Keep away from men with sticks and rope...

Being Human: Episode 2.2


Bloody hell! How brilliant was this second episode of the second series of the sublime Being Human? Pretty bloody brilliant is what! Episode two gives us more great character stuff with the arrival of Mitchell’s old friend Carl who has done something awful to someone he loves and now needs Mitchell’s help to clear up the mess. New werewolf Nina is struggling with coming to terms with her changed life and is becoming more and more at odds with George and some of the decisions he now has to make. And poor Annie really knows how to pick her men as Saul turns out to be not what she or we expect.

In this episode the utterly terrifying view of death that this series presents makes a shocking return. It is no warm white light and happy hereafter here, just a dark horrible tunnel lined with men bearing rope and sticks…and something awful waiting for you at the end. Understandably, Annie wants nothing to do with it. She wants to stay on earth where everyone can now see her and she is almost entirely corporeal (though still having her ghost powers so as to teleport when needed.) She arguably has a better life now than when she was alive. There is an awesome scene both scary and tense as anything where Annie is being dragged screaming towards the open door in to the corridor of death that had me on the edge of my seat hoping against hope she wouldn’t be thrown through. “NO! NOT ANNIE!” I nearly cried out. “Hurry up George, get in the room and save her…” The episode ends with poor Annie having had a major relapse in her condition. I felt so sorry for her. The other storyline of Mitchell helping his old friend Carl is excellent too and not a very hopeful sign for our recovering bloodaholic regarding his future prospects for controlling his addiction. Here we get the return of Ivan too, this time sans wife Daisy, to lend a helping hand. Ivan is a fascinating character. He has a talk earlier with George where you think it might kick off…but he is just keen to find out what it felt like for George to kill Herrick as well as to have made whoopee with Daisy. It seems Ivan has a hard time ‘feeling’ emotional connections anymore. And yet he still loves Kate Bush…the music he plays in his car.

This was a seriously fabulous episode full of character development, character backstory, plot twists, deepening mysteries, horrific happenings, surreal story telling (loved Sir Terry Wogan as the voice of death), cracking dialogue and brilliant humour, all produced with very strong production values. This show looks great. Some of the photography was darkly lush and wonderfully moody. Yep, Being Human just gets better and better. I so love this show.

Being Human, Being Brilliant!

Being Human: Series 2

The awesome supernatural house-share drama and my favourite TV show of last year returned for series 2 last night. A vampire called Mitchell, a ghost called Annie and a werewolf called George all live together in a shared rented house in Bristol and together gain mutual support in circumventing their supernatural natures so as to live like normal regular everyday people, to just be…well…human.

After the battle against the vampire revolution and the defeat of vampire leader Herrick at the end of the last series, only a short time has now passed. About a month to be precise. And there is fallout to deal with including the exact lycanthropic status of werewolf George’s girlfriend Nina and the power vacuum amongst the remaining vampires after Herrick’s death. Plus there is a group of humans doing nasty secret experiments on supernaturals, one of which results in the particularly gruesome death of a werewolf in a hyperbolic chamber. And then there's the arrival of two new vampires in town with their own weird agendas. They are a married couple of which the husband seems to want to taunt and torture Mitchell and George for Herrick’s death while his wife apparently just wants to make dirty vampire/werewolf sex with George while also looking to kill off any living remnants from her human past. Yep, the stage seems set for a very interesting and hopefully bizarre new series of Being Human.

This first episode was great. It did a very good job reintroducing the characters and setting up ideas and threats for the new series. The main focus of the story was about Nina, George’s spiky nurse girlfriend who he accidentally scratched in the last episode of series one. It was about her fear that she is now a werewolf too and how she'd deal if she is one, and how George would deal with being the one to have cursed her. The episode was also about the three main characters looking for new meaning and purpose in their lives. Annie the ghost has become more confident and less afraid. As such she’s now visible to everyone and almost 100% corporeal when she wants to be. So much so that she goes and gets herself a job as a barmaid in a local pub. It’s a crazy idea - a ghost getting a job. But it is very funny and Lenora Crichlow as Annie is so sweet and charming that you just go with it. Her excitement over finding a new lease of life in death is infectious. Meanwhile Mitchell the vampire makes a connection with a new female member of staff at the hospital where he works in a cute scene involving pet goldfish. And then there is George the werewolf. Previously, George was very ordered and reticent about life in general as well as hateful of the monster he'd been turned in to. But now he seems to have embraced his werewolf nature despite still protesting how much he hates it. Those protestations sounded a little hollow with his temperament appearing rather arrogant, cold and aggressive. He even went and got jiggy with the naughty vampire lady…something he’d never have done before. But then I guess it was the night before the full moon.

Writer/creator Toby Whithouse provided another great character based/led script that was as rich in human themes as it was in fantasy plot and horrific incident. The characters were all great and the dialogue funny, sharp and meaningful. Toby can write great lines just as well as any top US writer. I especially loved his little nod to Buffy when Annie, trying to console Nina over her fears of being a werewolf, said: “There was a werewolf in Buffy called Nina.” Nina replied that she never watched it. Annie then said: “Yeah, well, I stopped watching it when I started living it.” Great! Although being a Buffy geek I have to point out that Nina the werewolf was actually in season five of Angel and not in Buffy at all. But appreciated all the same Toby :D

And talking of werewolves…the beasties in series 2 look even better than they did last year with the transformations still up to the same high standards. Very creepy in An American Werewolf in London style. Wicked!

All in all a great start to (hopefully) a great second series. Bring on episode 2 already.

Two strangers arrive…