Being Human Revisited: Season 3
Oh season 3, how art thou wondrous. Every bit as good as I remembered, and still my favourite. Mind you, in that way that leaves one completely drained and shaken at the end, but ever so narratively satisfied.
What I had forgotten was that despite the clear narrative structure from the get go, the first half has surprisingly many lighthearted moments. Welll, even Macbeth has the porter's scene. Seriously, though, there is a lot of comedy going with the tragedy, and sometimes in the same scene. For example: Mitchell is presented with a lot of unforgiving mirrors this season, but the first sight of Graham the fanboy, dressed and styled in a perfect copy of Mitchell's leather and black hair look, and mirroring his posture exactly still made me smile. And despite knowing what will happen between seasons - SOB! - so did George and Nina tramping through the woods, with George making bad "cub" puns while the two of them hold hands and are generally adorable parent to be. Or their "we were in a cult" scene with George's mother. Or Annie being flattered as hell by Nancy (unknowingly) fangirling her tea making skills. And when I first saw Tom and McNair in their introduction episode, 3.01, having a meal in a coffee shop I melted, because awwwww, Tom, and zomg, McNair.
On to what made s3 so unique in this and many another show. And yes, I do think without the Doylist reason that Aidan Turner had signed on to play Kili in The Hobbit, we might never have gotten it, Toby Whitehouse might not have found the courage, but Turner departed for New Zealand, and we got the anti woobification storyline to end all anti woobification storylines. It's not just that the massacre that was Mitchell's idea of a temper tantrum refuses to go away. It's that the season explodes excuse after excuse, story after story which Mitchell has been telling both others and himself about himself, until everything is stripped away, and then the logical consequence does actually happen, despite a short fake out making it look as if we'd get a vampire ex machina at the last moment.
In the opening episode, Mitchell sings a familiar tune: "Don't you get it, I want to be punished." And he probably believes that - at that moment. But then the female ghost he says this to, whom he doesn't recognize as one of the many he killed only a few weeks earlier, Lia, with a few words strips away this conviction both for Mitchell and the audience, when she tells him the date of his death is already set, and that he'll die by a werewolf. The moment Mitchell hears he will, in fact, die - the punishment he is ostensibly craving - he starts to do everything he can to avoid that fate. (Sidenote: the fact that Lia actually doesn't have the power to arrange his fate but started a mind game in revenge for her death is important, of course. Mitchell's fate, as she later says, is one he created for himself. If he had responded differently, if he had made other choices at any point during the season, it would not have happened.) And then the ongoing question of the season is "how low can Mitchell sink?"
Pretty damm low. When George and Nina befriend Tom and McNair, Mitchell immediately concludes McNair is the werewolf destined to kill him, and sells him to other vampires. When a resurrected and amnesiac Herrick shows up and Mitchell realises this could give him the clue for his own resurrection, he first tries to reawaken Herrick's blood thirst and then very nearly feeds Nancy the police woman to him, changing his mind only in the proverbial last second. In between, the reasons he gives for his own survival and for keeping the truth about the massacre from Annie and (as Mitchell thinks) George keep changing: it's because Annie would be heartbroken. No, it's in order to protect the supernatural community. No, it's because he, Mitchell, would be the persecuted victim by the witchhunting humans once the secret gets out. And for all that Mitchell occasionally indulges in the traditional penitent vampire "I keep seeing their faces" speech, not only did he fail to recognize Lia at the start of the season but he absolutely refuses to take in Annie's point near the end of it about the victims' families and their right to closure. What eventually shocks Mitchell into accepting his death are his ties to George and Annie; the realisation of what turning a blind eye in the name of love has done to George. It's not that Mitchell was unable to be genuinely repentant; but he could be only over people he had emotional ties with. The reality of citizen X and said citizens right to live, I think, escaped him by the end, having gotten lost many years before.
In the opening episode, you get an illustration of this when Lia and Mitchell make their tour through Mitchell's past. His first victim in WWI, shortly after his becoming a vampire, was a comrade, and Mitchell is guilty and very repentant. He gave the man poison before drinking his blood so his victim wouldn't feel his death. A mid-1960s-victim, Sally, by contrast, lies around naked like thrown away trash, and when Lia points out that having sex with her beforehand wasn't necessary if it had been solely about the unstoppable blood lust. Sally was used in both capacities because it was convenient. And the boxcar 20 victims, to whom Lia herself belongs, are so anonymous to Mitchell he can't even recall what they looked like despite them having been his most recent kills.
