I have no idea how Lost Girl ended up on my radar, but with the promise of supernatural shenanigans, a woman protagonist and general kick ass shenanigans, it does not seem so farfetched that it would end up in my queue. When Netflix gave me a month’s notice that it was being pulled during a global pandemic, it suddenly became must see viewing and hit the top of my queue. It consisted of five seasons, seventy-seven episodes, and each episode was around forty-five minutes long.
Lost Girl is better as a multitasking television series, not a show that you give your complete attention, at least until you get to Season 2 Episode 8 when the show finally gets good and feels less like a no name brand True Blood meets someone’s idea of what Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like if the person just heard about the final season, but never watched it. The protagonist of the show is Bo, a woman who is unaware that she is Fae, specifically a succubus. She abruptly gets plunged into a supernatural world where she refuses to choose between Light and Dark, but acts as the protector of human beings, who are glorified happy meals to the Fae regardless of which end of the spectrum that they are on. Fae is basically the term for all the legendary and mythical creatures that originated in Europe. They look like human beings, but each have special abilities and longer life spans than their human counterparts.
Unfortunately the first season and initial third of the second season of Lost Girl seemed as if the creators were unaware that we are in the twenty-first century where porn is easily accessible to viewers so there is no need for cable television to give us this soft core crap, and neither porn, nor soft core interest me. It was inadvertently hella rapey because Bo would basically use her sexual powers to fight people. One episode had two women forcing an evil man to become attracted to them and make out with them, which in a vacuum, was just considering his transgression, but also ew, that is literally rape. It was also adhering to a supernatural police procedural show narrative where every week Bo and her human best friend, Kenzi, who was initially so terrified of Bo that she decided to live with her (huh? Not matched on Craig’s List), would figure out which Fae was responsible for the evil deed of the week, and they would work with Fae cops, a shapeshifter (don’t call him a werewolf) and a siren, named Dyson and Hale. Trick owns the bar that they hang out at, and he knows more about Bo than he is letting her know. It felt more like slightly jazzed up human problems and only lightly supernatural.
Then Season 2 Episode 8 of Lost Girl stopped being a weekly standalone story and really began to develop the mythology of the show, particularly Bo’s role in the Fae world. Let’s just say that Bo embraced Lord of the Rings’ Galadriel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer getting Primeval. When her power became Bo less literally fighting with her vagina and introducing the idea that because her power is not rooted in evil emotions thus what makes Bo special is her ability to harness the power of a woman’s sexuality, the sexual positivity that the series was aiming for finally hit its target. Also the series finally got an interesting big bad to focus the storylines and give the viewers a reason to become invested in the characters and their storylines. It was also the season where the actors got to have fun and play other characters, which normally does not work in other shows, but the acting always felt kind of weak before then, but the entire cast got an opportunity to show their versatility and understanding of other characters by depicting them. Kris Holden-Reid actually should do comedy because I preferred him doing comedy and finally began to reconsider whether before that point in the season, it was the acting that was dreadful or the writing. The series would frequently find excuses to explore these storylines, which may not have advanced the actual story, but was a decent palate cleanser that never felt like filler. Season 2 was the consistently strongest season of the entire series.
It is not that Lost Girl got worse, but it began to heavily lean on the idea of whether or not Bo could be trusted, which I kind of hated. Come on. She is the protagonist, and we have known her for two seasons. Who are you kidding? I am never a fan of that type of storyline regardless of gender, but it felt as if the series was undercutting what they had built by distrusting women with power. Also if the first season felt more human than supernatural, the third season felt as if it lost the balance between worlds established in the second season. It felt like it was another establishing season, a second first season, while the writers were trying to establish the next phase without being completely certain of their ultimate destination. One interesting character gets introduced, and once I recognized that the actor playing that character also played Alice in Batwoman, I realized that the series must have started attracting more serious talent because Rachel Skarsten is no slouch, and special guest star, Linda Hamilton, i.e. Sarah Connor, yes, please!
The fourth season of Lost Girl was an overall strong story, but I disagree with any narrative that undercuts the overall chemistry of the cast by keeping characters separate for too long, and it often felt as if it was completely removed from any human reality. In the end, the mysterious figure was anticlimactic though it did move the story forward to the final season, but I feel like hindsight shows that season three and four could have been stronger if the writers knew the ultimate goal.
The final fifth season of Lost Girl essentially answered all the questions raised. It felt as if Xena should make an appearance considering the huge plot twist regarding Bo’s background, and I love Xena so that is a compliment. The obstacles in that season raised the bar to heights that it had not reached since the second season. I am not saying that it was a perfect season, but it was an ambitious enough that I could forgive the sudden disappearance of a key main character and the cynical introduction of a charisma free younger character that was clearly introduced to be shirtless because Holden-Reid must have started to refuse to do those scenes anymore. Also the actor who plays the big bad is not only an Academy Award nominee, but has appeared in some guilty pleasure Christian apocalypse films so I was thrilled with that development.
If you hate love triangles, then Lost Girl may drive you batty because sometimes there are love squares and pentagons. The good news is that the love geometry was organically LGBTQ. Racially it was disappointing because how did the hot, rich, elite black character’s storyline constantly get downsized as his role in the story became more central to the main characters.
Ultimately I enjoyed Lost Girl and will miss having it as part of my daily routine during a global pandemic, but it could have benefitted from having a better production bible or single showrunner to steadily steer the show away from its inconsistencies or excesses and keep it on course.