Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Lost Girl: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie Review

Still lost after all these years.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 25, 2014

Lost Girl lives up to its name in more than one way as its fourth season gets underway. As this increasingly tiresome series’ fourth season stumbles out of the gate, the last refuge of a lazy writer—a missing hero and/or heroine —is front and center. This may strike some long time viewers as odd, given the cliffhanger involving Dyson (Kris Holden- Ried) at the end of the series’ third season, but those selfsame viewers will probably already know cliffhangers in this show are neither quite as cliff bound nor as hung (so to speak) as they first appear, and instead of Dyson’s predicament, this year starts off with Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) on the hunt for a Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired chest containing—well, something. Therefore, when Dyson himself shows up a moment later looking none the worse for wear after what looked like a pretty calamitous accident, it's hardly surprising when that accident is shunted to the side, the typical way this show tends to resolve supposedly life altering incidents that regularly crop up at commercial breaks, episode closings, and season finales. But even this isn’t the supposed real focus as Lost Girl continues exploring a by now almost ludicrously overcrowded and dense mythology, for it soon becomes obvious that not only is main character Bo (Anna Silk) gone, she’s forgotten. There is absolutely no trace of Bo ever having lived, and there are all sorts of new relationships and character interactions as a result. The first scene with Kenzi also highlights another gambit the writers of Lost Girl have come to rely on to the point of annoyance—having solo (Ksenia or otherwise) performers narrating their own actions on screen as the scene unfolds. In this particular instance, Kenzi lets us in on the somewhat less than profound musings of her mind and her current predicament, and it’s a way too obvious way to communicate salient information to the audience. To be clear, this is not voiceover—this is an actor talking to him or herself on screen as he or she performs various actions. This is also no mere fluke, however, for repeatedly various characters will “talk to themselves” on screen so as to bring the viewer up to speed. Even Bo (once she’s found, or at least been revealed to the audience) engages in this habit, offering up fairly useless commentary about the location where she comes to at the close of the first episode.

Bo’s mysterious disappearance takes up the first few episodes of the fourth season, but again in typical fashion there’s no real suspense, especially once it’s revealed that Bo is more or less okay, albeit transported off into some netherworld where she awakens without any memories herself in a scene that may bring the opening moments of the old film noir Sleep, My Love to mind. But that’s de rigeur for a show which repeatedly puts characters in harm’s way only to extract them within an episode or two, often with little to no immediate explanation. It isn’t much of a spoiler to state that things return more or less to normal (or at least as normal as they ever are on Lost Girl) within a handful or so of episodes, something this series has done in previous seasons with other supposedly epochal events that provided ostensible cliffhangers.

The “bizarro universe” opener for Lost Girl at least provides a bit of fun as longtime fans get to see slightly different iterations of some of the main characters, but the main flaw with this amnesiac conceit is that part of what has provided this series its overarching interest is Bo’s attempts to find (and forge) her own identity. The writers try to work the whole idea into a frankly silly larger philosophical approach that has two supporting characters waxing nostalgic about how great it would be if they could simply forget all the stupid things they’ve done in their lives. But this opening arc, as well as much of the rest of Lost Girl’s fourth season, increasingly smacks of desperation, with more and more arcane verbosity spilling from the likes of Trick (Rick Howland) as he gives little one or two line summations of the baroque mythology underpinning the series.

There are a number of other curious missed opportunities in this season of Lost Girl, including a too quick transformation for one character, a too long second disappearance for Bo’s lesbian love interest Lauren (Zoie Palmer), and an admittedly unexpected development with one major character which I frankly suspect will be resolved in about as facile a way as this show has ever done with previous life and death issues. There’s perhaps an added weight on many of these shows that rely so heavily on folklore and legend, for the backstories are often so incredibly complex that more traditional plot machinations such as Lost Girl repeatedly offers this season seem all the more ridiculous in this context. Over and over this show has taken its viewers on journeys that look to be disastrous but which in reality end up being no big deal. There is still some life in the show courtesy of a sometimes insouciant sense of humor and (for those who like this sort of thing) its reliance on steamy sex scenes (gay and straight), but it’s become increasingly obvious that hidden somewhere in the peaks and valleys of Lost Girl was a fae shark this show has jumped over.

For newcomers wanting to get up to speed on the show, our reviews of the previous seasons can be found here:

Lost Girl: Season 1 Blu-ray review

Lost Girl: Season 2 Blu-ray review

Lost Girl: Season 3 Blu-ray review

Lost Girl: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lost Girl is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Giant Ape Media (distributed by anime giant FUNimation Entertainment) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This fourth season falls very much in line with the series' previous years, with a nicely crisp and well detailed looking high definition presentation that makes the most of the sometimes spectacularly dressed sets and better than average if sometimes soft looking CGI elements. As with the third season, there's been quite a bit of fairly aggressive color grading at times here, to sometimes quite good effect. For example, the opening few episodes feature Bo on a mysterious train that is bathed in sepia and rose tones, giving a slightly spooky ambience to the proceedings. Contrast and black levels are both consistent and when the show indulges in close-ups, fine detail is excellent.

Lost Girl: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As with previous seasons, the fourth year of Lost Girl on Blu-ray has a serviceable and occasionally impressive Dolby TrueHD 5.1 track that really shows its mettle in the show's action and special effects laden elements. The sound design here often utilizes fun if hokey foley effects which accompany things like Kenzi erupting into "sparks" or Bo sucking the life force out of various characters, and those elements sound great here. Dialogue is cleanly presented, though tends to be unidirectional a lot of the time. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is quite wide in this series.

Lost Girl: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Cast Roundtable: Sneak Peek Behind the Scenes (1080p; 12:20) features the stars of the show (in various settings) discussing elements of the series.


• Lost Girl Inside Look at Season 4 (1080p; 35:01) is a good overview and also contains some fun candid footage from conventions.


• Lost Girl at San Diego Comic-Con (1080p; 25:36) features Ksenia Solo, Kris Holden-Ried, Zoie Palmer, Emily Andras and Jay Firestone.


• Lost Girl at New York Comic-Con (1080p; 26:25) features Rick Howland and Paul Amos.

Lost Girl: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans who have stuck with Lost Girl are probably willing to overlook what has become more and more tedious about this series, including things like putting characters into supposedly threatening situations only to almost immediately rescue them. There's one very important departure from this trope in this season, and how the show chooses to resolve it (if indeed they do) will probably finally prove if the writers have truly run out of ideas and are merely rehashing the same tired old folktales. For longtime aficionados, the technical merits of this latest season on Blu-ray continue to be strong.