In all other seasons, Being Human lets their regular male vampire struggle with blood abstinance, gives us temptation scenes, and at least one fall. Not in season 3. In this season, when Mitchell is at his worst, he doesn't drink one drop of human blood in any episode. (I checked. Not even when he's offered some in a glass by a voluntary donor.) "There is a poison in you that has nothing to do with being a vampire", Nina says to him mid-season, and she is and isn't right about that, because Mitchell's biggest flaw - the need to survive at any cost, at anyone's expense, while needing to see himself as the victim and hero (something he finally recognizes and spells out in the harrowing scene with Herrick and George in the season finale) - is both an excellent metaphor for what vampirism, at its core, is, and a very, very human thing writ large. In minor ways, I'd say most people are like that. The survival instinct is quintessential for the species, after all, and we all would rather see as as the heroes and victims than as the villains of our own stories. It's just that Mitchell takes it to horrendous degrees, until he finally realises that there is just one way to stop the cycle, "end the story" for good.
S3 brings back the class coded treatment of vampires, as well as vampire racism towards werewolves, in a big way (and with a lot of satire), but it also introduces the single vampire Being Human in five season shows us whom we never see or hear killing a human being, and to our knowledge never has. That's Adam, frozen in time as an eternal teenager but in actuality 40 something years old. Now given that every other vampire we ever meet eventually falls off the wagon, the odds aren't exactly in Adam's favour, but in terms of what the show does with him on screen I find it both fascinating and logical that Adam is the exception. I was careful with my phrasing earlier when I said Adam never killed. Of course he did feed, and he did do damage, albeit a lot subtler than the rest of vampdom. In his s3 introduction episode, we briefly meet Adam's parents, who after he got turned managed to keep him alive (so to speak) without letting him become murderer by being his food supply until old age took them. It works on a metaphoric level - parental love as self sacrificial, but also the need to keep a child as an eternal child, which not only keeps the child in that role but also means the parents never have their own life. Near the end of the episode, Nina and George are willing to adopt Adam, and are sketching out a future in which they'll first introduce him as a younger brother, later as their child, and eventually grandchild. Adam, however, who was a teenager in mind as well as in body until then shows signs of growing up by stating that this is what his parents did, and what he let them do: build their lives around him. And he won't do it to George and Nina. It could have come across as a cheap plot device to explain why Adam doesn't stay as a regular (though we'll see him again in s4), but it doesn't, because it works with the theme of vampirism as feeding off other people, and the freedom of choice. Adam makes several choices in that episode - George and Nina (and a difficult life) over the satirized comforts of the affluent vampire couple willing to wine and dine him, but also letting go of George and Nina and try to live on his own - and they are all about growing up, letting go, taking responsibility for his own actions. Which makes him an important character to have, in this season of all seasons.
Also introduced in s3 are a father-son pair of werewolves, McNair and future regular Tom, and they, too, offer comments on choices, responsibility, love. I once joked that McNair is Angel's Daniel Holtz written as a good guy, and there is some truth in that (notably in his final episode), but he's also a counterpoint and parallel to Herrick, who in a way created him (by letting then human McNair fight against a werewolf, whom McNair defeated but not before the werewolf scratched him), and who will eventually kill him. McNair, in his werewolf state, killed Tom's biological parents and scratched baby Tom, then, once human consciousness returned and he realised Tom was still alive, adopted him, raising him in the belief that they were biological father and son until Nina figures out the truth. It makes McNair a morally ambiguous character; since BH werewolves can't control themselves towards strangers, the deaths of Tom's parents and Tom's infection were accidents, and he couldn't exactly leave a werewolf baby to social services, but keeping up the lie instead of telling Tom the truth once Tom was old enough to understand was wrong. (Lies to your nearest and dearest being very high on the BH scale of wrongness, and inevitably resulting in disaster, as Mitchell among others can testify.) However, Tom's ability to forgive McNair once the truth highlights the human capacity for forgiveness in a positive way. And also is interesting counter point to George implicitly and finally explicitly forgiving Mitchell; as Mitchell says to George in the finale, what Mitchell did to other people isn't for George to forgive - that's forgivness as enablement, whereas Tom can forgive McNair because McNairs actions affected him, not other people.
