Tag Archives: Canadian TV

Review: Lost Girl’s Dyson goes dark

Of all the possible reveals I’ve been anticipating and speculating about for Lost Girl’s final season, Dyson turning out to be a long-lost baby daddy was not one of them. Although given Dyson’s possible turn from the Light side, maybe this is setting up some final saving grace for him after killing The Hunter (Aaron Poole, Strange Empire) in cold blood.

After the first handful of episodes were easily making this season out to be all about Bo and her search for her father, “When God Opens a Window” seemed to be taking advantage of the extra episode order by giving us an intriguing look into Dyson’s psyche, post-Season 4’s devastating loss. And judging by his grand speech to the unpleasantly returned Vex and his bloodstained face as he nursed a beer and some memories, things have gotten—dare I say—Dark in Dyson-land.

While it seemed like a pointed reminder to Trick to get him back for sticking Vex with Dyson, in hindsight the wolf’s comments about whom he’d sworn fealty to now have more weight. Was Dyson aware he was struggling with being the good guy when he made that oath, or has doing it finally given him the freedom to act on certain urges? Either way, it’s now apparent Dyson’s allegiance to the unaligned Fae in his life is going to be having an effect on him—especially since Bo clearly knew where the blood was from and didn’t confront him about it. And maybe that’s a good thing, looking at the generations of fighting between The Hunter and the Shifters. Moving away from binaries, traditions and old grudges could make for a much healthier Fae world.

Though I’d feel much better if this ended up being Dyson’s only major transgression—mildly justifiable since The Hunter wasn’t all that good himself. As refreshing as it is to see Dyson take a break from his constant do-gooder ways, now might not be the best time for him to totally descend into evil even if it could make for some interesting relations between Dyson, Bo and her father. Of course, if Mark does end up hanging around, there’s always his own path to redemption by hopefully helping Dyson instead of simply living up to the retelling of Vex’s paternal relationship with Massimo. Forgiveness is all well and good from parents, but as we’ve already learned multiple times this episode between Vex and The Hunter, there are serious consequences to those kinds of actions, however much daddy may love you.

Then again, given Bo’s particular allure for Dyson’s son and the awkwardness it immediately brought on, maybe it’s best if Mark takes off for a bit. In between Tamsin edging in eagerly to help Bo heal, her no strings arrangement with Dyson and the lingering tension with Lauren, I’d say Bo’s got her hands awfully full even if she is a succubus. And after that whole stepmom debacle, I don’t now how much more keeping it in the family I’m interested in seeing.

Besides, as much as shipping has become a fun part of the show, at this point I’m far more excited to find out who our elevator lady is, what that lighting she apparently commands is, and especially what another triskelion is doing on a supernatural show (having been a go-to design for Teen Wolf since the beginning). While the symbol Dyson put together apparently fits a more Celtic look, I’m still anticipating the connection of Persephone and Artemis via the candle to mean we’re headed for a much more Grecian revelation. And if that’s the case, I think it rules out Walsh as Demeter, if her behaviour hasn’t already. Though we may have at least some part of the mystery in our hands now after Evony dropped off a very, very old evil at Lauren’s lab—wasn’t that what we were looking for last week?

Lost Girl airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Showcase.

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Review: Lost Girl looks for a leader

“Strong, merciless, vulnerable,” were the words Bo used to describe a good leader in Sunday’s Lost Girl. While the episode may have only touched on the big mysteries unveiled last week as Bo and Tamsin took on a case of the week, in the end Musashi’s story did feed into the season’s bigger arc as Bo questioned what being the Chosen One meant for her and those around her.

And it was the vulnerability aspect that was most important in “Big in Japan,” not just for Musashi and his faux-claim to fame, but for Bo who was coping with Kenzi’s departure in obvious (see: decorating) and less obvious (see: not taking in chi) ways. While Bo may have been able to spot Musashi’s resistance to embrace his own vulnerabilities, in the end it was Tamsin who had to force Bo to confront hers—a nice parallel that ended up moving Bo’s evolution along in an episode that original seemed like it was going to kill time with a case of the week.

For all her bravado going into hell, confronting what may have been the arm of her father and coming back out (with the world’s worst candle) Bo’s challenges this season look like they’re going to be delving into the most personal, and possibly fragile, parts of her life. The show has already alluded to her father’s dark nature and a big part of what’s to come for Bo must be accepting whatever influence that has had on her without letting it define her. But as she pointed out, being who she is has also already cost her plenty and taking time to acknowledge that loss, especially in the face of losing Kenzi, is rightfully another part of her role she has to live with. Though what makes Bo a better leader that Musashi just might be her willingness to see leadership, and its cost, for what it really is and not just the glory of a bar full of Fae wanting to be like her.

Although—and maybe it’s blasphemous to say this—it was pretty fun to see Tamsin helping Bo with this week’s case and stepping into that empty spot next to her. While nothing could replace all of Bo’s years with Kenzi, those heartfelt moments in Lauren’s surgery were a good reminder for Bo that she’s still got plenty of friends with her. And while Tamsin may have a number of strikes against her, she rightfully got recognition for knowing a bit more about her roommate than she’s been given credit for. I expect she’ll been taking Dyson’s suggestion that she leave the shop and join the family business pretty soon, if not in the coming week. Though with this season set to deal with daddy dearest, I don’t know how much time they’re going to have to take cases—even if they do fit as neatly into the story as this Sunday’s.

