Jasmine Sahu is well suited with this new American drama exclusive to Dave.
Lois Cameron explains why this series is much more than your average cosy period drama.
The last episode of this series sees Sherlock and Moriarty attempt to solve the final problem with devastating consequences.
With major cast changes afoot, Jacob Martin ponders whether Being Human can live up to its own scarily high standard.
“We have a shouting, pissed corpse on our doorstep!”
Mitchell’s little trip to Purgatory has had some unexpected effects, briefly blocking the passage of the dead from the hospital and resulting in a walking, rotting corpse roaming the streets of Barry. Meanwhile, George and Nina’s tryst at the last full moon has rather negated the effectiveness of her birth control, and Mitchell finally realises that Annie feels a bit more for him than friendship.
Sasha the maybe-zombie was an absolute blast. Full credit must go to Alexandra Roach and the make-up department for going all out and creating a truly grotesque creature: from her hair falling out and the toenail coming off her blackened foot to the Death Becomes Her moment with her ex-fiancé and getting ready for a night on the town to the sounds of ‘Pretty Woman’, the whole thing was disgusting and hilarious in equal measure. Roach gives it her all without ever falling into caricature, and her final scene was understated enough to work.
There was a little bit too much going on in this episode, too many interesting stories for them all to be fully developed. In particular, Mitchell losing his patience with Graham seemed to come out of nowhere as the sense of threat hadn’t been built up enough. Mitchell had a lot to lose by annoying Graham; surely he would have held out for a bit longer before throwing him out. Their final showdown, however, was a timely reminder of the legend that Mitchell is in the vampire world (hopefully heralding the return of Herrick soon) and at least there were no clumsy reminders of Lia’s prophesy.
The real pity, however, was that George and Nina’s story wasn’t really given time to breathe. That said, Sinead Keenan and Russell Tovey nailed it in their big scene together: Nina’s revelation that her reluctance isn’t really to do with them being werewolves, but her history with her mother (presumably linked to her scars) was a very Being Human twist. These people may be supernatural, but that is by no means the only cause of their problems. Sasha’s speech was a slightly easy way to get Nina to change her mind, but the scene in which Nina asks George if he wanted to have “a little hairy baby” with her was sweet enough to make me forget that, and should lead nicely into the return of McNair next week.
The only thing that’s really worrying me about this series of Being Human is the Annie and Mitchell romance. It’s not just that it feels a bit forced, and that Mitchell is lying to Annie, though those are real problems. No, what’s the most troubling is that this feels like a major regression for Annie: as we saw in series one, Annie’s real unfinished business was that she had lived her life for other people, never allowing herself time to be independent and grow. While she’s always going to rely on George and Mitchell to an extent, it feels wrong for her to go back to being defined by a relationship. I trust creator Toby Whithouse enough, however, to wait and see how this plays out.
This episode very much continued the strong form of this series: if I come away from an episode wishing that the subplots had been given a full episode to themselves, then Being Human is doing something rather right indeed.
See the fourth episode of Being Human, ‘The Pack’, next Sunday at 9pm on BBC3.
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