"Lost Girl" musings ...
Nov. 25th, 2010 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fembuckSo, 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-26 02:20 am (UTC)I think this is what they are trying for, but as is the norm with the show they are kind of piss poorly presenting it.
If the fluffy-ness is a front that Bo is putting forward, we should still see some glimpses of turmoil beneath the surface every once and a while. For example, the character of Damon from "Vampire Diaries" puts on an unaffected, nothing can faze me front, but we get moments where we see his depth and his pain, before he paints a smirk on his face again.
Even if Bo is wise-cracking, and smiling most of the time, every once in a while we should see something deeper from her, something that shows that inside of her she feels the weight of her past, even if she can't let it show most of the time.
The way the show portrays Bo (both writing and acting) just doesn't show that Bo acts this way because she has to in order to go on. She just comes across as genuinely being capricious instead of pretending/making herself act capricious.
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.
Your right, the writing for Bo has been incredibly lazy. She is the star of the show, the protagonist. She should be the character that is the most defined, and yet she's so thinly drawn. I was just thinking about the other day in terms of fic writing, and how hard it is to write fic for this show because Bo makes no sense. It's impossible to get a sense of her internal self, because she is so contradictory on the show. It's like the writers just want to make her every single badass female they've ever seen on TV at once.
- Fights Fae like Buffy fought vampires.
- Has a dark, murderous past and a spunky side-kick who keeps her focused like Xena.
- Dresses up and goes undercover, often with her partner/handler like Sydney Bristow.
- She is tortured by her knowledge of the future (in Bo's case a prophecy) like Sarah Connor.
- Likes to dress in dark, tight clothes, has been forced to live on her own for years, and has uncontrollable sexual urges due to her biology like Max from Dark Angel.
And so on ...
The difference is that those characters were strongly, and carefully developed, and as a viewer you understood them and why they did the things they did. Yes, even Max from Dark freaking Angel was better written. It's like the show doesn't realize that Bo can't be both Buffy AND Faith.
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
Hopefully there will be some fine-tuning for the second season. I realize they can't undo her past now, but hopefully in season 2 they'll a least start to address some of the things they've been ignoring.
I don't even really mind the case-of-the-week format. It can be used effectively (i.e. The Good Wife. It has a new legal case to be solved every week, but in-between the lawyering it focuses on character and character relationships and slowly and carefully develops it's characters). Lost Girl just has the characters do whatever is needed to further the plot, which often makes the characters inconsistent.
I think that's one of the reasons Lauren is my favorite, because she's the most consistently scripted character on the show.
Speaking of coherent, sorry if that was incredibly long and convoluted.
As this long-ass response indicates, I don't have a problem with length replies! It actually makes me happy to know others are thinking about this show as much as I am :D