McNair is eventually unable to let go of the past as far as he himself is concerned - the fact that he decides to go after Herrick on his own after realising Herrick is in the house, as opposed to talking to George, Nina and Tom about it, dooms him - but he is able to want a different life for Tom; his last message to Tom is one of love, wishing a non-hunter future for Tom instead of dooming him to a path of vengeance the way McNair doomed himself. This ability to put someone else first is perhaps what is the saving grace in the BeingHumanverse for several of the morally ambiguous characters, and it's certainly what differentiates the unhealthy co dependent relationships from the functional ones.
For the former, look at Herrick and Mitchell. Herrick as written in season 1 is a standard master vampire trying to lure/blackmail/threaten his disobedient offspring back, with Lucien LaCroix and the Lestat from Interview withe Vampire (though not the later novels) as obvious predecessors. His lines aren't original, just the casting, because taking a short and stocky middle aged character actor like Jason Watkins made such a refreshing change to how these guys usually look like, plus the actor was really good. I still wasn't thrilled to see him back in the s2 tag scene. But then s3 came along and there, too, completely changed my mind. Just as Mitchell in s3 doesn't get a "will or won't he fall of the wagon?" storyline yet again, Herrick doesn't get a "will he manage to cause the vampocalpyse this time?" story. First of all, he starts out as amnesiac, which not only gives Watkins some acting muscles to stretch but also offers the show the chance to explore what is and isn't in Herrick's nature. (Oh, and it comes in handy for the seasonal "how low can Mitchell sink?" question of course. Starting with the egotism of "why does he get to forget not me?" and moving on all the way to nearly fed policewomen and cage scenes, but also the oddly graceful and peaceful responsibility taking final scene between them.)
Amnesiac!Herrick, not aware that he's a vampire, is still quite capable of verbal cruelty (poor, pathetic Kara, driven to suicide!) and manipulation (Kara again, and he also unsucessfully tries it with Annie). But he is not necessarily evil, and in fact even after learning blood will cure him from his feeble state and raving hunger puts up quite a struggle not to kill. His attic scene with George is so deliciously twisted not because Herrick is being mean (at this point Herrick genuinely doesn't remember George or his own history), but because of who Herrick used to be, because George killed him, and because Herrick delivers actual paternal advice on how to handle impeding fatherhood to George - which George takes. While he immediately hones on to the fact Nina is his best chance at protection, spots her doubts about Mitchell (who for unknown reasons threatens him) and seeks to exploit them in his own favour, his attachment to her and gratitude is quite sincere. Even once Herrick has regained his memories, he could still choose to be differently. He doesn't. But that is not because he needs blood; it's his own choice, after the initial one to let Nina go, to return and stab her (note: a very human way to kill, well, try to, since Nina survives it, though that wasn't Herrick's intention), to put vengeance above a shot at a new life. No wonder the soundtrack plays "History Repeating" when Herrick regains his memories. And this, of course, dooms Herrick. But not before the interaction between him and Mitchell has made George the last of Mitchell's unforgiving mirrors. Herrick's inability to let Mitchell go - both in the sense of letting him be someone other than a vampire in Herrick's own image, and in the sense of becoming indifferent to him or get rid of him for good - is part of their creator/created relationship, which you can read as a variation of the parent-child theme (and thus as the opposite of McNair and Tom.) (Though I bet that had Herrick been played by a young handsome actor, the Mitchell/Herrick slash would have shot through the roof.) As I mentioned in my s1 rewatch post: when Mitchell in the s1 finale offers to fight Herrick, he expects to lose and be killed, and the world to be doomed anyway. It's still part of his need to read himself as the hero/martyr. When, by contrast, he kills Herrick in the s3 finale, he does so because Herrick won't stop killing and because the returned Herrick is partly his responsibility. And he does it without any self righteousness or taking the moral high ground. It is, as mentioned, a scene with an odd grace and sense of peace, and of rare maturity on Mitchell's part.
