Review – Lost Girl

Lost Girl – SyFy – 10:00/9:00pm Monday – USA

Bad shows are a dime a dozen but spectacularly stupid shows only come around a couple of times a year. Lost Girl, a Canadian series that debuted on the SyFy channel last week, is so amazingly stupid that it’s hard to know where to even begin. Lost Girl stars Anna Silk as Bo, a woman with a mysterious ability that allows her to drain people of their life through the power of kissing. We first see Bo in action when she kills a date rapist by making out with him in an elevator, so she can save a mouthy pick-pocket named Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) who soon becomes Bo’s sidekick through the power of never-shutting-up about wanting to be her sidekick.

Fifteen minutes into the pilot it seemed as though we were being set up for a sort of modern day Xena where a woman with super-powers and her short, smart-ass sidekick go around town kicking ass and making quips. That is until a pair of detectives, Dyson, a white guy who looks like Chris Martin and Hale, a black guy who wears a funny hat, tracked down Bo and kidnapped her by using Hale’s magical whistling ability which can disable anybody he whistles at. Dyson and Hale then take Bo to meet some elders, who inform her that she’s Fae, and they’re all Fae, and Fae has two sides – the light side and the dark side, and Bo has to pick which side she wants to be a part of. In short, Lost Girl gets really stupid really quickly.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with weird logic defying mythologies and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea that living in the human world are a more advanced species known as Fae. What’s wrong with Lost Girl is that this information is presented in the dumbest fashion possible. We meet a woman with strange powers and her sidekick, then she’s thrown into a room and has exposition dumped all over her. We find out she’s a succubus and that all members of the Fae are different species and come from different clans and we’re given so much useless, dopey information about this world that each additional piece just seems stupider than the last. As a member of the Fae Bo must fight some Under-Fae in order to survive some test and then she has to decide whether she joins the Light-Fae or the Dark-Fae but instead after her human sidekick Kenzi saves her at the last minute, Bo chooses no Fae, she chooses to go it alone.

Hearing the word ‘Fae’ thrown about in incredibly serious tones by a collection of actors who leave no piece of scenery un-chewed is pretty amusing-in-the-wrong-way. However, when Lost Girl actually tries to be funny it falls flat on its face. Every second line uttered in this show is a quip of some description. Most of the dud lines are given to Kenzi because she’s the mouthy sidekick and is forced to say things like “you can control people by touch and not in a creepy handjob way” as if saying something like that even makes sense. When Kenzi first sees Bo use her powers she records it on her phone and says “this is so gonna go viral” because kids these days and their YouTubes, am I right?

Once Bo is tied up and forced to choose sides she goes into quip-overdrive where she suddenly becomes incapable of replying to a question without making a quip about. While the supposed-to-be funny dialogue isn’t funny, all of the supposed-to-be serious dialogue is funny. When Dyson takes Bo from the doctor he says “they’re going to give her the test” to which the doctor replies with a straight face “without training? That’s madness!” Lost Girl is a dumb show with a dumb premise and dragged down by even dumber writing. It is overwritten, badly acted, poorly shot, garbage. This same material in smarter hands could produce a fun, if still silly, sci-fi series but what we get instead is one of the dopiest new shows of the season.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly