LG: Night - Jan 18

Last Sunday marked the airing of one of the worst LG episodes...ever.

The problem was not the actors, who performed as well as they always do. The problem was not the setting or the special effects (the episode took place during the night – it was aired during the day, and then – or during the filming – special effects were added to make it look like a night). The problem... the problem was the same duo that had plagued LG from the start – the problem with continuity and the cast rotation.

This particular episode, however, was something else. For a start, Evony’s pet monster had escaped – and it was another one of the ‘Ancients’: Eros. Eros was the Greek god of love, so why the LG scriptwriters gave its’ name to some sort of an invisible stalker type of creature is anyone’s guess. The most likable is that on top of continuity and cast problems, they decided to bastardize Greek mythology too.

Well, that was always a feature of LG – they took bits and pieces of real-life myths and tried to assimilate them. Sometimes it worked; sometimes – as in a recent LG episode centered on Japan and the Japanese culture – it does not. Lately, aside from Hades, they have been working with a genderbent pair of Zeus and Hera, oracles, Iris (the girl who has been flirting with Mark in the episodes past), and lately – the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The later is, basically, the Greek version of the great Deluge, with Deucalion being the Greek Noah (and a son of Prometheus). In this episode, Trick claims that Zeus used Iris, the rainbow god, to unleash the aforementioned deluge. 

Right. Iris was a goddess of the rainbow, just as Helios was the god of the sun, and Eos – of the dawn, so let us try to keep the genderbending at a minimum. Secondly, she helped to wipe out the human race with the flood, but it was mainly done by Poseidon’s will (the Greek god of the sea, if anyone has not read Percy Jackson novels lately). Trick’s LG version of the myth is just incomplete and incorrect, period.

But this vanishes before the problems of continuity and cast rotation. In particular, Iris, the LG character – not the original goddess – was depicted as something of a love interest for Mark Dyson’s son in the past. Now Iris is no longer in evidence, and Mark is being shaped-up to be as a romantic interest for Vex. Seriously?!

To be fair, the episode tries to give this twist some justification; in particular, it was not really Mark, who gave Vex a blowjob in this episode, it was the trio of oracles, who sought to uncover truth about Bo from the lips of those close to her. Fine, but in case of Vex they were nowhere near his lips, so perhaps they were just trying to derive some satisfaction from him instead? Either way, this still opens the question about Iris and Mark – perhaps in some future episode the two of them and Vex will form some sort of a threesome...or have a massive confrontation about it. Who knows – it will at least give Mark a role of some importance in the show, something that he had lacked before.

On the other hand, speaking of threesomes and confrontations, this was also a sad episode for team Valkubus: as a Valkyrie, Tamsin appears to be monogamous, as a succubus, Bo is an embodiment of lust. (No, really). Tamsin cannot understand that Bo has a lot of both living to live and of loving to give, and so they break up. Very sad, this is, yet “Night” was able to give this episode something of a disjointed feel; this confrontation should’ve occurred after Bo arrived at their place but before she met the oracles, who were disguised both as Dyson and Lauren (just not simultaneously). Instead, this happens after...everything, at the very end of the episode, making one wonder where Tamsin was all the time between her confrontation with Bo and her earlier discovery of Bo and Lauren doing the nasty. Seeking out Hades? Other Ancients? Or just doing nothing, for the continuity of LG sucks, as it was said earlier.

Take another good look at Vex. He came to Lauren’s clinic with Evony in order to recapture her monster and to recover her serum. And then, without any good reason he disappeared, only to reappear back at the Rahl in order to help Dyson scare away the oracles from Trick. Trick, for his part, also did this sort of strange disappearance... from the Rahl, in order to appear at Bo’s and rescue her from the oracles...also in time. Yes, the reason for Trick’s actions is understandable: he has to save Bo, for she is his granddaughter and the star of the show. The reason for Vex’s actions are less understandable: they’re the key reason behind the new and rising Vex/Mark ship...something that we could’ve lived without...but still. Yet the execution of these actions, their depiction in the show, to put it frankly – sucks. Vex went with Evony to the clinic, did nothing there, and then vanished from the clinic and appeared in the Rahl without any realistic or reasonable explanation. That is just wrong, and not the good kind of wrong, the sort that Bo has with Dyson and Lauren.

Dyson...he confronted the one that he thought was Zeus, but was actually Hera. He received a faceful of swarming flies or locusts for his trouble, but his new widow friend was able to fight off her fake husband by stabbing Hera with a convenient shard of glass. That what it takes, folks, to fight off Hera, the vengeful and powerful queen of the Greek gods – stabbing her (while she is disguised as a man) with an ordinary piece of glass. The ancient Greeks, who made their gods almost all-powerful and invincible, were absolutely wrong. Ouch.

Regardless of this, Dyson rescued his new fair maiden and took her to his place, where she went to sleep – conveniently, too, for then Dyson was visited by the oracles disguised as Bo and became otherwise occupied for a while. The same goes for Lauren, only she had been occupied by the real Bo, to Tamsin’s heartbreak...

(The Bo-Lauren-Evony confrontation and defeat of the invisible monster was one of the better parts of “Night”, BTW, but that is not saying much.)

So: Bo and Tamsin have broken up, Dyson appears to have acquired a new love interest, ditto for Vex, Evony appears to have played a rather important role in the episode, and Lauren had lost another lab assistant to a Fae. (Seriously, does she think that she is captain or Kirk or Picard and that her lab assistants come in an unending supply?) Either way, this was one of the worst ever executed episodes of LG.