Speaking of maturity: Annie early in the season, in her falling-in-love-with-Mitchell phase, feels younger than she did in s2. Watching this so shortly after watching s1 makes these scenes even more uncomfortable than they were the first time around, because Annie's behaviour really is almost identical to how she was around Owen (before her memory unblocked, and she remembered he had killed her). If this wasn't set up for the reverse as Annie starts to investigate the massacre and her fantastic response to it in the later half of the season, I would call it a serious blemish of the season. Incidentally, about the Annie/Mitchell romance in general: I hadn't recalled it started as a mind game of Lia's just as the self fullfilling "werewolf shaped bullet" prophecy did, i.e. before Lia gives Annie the idea there could be something romantic between her and Mitchell, it never occurs to her. For his part, the only time Mitchell ever showed sexual interest in Annie pre s3 is in the extremely creepy scene when he finds her in the kitchen directly after committing a massacre. But given Mitchell's propensity for romantic savior figures, I can easily buy him turning Annie into one in s3, given her interest and given that he is on the lookout for a "noble" reason to justify his continued survival. Now if the writers expect me to believe Mitchell and Annie in the "you were the love of my long life"/"and you were mine" exchange, they failed, though it's IC for both of them to say that at the point they do, but making Mitchell/Annie a dysfunctional romance was totally worth it for the dramatic deconstruction of the "bad boy saved by the love of a noble woman who really understands him/ bad boy just needs a hug" trope. In the episode that directly parallels Annie's relationship with Mitchell to Kara's with Herrick, I was during first broadcast hoping that this was the intention, and indeed, that's how it eventually played out. Annie's reply to Mitchell's "but I love you" (after her discovery of the truth about the massacre), her "do you have any idea how inadequate that sounds?", her listing the victims and their families when he protests he needed to keep the truth from her because she gave him a reason to go etc., her "maybe you thought that it it was worth it, that we were worth it, but what the hell made you think I would?" - her absolute identification with Mitchell's victims, not Mitchell, all this is balm to anyone who got well and truly sick of the sufferings of the handsome woobie being treated narratively as more important than the human damage he caused. When Annie persuades Lia to let her return, she doesn't do so by pleading clemency for Mitchell. She does so by pointing out that letting Nina, George and their baby pay for what Mitchell did isn't any more just than the sufferings of Lia's family. And when Annie, George and Nina talk about Mitchell's fate, it's Annie who points out that even letting Mitchell go is making a choice, and accepting responsibility for every victim Mitchell kills from this point onwards. In terms of how romances between reformed (or not so much) killers and their female love interests usually go, both in fanfiction and in canonical sources, this is nothing short of revolutionary.
And Annie was critisized accordingly. But not as much as Nina, who as I recall was hated and condemmed from the moment she responded to figuring out the truth about the massacre by throwing up and then calling the cops. By surfing through friends' friend lists, I came cross some entries of someone who had just watched s3 for the first time, and big surprise, Nina still gets hate for the same reasons. How dare she be "judgmental" of Mitchell, how dare she endanger the supernatural community, da capo, al fine. Leaving side Doylist circumstances, this particular storyline could not have played out earlier than s3, because not until then was Nina a regular - and there needed to be one who was not enamored with Mitchell to begin with, and who had a different perspective on the whole cover-up principle. As I mentioned: Nina's reaction in early s2 to the hospital being used to cover up a vampire kill now looks like great foreshadowing. It's not that Nina is incapable of deception and manipulativeness for cover-up purposes - both the hilarious variety, such as in 3.01. when she gets George out of prison just minutes before both of them have to transform into wolves, and the darker variety, such as when she reduces the hapless social worker played by Nicola Walker (Ruth from Spooks!) to tears by gaslighting her in order to prevent the authorities coming to the house. It's no coincidence that her key exchange with Mitchell takes place immediately after, when his "well done" compliment causes not just her "I'm not proud of it" reply but the blistering "there is a poison in you" remark. She is not judging what she can't understand; she understands all too well. And she rejections the rationalizations and excuses for it. Oh Nina, I'm going to miss you so, so much, more than ever.
Other thoughts:
- s3 had a lot of female scriptwriters. Must try to pay attention whether this will be true in the next season as well.
