LOST GIRL – Episode 308 – Fae-ge Against the Machine – SPOILERS ⁓

Stella Nashira (Debra Odell) has a blindfolded Bo (Anna Silk) chase a cricket (The Zambian Cricket of Good Fortune). After failing to catch the thin, Bo phones Lauren (Zoie Palmer) and tells her she’s coming home to rest. While on the phone, she fiddles with a strange machine that has appeared at the Dál. At home, Lauren comes up behind Bo and covers her eyes, and it becomes apparent that, to Bo, Lauren is both the blindfold and the cricket.

The doctor is scheduled to receive an award that night (The Moses Gomberg Distinguished Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Free Radicals) and asks Bo to come with. Lauren is excited and impossible to refuse, so, with the best of intentions, Bo agrees. Later, when Bo fails to show, Lauren decides to stay home. She may have been less interested in the award than she was in involving Bo in her work. Then Dr. Isaac Taft (Shawn Doyle) arrives to tell Lauren she won. He offers to take her out for drinks, explaining that he has read all her papers. Lauren is amazed that another scientist is interested in her work.

At the Dál, Trick discovers that Bo accidentally activated her “invitation” to The Dawning. This invitation is in the form of a Rube Goldberg contraption that mysteriously appeared in the Dal’s backroom and went unnoticed because of Hale’s recent redecoration of the place. Bo toyed with the device while talking to Lauren on the phone, setting it in motion. Stella explains that the machine will present dilemmas for Bo to solve, and since Bo is unavailable, Trick, her closest (most proximate) relative must solve them for her.

On the other side of town, characters named for two 19th century writers put Bo in the middle of a fight for a young Fae’s freedom.

Over a liquid lunch in a unnamed Dark Fae bar, Tamsin (Rachel Skarsten) tells Bo that everyone has been lying to her, and that The Dawning is a much more terrible experience than she has been led to believe. (Tamsin is likely basing this on her own personal Dawning experiences, but we are told nothing about those.) A fight breaks out and the two women escape via a freight elevator with the help of a Spriggan named Balzac (Ryan Belleville).

A Spriggan is, in Cornish myth, a creature that steals things (sometimes children). This particular Spriggan is well-groomed, civilized, and seems to be in the business of rescuing young people rather than stealing them.

Bo shakes Balzac’s hand and says, “I owe you one.” This commits Bo to doing Balzac a favour, and he asks Bo to liberate a ‘fortune cookie’ from the leader of The Tong, and use it to gain entry to Brazenwood, a gated community of voluntary Dark Fae outcasts. There resides Whitman (Brian Frank), a drug dealer who is exploiting a young Squonk named Hannah for her tears, which are a valuable drug. Once inside Brazenwood, Bo must rescue Hannah (Alexandra MacDonald), and one needs a prescription to gain access to her and her tears. (Just what effect the tears of a squonk have is not specified, except that Hannah says her tears “make people happy”.)

Balzac takes Bo to a woman called The Landlady (Lauren Ash) to get the prescription, and The Landlady insists that Bo pick a Tarot card. Bo chooses The Wanderer, and the significance of that will become increasingly apparent as Season Three progresses.

There is a Wildwood Tarot Deck, and the (Wanderer Card) is card 0 in the Major Arcana, though it is different from the one depicted on the show.

Balzac (the realist) does not follow Bo into the den of Whitman (the bohemian). He is shot with a (tranquilizer?) dart and sends Bo and Tamsin off on their quest without him.

One of Trick’s decisions makes Bo temporarily drunk. (He feeds the machine Bo’s least favourite drink, an Elderberry cocktail with nectar of gnome.) Just then Lauren phones, and, Bo (leaning on a donkey) says more of what she is really thinking than perhaps she should, and Lauren, who is also drinking a bit, hangs up angrily.

When Bo and Tamsin locate the girl, they discover that she doesn’t want to leave Brazenwood.

BO: “Hannah, please, we have to leave this place.”
HANNAH: “But Mr. Whitman tells me things about the world, and it sounds awful.”
BO: “I think he’s just telling you those things to make you cry more.”

Bo wants to get back to Lauren, so her initial impulse is to drag the girl out of there. Tamsin warns that the Squonk must go willingly, or she will dissolve into a puddle of tears. When asked, Bo assures Hannah that Balzac’s school will have boys, and Hannah quickly agrees to leave. Whitman (appearing as an Old West gunslinger) tries to stop them. Despite having brought a knife to a gunfight, Bo slays Whitman and saves the girl, using her experience with the Zambian Cricket as a guide.

So (Honoré de) Balzac (who might be considered the progenitor of Socialist Realism) rescues a young woman from (Walt) Whitman‘s idealism.

When Bo’s ordeal is over, Trick and Stella, who have been flirting throughout the process, kiss, and inadvertently touch the machine while doing so. This might be what makes Tamsin spontaneously kiss Bo passionately, but the machine is affecting Bo, so one would expect it to make Bo kiss Tamsin, not the other way around.

Balzac and Hannah join Bo and Tamsin at the Dál and officially invite Bo to The Dawning. Then Bo remembers she forgot about Lauren.

The Doctor is not home, having gone for celebratory drinks with Dr. Taft, so Bo and the Valkyrie finish Lauren’s champagne. Bo is having warm feelings for Tamsin and apologizes to her for treating her like an enemy. Tamsin is both pleased and disconcerted by this. She gives Bo an awkward pat on the arm and leaves.

Outside, Tasmin finds another Wanderer Tarot card. “She can’t be the one,” Tamsin says, to no one in particular, and the heavens rain Wanderer cards upon her. It seems clear that Tamsin is being forced to do things she would rather not do.

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Miscellaneous Info

Cave crickets (Phaeophilacris bredoides) were first discovered in the Chibongwe cave in Zambia. Both sexes have no hearing organs. They do not chirp.

Squonks are cryptids believed by some to live in the Hemlock forests of Pennsylvania. According to Cryptid Wiki, the squonk “hides from plain sight, and spends most of its time weeping. Hunters who have tried catching squonks have found out that the creature is capable of dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered.”

Balzac identifies himself as “a bounty hunter for the Demetrius Institute for Higher Learning…a school that specializes in giving rare and outcast Dark Fae a home and education”. The name Demetrius means “devoted to the goddess Demeter.” Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, will meet Bo in “Like Hell, Part 2” (episode 502).

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All episodes of LOST GIRL can be streamed on The CW.

The Lost Girl Rewatch Podcast is an episode-by-episode discussion of the show hosted by Anna Silk. New episodes are released most Tuesdays.

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** — Revixed. Originally posted on 13 March 2013