"Lost Girl" musings ...

[fembuck]

So, I've been posting a lot on the Television Without Pity 'Lost Girl' board, because despite my complaints about how everyone on the show (save Lauren) is a douche, I actually really enjoy the show and have become a little obsessed with it.

Due to my recent posting bonanza on TWoP however, I've become frustrated with the people making the show because I realized how easy it would have been to fix the things that bug me about the show.  Namely:

1)  Bo being too light-hearted/happy-go-lucky a character considering her background.   Bo should be a broody mess. She should be more conflicted than she is. She should be tortured when she gets cases like the one in "The Mourning After" because she was Bertram for ten years (even if she wasn't proud of what she was doing the same way he did).  Her devil-may-care attitude to her history of murder is really jarring. 

In fact, after thinking about it (probably too much) I realized that Bo's fluffy personality really makes her seem like a sociopath (i.e.  she is self-serving, routinely disregards rules, social mores and laws, and is unmindful of putting herself or others at risk. She still lives on the fringes of society, without solid or consistent economic support, and she often spontaneously acts out in inappropriate ways without thinking through the consequences).

2)  The lack of attention paid to Bo training to learn how to control her hunger while feeding.  We should have really seen Bo trying to ween herself, seen scenes of Bo feeding off of Fae volunteers and having to literally be pulled away from them. We should have seen her struggling against the people holding her with those succubus blue eyes, going mad with the need to keep feeding in order to show us how strong the desire to keep feeding is. Then over the course of multiple episodes we should have seen her start to gain a bit of control, then some more, and some more, until finally she was able to stop feeding herself.

This at least would have shown that it was something she needed to be trained to learn, and was something she couldn't have taught herself over the years. As things played out on the show, it seemed like all she needed was a cheerleader to tell her, "I believe in you, Bo!" in order to get her shit together.

These (especially the first one) are two really big problems.  But what really galls me the most is that they are two big problems that would have been ridiculously easily to fix when the show was retooled.

Problem 1 and 2 could have been solved by having the following happen:
*Note:  My screen name at TWoP is TheExaultedOne, so I'm not stealing ideas I'm just re-posting them*

If they wanted to make Bo this happy-go-lucky woman child with the social skills of an obnoxious teenager they should have, you know, not made Bo a serial murderer.  They could have just had Bo be able to control her abilities from the beginning (I mean it's not like they invested much time in her learning to control her power anyway. They'd have lost like 3 min. of footage, total).  They could have just had Bo's succubus appetite alienate her from people (i.e. she kept sleeping with her friends boyfriends/girlfriends, nearly got a teacher/professor/social worker or something fired because she touched them and all of a sudden they were all over her, etc.)

That way she would have still been on the outskirts of society, moving around on her own to avoid the heartache of losing the people she cared about, AND it would have allowed for her to be the laid-back, happy-go-lucky character that we see on screen because with Kenzi, Dyson and Lauren she's found people who know what she is and don't judge her/hate her for it.

Honestly, Bo being able to control her powers from the beginning wouldn't even have affected Bo/Lauren that much, because in "Vexed" Bo seemed to want to take it slow in order to be romantic (since she certainly gave into Lauren quickly enough after Lauren was all like, "I trust you okay, just do me"). They could have delayed Bo/Lauren hooking up for 8 episode by having Bo want to try her hand at really wooing someone, and by having Lauren hold back because she was afraid of what the Ash's reaction would be (and the angst of "Vexed" could still have happened exactly as it did, allowing the cheapo producers to still insert the demo pilot as an actual episode)

In fact, from a Bo/Lauren stand-point, not only would this have made the storyline more romantic, it also would have foreshadowed the "Lauren is owned by the Ash" reveal, and Bo's sudden epic!love-turned-epic!butthurt in "Vexed" would have made sense because we'd have seen her investing her heart into Lauren all along (while she had been investing her body in Dyson).


Bo being a douche (really, Bo.  You're going to refer to the Ash as Lauren's "boss".  Really?), Dyson often being a douche, Bo being dumb, and Dyson and Bo's relationship being all over the place (often within the same episode) would still be problems.  But the show would be a lot more coherent and enjoyable if they'd just retooled Bo's background.

Comments

[orange-creative.livejournal.com]

Her devil-may-care attitude to her history of murder is really jarring.

This! Involuntarily murdering people for ten years does not a happy person make, especially if they really wished they weren't murdering people.

In the end, while there are so many good concepts and ideas floating around the show, it's poor, sloppy execution.

[cyandragonfly.livejournal.com]

Bo's fluffy personality really makes her seem like a sociopath.

I'm not sure how this escaped my attention because you are deadly right about this.

Problem 1 and 2 could have been solved by having the following happen:

Now I feel like there needs to be a rewrite Bo's history, as you said. Or, a rehash of all the previous episodes because they way you described her tying to ween herself off sounded like a much more appropriate way to treat her character.

[trickstertroll.livejournal.com]

Happy-go-lucky Bo is probably the more forgivable oversight to me. While her conflict could definitely be better portrayed with very little effort, I've sort of made a nice cover story for the disparity in my head. Some people simply deal with that sort of trauma by pretending it doesn't exist. It's almost like you have to look at it one way with Vexed as part of the continuity and another way without it.

In Vexed, you obviously saw a lot more of the darkness that one would assume would be there after years of incidental murder. If you take that into account, I guess my assumption is that it's always there but she simply chooses to push it down as much as possible. And I think maybe she is supposed to be a little sociopathic. She's had to learn to ignore her conscience and learning that she can live without killing is forcing her to re-evaluate the sense of morality she had established for herself. She's sort of being set free and if she spent too much time dwelling on the fact that she didn't have to be killing people that whole time she would probably be crushed by the guilt. So she's focusing on the positive. That's a whole lot of rationalization on my part, but it helps.

