Recap and Review: Lost Girl 1.12: (Dis)Members Only

By Paula R. Stiles

[spoilers ahoy]

Recap: Dyson is going on vacation and Bo talks him into taking her with him. Even Kenzi gets on it when she picks up a case from a friend of her street kid days, Neville. His cousin, Thumper, a newly arrived illegal, has gone missing. We get a scene where Thumper is conked on the head and then grabbed (and probably killed) by a killer vine. Later, a drunken member, Blake, who talked to Bo and Dyson, is also dispatched in the same way, after being whacked over the head with a golf club by the club owner’s wife.

At the club, Bo and Dyson go undercover as a married couple, while Kenzi goes undercover as a geeky, Mexican maid (oy). While Bo and Dyson are getting the guided tour, thanks to Bo’s powers of seduction (and discovering that the members get financial bumps after joining), Kenzi is being harassed by a creepy groundskeeper, finding out that a lot of the workers are going missing after having strikes on their record, and burgling the main office with Hale (who keeps calling her “short” and tries to seduce her). Dyson admits that he doesn’t want to share Bo, even though he knows that she, as a Succubus, is not naturally monogamous. Later, Dyson warns Trick that he must tell her what they’ve been lying to her about, or Dyson will tell her, himself.

Kenzi, meanwhile, is sweating over having “two strikes” against her because all of the missing employees had three strikes against them. When she accidentally runs into another waitress and drops a tray, she freaks out. Bo and Dyson, already alerted by the odd run of good fortune among the members, find a lucky lottery card and then spot the groundskeeper. Passing by a shed, they discover a sewer cover near where Blake disappeared and nasty-smelling sludge that turns out to contain the drunken member’s DNA, as well as some Fae DNA. Getting the owner alone, Bo seduces him into admitting that the club sacrifices “incompetent” employees to “something” in the woods in exchange for “good fortune”. Dyson then gives him amnesia going back five years.

When Hale brings some of the sludge to Trick, Trick identifies the Fae as a “Land Wight”, a shapeshifter that can take on the form of the plants from whom it derives its strength. At the club, Bo chases down the groundskeeper while Kenzi runs back to the kitchen to warn the cook, who had been acting as a sort of mentor to her, earlier. Unfortunately, the groundskeeper turns out to be an innocent paranoid employee trying to warn the others – and the cook is the Land Wight. As soon as Kenzi warns her, of course, the Land Wight attacks her.

Bo shows up in time, with some garden shears, to save Kenzi. The Land Wight won’t back down at first and acts arrogant about Bo’s chances against her. But Bo has a different idea. The groundskeeper and other employees walk in with sharp implements and herbicide. As Bo and Kenzi walk out, they hear the Land Wight’s death shriek and later find out that her death at the hands of humans is enough to mollify the Dark Fae. They don’t suspect that Bo was involved. Since the Land Wight exposed her existence to humans, her life is forfeit, anyway.

Meanwhile, Saskia returns, trying to seduce Bo to the Dark side. Bo tries to remain firm, but Saskia has her methods of persuasion – like trying to kill Dyson at his office after he calls Bo to tell her he wants to tell her something (what he warned Trick to tell her, first). And her true identity is a shocker that may well Bo and Dyson apart, because she knows him and he also recognises her. Bo interrupts the attack, stabbing Saskia and barely saving Dyson’s life. Annoyed, but not enough to attack Bo, Saskia pulls out the stake and leaves. Bo revives Dyson by figuring out how to give him some of her power, but he sure has some explaining to do now.

Review: As amusing as it is to watch Kenzi work in the service industry and go up against a killer plant, most of the fun stuff in this episode occurs either offscreen or on the periphery of the A plot, which is yet another simple MOTW. I thought the actress who played the cook, who turned out to be the Land Wight (a Norse creature similar to the Vanir in Supernatural‘s “Scarecrow”), did a good job and was appropriately chilling at the right moment. The bit where the human gang with garden shears instead of pitchforks shows up was a nice touch and a clever (if somewhat obvious) way for Bo to destroy her opponent. Looks like humans aren’t always just cattle. I wonder, though…are there species that always go to the Dark or the Light because their specific power gives them little choice, or does even a Land Wight, which feeds directly off humans, have a benign purpose?

The stuff with the hot tub and the couples swapping was really boring and the illegal immigrants plot lightly passed over (I thought the latter could have been mined for a lot more subtextual horror and social commentary). I felt as though all the intrigue and romantic angst existed mostly to hide the really low budget. Okay, so, they couldn’t do tons of CGI with the vines, but the kill scenes were still pretty uninspired. At least give us some good chunky bits when they cleaned out the sewer. Meh.

Inga Cadranel as Saskia is sassy and lots of fun. Saskia clearly has history of the unpleasant variety with Dyson and a huge grudge against him. From the way he and Bo were kissy-facing around this episode, even with his insisting to Trick that he was going to “tell Bo everything”, I was kind of cheering Saskia on. Mean, I know, but Dyson has some big old moral comeuppance heading his way. I’m getting tired of every female character not named “Bo” or “Kenzi” being treated like a treacherous mean girl by the writers for either doing exactly the same number (or even fewer) of underhanded things as the equally dodgy “good” male characters. That doesn’t work for me in a show with two female leads, that is supposed to be celebrating female power. You don’t have to take it the opposite extreme that a show like Charmed did, where the men were either dead, evil or neutered, but come on.

I get that Dyson is jealous because that’s his wolfy nature and okay, I guess they had to have that “talk” about fidelity and their relationship, but I didn’t really care about it. Partly, it was because Dyson was talking about honesty and loyalty, while still lying to Bo. Sure, he kept meaning to tell her the “truth”, whatever that was, but something always conveniently seemed to get in the way. Yet, getting naked and fooling around, while talking about wanting Bo to go against her own nature and be monogamous (and being judgemental about her “species”), was perfectly A-Okay. Guess I’m still Team Lauren, if only almost by default.

Next Week: Bloodlines (season finale): When Bo finds out the truth about her connection to Saskia, her anger causes her to turn away from her friends, one by one.

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