LG: Clear eyes - Jan 11

The latest episode of LG is an interesting and strange bag of good and bad. Just as an earlier episode, “Big in Japan”, was based very much on Japanese symbols, metaphors, allegories, etc, so the “Clear Eyes...” is centered on football. 

One can ask straight from the start: why football? LG is a Canadian show, why not hockey? Possibly because Tamsin/Rachel Skarsten had to star as a jock in this ep, the cast and crew decided on football; maybe Skarsten is not that good on skates...or maybe they just wanted to dress her in a cheerleader’s uniform, something that is more connected to football, rather than hockey, even in Canada.

That aside, what else? The cast, as always, has delivered, even Mark’s actor: whatever one can say about the role, the actor is certainly doing his job well enough. The role, however, is rather redundant: Mark is mainly hanging around, doing filler staff, nothing important. Sure, he is flirting with Iris, who is the daughter/youngest member of team evil, but beyond that, one cannot help but feel that he is filling the hole left by Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) as does Tamsin (Rachel Skarsten). And frankly, while Mark is doing a rather uninspired job, Tamsin is not filling the gap either, though she (and Rachel) tries. 

But if Mark is just an unimportant placeholder (though probably, as his connection with Iris grows, so do their roles in the conflict/S5 of the series), Dyson is being something else.

For one thing, he is being (seemingly) purposefully obtuse. “Fae don’t sleep with humans”, he tells Mark. The Hell? Someone tell this to Bo, because she certainly is not averse to sleeping with Lauren (or another human). And the conflict at the end of S4, with the druid, had a lot of human/Fae interaction, including the druid himself, who was a Fae/human hybrid. Thus, either Dyson is still feeling sore about the good ship Doccubus (currently put into the backyard in favor of the ship Valkubus), or yet another sign of the changing world of LG in the background; the crew of LG aren’t stupid and are doing their best to downplay the changes as much as they can, but even so, these changes are very much in your face.

Then we have Dyson strike a relationship with a widow of one of the deceased... who have become resurrected as avatars or hosts of the Ancients. The deceased in question was known as ‘Heratio55’ in the previous episode, and since his ‘spouse’, Amanda Walsh’s character, can shoot lightning bolts and generated storms, this makes him Hera and her – Zeus.

Now, the problem with that idea is not the fact that their genders were reversed, in the Classical mythology the Greco-Roman gods got into stranger situations and metamorphoses than this one; the problem on one hand, is Iris – the goddess of rainbow, she wasn’t one of the 12 Olympians and certainly not the daughter of Hera or Zeus, unlike Heracles, better known as Hercules.

What Herc has to do with this? He had descendants, the Heraclides, who eventually initiated the process known as the Dorian invasion of the Achaean Greece on one hand, and one of them (there were several brothers at first) had a descendant – a quarterback at the school and the football team that were central to this episode.

And on the other hand, why did the evildoers arrive in Toronto? Being the apparent heirs or avatars to Greek gods gives them a bond with Hades, but the trick is that Hades was not an Olympian, he was a sibling or uncle to the big 12, but he never really came to Olympus himself, so this tie is weak.

Yet it is the only tie that we – the audience – currently have. So far the evildoers appear to be interested only in Bo (yes, the widow is interested in Dyson instead, but since this would make the evil trio a quartet, it isn’t very likely – so far S5 had a lot of ‘investment’ into the number 3, and switching the evil trio to a quartet would make it pointless or useless – so Bo and her father Hades are the reason why, the most likely guess.

Other than Dyson being a moron and a worthy father to Mark (not a compliment), we had Tamsin both as a cheerleader and a football player; Bo, who was zapped by lightning; Trick, who had flirted a bit with Amanda Walsh’s character (‘Zeusse’?); and Lauren, who is being the brain, just as Bo is being the heart, Tamsin the muscles and Dyson – the dick.  

Lauren’s role is actually worth mentioning because of her connection with the dark Fae back in the previous season. So far this has not been really mentioned at all; Evonee, after a single appearance, is back to being a no show, and though she put some sort of a bound monster into Lauren’s lab, Lauren doesn’t appear to be disturbed by this fact either; but then again, she’s Lauren, so she may be just cool like this.

Vex, however, has not appeared either in this episode, and he had been relatively active back in the previous two. It’s hard to decide whether he’s just lying low, or this is another one of LG’s problems – continuity; the cast of characters, the regular cast of characters, appears to be going through some sort of an alternating cycle, appearing together fully only rarely – like at the end of this episode, for example. Only Vex was not in it, so it does not count either. Oops.

In any case, both the good guys and the villains are hankering down for a fight; Mark and Iris might be caught in the middle, but only time will tell. Until later, people!