Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Lost Girl Season Two, Episode Three: Scream a little dream

After the big Dyson rejection, Bo goes on a cleaning fit which sends Kensi straight to the bar to drink away her blues over broom slivers.  Once there she meets a charming fae named Mumford.  Mumford is a brownie and he loves to clean.  Once Trick tells her that bringing home will be safe she is excited to realize that her cleaning days are over.  Just before she leaves, Trick warns her not to take Mumford for granted. It's starting to look like there is a fae for anything and everything under the sun.

In a diner Bo and Kenzi are approached by a fae who works as a doorman. Apparently, all of the humans in the building where he works are suddenly exhibiting signs of some sort of mental incapacity.  He claims to have gone to see the new Ashe, but was ignored because the new Ashe doesn't care for humans.  Bo and Lauren go to the building to investigate and while there, Bo asks Lauren if she wants to celebrate being free because a new ashe is in power now.  Lauren explains that it's not that simple.

Later that night a creature attacks Bo in her sleep, by making her believe that Dyson is ripping her heart out.  Of course, it's Kenzi to the rescue.  In the morning Bo tells Kenzi that every time she fell asleep she had nightmares, and so she decides to consult with Trick. At the bar, Trick tells her that she is being attacked by a mare, and that it is strange because a mare does not normally consume the amount of food that this one seems to.

Shall we jump to the analysis now?  The mare is on a mass feeding frenzy because she is pregnant.  Not only is she massively hungry, she is constantly snipping at her husband.  Yeah, I call BS on this one.  Even if a woman is pregnant with sixtuplets she is not a massive food eating machine. They also made the Mare verbally emasculate her husband.  So, the long and short of it is that if you are pregnant you eat without stopping and you constantly bitchy and angry.  Pregnancy may not be the most comfortable time in a woman's life but these stereotypes are ridiculous.


Continuing on with the sexist nonsense, it seems that Lauren is chattel to be passed around from Ashe to Ashe.  Bo obviously knows that this is wrong but is powerless to do anything about it.  This bothers me on two levels.  When The Ashe was a Black male, she was more than ready to mouth off at every turn, but now that he is a White male, she curtseys to him. Suddenly she is in full awe of the office of The Ashe and feels no need to make ridiculous plans to get around him.  So if the power is the position and not the race, why did her behaviour suddenly change?  She did say that she would not work for him on a freelance basis but there was no doubt that her attitude certainly was far more wary. 

In Lost Girl, humans are decidedly considered to be lesser beings than the fae however deciding that this justifies a man owning a woman and treating her as property is absolutely wrong.  Even though White women were never enslaved the way that Black women were, they were still at one point considered to be the legal property of their husband or their father, so much so that if they were raped it was considered a crime against the husband or the father.  What Lost Girl is doing, is using woo woo, to play upon a historical wrong.  This is a phenomenon that that stretches across the entire urban fantasy genre.  There is no reason that justifies Lauren being declared a possession.

As much Lost Girl attempts to bring us strong female characters, it often fails far more than it is successful.  Of the regular women the only character that inspires any kind of respect is Kenzi and she leaves in a virtual state of servitude to Bo.  It was Kenzi who sought out the dream eater for Bo, saving her once again.  If the writers are determined to have Bo be the protagonist of this program they need to let her start acting like it.  A supposedly powerful woman that is so weak that she has to be saved every week is more about promoting female dependency than any kind of agency or power.