Lost Girl – Fae-ed to Black
On this week’s Lost Girl, mythologies collide. Hale is an ashhole. Trick overacts. And Bo just can’t get enough. She just can’t get enough.
A lot of TV dramas begin with a cold open. Lost Girl subverts the whole idea with a hot open – a lengthy montage of Bo and Lauren having sex. There’s oil and hair-pulling and even a little scissor-sister action if you watch closely. Bo is wearing Lauren out and seems totally insatiable, turning to chocolate as a diversion and even getting cranky with Kenzi. “Why does everything have to be about sex?” Kenzi responds by calling Bo “Wondersnatch.”
This is the first of three plotlines in this episode. Bo is having enormous amounts of sex with Lauren, but her efforts to remain monogamous are running into an obstacle. As a succubus, Bo literally feeds off of sex. Lauren’s human hoo-ha isn’t enough to satisfy all of Bo’s needs, so Bo is weak and can’t recover from injuries. She ultimately turns to Dyson for some “no strings attached” sex when she starts suffering from internal bleeding.
The whole thing is sort of wrapped up by episode’s end when Bo confesses to Lauren and explains that monogamy isn’t really in the cards for a Wondersnatch. Sorry, for a succubus. Lauren does her weird weepy face and accepts Bo’s situation with the stipulation that Dyson is off-limits (I’d have requested a. first voyeur rights and b. weekly threesomes to make things more inclusive, personally). Thus begins the weirdest open relationship in TV history. “Honey, I have to have sex with all these other hot people or I’ll DIE.”
Of course, rigging the plot so that Bo is physiologically required to be slutty really undermines Lost Girl’s sex-positive vibe. The whole point is that you can have sex with whoever you want because it’s your body, not because you have a doctor’s note.
Speaking of doctor’s notes, the fae of the week for this episode is a rakshasa, a shapeshifting wizard of Hindu/Buddhist origin who has taken up residence in a hippy-dippy alternative therapy medical office. The secretary in the rakshasa’s office is an ixtab, a creature from Mayan mythology. Lost Girl’s versions are only loosely based on their real-life counterparts. For instance, Ixtab was actually a goddess of suicide, while Lost Girl depicts her as a creature that feeds off the despair of suicide victims.
Rakshasa’s are also famous for being classic D&D monsters. Since they’re grabbing mythological creatures from all and sundry, wouldn’t it be cool if they worked in a few D&D baddies? Some of them are trademark or copyright protected, but I’ll bet they could get by with a beholder or some drow.
Dyson and Tamsin once again play the “incredibly inept detectives” game, at first thinking the ixtab is the reason humans have been killing themselves while trying to live out their dreams (like tightrope walking). Then the ixtab dies, so they finger the clinic’s frumpy hypnotherapist as the culprit when Dyson goes undercover as a patient and gets convinced he should live out his childhood dream of being a griffon. You know, on second thought, with Lost Girl, I should be more careful with my phrasing. They identify the hypnotherapist. But when Bo does the whole succubus thing where she stokes his hand and he tells her the truth, he doesn’t know anything.
That’s when a seemingly cutesy detail from before (that two of the “doctors” listed on the clinic’s board, Dr. Nemo and Dr. Bob, are actually the resident goldfish and housecat) becomes relevant. Rakshasa’s are shapeshifters, and they aren’t limited to human shape. It’s Dr. Bob! There’s a really great effect where Dr. Bob transforms from a plain kitty into an evil devil-kitty. Then it’s totally undone when Lost Girl’s budget requires the full-size monster rakshasa to appear only in shadow. Tamsin makes it go poof with a single throw from her, uh…valkyrang? And Bo talks a shirtless Dyson down from the roof with a “you’re an awesome wolf and we all love you” speech.
The third plotline is Kenzi’s alienation from her fae friends and her ongoing bizarre arm infection from last season’s encounter with the norn. She keeps asking everyone for help, but all the fae are too busy to even listen to her, including Hale, who as the Ash has a lot on his plate.
When Kenzi disrupts an important meeting with an ambassador from the valkyries (which has something to do with Dyson and Tamsin being paired together), Hale complains to Trick, who is a total douche. He says, “Yeah, Kenzi’s great, but she’s not one of us, so do what you have to do because this fae stuff is srs bsns.” But he says it in a super mean, “Can’t you tell I’m acting here?!” voice, so maybe he was laying it on too thick to protect Kenzi or something? Or maybe, you know…bad acting.
At the end, Kenzi gets dragged into an alley by something.
Other odds and ends: we have our first gay man kiss! Bo does some undercover work at the clinic as a couples therapist, and counsels a gay couple having issues with the amount of sex they’re having together. Her solution is to give them a little succubus supercharge so they both want tons and tons of sex, immediately. They were pretty unstereotypical – the one guy was a little, you know…gay. But his boyfriend just seemed like your average frazzled dermatologist. Which is probably the most accurate depiction of a gay couple I’ve seen on TV.
Line of the week might be Bo responding to Lauren’s suggestion that she might be underqualified to be a therapist. “So you think I lack the intellectual whatchamacallit to pull off this fake doctor crap?”
Or maybe it was Dyson: “It’s just that this shirt is kinda tight.”
Oh who am I kidding? As if any of those beat “Wondersnatch.”
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Posted by Ed Grabianowski
on Monday, February 4th, 2013. Filed under Dark TV, Headline.
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Tags: fae-ed to black, lost girl, lost girl season 3, syfy
