weak, partly because she hasn’t fed lately, partly because some kind of weird disease or something is affecting her. Trick is acting really weird with Lauren, making her double-check the results of blood tests. Lauren gets the goofy line of the week: “I know the biochemical anatomy of my girlfriend.” Oh, I’ll bet.
I give a lot of credit to Ksenia Solo. For the last two weeks, she’s managed to depict this thing that looks like Kenzi but isn’t Kenzi with remarkable subtlety. The default for a show like this would be to go big, with the thing acting extremely out of character, like Balki from Perfect Strangers (bet you weren’t expecting a Perfect Strangers reference in tonight’s Lost Girl recap). But “other Kenzi” has felt just slightly off. Different, but not in any kind of broad or obvious way. I didn’t really get it until we see real Kenzi chained up in some kind of underground drainage pipe, and I realized how much I’d missed her.
The episode’s title, if you’re wondering, is a reference to the Kinsey Scale, a measure of homosexual tendencies developed by Alfred Kinsey and other researchers in the 40s and 50s. The underlying theory is that people are not strictly either homosexual or heterosexual, but rather exist along a spectrum of thought and action.
Of course, other Kenzi does screw quite a few things up, like not really understanding how ice cream works. She gets really close to Dyson, and Tamsin is the only one who realizes Bo is right. Tamsin wants Bo to go to jail because she thinks she’s guilty of feeding on a dark fae, but she releases Bo so they can go find real Kenzi. Cool tension there, much better than Tamsin’s usual mean girl schtick. Dyson tries to stop them, so Tamsin unleashes her inner valkyrie, showing off some scary skull face that lays wolfie low.
We later learn that when a valkyrie shows her true face to an opponent, it’s so intimidating that it leaves the opponent wracked with self-doubt for quite some time afterward. It also seems to take a lot out of Tamsin, who loses some hair.
Tamsin almost immediately discerns that other Kenzi is a kitsune (great FX when kitsune Kenzi shows her tiny fangs). Kitsune are supernatural fox creatures from Japanese folklore. They can be good spirits or malicious tricksters, and they have the ability to shapeshift into human form. Tamsin and Bo track down this particular kitsune by visiting a kitsune sorority that hired Tamsin to work security.
Kitsune sorority. Let that sink in for a bit. I guess if you could shapeshift into human form, you’d pick hot college girl form. Why not? And I almost failed to make a joke about “the foxes at Gamma Phi.” Heyooooooo!
Other Kenzi is back at Dyson’s pad. He goes back to sleep off his valkyrie-induced self-doubt, and it takes a while for him to notice that Kenzi’s come ons are unnatural. Then he wakes up to find her licking his face. There’s a great wolf vs. fox showdown, and Dyson accidentally shoots the kitsune. I liked Dyson’s “distraught friend still messed up by the valkyrie” acting job in this scene.
There’s a bit of pathos there, since we’ve learned that the kitsune just wants some friends. Unfortunately, she’s also crazy from the norn stealing her glamer (which was the source of Kenzi’s weird rash, and why the kitsune stalked Kenzi).
As they track down the kitsune’s lair, Bo is having trouble keeping up with Tamsin. Tamsin realizes Bo needs to feed to gain some strength and offers herself up as a small sexual snack. Bo: “But I kind of hate you.” Come on Bo, don’t pretend you don’t know the joys of hate sex. So we get our second Bo/Tamsin makeout scene, but this time Bo has her powers and gets a good taste of Tamsin’s chi. She likes the flavor, and Tamsin doesn’t seem too bothered either.
There’s a big reunion when they save Kenzi and take her out for burgers. But the bonds of friendship suffer some strain. No one believed Bo, including Lauren, who tests Bo even when Bo says, “I will never forgive you for this.” There’s also the fact that Kenzi had been trying to find help from her friends for weeks, but they ignored her.
Tamsin finds herself on the outside looking in (like the kitsune, but less insane), craving the kind of friendship the Scooby gang shares. She might be willing to find it with them, but she’s under the Morrigan’s thumb, and the Morrigan really wants to destroy Bo. Ordered to use her valkyrie stuff on the man in a coma due to Bo’s attack, Tamsin complies even though it will leave the man brain dead. He IDs Bo from a photo, then dies. Asked point blank by the Morrigan, Tamsin lies and says he died without talking. The Morrigan knows she’s lying, so now her dark fae insider in the Scooby gang has gone rogue.
This was without a doubt the best episode of the season so far. Right up until they started talking about “The Dawning.”
See, Bo is undergoing some kind of fae “evolution” that will require her to pass a test or devolve into underfae. The writing is what devolved, as the actors were forced to haplessly mouth lines like, “The Dawning? I’ve heard whispers of it, but…” Really? Another major fae secret no one bothered to mention to Bo in all this time?
There are some really interesting through lines developing this season. This Dawning thing sounds unbelievably terrible though. And I’m going to mock the hell out of it.
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Monday, February 18th, 2013. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: fae, lost girl, lost girl season 3, syfy, the kenziscale
