RogerBW's Blog

2014-2015 urban fantasy, 16 episodes. The succubus Bo faces her biggest challenges yet, as her father tries to use her to take over the world.

This show surprised me from its start: what could have been just a mixture of supernatural menace-of-the-week and bisexual polyamorous sexytimes almost instantly turned into something much more. Yes, it's a sex-positive world with cheesecake for all tastes, but while season 1 established the Light and the Dark Fae as the major factions it immediately made very clear that neither side had all the answers. As the power levels have gradually escalated in successive seasons, the answer to moral questions has always been to do what you know is right rather than what supposedly moral authority, of any kind, wants you to do.

This season was several months into production when it was announced that it would be the last, but there was at least time to set things up for the series's end. Broadcast was in two chunks of eight (getting closer to the UK TV style, as North American cable TV producers now admit that having every series starting and ending at the same time isn't actually necessary or even particularly helpful).

Season 5 opens with a two-parter wrapping up previous plots, continues with Bo (Anna Silk) recovering from the departure of Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) who's been the emotional heart of the show from the beginning, then quickly pulls out all the stops, playing up the Greek mythology that's often been part of the mélange of supernatural traditions that make up what passes for the show's mythology ("it's all true, but not the way you know it") and throwing it into the foreground as immortal near-gods battle and scheme against each other, displaying all the tactical sense and care for their pawns that one might expect of spoiled children. As always, Bo and her friends are stuck in the middle.

There are plenty of personal moments too, as Bo's relationship with the human Lauren (Zoie Palmer, in the show that introduced me to her) is mended, broken, and mended again; Dyson (Kris Holden-Reid) the werewolf tries to mend fences with the son he didn't know about… so much so soap opera, but after four previous seasons of mostly pretty good writing we know these people and care about what happens to them. This is a show that's always tried to balance character development, a light sense of humour, and fantastic adventure, and it does it well.

Season 5, episode 10 of 16, may not be the time to be doing a stock "contort through the lasers" scene for the first time in the show, but somehow it worked. When Kenzi returned, I cheered. And the ending is a proper, genuine ending to the story: yes, they will all have more adventures in the future, but the narrative arcs that we've seen through the series are neatly concluded.

Yes, there are plenty of individual moments and episodes that aren't all that amazing, but the characters and big stories were interesting enough to carry me over the rough spots. For a show that looks like cheap exploitation, it's well worth a closer investigation.