The second issue, though - her control - that really bothers me. The opening sequence (..love..death sentence... blah blah...) seems a little over dramatic considering six episodes in she was able to feed without killing without any real background on how she got to that point. Really, the two problems could have been solved with the same very brief scenes. Struggling with controlling her powers would make an excellent parallel to struggling with her own killer past.

The whole issue of Bo herself seems incredibly glossed over in the re-tooled episodes we've seen. We don't see her relationships' consistent development, we don't see her gaining control over her powers, and we don't see her dealing with her past. I feel like making some awful pun regarding the show title and the character development, but... yeah, it's pretty awful. I wish everything could just kind of start over again with a focus on Bo instead of the meandering, freak-of-the-week episodes, but instead I'm just hoping that maybe there will be a more plot-centric drive to the second season. It wouldn't even really be that hard to go back and do a little light dusting over the first season in the second to make things seem a bit more coherent.

Speaking of coherent, sorry if that was incredibly long and convoluted. Hopefully you got an idea of what I was getting at.

[spanishtvjunkie.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna spout an unpopular viewpoint here. I see Lost Girl in a more tongue-in-cheek-leaning-towards-camp murder mystery genre. We're talking succubi and light and dark fea here. Foot soup. Really great zingers and one-liners. There is a serious tone to the drama sometimes and I don't make light of Bo's life or history I don't see the show taking itself too seriously. Perhaps that is because they need to have a sense of humor and see how the audience would be reacting to such a different type of show. Seriously this show. It's so weird sometimes it's awesome! I don't know what it going on with this show, I don't know what is going to happen with this show but I know that I like this show. I'm curious every week to see what other strange stuff they come up with to dazzle and stupify me! I would love for Bo and Lauren to have a somewhat normal relationship but there really is not much that's normal about this show!
Not gonna be popular after this post, I know.

[rtms.livejournal.com]

I really hope that in the second season Bo is made to face her past and her killings in some way. That some character or characters track her down and really go after her for killing say a family member etc and demand justice, either by themselves or through the law. It would be a great way to see her past and make her and everyone else around her confront what she was doing all those years.

[kennedyismyhero.livejournal.com]

This. This! I now swear by your fic and your perfectly reasonable nitpicks for this ridiculous show. My only hope is that now that they've been picked up for S2, they'll get their shit together in the writing department, at least more than the clusterfuck sans continuity it has been this season.

[dantzig75.livejournal.com]

Since I have miserably failed to defend my own thoughts on Bo in TWOP, I won't even try this again here. I agree that a lot could be made on many subjets to increase the quality of this show. Bo's character is boring as hell, the Fae-of-the-week case is useless and poorly written, the narrative lacks rythm, why is every other character more interesting than Bo (why is every other actor more talented than Silk), give Kenzi and Dyson something to do, WE WANT LAUREN BACK AS A REGULAR, and so on...Maybe they should get rid of Bo (I'm kidding... almost). I'm kinda cynical because I honestly don't think the writers will change anything. And because I'm a poor starved dyke, I'll keep on watching ;)

[ded-n-berried.livejournal.com]

Regarding Bo's self-described ten year killing spree, I, for one, would have happily written it off if she'd had a conversation with someone explaining that after the accidental death of her first boyfriend, she fed exclusively on scumbags like the GHB barfly who nearly raped Kenzi in the pilot ep. They wrecked that possibility when she spoke of habitually waking up next to "dead lovers," like she kept taking people to bed and rolling the dice with their lives. This bespeaks an ugly lack of compassion and is nigh impossible to fanwank away. Bad writers. Bad!

At its best, this show still evokes good sci-fi/comedy vibes for me, like BtVS and Angel, or even the Darin Morgan eps of X-Files. I am cutting Lost Girl a lot of slack because there isn't anything else like it on the air right now.

[ic1pher.livejournal.com]

I had this very problem in episode 1. So when they didn't really address it in any sensible way in later episodes, I just decided not to care and try to enjoy the good instead focusing on the bad.

Some other urban fantasy also has this problem. The protagonist does bad things and because it is convenient for him/her, it is considered the right moral thing to do. Usually makes me quit reading if this pattern repeats.

I don't know how to accurately explain the phenomenon but something like horrible irresponsibility comes quite close.

[ralst.livejournal.com]

I think the show has done such a good job of being inconsistent and void of character growth that my mind has become somewhat immune to these problems. Now, of course, I can see them perfectly and I can also imagine how good the show could have been if they'd addressed the issues.

I can understand them not wanting to go down the tortured soul route, as it's rather overdone in the genre, but if they'd chosen that path they should have given her an appropriate backstory. Personally, I'd have loved to see a darker side to her character, because it would have added an extra layer to her main relationships and provided a simmering rage that could be exploited in the betrayal-reveal to come. As it is, she simply lacks depth, and while that's okay in a fluffy show, it really shows when they try and do darker episodes.

As someone else mentioned, her instant best friends/sisters relationship with Kenzi is another sore point. I do love seeing them interact but there is a lack of substance to their relationship that makes me assume it could be over just as quickly as it began (the LotS writers need to send over their character development notes).

I'd love to see this first season rewritten as both a fluffy (Bo not a killer) and dark (Bo a killer and screwed up about it) version, because I think both have potential... know of any femslash writers up for the challenge? *g*

[canvasbug.livejournal.com]

Just curiously, since in ep 10 Bo said she looked for love with both fae and humans...does that mean they're counting puppyhealsex-seeking as looking for love?