Being Human Revisited: Season 4
Aug. 22nd, 2013 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe fourth season is the last one that was included in the Being Human box I bought when I visited London during the Easter holidays, so you won't get an s5 rewatch from me (also, it was too recent). But there will be fanfic recs!
Firstly, by and large, I still think the show succeeds in pulling off a near complete cast change (becoming complete by the last episode), and endearing the new cast to the audience. Which is a particular British rabbit to pull out of an hat so quickly, and yet, it does.
Mind you: I also still think it should have managed to find another way to do so as far as George and Nina are concerned. Mitchell's ending was organic and grew out of his story. Theirs was not. Whatever happened between seasons to make Toby Whitehouse decide to write both characters out entirely - maybe Russell Tovey wanted to leave, or whatever, I honestly don't know -, it could have resolved in another way. Still with two transition episodes, only, say, George and Nina after having a newborn baby (and having gotten rid of Wyndham) get the chance to go emigrate to fictional guaranteedly vampire free country X. Originally they plan to do this with Annie, and also plan on returning once their child has grown up a little (there is absolutely no shame in wanting to bring your newborn baby out of a likely fighting zone), with Tom deciding to stay on to fight the good fight. In order to fake the vampires out re: the baby, Annie is looking for her fellow ghost who has one from s2, and the idea is she'll stay a few days longer in Barry, highly visible with the ghostly kid, until George, Nina and their baby have gotten away to no vamp will know where, and then she'll rejoin them via rent-a-ghosting. Only things get pear-shaped; the ghostly baby and his mom have passed over, somehow Annie ends up with a real baby by accident whose parents were killed by supernatural incident x, and because every vamp now thinks THIS kid is the war child of prophecy, she feels obliged to stay in Barry and protect it. Simultanously Hal, Pearl and Leo arrive as they do in actual s4 canon, and then events pretty much proceed as they do in the season proper. (Annie would come to love this child just the same, and instead of feeling the extra obligation of caring for the child of her dear dead friends, she's feeling the extra obligation of caring for a child who would never have been in any danger if not for her subterfuge attempt.) Just one possible scenario.
While we're talking what ifs: I also wonder whether the show shouldn't have been more daring and varied the gender within their various ghost-vampire-werewolf trinities. Okay, you can't make Leo a woman because the Leo and Hal backstory is tricky enough as it is (if you count webisodes, Leo is a black man in chains when meeting Hal who put him there), but why not make Pearl a man? Or why not make Hal a woman, come to think of it? Lady Kate instead of Lord Harry. You can still have the relationships with Tom and later Alex develop the same way. (No change to Alex. Alex is my darling best beloved after Nina left us, and she must stay as she was.) Yes, Tom has been raised by McNair with an old fashioned attitude, and there's his natural sweetness, but I think any notions of chivalry towards Female!Hal, aka Kate because Shakespeare, would be counteracted by her being a vampire and giving him the same attitude male Hal did in the beginning.
Now on to the season proper. Which I like a lot - amazingly, given it's the one where the vampocalypse finally comes to town, it also feels like a breath of lighter air after the tightly written darkness of later s3, the introduction of the new characters is handled well, and you know, I do approve of the fact Annie stays for this one more season. Because Tom and Hal needed someone at the start who was in a position of semi-authority over them - Tom looks up to her, and it's Annie's house, so Hal is obliged to her - in order to make it believable why they would live together before they start to bond, for starters; and also because the heartwrenching arc she goes through - having to kill the child she has come to love along with the Old Ones in order to save humanity, with no one else to give her an out or take that burden from her - is in a gruesome yet effective way a culmination of Annie's story in the way George's and Nina's endings at the start of the season are not. Annie's big moment in the previous season was putting the lives of Mitchell's past victims and the lives of his future ones before her affection for him, or rather, see in that affection not something that's worth ignoring said lives but rather something that obliges her to make him stop and atone, not to enable him to continue. It figures Annie would end up with the most gruesome "life of the one versus life of the many" scenario of them all.
The MacGuffin of letting adult, grown up Eve find out this is the way to save humanity and return from the future (in a ghostly way) to engineer her own death manages to pull this off without ignoring that baby Eve, too, is a person with a right to live. It's also a great deconstruction of the savior/chosen one trope without making the chosen one in question evil or a caricature or incompetent.
And while I'm still on the arc, before getting to the characters: this, too, would have worked better than the Devil the next season does as a final arc. You can of course hold the opinion Being Human should never have any arcs and big bads at all and only been about daily interaction problems and joys between its main characters. But the show has been toying with a vampocalypse scenario since Herrick brought it up in season 1, and the Old Ones have been name dropped throughout the third season, so after that build up, some delivery was due. Not that I don't still dislike the show doing the usual Nazis-as-pop-culture appropriation in its futuristic imagery of those scenes set in adult Eve's world, but you've heard that rant from me more than once already. Still: Mr. Snow, the Old Ones and the threatened future of a vampire run world which in one timeline already happened work as antagonists in a way Captain Hatch/The Devil does not in s5. Part of this is because the show wisely keeps Snow and the other Old Ones - but Snow is the one doing the talking, and Mark Gatiss is truly magnificent in the role, creepy to the max without having to kill a single person - off stage until the last episode, thus building up anticipation and avoiding two traps: letting your supposedly fearsome foe go through a weekly "curses, foiled again!" routine, or letting him/her do exactly the same things other opponents also managed, when he's supposed to be so much worse than them.