- Nina/George remains the sole regular/regular romance I have shippery feelings for (recurring character/regular wise, I can get behind Tom/Alison, and guest star/guest star, behind Adam/Yvonne)
- not that I'd ever deny George loved Mitchell and vice versa, it's just that early life saving and being cajoled into society aside, this was none too good for George
- while I love Alex and Tom too much to wish the next two seasons away (used to love Hal, too, but the bar massacre put an end to this), this really would have been the best ending for the show. With the story of the vampire regular taken to its logical conclusion and the werewolf and ghost regulars determined to take on the future, dangerous as it may be.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/916133.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
What I had forgotten was that despite the clear narrative structure from the get go, the first half has surprisingly many lighthearted moments. Welll, even Macbeth has the porter's scene. Seriously, though, there is a lot of comedy going with the tragedy, and sometimes in the same scene. For example: Mitchell is presented with a lot of unforgiving mirrors this season, but the first sight of Graham the fanboy, dressed and styled in a perfect copy of Mitchell's leather and black hair look, and mirroring his posture exactly still made me smile. And despite knowing what will happen between seasons - SOB! - so did George and Nina tramping through the woods, with George making bad "cub" puns while the two of them hold hands and are generally adorable parent to be. Or their "we were in a cult" scene with George's mother. Or Annie being flattered as hell by Nancy (unknowingly) fangirling her tea making skills. And when I first saw Tom and McNair in their introduction episode, 3.01, having a meal in a coffee shop I melted, because awwwww, Tom, and zomg, McNair.
On to what made s3 so unique in this and many another show. And yes, I do think without the Doylist reason that Aidan Turner had signed on to play Kili in The Hobbit, we might never have gotten it, Toby Whitehouse might not have found the courage, but Turner departed for New Zealand, and we got the anti woobification storyline to end all anti woobification storylines. It's not just that the massacre that was Mitchell's idea of a temper tantrum refuses to go away. It's that the season explodes excuse after excuse, story after story which Mitchell has been telling both others and himself about himself, until everything is stripped away, and then the logical consequence does actually happen, despite a short fake out making it look as if we'd get a vampire ex machina at the last moment.
In the opening episode, Mitchell sings a familiar tune: "Don't you get it, I want to be punished." And he probably believes that - at that moment. But then the female ghost he says this to, whom he doesn't recognize as one of the many he killed only a few weeks earlier, Lia, with a few words strips away this conviction both for Mitchell and the audience, when she tells him the date of his death is already set, and that he'll die by a werewolf. The moment Mitchell hears he will, in fact, die - the punishment he is ostensibly craving - he starts to do everything he can to avoid that fate. (Sidenote: the fact that Lia actually doesn't have the power to arrange his fate but started a mind game in revenge for her death is important, of course. Mitchell's fate, as she later says, is one he created for himself. If he had responded differently, if he had made other choices at any point during the season, it would not have happened.) And then the ongoing question of the season is "how low can Mitchell sink?"
Pretty damm low. When George and Nina befriend Tom and McNair, Mitchell immediately concludes McNair is the werewolf destined to kill him, and sells him to other vampires. When a resurrected and amnesiac Herrick shows up and Mitchell realises this could give him the clue for his own resurrection, he first tries to reawaken Herrick's blood thirst and then very nearly feeds Nancy the police woman to him, changing his mind only in the proverbial last second. In between, the reasons he gives for his own survival and for keeping the truth about the massacre from Annie and (as Mitchell thinks) George keep changing: it's because Annie would be heartbroken. No, it's in order to protect the supernatural community. No, it's because he, Mitchell, would be the persecuted victim by the witchhunting humans once the secret gets out. And for all that Mitchell occasionally indulges in the traditional penitent vampire "I keep seeing their faces" speech, not only did he fail to recognize Lia at the start of the season but he absolutely refuses to take in Annie's point near the end of it about the victims' families and their right to closure. What eventually shocks Mitchell into accepting his death are his ties to George and Annie; the realisation of what turning a blind eye in the name of love has done to George. It's not that Mitchell was unable to be genuinely repentant; but he could be only over people he had emotional ties with. The reality of citizen X and said citizens right to live, I think, escaped him by the end, having gotten lost many years before.
In the opening episode, you get an illustration of this when Lia and Mitchell make their tour through Mitchell's past. His first victim in WWI, shortly after his becoming a vampire, was a comrade, and Mitchell is guilty and very repentant. He gave the man poison before drinking his blood so his victim wouldn't feel his death. A mid-1960s-victim, Sally, by contrast, lies around naked like thrown away trash, and when Lia points out that having sex with her beforehand wasn't necessary if it had been solely about the unstoppable blood lust. Sally was used in both capacities because it was convenient. And the boxcar 20 victims, to whom Lia herself belongs, are so anonymous to Mitchell he can't even recall what they looked like despite them having been his most recent kills.
