Bo depends on intimate interaction for life sustenance. As a succubus, it is what keeps her going, and in that sense, it’s only logical that romantic drama would follow her around like the plague. Last season, the road block to commitment with Dyson was just their fluctuating feelings (and Bo’s mother), but now that the show has set her up with Lauren, the hurdles to their relationship are more explicit. Lauren has a girlfriend, Nadia, who’s been in a coma for years. Bo has the first clue Lauren needs to figure out how to save Nadia, an old metal nail given to her by the Morrigan, but neither of them have any idea how to proceed. They have a tenuous partnership at the moment, working to save Lauren’s girlfriend, but are still hopelessly attracted to each other. I’m not too fond of cases that split up Bo and Kenzi, and this week is yet another example of an intriguing character concept that gets bogged down in an overarching plot I just don’t care enough about.
The Case of the Week—involving one of Trick’s oldest friends whose recently deceased dancer husband has gone missing—leads Bo to a Lich who has taken to collecting various artists and eccentric personalities to indulge his mind. The Lich is immortal, feeding off of human flesh as well as accumulating a wide swath of experiential knowledge. That vast knowledge is exactly what Bo needs in order to get to the bottom of the nail she got from the Morrigan, so she brings Lauren along to some kind of sinister salon the Lich throws, making the reanimated dancer and a harpsichord soloist perform to satiate his intellectual desires.
According to Trick, a Lich theoretically keeps an item that contains his chi, which needs to be destroyed to defeat the Lich. There’s a nicely comedic detour into some Dorian Gray references, but after some playacting, it’s clear that the Lich keeps a big entourage of mindless cultural soldiers on hand as his chi containers. He chains Bo and Lauren up on a stage, and tries to force Bo to feed on Lauren so he may experience Bo’s feelings of unhinged passion. She refuses, so the Lich has his minions bring Lauren to his table, planning to consume her flesh.
Perhaps it’s that Bo is desperate to protect Lauren because of her romantic feelings, or the bullet in her gut, but whatever the reason, Bo taps into some seriously powerful succubus ability, draining the chi of every one of the Lich’s “dolls” before collapsing. She doesn’t remember any of it, but the Lich is defeated, but not before Bo extracts his knowledge about the nail. Nadia isn’t sick; she’s been cursed by an African shaman’s cursing nail. Find the piece of wood with Nadia’s nail and remove it, and she should return to normal. All in all, an interestingly creepy take on a Lich with some overarching plot movement, but one that felt particularly constrained by only a few locations (all interiors it seemed) and some heavy leaning on the already difficult Bo/Lauren relationship.