All the Old Ones are off stage for most of the season, that is, except for Hal, and of course the fact that Hal over the season is someone the audience bonds with makes the revelation in the last two eps that in Eve's timeline, he has become a global scale mass murderer such an effective blow, too, and a goal to be avoided by stopping the vampocalypse from ever happening. Having a sympathetic character revealed to be a villain in an apocalyptic future isn't new - several shows and comics have done it - but if done well, it works, and it also ties with one of the shows more optimistc aspects: that fates still come by choice, and thus can be averted by other choices. With Hal we're back to the "regular male vampire struggles with being on the wagon" storyline the show finally stopped giving Mitchell in s3, but Hal's personality is different enough, and the major narrative space is given not to this but to his bickering and bonding with Tom, so that it doesn't annoy me, not even upon rewatch. That Tom, despite being a vampire slayer (in addition to being a werewolf) by raising and inclination, would still come to eventually like and befriend Hal is believable not just because of the aforementioned natural sweetness but because Tom is the character who last season upon discovering that his father wasn't his biological father but the man who killed his biological parents and turned Tom himself into a werewolf was majorly upset, yes, but also came to the conclusion he stil loves his adopted father, wants to be with him and judges him by intentional actions only.
The Tom and Hal double act provides much of the comedy relief through the season, and Hal's reaction to the indignity of having to work at a fast food restaurant still cracks me up. ("Peasants were once flayed for looking at me the wrong way. I had a shield! A red one!") (And again I say, suck it up, Hal - if it's good enough for Buffy Summers to earn cash that way, it's good enough for you, and Annie and Tom were right: you can't expect Tom to finance your (un)life.) Speaking of Hal's social interactions, it's interesting that the incredible awkwardness of his every scene with Alex as long as she's still alive immediately vanishes after her death. Part of this is that Ghost!Alex chews him out instead of trying to flirt with him, of course, which allows him to fall into bickering mode with her as well, but I think it's also that Hal didn't really see her as a person before, just a walking temptation. And here's another reason why despite of two previous seasons with Mitchell struggling to stay on the wagon I wasn't irritated to see this with Hal again - I don't think the show ever did something as drastic with Mitchell as it did by letting Hal lick Alex' stale blood, complete with maggots, the same that are also by then in her dead body, from the floor. It's as graphic and undignified an illustration of the depth of addiction as you can get, and the truth behind that visual of looking at desirable necks. Similarly, Hal's OCD and strict observance of rules might come across as quirky at first but the longer the season continues the more you understand he's really not kidding when he says he needs them to hold on. ( By contrast, Hal in full blood drinking mindgame playing psycho mode in the Cutler flashbacks moves fluid and easily, and of course has no problem with the social graces, charming the soon to be doomed Mrs. Cutler when saying hello.)
Speaking of Cutler: Season 4 boasts of some of the most memorable guest characters. (Including of course Alex who won't become a regular until s5.) If Mr. Snow being off stage for most of it helps making him an effective menace for the finale, then Nick Cutler being on stage throughout makes him such a three dimensional, memorable and ultimately tragic Little Bad long before his origin story with Hal is revealed. The show also uses Cutler to lampshade the obvious problem with its Vampocalypse on the horizon - that it's all very medieval in planning and doesn't take into account modern technology and the way humans would respond through it - though it never tells us how the vampires get around that problem in Eve's timeline. Not via Cutler's plan, which these days has eerie current day politics resonances, with its "get people to give up their freedoms and bow to the vampires by presenting them with theterrorist werewolf bogeyman who is worse and whom they need protection from " principle, as Cutler keeps getting dismissed by every older vampire throughout the season. And yet Cutler's tragedy isn't that he's actually more clever than most of them (and good at manipulation, see him dealing with Tom and Allison), but his desperate need of approval and the fact he's not suited to be a vampire at all; that he was made into a monster by Hal who needed a lawyer and who did such things because he could and then stuck in an existence he had never chosen without any possibility to return to his old one.