In all other seasons, Being Human lets their regular male vampire struggle with blood abstinance, gives us temptation scenes, and at least one fall. Not in season 3. In this season, when Mitchell is at his worst, he doesn't drink one drop of human blood in any episode. (I checked. Not even when he's offered some in a glass by a voluntary donor.) "There is a poison in you that has nothing to do with being a vampire", Nina says to him mid-season, and she is and isn't right about that, because Mitchell's biggest flaw - the need to survive at any cost, at anyone's expense, while needing to see himself as the victim and hero (something he finally recognizes and spells out in the harrowing scene with Herrick and George in the season finale) - is both an excellent metaphor for what vampirism, at its core, is, and a very, very human thing writ large. In minor ways, I'd say most people are like that. The survival instinct is quintessential for the species, after all, and we all would rather see as as the heroes and victims than as the villains of our own stories. It's just that Mitchell takes it to horrendous degrees, until he finally realises that there is just one way to stop the cycle, "end the story" for good.
S3 brings back the class coded treatment of vampires, as well as vampire racism towards werewolves, in a big way (and with a lot of satire), but it also introduces the single vampire Being Human in five season shows us whom we never see or hear killing a human being, and to our knowledge never has. That's Adam, frozen in time as an eternal teenager but in actuality 40 something years old. Now given that every other vampire we ever meet eventually falls off the wagon, the odds aren't exactly in Adam's favour, but in terms of what the show does with him on screen I find it both fascinating and logical that Adam is the exception. I was careful with my phrasing earlier when I said Adam never killed. Of course he did feed, and he did do damage, albeit a lot subtler than the rest of vampdom. In his s3 introduction episode, we briefly meet Adam's parents, who after he got turned managed to keep him alive (so to speak) without letting him become murderer by being his food supply until old age took them. It works on a metaphoric level - parental love as self sacrificial, but also the need to keep a child as an eternal child, which not only keeps the child in that role but also means the parents never have their own life. Near the end of the episode, Nina and George are willing to adopt Adam, and are sketching out a future in which they'll first introduce him as a younger brother, later as their child, and eventually grandchild. Adam, however, who was a teenager in mind as well as in body until then shows signs of growing up by stating that this is what his parents did, and what he let them do: build their lives around him. And he won't do it to George and Nina. It could have come across as a cheap plot device to explain why Adam doesn't stay as a regular (though we'll see him again in s4), but it doesn't, because it works with the theme of vampirism as feeding off other people, and the freedom of choice. Adam makes several choices in that episode - George and Nina (and a difficult life) over the satirized comforts of the affluent vampire couple willing to wine and dine him, but also letting go of George and Nina and try to live on his own - and they are all about growing up, letting go, taking responsibility for his own actions. Which makes him an important character to have, in this season of all seasons.
Also introduced in s3 are a father-son pair of werewolves, McNair and future regular Tom, and they, too, offer comments on choices, responsibility, love. I once joked that McNair is Angel's Daniel Holtz written as a good guy, and there is some truth in that (notably in his final episode), but he's also a counterpoint and parallel to Herrick, who in a way created him (by letting then human McNair fight against a werewolf, whom McNair defeated but not before the werewolf scratched him), and who will eventually kill him. McNair, in his werewolf state, killed Tom's biological parents and scratched baby Tom, then, once human consciousness returned and he realised Tom was still alive, adopted him, raising him in the belief that they were biological father and son until Nina figures out the truth. It makes McNair a morally ambiguous character; since BH werewolves can't control themselves towards strangers, the deaths of Tom's parents and Tom's infection were accidents, and he couldn't exactly leave a werewolf baby to social services, but keeping up the lie instead of telling Tom the truth once Tom was old enough to understand was wrong. (Lies to your nearest and dearest being very high on the BH scale of wrongness, and inevitably resulting in disaster, as Mitchell among others can testify.) However, Tom's ability to forgive McNair once the truth highlights the human capacity for forgiveness in a positive way. And also is interesting counter point to George implicitly and finally explicitly forgiving Mitchell; as Mitchell says to George in the finale, what Mitchell did to other people isn't for George to forgive - that's forgivness as enablement, whereas Tom can forgive McNair because McNairs actions affected him, not other people.
