Thinking about coming back to this. But doing it different. Instead of trying to do a post with screenshots for every episode, just posting whatever thoughts I have. If any. Maybe even live-blogging, I don’t know. What I was doing before made it difficult for me to keep up.
Maybe.
I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately and rewatched 1x01 plus (made the mistake of rewatching) Tamsin Season 3 scenes because I was curious…was Valkubus even really that good?
It turns out. Yeah. It could have been, anyway. :(
I feel like these days, Lost Girl gets a pretty bad rap on the internet because it was such an early example of queer women representation on tv and standards are a lot higher now. At the time, a lot of queer women ate this up. But now I feel like younger queer women get a whiff of Lauren, Doccubus, and the disaster that was S4-5 from a mile away and have secondhand embarrassment that we ever put up with that shit. There’s a general vibe of, man, back in the day when there was only The L Word and Lost Girl, queer ladies sure had it rough. It’s the only explanation for why they swallowed that Doccubus crap.
But I always want to say to those folks: yes, a lot of things about the show do suck, particularly Lauren and Doccubus and S4 and S5 in their entirety, but that’s not all Lost Girl is!
It was also a show with one of the best platonic friendships (and, in Kenzi, one of the best characters) on tv, ever, period! It was also genuinely funny and charming.
I feel the compulsion to defend Lost Girl’s honor sometimes. Like, it might look bad from where you’re standing, but it wasn’t all a garbage wlw couple, racism, and TERFyness, I swear…
Though. To be fair. That stuff is in there. And to be clear I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for never watching this regardless of the reason.
Thoughts about Lost Girl from memory (now I could be wrong about ANY of this—it’s been 5 and in most cases 10 years!):
Kenzi is quite possibly my favorite tv character of all time and considering I haven’t fully rewatched S1-3 in over a decade, that’s crazy
Lauren is STILL, to this day, my least favorite tv character of all time, and considering I haven’t fully rewatched S1-3 in over a decade, that’s crazy
It’s not that I haven’t watched a ton of other stuff since then, it’s just that those characters were THAT impactful, I swear
Bo and Kenzi is such a rare example of a platonic female friendship done right. I can’t think of another example like them. Most of the time the friendship either sits on the backburner or ends up feeling kind of romantic. Neither is the case here. Not only that, but it’s not just some cute side thing. In a show that is romance-focused enough that we could probably even call it part of the paranormal romance genre, this platonic friendship is the core of the show. Lost Girl still stands out among its peers for this.
Back then, shows had the balls to try to be Buffy. And that’s part of Lost Girl’s charm. It’s shameless Buffy-ness. Now, we don’t see that as much. Like, look at something like Netflix Wednesday. A show that SHOULD be trying to be Buffy, but isn’t. You are never going to be better than Buffy. You might as well copy it. Lost Girl understood the assignment.
Tamsin and Bo’s chemistry in Season 3 is legitimately THAT good. After two seasons of Bo ping ponging around between two mediocre romances with people who fell to her charms instantly, patronize to her, and lie to her, Tamsin bulldozes her way into an interrogation room and gets Bo’s hackles up in a way they never have been before on the show. They both immediately challenge each other in new ways and have to learn to trust and respect and like each other before anything else can even happen. Unlike Lauren and Dyson, Tamsin never bullshits to Bo. They make each other better people. And they have this incredible banter and chemistry between their personalities. It feels so OBVIOUS when Tamsin and Bo’s relationship starts to develop over the course of S3 that the showrunners must be building up to something, that THIS is the dark horse endgame romance Bo deserved all along, only for them to immediately throw all of that in the trash at the start of S4. The Bo and Tamsin we see in S4 and S5 are basically unrecognizable characters. “Lost Girl.” More like “Lost Potential.” Fuck me. God damn, it could have been so good.
Instead we got that crap (pointing at Doccubus). Are you people happy with your room temperature soup type shit fuckass canon wlw ship?
Lauren really, really sucks, and so does her romance with Bo. She’s poorly written and she’s a miserable human being that the show never stops pretending is a good person. She’s abusive, she’s elitist, she’s probably a covert narc, and she treats everyone around her like shit. I fail to understand what makes her romance with Bo appealing other than her being “hot.” People say queer women can do better now, but the truth is we could do better then, too, and people just didn’t.
Like honestly, I’m not sure if any of the old Lost Girl forums even exist anymore, but I know the Showcase comments sections are gone, and the WILD discourse that I used to see in these spaces between Doccubus fans and everybody else… I make no comment on the Doccubus fandom in 2025, yall are probably perfectly normal and nice people, but in 2013 it was truly the Wild West. Peeking into a comment section with Lost Girl ship discourse was like being Snake Plisken in Escape From New York. It was vindictive and nasty on all sides, don’t get me wrong, but Doccubus fans in particular exhibited a level of delusion and fanaticism that to this day is the standard by which I measure toxic shippers.
People won’t want to hear this, or would prefer a euphemistic phrasing, but the show was racist. Even if you pretend S4 and S5 don’t exist, which I do. I’m thinking of not just the fact that Hale is virtually the only person of color in the main cast, but the way the show likes to cherry pick myths and monsters from different cultures and slap them onto white people with minimal care or research. I also don’t remember much but I’m willing to bet Hale isn’t portrayed well either.
TERF vibes. Except for the season premiere of S3, which goes beyond the realm of “vibes” and is just straight up disgustingly transphobic propaganda. To the point where even when I was 16 or 17 watching it, with no real knowledge of trans issues, was immediately uncomfortable. And that episode is just what I remember! I’m scared to find out if there’s more. We shall pretend that episode doesn’t exist because transphobia feels out of character for the main group on this show. I can’t really see it on them.
I’m still going, so….in S4, Michael Grassi was added as writer and consulting producer, which I had a bad feeling about right from the jump. Mainly because I had never seen that name before in the credits of this show. Dude with no history of working on Lost Girl, suddenly becomes consulting producer. What could go wrong? Well, apparently a lot. There’s no way to tell how much blame for how bad the season was should be assigned to whom, and I have no doubt there were multiple factors at play, but Grassi’s addition is the smoking gun.
I didn’t even finish S5, but Andras was no longer showrunner this season, replaced by Grassi, and I vaguely remember it somehow being even worse than S4, so there’s that.
I feel this is important context though: I don’t consider S4 and S5 to be part of the same show. I know it is. Factually. But I don’t consider them when I think about and talk about Lost Girl. To me, Lost Girl is three (flawed but fun) seasons long.
So… if I continue rewatching the series, maybe I’ll post my thoughts on here as they come. It would be nothing as official as it was before. I don’t even have a working disc drive anymore to take screenshots. But it might be something. Who knows?














