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.

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!

LG: Lucky Fae - Jan 4

And so, yet another episode of LG happened, and as far as LG episodes went, this one was rather... confusing.

There were several plotlines all going at the same time. 1) Bo is trying to save her friend Cassie, who’s an oracle; 2) Tamsin and Lauren have brought Bo a birthday present – a stuffed cat, which gives Bo good luck, but also transforms her into a cat, and curses Lauren with bad luck; 3) Mark – Dyson’s son – begins to work at Trick’s, but has fallen with a bad crowd, which includes Vex; and 4), the man behind Cassie’s kidnapping (as well as the theft of Trick’s big book of Fae names) is another agent of Bo’s father Hades and mayhap her own brother.

Sounds confusing? Perhaps, but Bo and the crew were able to resolve all of the above about two thirds into the episode, leaving Bo and Tamsin at the end doing nothing, other than reminiscing about how to deal with Hades (Bo’s father, and Tamsin’s ex-employer), but that is because there wasn’t a lot going on. Sure, there was plenty of secondary action, but otherwise, it was more of a running in circles, metaphorically speaking, plenty of visual gags, (Bo was sprouting a cat tail at one moment of the episode, for example) and so on, but nothing specific or concrete. “Lucky Fae” acted more like a filter or a pressure relief episode than anything else; other than the brief Valkubus bit at the end, there was no character development per se.

Then again, there is Dyson Jr. or Mark. With Kenzi gone, the LG crew and cast must have really felt a need for a young adult character, and Mark is it. So far, Mark is shown to be a wastrel and womanizer, but what is more important, his plotline feels tacked on; Mark himself feels tacked onto the rest of the show. Sure, Trick’s big book got stolen on his watch, and the thief (who is female, OT) is flirting with Mark and is trying to bring him to the dark side of the force, but beyond that, Mark’s superfluous; Vex could’ve done the same thing (and he’s been employed by Trick in the previous ep too, so to speak).

Vex, incidentally, just might be evil still – never fully reconciled with his brief flirt with goodness back in the previous season, his motives for coming back to Toronto are still unknown, and his relationship with Dyson is still rocky, to say the least. He is also appearing to be avoiding Bo...or maybe that is just the LG scripts going wonky. 

And speaking of tacked on, that goes for the entire oracle plot line of this episode. Initially, Cassie and her family appeared in S1, where she and her brother were played by entirely different actors. They appeared in just one or two episodes, when Bo was searching more actively for her mother (Aoife; so far a no-show in this season), and that was it. To have those characters reappear and have the regulars act as if Cassie at least was an old friend – or at least an old acquaintance – of theirs was just cringe-worthy at best and WTF at worst. 

So: Bo had a birthday party, a rescue of Cassie and other two oracles, and Tamsin (in that order); Tamsin showed-off her cop skills slightly, and bonded with Bo; Trick gave Bo a gift – a petrified finger; Mark got laid and had another confrontation with Dyson; and Vex just smirked at the sidelines. This episode was sort of fun, but not really good plot-wise.

LG: Hel part 2 - Dec 14

And so, last night gave us the second part of the season starter episode, and it was not what most of us expected. More precisely, there was little violence, no fighting as it was, for example, the Hel part 1 – or is it Hades?.. Instead, we get Bo running around in a dilapidated run-down building of an underworld (or is it the otherworld?) while her friends work out how to get her out – a typical Team Bo event, in short – if you disregard the lack of violence. 

On the other hand...let us start with the elephant in the room – the underworld. In the first part, LG showed that in place of Heaven it had Valhalla, and now, in place of Hell, or even Hel, it got Hades, the Greek underworld. Sigh. The Greek version is the easiest way out, especially after Rick Riordan had finally completed his series about PJ and friends vs. Gaea. If they didn’t want to do a Norse Hel, for example, they could’ve used a Sumerian one, or a Japanese one, etc – but instead they went for the Greek. It’s the easy way out, period.

The depiction of Hades (yes, it is the name of both the god and the kingdom – one of the three Greek kingdoms – of the dead) is very unusual, though: it is the abandoned, broken-down version of ‘hotel Valhalla’. In this version, though, there are no customers, for Hades the god is losing his powers, and dwells in a third domain, which is featureless in its’ darkness, save for one giant mystical candle, which Bo steals for reasons given to her by Persephone, (who is more of a sister role here to Bo, rather than a stepmother, even though she's Hades' bride, as it is in the Greek myths), after the obligatory sex scene, of course, ‘cause this is Bo.

That brings us to Lauren – apparently, in LG, the world of the living and the world of the dead (or at least Hades’ old haunt) are connected, and certain messages and sensations can come across the border, so to speak. Or maybe it was because Dyson distracted Tamsin’s sister Valkyrie Stacy, and the doorway between the world of the living and Valhalla didn’t close, until Bo was able to escape. Persephone got eaten, though…

Getting back to Lauren…she was little more than comic relief in this episode alongside Kenzi, as was Kenzi herself. In fact, Kenzi and her role were something of a weak link in this episode, as after getting rescued from her coffin, Kenzi (with Lauren’s help) messed around with an Ouija board, and trapped some sort of a spirit – perhaps the same puca that harassed Bo while the latter hanged around Persephone – and then shot it at the end of the episode, saving Bo, before leaving the show for good. (Well, her actress did, that is.)

Lastly, that scene, when Kenzi came to Bo’s rescue felt tacked-on, giving Kenzi at least one more heroic thing to do before going to Spain and away from Toronto, Canada. Firstly, for Kenzi to leave ‘her Bo-Bo’ behind is definitely OOC. And in-between lies the fact that Kenzi’s character in this episode was underplayed and little used – perhaps the actress just wanted to leave the show for good, but was forced to say for the season’s starter, who knows?

