Spoilers. For long stretches, Being Human's finale was quite poor. The threat posed by the vampire subculture is just too clichéd and laughable to be involving, and Herrick (Jason Watkins) is a delicious creep, but a very unthreatening head vampire. Even more so with his ridiculous fangs, so I'm glad they didn't make another appearance. Really, this was an episode of good isolated moments, a few silly sequences, and a half-decent climax let down by an unintentional laugh.Having been staked by Herrick, Mitchell (Aidan Turner) is recovering in hospital, confusing the medical staff because of an absence of any heartbeat, with loyal friend George (Russell Tovey) at his bedside. Annie (Lenora Crichlow) has missed her chance to leave this plain of existence through the ominous door to the afterlife, instead opting to ensure her friend pulls through. George protects Mitchell from further attacks, thanks in part to the presence of a chaplain, whose faith proves to be an effective barrier when two vampire goons arrive in the ward. Incidentally, the green fluorescent flashes of those neckbiters was the first vampire scene that chilled the blood to the right temperature.
George tries to reason with Herrick in the hospital canteen, urging him to end his feud with Mitchell, but clearly both are headed for a final confrontation to settle their differences. Mitchell is later restored to full strength, thanks to terminally ill ex-girlfriend Josie offering herself as a blood sacrifice, and Mitchell makes arrangements for a one-on-one fight with Herrick. Everything rests on Mitchell being victorious, too, as George will be hounded out of town if Herrick wins (likely ending his relationship with Nina) and Annie's earthly ties will be severed if Herrick goes through with his plan to raze their pink house to the ground.
It's not a bad way to position a finale, with every character facing great loss and the destruction of their friendlu trifecta, but the narrative was too thin to go the distance. This felt like a decent half-hour stretched to twice its length. There was a lot of heel-clicking as we awaited Herrick and Mitchell's fight, and too much filler without the benefit of a subplot. Herrick's Cornish dinner lady henchwoman was a particularly daft addition; a lame way to inject some comedy that just made scenes she appeared in feel silly.
It didn't help that an early flashback to Mitchell rescuing George from a group of vampires attacking him behind the café he was working in) proved more tense, exciting and emotional than the rest of the present-day scenes combined. I'd actually have enjoyed an entire episode focusing on George and Mitchell's early days together.
Still, the last fifteen minutes were fairly solid with some nice ideas -- involving a fun twist, as it becomes clear Herrick has actually agreed to fight George, not Mitchell. Inside the locked hospital basement, with a vampire versus werewolf bout about to get underway, Nina (Sinead O'Keenan) finally learns the truth about George, too -- arriving to witness her boyfriend's transformation through the door's peephole. Sadly, after a satisfying build-up and another superb performance from Tovey that got us psyched for battle, the resulting "fight" consisted of a rubber wolf marching over to Herrick and... well, eating him.
Now, I had my expectations set low because of budget constraints and the obvious difficulties in making a werewolf look convincing on-screen (even in expensive movies), but this was a major let-down. After all Herrick's trash talk, he barely lifted a finger to defend himself! And the wolf suit (itself so disappointing after the excellent transformation sequence) just begs the question: why didn't they opt to put lupine makeup on Tovey, a la Lon Chaney's Wolfman? We'd get a performance cruelly missing from the man-in-suit option.
Overall, episode six was something of a let-down, although Being Human as a whole was a very entertaining and occasionally rather beautiful horror-comedy-drama. Its great successes came in the allegorical moments and whenever George was on-screen, but it was mostly undone by the unconvincing way it handled the vampire subculture, and Aidan Turner just can't communicate he used to be a vicious killer.
Are we to believe that nice ol' Josie dated Mitchell in the '60s when he was at the height of his bloodthirsty ways? I just don't buy it. Nor did I like the sudden way Annie is spurred into action by a random ghostly visitor (one of the humans Herrick feeds from in the funeral parlour basement), and is suddenly endowed with awesome telekinesis to kick butt for a few minutes. Where did that all come from? Shame she didn't learn that last week; would have come in handy.
Still, maybe I'm being too harsh. Particularly for a BBC Three series, this was very impressive in most respects, and I'm hopeful creator Toby Whithouse learns from a few mistakes when planning the eight-part second season. He certainly leaves us with a few enticing moments -- the reveal that Nina was scratched (by George, I assume) and has therefore inherited the werewolf curse, and a coda with a half-crazy Owen spilling the beans to a white-haired old man who appears to be working for someone interested in "them" (supernatural beings in general, or Mitchell and George in particular?)
1 March 2009
BBC Three, 10pm
Writer: Toby Whithouse
Director: Colin Teague
Cast: Aidan Turner (Mitchell), Russell Tovey (George), Lenora Crichlow (Annie), Jason Watkins (Herrick), Dylan Brown (Seth) & Claire Higgins (Josie)