McNair is eventually unable to let go of the past as far as he himself is concerned - the fact that he decides to go after Herrick on his own after realising Herrick is in the house, as opposed to talking to George, Nina and Tom about it, dooms him - but he is able to want a different life for Tom; his last message to Tom is one of love, wishing a non-hunter future for Tom instead of dooming him to a path of vengeance the way McNair doomed himself. This ability to put someone else first is perhaps what is the saving grace in the BeingHumanverse for several of the morally ambiguous characters, and it's certainly what differentiates the unhealthy co dependent relationships from the functional ones.
For the former, look at Herrick and Mitchell. Herrick as written in season 1 is a standard master vampire trying to lure/blackmail/threaten his disobedient offspring back, with Lucien LaCroix and the Lestat from Interview withe Vampire (though not the later novels) as obvious predecessors. His lines aren't original, just the casting, because taking a short and stocky middle aged character actor like Jason Watkins made such a refreshing change to how these guys usually look like, plus the actor was really good. I still wasn't thrilled to see him back in the s2 tag scene. But then s3 came along and there, too, completely changed my mind. Just as Mitchell in s3 doesn't get a "will or won't he fall of the wagon?" storyline yet again, Herrick doesn't get a "will he manage to cause the vampocalpyse this time?" story. First of all, he starts out as amnesiac, which not only gives Watkins some acting muscles to stretch but also offers the show the chance to explore what is and isn't in Herrick's nature. (Oh, and it comes in handy for the seasonal "how low can Mitchell sink?" question of course. Starting with the egotism of "why does he get to forget not me?" and moving on all the way to nearly fed policewomen and cage scenes, but also the oddly graceful and peaceful responsibility taking final scene between them.)
Amnesiac!Herrick, not aware that he's a vampire, is still quite capable of verbal cruelty (poor, pathetic Kara, driven to suicide!) and manipulation (Kara again, and he also unsucessfully tries it with Annie). But he is not necessarily evil, and in fact even after learning blood will cure him from his feeble state and raving hunger puts up quite a struggle not to kill. His attic scene with George is so deliciously twisted not because Herrick is being mean (at this point Herrick genuinely doesn't remember George or his own history), but because of who Herrick used to be, because George killed him, and because Herrick delivers actual paternal advice on how to handle impeding fatherhood to George - which George takes. While he immediately hones on to the fact Nina is his best chance at protection, spots her doubts about Mitchell (who for unknown reasons threatens him) and seeks to exploit them in his own favour, his attachment to her and gratitude is quite sincere. Even once Herrick has regained his memories, he could still choose to be differently. He doesn't. But that is not because he needs blood; it's his own choice, after the initial one to let Nina go, to return and stab her (note: a very human way to kill, well, try to, since Nina survives it, though that wasn't Herrick's intention), to put vengeance above a shot at a new life. No wonder the soundtrack plays "History Repeating" when Herrick regains his memories. And this, of course, dooms Herrick. But not before the interaction between him and Mitchell has made George the last of Mitchell's unforgiving mirrors. Herrick's inability to let Mitchell go - both in the sense of letting him be someone other than a vampire in Herrick's own image, and in the sense of becoming indifferent to him or get rid of him for good - is part of their creator/created relationship, which you can read as a variation of the parent-child theme (and thus as the opposite of McNair and Tom.) (Though I bet that had Herrick been played by a young handsome actor, the Mitchell/Herrick slash would have shot through the roof.) As I mentioned in my s1 rewatch post: when Mitchell in the s1 finale offers to fight Herrick, he expects to lose and be killed, and the world to be doomed anyway. It's still part of his need to read himself as the hero/martyr. When, by contrast, he kills Herrick in the s3 finale, he does so because Herrick won't stop killing and because the returned Herrick is partly his responsibility. And he does it without any self righteousness or taking the moral high ground. It is, as mentioned, a scene with an odd grace and sense of peace, and of rare maturity on Mitchell's part.
