There were points in this episode were it felt as if it were driving towards the fundamental hopelessness that is at Being Human's center - at the end of the day, this is a show that keeps concluding that the project of living human lives is, for its characters, hopeless and at best temporary. Which means that I found it simultaneously interesting and frustrating; interesting because the show rarely has a character acknowledge that the rehabilitation effort is at best a stopgap measure and that eventually more people will die or become werewolves because of it, as Hal does in this episode, and frustrating because as usual the show doesn't seem willing to actually face up to how hopeless a story it's telling. It keeps circling back to the hope that this time things will be different, and yet they never are. It's not that I want Being Human to be a grimfest about monsters who are just human enough to wish they weren't monsters, and whose only hope to hold on to their humanity is suicide (though you could certainly argue that the third season, which did tell that story, was the most dramatically and thematically coherent so far), but I am getting tired of getting the same story over and over again.
While I thought a lot of the Hal/Ian scenes were strong, I really didn't care for the choice to make Evil Hal a separate personality. I've been pretty dubious about the notion of Hal switching between good and evil, because it seemed to take some of the responsibility for his actions off his shoulders. Making him two different people goes further along those lines, and it also contradicts everything else we've seen of him - his conversation with young Leo in the webisode, when he's still evil but starting to come out of it, his decision to drink blood in this episode, without switching personalities, and the story he tells Ian about deciding to kill his lover. I hope the show backs down from this device.
While I thought a lot of the Hal/Ian scenes were strong, I really didn't care for the choice to make Evil Hal a separate personality. I've been pretty dubious about the notion of Hal switching between good and evil, because it seemed to take some of the responsibility for his actions off his shoulders. Making him two different people goes further along those lines, and it also contradicts everything else we've seen of him - his conversation with young Leo in the webisode, when he's still evil but starting to come out of it, his decision to drink blood in this episode, without switching personalities, and the story he tells Ian about deciding to kill his lover. I hope the show backs down from this device.
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