Lost Girl – Season 5 – review

Directors: Various

First Aired: 2015 – 2016

Contains spoilers

For reference my previous season reviews are available for: Season 1, Season 2, Season 3 and Season 4.

Lost Girl hit its final season with this and despite not being the shortest of all – it was 16 episodes for some reason released in the US as season 5 & 6 on DVD – it did feel rushed. It still concentrated on the world of the Fae – a collective noun for all the “mythological” creatures of the world and centred on Bo (Anna Silk) a succubus. When I looked at season 1 I said that, in the case of Bo, she was most definitely an energy vampire. Whilst she often fed (but as the seasons went on, not exclusively) during sex she was actually sucking the chi or lifeforce from her meal (I can’t say victim, many of her feeds are willing and friends/lovers).

Bo in Tartarus

In this season, as it begins, Bo is looking for the second of two Hell Shoes so she can travel to Valhalla and rescue her human friend Kenzi (Ksenia Solo). However – once she achieves this goal – Bo finds herself in Tartarus where she discovers that her long mysterious father is actually Hades (Eric Roberts, Halloween Hell). Having been helped by Persephone (Hannah Emily Anderson), Bo is then tricked by her into lighting a candle, when back on Earth, that manages to summon Zeus (Amanda Walsh) and Hera (Noam Jenkins).

Bo sucking Chi

So, this is very much a Greek mythology orientated season and you may have noticed that the characters of Zeus and Hera have been gender swapped. As exciting as this was the season wasn’t clear enough around the concept. The spirits of the powerful fae (as they are not actually Gods) have possessed human bodies of a given gender (so Zeus possesses the body of a woman). However, dialogue through the season vacillates between Zeus being a woman originally (and the patriarchal Greeks gender swapping her in their stories) or being male originally – Persephone calls her mother and Hades calls her brother, for instance.

Father and daughter

Another issue, which made the system feel a tad slapdash was Hades going by the pseudonym Jack (fair enough) but then Zeus calling him Jack – a name he wouldn’t have used in ancient Greece. And this is the problem I had with the season, it seemed rushed and ill-thought out. I got the impression that they knew it was the last season and their time was limited and so they quickly pulled the story together without necessarily thinking the threads through thoroughly and this led to under-explored elements such as Bo sleeping with a young Fae named Mark (Luke Bilyk, My Babysitter is a Vampire) and it then turning out that he was the long-lost son of Dyson (Kris Holden-Ried, Underworld: Awakening & The Death of Alice Blue) – a son that the cop never knew he had. If Dyson and mark’s relationship was handled in shorthand, the awkwardness and drama of previous lovers being father and son was essentially ignored. Mark’s later bisexual 'relationship' with Vex (Paul Amos) was also only run in shorthand (so much so that I put relationship in apostrophes due to the lack of focus on it and development of it).

the shtriga

There was one additional element that was vampiric in this season. In the episode “Follow the Yellow Trick Road” Bo is found comatose and it is discovered that she has had her blood drunk by the vampiric moth the Shtriga. This puts her in a dream world (and you can tell by the title that this is based on the Wizard of Oz) and she can only be saved by the Shtriga (represented in her dreams by Ksenia Solo) vomiting her blood back onto her mouth. According to Bane the shtriga (in folklore) is from “Albanian lore” which “tells of a female VAMPIRIC WITCH”. In this case the shtriga could be said to be helping by unlocking aspects of the story for Bo.

Eric Roberts as Hades

So, I had issues and it was all based around the fact that it seemed rushed. However, it was great to see the characters again and Eric Roberts was clearly loving the role of Hades, stealing every scene he was in with an easy charm. Not the best season, however worth seeing for fans of the show as it does round the story off and whilst it codas with an opening for further stories one feels that the story at the heart of the series was brought to a conclusion. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Many Bloody Returns – review

Editors: Charlaine Harris and Toni L P Kelner

First published: 2007

Contains spoilers

This is a collection of 13 short stories concerning vampires, all around the themes of birthdays – be that the birthday of the vampire, inviting a vampire to a birthday party or the coming of age of a human in a vampire run town.

The collection features all new stories, which is nice, and many are from current authors whose series grace booksellers at the moment. Whilst some of the stories are clearly one off tales others are based in the universe of the author’s series.

For this reason we get a Sookie Stackhouse story by Harris, A Harry Dresden story by Jim Butcher and a Henry Fitzroy story by Tanya Huff, amongst others. This is both a strength and a weakness of the compilation. All of the stories are very readable but one wonders whether the stories would mean as much to a reader unfamiliar with the series – this being the weakness.

As for the strength, if you are familiar with the particular series it adds a little facet to the respective series and, if you are not, it might encourage you to start reading the series. For example, I have never read the Morganville Vampires series, a series said to be young adult but probably more accurately a teen series. However, I found the background offered in Rachel Caine’s “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life” so intriguing (the concept of a town controlled by vampires and humans forced to contract themselves to vampire protectors) that I may well give the series a go.

As always, some of the stories are better than others. Highlight tales for me were the Jim Butcher tale – as I am a sucker for the Dresden books and it was nice to see something Black Court orientated – as well as Bill Crider’s “I was a Teenage Vampire” and Christopher Golden’s “The Mournful Cry of Owls".

The Crider story had a level of preposterousness that I fully appreciated, a respect for perhaps the more traditional vampire story but a nicely modernistic, disenfranchised youth aspect. Golden’s story was fantastic as it moved away from the standard vampire lore and concerned itself with shtriga, a more traditional vampire like creature from Albanian myth – though tied in with owls rather than flying insects in Golden’s imagination. The shtriga was used to great effect in season1 of Supernatural, in the episode “Something Wicked”.

The sort of volume that would serve as an ideal birthday present for the vampire fan, it is definitely worth a look. 7 out of 10.