Note: My weekly review in the TV Guide section of The Marshall Independent.
Lost Girl is a Canadian import, already in its third season in the Great White North, which just premiered on the SyFy channel here. As a reviewer I had the advantage of having just seen the premier episode and a couple of the current ones, so I kind of know where this is going.
First let me make this perfectly clear, I would not let my children watch this. It’s definitely adult entertainment and SyFy only shows it after their bedtime.
The title character Bo (Anna Silk) has kind of a kinky sex life involving a romantic triangle with a man (Kristen Holden-Ried) and a woman (Zoie Palmer,) and indulges in too-casual sex including the occasional threesome. Not an example I want set for my daughter. So sue me, I’m a prude. At least as far as my children are concerned.
Oh, and did I mention that sex with Bo is fatal for humans?
Bo’s sidekick Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) is a thief-with-a-heart-of-gold. And how many of those loveable pickpockets have you ever met? I do not want my children to see thieves portrayed as anything but lowlifes. (Robin Hood is a special exception, a counter-thief recovering stolen goods.)
And in my other capacity as an anthropologist and folklorist I have very ambiguous feelings about media messing with my myths. On the one hand they take serious liberties with classical myth and folklore. On the other hand where else are people getting any exposure to it at all?
Bo you see, is a succubus. A succubus in medieval demonology derived from ancient Hebrew myths, is a female demon who seduces men in their sleep. The male counterpart is an incubus.
The succubus was thought to explain nocturnal emissions. In medieval myth the succubus would then transform into an incubus, using the seed gathered from one male to impregnate a female. I’ve always thought that was a convenient way to explain to your wife why the kid across town looks just like you. “A succubus Honey! I swear it!”
However Bo is an apparently normal albeit strikingly beautiful woman, who grew up in a normal family unaware of her fae origin. Until her first sexual encounter killed her first boyfriend.
In the first episode Bo met and teamed up with Kenzi after saving her from a cad who’d slipped a ruffie in her drink – and killing the cad by draining his life energy. (Bo is not a vampire, but the effect is the same.)
Bo discovers something of her nature as a fae, a Celtic word covering all tribes of supernatural creatures such as morrigans, werewolves, leprechauns, furies, etc. That’s a pretty multicultural bag of myths right there.
The fae are divided into the light side, and the dark side. When they attempt to force Bo to chose her path, she defiantly chooses, “Human!”
The series revolves around Bo and Kenzi’s supernatural detective agency helping humans who run into supernatural trouble, and vice versa. They are aided by Bo’s romantic interest, a police detective who happens to be a werewolf.
And right there is another thing that makes me uneasy, the notion you can be neutral in a fight between good and evil. But then again this echoes myths about the fae that they were once angels who attempted to remain neutral in the war between God and Satan. They fell from heaven, but not all the way.
After having said all of the above, I have to tell you I find the series oddly compelling. Anna Silk is lovely in a distinctive non-classical way with bone structure to die for. Ksenia Solo plays a delightful smart-mouth who frequently natters away in Russian, a beautiful language that always hovers on the edge of intelligibility for those of us who speak any other Slavic tongue.
The stories of the supernatural world existing side-by-side with our mundane world probably owe inspiration to the work of Canadian fantasy author Charles de Lint and have a lot of the same flavor.
So if you have a taste for fantasy you might give this a try. But it’s not for everybody, and it’s definitely not for children.