Being Human (US) 1.10: Doggy

[tartysuz]

Did that episode work better on paper than it did in actuality?



I had three big problems:

1. There was no context for Bishop's former personality: it just seemed like a random characterization to make a point about how he and Aidan have flipped roles. Also, Bishop's relationship with the nurse was completely uninteresting, so it didn't seem like much of a sacrifice when he killed her. The nurse was a really underdeveloped character. She was so placid that you had to wonder why Bishop even bothered to kill her, especially in a way that couldn't be written off as an accident (crushing her windpipe).
   
   
2. Cutting away from the werewolf fight was kind of a cheat, and since Josh was sitting there without a single scar, I thought I'd missed a scene. Anyway, the ratio of "talking about werewolf fighting" to "intensity of werewolf fighting" was out of whack.
   
   
3. Sally transported herself into the vampires' lair, and no one thinks this is a big deal? (And why wasn't Douglas, the older wolf, more curious about her, especially since she had dirt on Aidan that Douglas could have used as leverage with the other vampires?) Again, we seem to have skipped some important developments.
   

These problems make me a bit anxious for the series because they are very similar to the issues that the original Being Human had with being able to tell a story within the space allotted. The whole Aidan/Bishop thing would have been a lot more effective if we knew more about the dimensions of their relationship, the way that the back-in-time episode of Supernatural (4.03 "In the Beginning" -- written by Jeremy Carver, who co-wrote this episode of Being Human) was powerful because it overturned three full seasons of what we'd assumed was the nature of John and Mary Winchester's relationship with demon hunting.

In other news:



Sam Witwer's 1950s Aidan looks quite a bit like Jack Kerouac (above, left). Does this make Mark Pellegrino's Bishop the button-down, spouse-killing William S. Burroughs (right)?

The show has been making a correlation between being older and being stronger: the monster world is unnatural, inverted from the human world, where the young are stronger than the old. However, Josh beat the older wolf. But how? Sheer strength and will power? I couldn't tell because, once again, THEY CUT AWAY FROM THE FIGHT.

Killing people is also a right of passage on this show, but it's one that characters go through with reluctantly. Before the fight, Josh tells Sally: "I think I have to kill a man. That's not me. I can't do that." But kill Douglas he does. So evidently, Josh can do that, and it is him -- or at least the monstrous him. Similarly, Bishop chooses his monstrous identity over his human one by killing his girlfriend. And Aidan was the model of monster management by killing the boy that Rebecca turned. So killing people is a sign of growing up. Or growing into a monstrous identity.