With Kenzi hanging in the background, the same can be said for Lauren (who in this episode was little more than Kenzi’s sidekick), and Trick, (who had to run his bar, probably), leaving just Tamsin and Dyson to deal with Valhalla and Stacy. 

Stacy, as it was said before, is Tamsin’s sister Valkyrie, and for the record let it be noted that LG did a very masterful job with the Valkyries’ make-up during Tamsin and Stacy’s final confrontation in this episode. As far as Valkyries go, Stacy is competent and not as blonde as she looks, but she tends to be obnoxious… that is probably her fatal flaw, so to speak. Either way, without others to back her up, Stacy tends to lose to Tamsin, it seems, which is good. And who knows, maybe she’ll even stick around, as a special guest star or a regular of the cast.

Finally, Dyson. He kept the gates of Valhalla from closing long enough for Bo to escape. That’s what he did in a nutshell. He also tried to send Stacy after Vex (who left for England, or thereabouts, at the end of S4), but failed to trick her – Stacy isn’t as clever as Lauren, but she isn’t too dumb either…

So: Bo is back, Kenzi has left for good, the LG canon is going to undergo some final and drastic changes, and Bo also got her mystical candle and lit it, which forged some sort of a mystic bond with a mystery character (the actress’ Amanda Walsh, BTW), who also has a similar candle. Who knows what’ll happen next?!

LG: Hel part 1 - Dec 7

And so, the 5^th – and final – season of LG has begun vigorously! This season begins where S4 has ended, with Hale and Kenzi dead and Bo doing what she can to fix this state of affairs. In this particular case, it is on with a pair of magical slippers and off to the Valhalla, the current version of the LG-verse afterlife. 

Now, let us be frank. Valhalla, just like the Valkyries, is Norse, whereas the first seasons had a more Celtic bend to their mythos, but just like the departed Una Mens, the last seasons of LG have a different take on things than the first; something, apparently, has changed (or someone has changed, gotten replaced, quit, etc) on LG behind the scenes, and so LG has changed itself.

One may argue that this statement is unimportant, for LG take on Valhalla is ambiguous at least: from the inside it is a swanky hotel (more US than Canadian in style); from the outside – it is a snowbound wasteland with a statue of (apparently) Odin standing tall. (Or maybe it is Thor – who knows?)

Fair enough, but the choice of the afterlife for LG is still interesting: unlike Heaven, Valhalla was more materialistic and real, just like the Norse, who had invented (or imagined) it, less with the matters of the spirit than with the matters of heart and body – LG appears to be following this sort of reasoning too: when Bo meets Kenzi, the latter is enjoying luxuries such as food and clothing; but food and clothing alone do not make a person (well, not every person) happy, and that’s why Kenzi wants to get out. 

...And, because Bo is a selfless succubus of a character, she wants Kenzi to stay in hotel Valhalla instead, marry Hale, and finally have some happiness in her life. Well, her afterlife, if you want to be technical. Sadly, Bo’s father has other plans, and apparently he has shanghaied Hale from their wedding, and Bo has to confront him (her father) and possibly rescue Hale.

Among other characters whom we have met already in this season are other Valkyries (with whom Tamsin does not get along, apparently), and their mistress (and the Lady of Valhalla, perhaps), Freya or Freyja. The latter (alongside a reference to Bifrost, a bridge/highway/elevator between all of the realms) is another nod to the Norse myths, and again, it is a true one. The Norse did consider Freya to be something of a queen/mistress of the Valkyries, the only goddess, who could stand up to Odin, besides his wife Frigg (but there is confusion between the two goddesses, and one of Freya’s husbands was named Od/Odd/Odr, so let’s just assume that Freya and Frigg may be one goddess with two names). So far, Odin himself is absent, so naturally that Freya is the one in charge – of Tamsin’s fellow Valkyries (like Stacy) and of Valhalla itself.

This brings us to Tamsin, who really does not like Valhalla – apparently, as she tells Bo, whenever she is home, she does something to it. So far, however, it appears to be the other way around: Tamsin briefly went crazy (in a homage to Stanley Kubrick), and Bo had to smack her out of it. So far it is Valhalla one, Tamsin zero.

Or maybe it is more than one for Valhalla. At the end of this episode, as Kenzi wakes up in her coffin (a la the bride in “Kill Bill 2”) and Bo is riding the elevator to Hel (one ‘l’ in the Norse version, not two, as the episode’s title might indicate), more of the hotel Valhalla’s staff are holding Tamsin, while Stacy gloats – but perhaps Dyson and Lauren can rescue her.

Dyson and Lauren, now, they have been mostly background characters in this ep; Dyson hanging around with Trick (who had been left to man the rear guard at the end of this episode); Lauren – at her own personal clinic, which deals with Fae as well, since there’s at least one fire-breathing patient in it.

Of course, the question as to how Lauren got this sort of clinic after she had turned Evony human back in S4 is a plot hole, just one of the latest plot holes that had haunted since S1 at least. The plotline shuffling since S4 had not helped matters either – but otherwise, in Lauren’s case, the episode has held-up.

The only other weak point of the episode was the hotel Valhalla’s crowd – it came and went without any sense or planning. Sometimes it was there, other times it was not, and it did not make sense, not even in the LG version of Valhalla. But the episode still worked, it was a good one, and it promises a lot of excitement to come before the show finishes!