It was also another week of Dyson and Lauren teaming up with their sass providing a nice counterbalance to all the flirtatious teasing going down between Bo and Tamsin (the writers are just playing with us, right?). There’s a bigger sense of the stakes the season is building towards whenever these two talk since their main common ground at the moment is Bo and how to help her survive what’s coming. Given their flirt-free zone, I’m actually digging the friendship between these two since Dyson’s down a buddy, and the combination of Dyson’s training and Lauren’s science-savvy made for a pretty sweet takedown of the first Fae to come for her.

Though Lauren might need more than her wrist and some ketamine if elevator-lady is still in the lab when Lauren returns to work because I’m getting the sense—from the maniacal face, resurrection stunt and neck snapping—that she’s not your average baddie. I guess the question we’re left with, aside from last week’s “who is she?” is whether she’s very, very old or really new. Any bets?

Lost Girl airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase.

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Review: Alex’s awkward return on Saving Hope

My biggest fear going into the third season of Saving Hope with Alex on the operating table was that she’d spend most of the season in a coma, expanding on a premise set up in Season 1. Thankfully, Alex woke up after only two episodes. Less fortunately for her, she might have a bit of a mess on her hands—assuming she remembers anything.

I can’t think of an episode of Saving Hope that has managed to put together as many awkward moments as this one. Just as Alex and Charlie seem to have made up from the fallout of last season’s reveal and decided they wanted to have a baby together, Joel decided to go in for the Sleeping Beauty kiss and we were left wondering which of the two (if any) were responsible for waking the good doctor up. In between this and last week’s fisticuffs, I’ve got a feeling our quietly simmering love triangle is about to explode—at least on the men’s side of things, that is, since we don’t know how much of her time with Charlie that Alex is going to remember, or if she’s even aware of Joel planting one on her.

Hopefully her subconscious will at least do Dawn the service of forgetting about her early morning routine. As adorable as it was to watch her sing to the pet she grudgingly took on to help one of Gavin’s patients, I couldn’t help but feel like this was some gross violation of her privacy. And while it’s not the first time Charlie has tried using a ghost to get intel on someone in the hospital, I was a bit surprised Alex went along with it. Maybe she was expecting something as simple as an early morning nap, and maybe she’ll keep that info to herself, but a woman should be allowed to sing a lullaby to her guinea pig in the privacy of her own office without her ghost of a colleague butting in. Or at least she should be, if there’s any decency in the world.

Also high on the awkward spectrum was almost the entirety of Maggie’s day, now that she’s got a new doctor in the form of Degrassi’s Stacey Farber (also lately a troublemaker on Rookie Blue). While I was enjoying Dr. Katz’ directness, especially about the Kalfis debacle, it was definitely throwing Maggie off in a way I appreciated after she not only broke up with Gavin (understandable under the circumstances) but then kept twisting the knife in. I was really hoping that split would be a blip in things after losing the baby, but her strange elevator proposition to Joel—along with her new residency on the couch—are starting to worry me. Not only does it spell the end of my favourite Saving Hope couple, but I suspect it just might put a damper on Gavin’s trademark sass.

As for the two cases of the week, Joel had a gruesome (and I do mean gruesome, thanks to the graphic effects) infected plate to deal with—before opting out of an amputation to try and save the leg of his drug addict patient. Meanwhile, Maggie and Katz were trying to convince David (Vampire High’s Joris Jarsky) to keep his wife on life support long enough for their baby to live. With Charlie’s help, David finally conceded that as much as he hated people (and kids) he just might like his own, but unfortunately Joel’s string of bad luck only continued. Now that Alex is back, things just might turn around for him, but it’s far more likely he’ll be ending up with another black eye.

Saving Hope airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on CTV.

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Review: Saving Hope delves deep

Well the good news after that Saving Hope cliffhanger season finale is that Alex isn’t dead. The bad news is she’s still in a coma and Charlie seems pretty happy about that. Things picked up right where Season 2 left them, with Alex’s body on the operating table and Dawn and Maggie scrambling to save her, while spirit Alex and Charlie tried to figure out what this new situation meant.

I’ll admit I got a kick out of Dawn repeatedly telling Charlie to stop talking—although I wish someone had taken it one step further and demanded to know just who he was talking to when the supposed love of his life was nearly dying in front of him. It was one of a handful of lighter moments that balanced out the very dark place Alex went to almost immediately after her short bonding session with Charlie.

While the whole coma-meets-alternate-life isn’t a new thing to television, I do appreciate the direction Saving Hope went in—instead of giving Alex a glimpse at a life (and husband?) she would wake up wanting, we got a shocking look into her past when it eventually came out that Alex had witnessed her father’s suicide. If it came as a jarring transition as her fictional daughter turned into her, I missed it because I was completely caught up in Luke’s return.

