WINTER TV EXTRAVAGANZA

LOST GIRL

** (out of ****)

In this winter TV season of attempted less discontent, I’m trying to take a different, more understanding look at the pilots I watch. With this in mind, I’m also trying to take a more understanding look of TV sci-fi. Science fiction automatically means you’re going to have to shell out some cash to create things that are not of this world, and TV just doesn’t have the time and the money that movies do. The make-up is going to look a little less fresh, the CG is going to look a little less real. This means that I’m not going to hate your show for having cheesy effects, but it also means I will not be tuning in for them either. So, Lost Girl, what else you got?

Bo is a young woman who has to move from town to town because she has the soul-eating needs of a succubus, do to the fact that she’s a succubus. In one town, for whatever reason, she feeds on a dude and leaves him in an elevator, alerting the police. More unfortunately, other human-looking monster men work for the police department, and now know there’s one of them on the loose. She kills the man in the elevator not just to feed but also to save the girl this man was about to rape. Now we know she’s not a bad succubus, but instead a misunderstood hero succubus. The other monstermen don’t care, and explain to her that whether she likes it or not, she has to choose a side in the great monsterman civil war that has been going on for centuries.

That’s a lot of plot to get out in one episode, and Lost Girl does a halfway decent job of it, if not having one or seven too many extra information dumps. And the effects aren’t that bad. What doesn’t work here are all the things that I have a sinking suspicion the producers didn’t really care about in the first place: dialogue and performance. No one in this cast is capable of anything more than hissing like a pissed off cat, which is a problem not just with trying to smooth out an information dump, but also with the script trying so hard to have quick, witty banter. Every smartass quip and Sorkin-like conversation falls so flat you wish everyone would just shut the fuck up and get back to the cheesy graphics. The most serious offender here is the leader of the “Dark Team” of monstermen, a villain so heinously hack and cheeseball you’d think you were watching Are You There, Chelsea?
-Ryan Haley