Recap and Review: Lost Girl 1.10: The Mourning After

By Paula R. Stiles

[spoilers ahoy]

Recap: Bo and Kenzi are having a girls’ night in, lamenting their lousy romantic history. Meanwhile, a young woman named ‘Allison’ has a romantic night with a man at a club, but when she wakes up alone the next morning, she draws the word “Whore” all over the glass wall next to her tub and electrocutes herself with a hair dryer.

Bo and Kenzi come into the picture when Allison’s sister, Collette, hires Bo to investigate the suicide, feeling it was entirely out of her sister’s character. Bo agrees, sharing with Dyson her theory that the woman was compelled to kill herself by a Fae. She also goes to Lauren for a Fae analysis of the woman’s blood, but Lauren finds nothing. Bo’s attitudes toward Dyson and Lauren are strikingly different, where she’s friendly with Dyson and angry at Lauren about “leading her on” last week. Bo, I sense you do not understand what ‘slavery’ truly means.

Bo and Kenzi investigate the club where the dead woman spent her last night and speed-date their way through the regulars. Instead of a suspect, they find a Dark Fae Succubus, Saskia, who is new in town and angry that Bo didn’t “mark” her turf, leading to an awkward situation. Bo is shocked. She thought she was the only Succubus out there. Saskia is elegant and flighty, but finds Bo intriguing. She happily takes Bo on board and starts teaching her the ways of Succubi, while coming along for the ride on Bo’s investigation.

Needless to say, this puts Kenzi’s nose out of joint. Fortunately, for her, she has a distraction – helping Trick save the Dal Riata. It seems Trick once found a lucky coin along with another Fae (a Leprechaun?) and they share it every 100 years. The problem? Trick’s time is up and he has to hand it back, but he’s recently lost the coin. If he can’t hand it over, he’ll have to forfeit his bar as collateral.

He says he can find it, but he needs Kenzi’s help in consulting a Fae who will only talk to human women and cannot be seen by other Fae. The Fae is a “Lightning Bird” (a vampiric monster found in South African folklore), who appears in (what else?) a flash of lightning. Her name is ‘Clarice’ and she comes in the form of a black woman with a Caribbean accent. Kenzi chats her up, clueing into Clarice’s resentment of the other Fae always trying to grab her eggs. This resentment is why she steals from them. Kenzi agrees to be a middlewoman for her, which pleases Clarice. She happily gives Kenzi one of her eggs and also tells her about Trick’s Fae power (which he keeps hidden) – he can make things happen “by writing in his book of blood.”

Afterward, Trick does a finding spell with the egg and a pendulum, whereupon it locates the coin in a cemetery. Hale joins Trick and Kenzi to uncover the tomb, but it’s gone. Kenzi, however, has figured the mystery out – Trick’s buddy pulled a fast one on Trick, giving him a fake coin that would dissolve the last time they switched. Once the con is uncovered, the friend is forced to give the coin back indefinitely. At the end, Kenzi mentions to Trick what she learned from the Lightning Bird about his power.

Meanwhile, on Bo’s case, Collette is attacked by an unseen person who induces her to write “Dirty Slut” all over her walls and commit suicide by taking pills. Bo and Saskia find Collette’s dead body and Saskia immediately identifies the culprit, or at least its species. It’s an “Albaster”, a Fae that feeds on shame and makes women feel guilty about sex, causing them to kill themselves. The Albaster is a mortal enemy of the Succubus.

Bo identifies a man at the club as the one who took Allison home. He’s a player who appears around closing time to pick up lonely women. She and Saskia accost the guy outside the club. To Bo’s horror, Saskia apparently drains the man to death, but Saskia then shows her a trick of getting the truth out of any human man by reviving him again. He’s not the killer. Unfortunately for Bo, she does find the killer when she returns home – the club owner. He’s stronger than Bo, who has a conscience, but not stronger than Saskia, who knocks him out. After they strap him up with duct tape and Bo calls Dyson, though, Saskia mortally drains him, calling it revenge for his attack on a Succubus. The Dark Fae wouldn’t punish him for killing humans, anyway. She leaves, though she offers to instruct Bo further once Bo is willing.