Speaking of maturity: Annie early in the season, in her falling-in-love-with-Mitchell phase, feels younger than she did in s2. Watching this so shortly after watching s1 makes these scenes even more uncomfortable than they were the first time around, because Annie's behaviour really is almost identical to how she was around Owen (before her memory unblocked, and she remembered he had killed her). If this wasn't set up for the reverse as Annie starts to investigate the massacre and her fantastic response to it in the later half of the season, I would call it a serious blemish of the season. Incidentally, about the Annie/Mitchell romance in general: I hadn't recalled it started as a mind game of Lia's just as the self fullfilling "werewolf shaped bullet" prophecy did, i.e. before Lia gives Annie the idea there could be something romantic between her and Mitchell, it never occurs to her. For his part, the only time Mitchell ever showed sexual interest in Annie pre s3 is in the extremely creepy scene when he finds her in the kitchen directly after committing a massacre. But given Mitchell's propensity for romantic savior figures, I can easily buy him turning Annie into one in s3, given her interest and given that he is on the lookout for a "noble" reason to justify his continued survival. Now if the writers expect me to believe Mitchell and Annie in the "you were the love of my long life"/"and you were mine" exchange, they failed, though it's IC for both of them to say that at the point they do, but making Mitchell/Annie a dysfunctional romance was totally worth it for the dramatic deconstruction of the "bad boy saved by the love of a noble woman who really understands him/ bad boy just needs a hug" trope. In the episode that directly parallels Annie's relationship with Mitchell to Kara's with Herrick, I was during first broadcast hoping that this was the intention, and indeed, that's how it eventually played out. Annie's reply to Mitchell's "but I love you" (after her discovery of the truth about the massacre), her "do you have any idea how inadequate that sounds?", her listing the victims and their families when he protests he needed to keep the truth from her because she gave him a reason to go etc., her "maybe you thought that it it was worth it, that we were worth it, but what the hell made you think I would?" - her absolute identification with Mitchell's victims, not Mitchell, all this is balm to anyone who got well and truly sick of the sufferings of the handsome woobie being treated narratively as more important than the human damage he caused. When Annie persuades Lia to let her return, she doesn't do so by pleading clemency for Mitchell. She does so by pointing out that letting Nina, George and their baby pay for what Mitchell did isn't any more just than the sufferings of Lia's family. And when Annie, George and Nina talk about Mitchell's fate, it's Annie who points out that even letting Mitchell go is making a choice, and accepting responsibility for every victim Mitchell kills from this point onwards. In terms of how romances between reformed (or not so much) killers and their female love interests usually go, both in fanfiction and in canonical sources, this is nothing short of revolutionary.
And Annie was critisized accordingly. But not as much as Nina, who as I recall was hated and condemmed from the moment she responded to figuring out the truth about the massacre by throwing up and then calling the cops. By surfing through friends' friend lists, I came cross some entries of someone who had just watched s3 for the first time, and big surprise, Nina still gets hate for the same reasons. How dare she be "judgmental" of Mitchell, how dare she endanger the supernatural community, da capo, al fine. Leaving side Doylist circumstances, this particular storyline could not have played out earlier than s3, because not until then was Nina a regular - and there needed to be one who was not enamored with Mitchell to begin with, and who had a different perspective on the whole cover-up principle. As I mentioned: Nina's reaction in early s2 to the hospital being used to cover up a vampire kill now looks like great foreshadowing. It's not that Nina is incapable of deception and manipulativeness for cover-up purposes - both the hilarious variety, such as in 3.01. when she gets George out of prison just minutes before both of them have to transform into wolves, and the darker variety, such as when she reduces the hapless social worker played by Nicola Walker (Ruth from Spooks!) to tears by gaslighting her in order to prevent the authorities coming to the house. It's no coincidence that her key exchange with Mitchell takes place immediately after, when his "well done" compliment causes not just her "I'm not proud of it" reply but the blistering "there is a poison in you" remark. She is not judging what she can't understand; she understands all too well. And she rejections the rationalizations and excuses for it. Oh Nina, I'm going to miss you so, so much, more than ever.
Other thoughts:
- s3 had a lot of female scriptwriters. Must try to pay attention whether this will be true in the next season as well.
- Nina/George remains the sole regular/regular romance I have shippery feelings for (recurring character/regular wise, I can get behind Tom/Alison, and guest star/guest star, behind Adam/Yvonne)
- not that I'd ever deny George loved Mitchell and vice versa, it's just that early life saving and being cajoled into society aside, this was none too good for George
- while I love Alex and Tom too much to wish the next two seasons away (used to love Hal, too, but the bar massacre put an end to this), this really would have been the best ending for the show. With the story of the vampire regular taken to its logical conclusion and the werewolf and ghost regulars determined to take on the future, dangerous as it may be.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/916133.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.