If there was anything I would have wanted to come out of Alex’s attack, it would be a chance for her to see her brother again—though ideally not with their dead father suspended next to them. But as the two finally got to talk again, the possibility that the two siblings could spend the rest of eternity hanging out in their childhood home and having barbeques seemed like a nice alternative to recovering from a brutal scissor stabbing and diving back into the complicated mess that is Charlie’s unique set of abilities and a very unresolved love triangle. Then again, maybe I’m just really partial to Luke.

Because as soon as Alex disappeared from Charlie’s sight, that love triangle was kicked into high gear. While I should probably preface my feelings on Charlie deciding to beat up Joel with an admission that I’m hands down Team Joel, that wasn’t a particularly mature or constructive way to deal with the horrifying things happening at Hope Zion—and it certainly wasn’t going to do Alex any good.

Not that Joel needed a physical pummeling to go with his emotional one when he got hit with the double whammy that his patient was the one who stabbed Alex (while he was asleep, no less) but that said patient then went on to throw himself off the hospital roof. And despite how hopeless it was, Joel and Zach were doing all they could to save the guy until he demanded Joel let him sleep—the kind of medical decision I’m sure wouldn’t fly in court, if anyone ever checks up on this. I’ve got the feeling making that call will be sticking with Joel for a while, and not just because he was being tailed by a ghost.

More Hope-ful moments:

  • “Maggie, are you crying? Because if you move, she dies.” Dawn is probably not the most reassuring person in a crisis.
  • “Godzilla, Mothra, do you want to shake paws and call it even?” What Gavin didn’t say was who was who?
  • “Mothra didn’t have paws, man. She was a moth.” I am pleased to report there was also plenty of Reycraft in this episode.
  • “That’s disgusting. What are you, like a teen hooker?” Dawn on Gavin’s sugar to coffee ratio
  • “I read in a paper that we’ve reached peak beard, but I’m not so sure.” Zach should definitely take advantage of his Armenian half and really show us what peak beard is.
  • Charlie: “I can see you, and I’m glad.” Alex: “I’m in a coma, Charlie.” Basically says it all.

Saving Hope returns to its regular time period on Thursday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CTV.

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Review: Mystery lingers in ‘Listener’ finale

There was a definite sense after last week’s episode of The Listener that the finale would have plenty on its hands—the IIB was faced with one stunner of a weekly case while Tia and Oz still had to provide closure to the series’ longest running mystery. While Becker’s storyline offered up a meaty intrigue, things fell a bit short when it came to Toby’s reunion with his mother.

The Rookie Blue fan in me was excited to hear Noam Jenkins would be appearing in the finale as the Becker-thwarting baddie, although his tense posturing quickly tipped me off that we didn’t actually have two dirty cops on our hands, or even one. But the incriminating evidence Griffin (Bruce Gray, All My Children) was able to build up had me wishing this sort of investigation could have gone on for a bigger lead into the finale, especially when Becker had to negotiate how much he trusted his new team with how important it was to protect an old friend. He and Michelle have been getting closer throughout the season, but despite all his talk it wasn’t until this episode that Becker and Toby finally sorted their issues out.

As for Michelle, after the expectation she’d had at the beginning of the season that she would become head of the unit, it was interesting to see how she ran the team once given orders to investigate Becker. Much as I lost most of my respect for Griffin when he dangled that promotion back in her face, at least she finally got her chance to lead before the show wrapped. And I would not have wanted to be Griffin considering her expression after he threatened her family, guaranteeing that however they might stack the evidence against Becker, Michelle wouldn’t just roll over. Of course, with the way things ended Michelle seems to be going a more traditional route by clocking in two months on the road with her family instead of leveraging her big bust—but after four years of high–intensity work, she’s probably earned that vacation. How long she’ll be able to keep herself in vacation mode is another matter entirely.

In fact, even though this has been Toby’s show from the start—he and Oz being our mainstays over the past five years—the finale felt more like it belonged to Michelle, or even Dev and Alex, more than our teal-sporting lead despite the big reveal at the end. What the episode did show us was how far Toby and Michelle have come as a team as he trusted her when she asked him to read Becker (not to mention a few episodes back when she trusted him to read her). Outside the office offered more as Tia, taking advantage of Dev’s open computer, finally found Toby’s missing mother only to be misled into believing she was dead. After all these years, that couldn’t possibly have been the ending, so Maya’s perfectly-timed reappearance in Toby’s life didn’t surprise me as much as it did him.

But instead of offering the answers about why the pair had been split up for so long, or what role The Institute had to play in everything, the two sat down for tea as The Listener rolled to a close—leaving us with some mysteries still unsolved. Given the way the show changed over the years, it’s entirely possible the writers weren’t interested in going there anymore, but without any resolution that half of the conclusion felt more rushed. Even Dev and Alex suddenly and awkwardly admitting their feelings and running off to the dance floor together at least had enough build to it that Alex’s “that took way too long” came from us as much as herself. Then again, in a world where a mind-reading paramedic can end up cracking the nation’s highest-ranking corruption ring, maybe there are only so many answers we can expect.

What did you think of The Listener finale? Let me know in the Comments below!

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