Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Dangerously sexy.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 12, 2012

They say that sex sells, but as we learned in Lost Girl: Season 1, it can also kill. Lost Girl is yet another in what has turned out to be a burgeoning subgenre of series television that traffics in the hoary world of fairy tale and folklore, telling the story of the race of creatures known as the Fae (an obvious play on the alternate spelling faerie). The heroine of Lost Girl is a Fae named Bo (Anna Silk, looking very elfin in the role). The first season detailed Bo’s adventures not only in figuring out that she was a Fae (a succubus to be exact, and more about that a bit later in this review), but also her attempts to navigate a long running internecine conflict between two “camps” of Fae, the Light and the Dark. Bo had been raised by humans and had never known about her true background, having only been aware that she had the rather odd and intertwined “talents” of being sexually irresistible when she put her mind to it, and could literally suck the life out of any partner with whom she engaged in amorous activity. Bo saved a young human girl named Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) by utilizing these very skills on a man making an unwanted pass at the human lass, and the two women then forged an interspecies friendship that saw them setting up a detective agency of sorts. In the meantime, Bo’s activities caught the attention of several other Fae, all of whom had been quietly coexisting in the human world, attempting not to attract too much attention. Chief among these were Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried), a wolfman who works as a police detective, and Trick (Rick Howland), a little person who owns the chief Fae watering hole in the city and who is a kind of keeper of Fae lore. There’s also a human scientist named Lauren (Zoie Palmer) who is investigating the genetic roots of the Fae and who has an immediate attraction to Bo. The first season developed the rather arcane back story of both Bo and the Fae while pursuing a kind of “who am I?” arc for Bo that culminated in a showdown with Bo’s long lost (and pretty nefarious) Fae mother in the series’ climactic finale.

The second season picks right up with several dangling plot points, chief of which is the relationship between Dyson and Bo. This very aspect points out both the pluses and minuses of Lost Girl, a series that is often quite winning and wise in its use of ancient lore, but which just as often shoots itself in its fairy foot with predictable storytelling and sometimes hackneyed writing. Without revealing too many little twists that crop up with appealing frequency in the series, Dyson made a deal at the end of season one to keep Bo from getting decimated by her supposedly much more powerful mother, but that deal was a Faustian bargain of sorts that resulted in a sort of magical spell being placed on him that kept him from feeling anything romantic toward his once very hot and heavy flame. But who are the writers kidding here? Is there any question that Bo and Dyson are going to hop back in the sack at some point, and that Bo will find some fantastic way (even if it’s only wearing extremely low cut blouses) to re-attract her boyfriend? It’s in these needless little bits of melodrama that Lost Girl tends to stall its own momentum, rather than just letting the main supernatural arcs fill the storylines.

There’s an at times overly convoluted use of terms within Lost Girl that actually becomes kind of funny after a while. Any given line of dialogue can include all sorts of references to various types of ghouls and goblins or even concepts culled from the darkest recesses of the subconscious. But this is also a way in which Lost Girl really does its homework and provides some fascinating new takes on ancient yarns. The first episode, while teetering awfully close to X Files territory, dances with some pagan ideas that are somewhat reminiscent of the old Thomas Tryon novel Harvest Home, in terms of a people “married” to its land. It never really develops the idea as well as might be wished, and we do get very brief sequences filled to bursting with all sorts of “technical” verbiage that is a bit confusing to follow, but it’s a great example of how this show’s writers at least try to incorporate actual long existing lore into the framework of the series.

The "X Files meets Grimm meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets any number of other folklore cum supernatural series that have populated the airwaves over the past several years" connection proves to be a consistent nature of Lost Girl as it moves forward in this much longer second season. That in turns means that the series once again tends to get stuck in the rut of the “freak of the week” scenario (something I’ve lamented about concerning the somewhat similar Haven, another series featuring a lead heroine who doesn’t know quite who she is or where she came from). What keeps Lost Girl’s fairy head above the water is its often racy sensibility (there’s a none too subtle lesbian subplot involving Bo and Lauren, just one example) and frequently very funny whipsaw smart banter, often between Bo and Kenzi.

There are a couple of intertwined and compelling arcs in this season that also help to relieve the occasional predictability. Bo starts having visions (for want of a better word) of a scary little girl who looks suspiciously like one of the twins in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining , who warns Bo that she’s about to become prey for some kind of evil entity. About two thirds of the way through this season an evil group called The Garuda (a term copped from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, another sign of this series’ ecumenical approach) starts wreaking havoc, including ironically misleading Trick (for a while, anyway) about his long ago decision to mitigate the war between Dark Fae and Light Fae. In fact the “relationship” between The Garuda and Trick provides one of the key elements to this season’s finale, which once again sees all sorts of tumult and turmoil (as well as some evident deaths, but we know how those things tend to be resolved in subsequent seasons) unfolding. Predictable? Yes. Entertaining? Usually.

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lost Girl's second season continues the generally excellent looking AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 (courtesy —rather strangely—of FUNimation Entertainment, a label more typically associated with anime titles). Digitally shot in Canada, the series offers some nice color (occasionally graded to look somewhat spooky) with good saturation. This second season evidently had a somewhat higher budget, as some of the CGI on display here is a tick or two better quality than the sometimes iffy SFX on display in the first season. The series still tends to be too "smooth" looking (a typical byproduct of HD video) for such a supposedly dark milieu, but that may not bother some who have become accustomed to this somewhat textureless look. Fine detail is quite good, and is even more prevalent due to the series' tendency to frame many shots either in close-ups or midrange shots featuring only a couple of actors at a time.

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lost Girl features a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 that really springs to life in the FX sequences which are more often than not accompanied by some very well done sound effects. But even in relatively quieter, dialogue driven moments, such as many sequences in Trick's bar, there's a nice feeling of spaciousness with good use of ambient environmental sounds which helps to increase immersion, albeit somewhat subtly at times. Fidelity is excellent, with dialogue always cleanly and clearly presented, and the overall mix is very well prioritized. Dynamic range is variable, but virtually every episode has at least one moment of bombastic activity that helps to enliven the proceedings.

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Lost Girl features several mini-featurettes, including:

  Making an Episode (1080i; 6:38)

  
  

  Stunts (1080i; 4:38)

  
  

  Set Design (1080i; 5:10)

  
  

  Wardrobe (1080i; 5:46)

  
  

  Hair/Make-up (1080i; 6:21)

  
  

  Props (1080i; 5:21)



• Anna Silk Interview (HD; 2:31)


• Rick Howland Interview (HD; 6:59)


• Zoie Palmer Interview (HD; 7:24)


• Blooper Reel (HD; 7:29)

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As a voracious reader of everything from Thomas Bulfinch to James George Frazer to Joseph Campbell (not to mention a smattering of Carl Jung), I've personally found that there's a lot about Lost Girl that really appeals to me. This show goes the extra mile in terms of trying to incorporate all sorts of world mythologies and various folklore, often to quite striking effect. But it must also be admitted that the series tends to travel oft-walked roads, especially with regard to some of the interrelationships on display throughout this longish second season. This is a pretty sexually charged series, and is more profane than some prudish American audiences may cotton to, but it's often very funny in its own snarky way, and Silk is an extremely appealing actress who manages to make Bo both tough as nails and surprisingly vulnerable emotionally. The show continues to look and sound great, and this second season comes Recommended.