Dyson later tells Bo that she is off the hook for the Albaster’s death because he attacked her at home and killing in self-defense is allowed under the rules. Bo shares a hug with Dyson, right in front of a glum Lauren (awww) and later has a girlfriend moment with Kenzi, asking her about her day. but even so, Bo is still drawn to Saskia’s red jacket, which Saskia has left behind at her apartment.

Review: I read ahead a bit, so I was wondering how this one would turn out (Let’s just say it’s more pivotal in the show’s mythology than it looks at first glance). Saskia is fun and we get to see some new permutations on Bo’s Succubus powers, with Saskia showing her some new ropes. Plus, the show has not delved enough into the Dark Fae before now, except as one-dimensional villains, while the Light Fae tend to be both morally suspect and holier-than-thou – hypocrites, in other words. There are also some strong hints that Saskia will be back, that she didn’t just happen to pop into town and run across Bo by accident. It did seem a bit silly that the episode, rather than explaining why Bo had never met a Succubus before and others acted as if they were rare, simply handwaved the issue as one relating to Bo’s ignorance of the Fae world. No, I’m pretty sure everyone else has been acting as though Succubi are rare, too.

I was also not satisfied with the storyline about the Albaster. Okay, he’s the antithesis of a Succubus and it’s an interesting twist to have a black actor play him. And the actor did do a good job. But the reveal – after all that sinister, misogynistic build-up – was pretty underwhelming. He came across as just another one-dimensional bad guy.

Much more fun was the Lightning Bird, who brought snap and spice to her brief scene, while also casually dropping a major bit of info about Trick. I liked how subtly they wove in several motivations that accounted for her behaviour, such as her little thefts, preferring to interact with human women, and outing Trick like that. She was surprisingly complex for such a quick and almost-offhand scene in the B plot of an episode. I missed her when she went.

I also found myself wanting to slap Bo a few times, particularly when it came to Lauren. We didn’t see Lauren last week. This week, Bo was acting all snappy and jealous around her because she felt that Lauren had manipulated her on behalf of her boss. Okay, first of all, Lauren did bring up an alternative idea – that she was trying to protect Bo – that Bo could at least have explored. At the very least, it might have led Bo down a route or two to finding out more about her place in Fae society. Why would the Ash have manipulated Lauren into seducing Bo and delaying her? And why was Lauren so easily manipulated? It wasn’t just because she was a slave. She did have genuine feelings for Bo and she was worried about Bo. By doing the Ash’s bidding, she could also protect this woman she had fallen for.

Second, is Bo really that clueless and naive not to understand what slavery entails for Lauren? Even if Lauren had not wanted to sleep with Bo, the Ash could still have ordered her to seduce and delay Bo, and she would still would have had to obey. Which is uncomfortably close to command rape. The very reasons Bo uses to condemn Lauren’s actions indicate that Lauren’s ability to act in the first place is limited by her situation. It’s as if Bo were looking subconsciously for a reason to rationalise Lauren’s slavery (and ignore other gross inequities in Fae society, including those that directly affect Kenzi), so this “betrayal” of Lauren’s gives her an excuse to look the other way.

Finally, I get that Bo does not know everything we do about how Dyson and Trick are manipulating her and hiding things from her. But she’s hardly fresh off the bus from Manitoba. Why trust Dyson so implicitly when he’s made it clear he has an agenda separate from hers and is sometimes even hostile toward her? Not to mention the whole “Ooops, did you just catch me banging the barmaid? Did I mention I don’t consider us exclusive, even though you did?” issue. Sure, Bo is trying to play it cool and cosmopolitan with Dyson, but that doesn’t mean she has to act as if his chi is scrambling her brains, either. Methinks she frequently thinks with a different part of her anatomy around him.

Next Week: Faetal Justice: When Dyson wakes up covered with blood next to a dead Dark Fae, he finds himself charged with murder.

You can watch the first season of Lost Girl on Syfy, either Monday nights at 10pm or on the official site.