Then there are Yvonne (who comes with returning guest star Adam, still managing to be the only vampire of the show who hasn't killed someone), who is the best and most creative version of a succubus I've ever seen in any media, book, comics and tv alike, and Allison, who manages to be adorable and geeky without being trite, who actually looks like, say, Hermione was supposed to (nothing against Emma Watson, but the only Harry Potter film where they bothered to make her look like the book descriptions of her was the first one), and Regus ("I am the vampire recorder"), whose "Team Edward" t-shirt stays as hilarious upon rewatch as it waas the first time around. I think Yvonne as a 40 something school mistress who looks just like a 40 something school mistress could only exist on British tv; that the revelation about her succubus nature comes with the particular horror of having to wonder whether any emotion anyone felt for her can be real (given anyone she touches HAS to be in love with her) in addition to realising she killed her previous lovers without meaning to is delivered from Yvonne's pov is crucial for the episode to succeed. She comes across as a real person whose story for a short time intersects with that of the regular characters, not as a prop just there to teach the regulars something about themselves. And the fact it ends well for her and Adam still makes me smile. (Despite, yes, the awareness that if Yvonne ever gets sick of Adam, that cancelling-each-other's-dangers-out-arrangement runs into a heavy problem.)
Allison is and isn't a girl of the week; she's a first love for Tom, yes, but that he falls for her is prepared in previous eps (that developing fondness for female barristers, which Allison is preparing to be), and her influence on him is shown after she leaves again, most obviously, but not solely, in the scene where Tom talks to Cutler using talking points as he learned from Allison. Most importantly, though, again: Allison feels real, and watching her episode, I could imagine her life before and after it. And be profoundly grateful she makes it out of the show alive, because losing one female werewolf I love has been bad enough.
And then: Alex. Who gets sneakily introduced as a girl of the week as well, set up to be fridged, only for that trope to be turned around completely. I already mentioned how her mode of interaction with Hal changes immediately once she's become a ghost. That's also when the full force of her personality hits the audience, and rewatching the scene, I was as much in love as ever. It's not just the Scottish bluntness and refusal to let Hal make her death about himself. It's that on the one hand, you have her vibrancy and courage, but on the other, she's also allowed vulnerability - the reality of her death doesn't hit her emotionally until they leave the basement, but then it hits her hard. And, as the fifth season will highlight, she truly has a wicked sense of humour. (Since Ghost!Alex is only in the s4 finale, and I don't have s5 with me, I ended the season by going to YouTube to rewatch all the great Alex webisodes that formed additional s5 material and were put up here.) Also, Alex briefly mentioning her brothers and the fact there is no mother reminded me of something I already thought when watching Nina's scene with George in s3 when they talk about her pregnancy - in this show, if anyone has parent issues, they're Mummy issues, not Daddy issues. It's Annie's mother who needs closure with her after her death. Nina's mother, as we findout, abused her. Alex' mother left not just Alex' father but Alex herself and her three brothers, leaving Alex with a lasting grudge and wound, though, this being Alex, it usually comes out in sarcasm. (Tom, who could have Daddy issues - given the way McNair came to be his adopted father - doesn't. Hal could have them if he were Henry V., but to my everlasting regret, he's not, and we never hear more about his human background than that he was born in a brothel.) You could make something out of the fact that Annie, Nina and Alex all at different points have to take on motherly roles, but that doesn't define any of them; it's just one side of several in their stories.
In conclusion: s4, with the caveats uttered at the start of this review, was and still is a success with me. And thus I end my rewatch, and move on to the fanfiction!
Firstly, by and large, I still think the show succeeds in pulling off a near complete cast change (becoming complete by the last episode), and endearing the new cast to the audience. Which is a particular British rabbit to pull out of an hat so quickly, and yet, it does.
Mind you: I also still think it should have managed to find another way to do so as far as George and Nina are concerned. Mitchell's ending was organic and grew out of his story. Theirs was not. Whatever happened between seasons to make Toby Whitehouse decide to write both characters out entirely - maybe Russell Tovey wanted to leave, or whatever, I honestly don't know -, it could have resolved in another way. Still with two transition episodes, only, say, George and Nina after having a newborn baby (and having gotten rid of Wyndham) get the chance to go emigrate to fictional guaranteedly vampire free country X. Originally they plan to do this with Annie, and also plan on returning once their child has grown up a little (there is absolutely no shame in wanting to bring your newborn baby out of a likely fighting zone), with Tom deciding to stay on to fight the good fight. In order to fake the vampires out re: the baby, Annie is looking for her fellow ghost who has one from s2, and the idea is she'll stay a few days longer in Barry, highly visible with the ghostly kid, until George, Nina and their baby have gotten away to no vamp will know where, and then she'll rejoin them via rent-a-ghosting. Only things get pear-shaped; the ghostly baby and his mom have passed over, somehow Annie ends up with a real baby by accident whose parents were killed by supernatural incident x, and because every vamp now thinks THIS kid is the war child of prophecy, she feels obliged to stay in Barry and protect it. Simultanously Hal, Pearl and Leo arrive as they do in actual s4 canon, and then events pretty much proceed as they do in the season proper. (Annie would come to love this child just the same, and instead of feeling the extra obligation of caring for the child of her dear dead friends, she's feeling the extra obligation of caring for a child who would never have been in any danger if not for her subterfuge attempt.) Just one possible scenario.
While we're talking what ifs: I also wonder whether the show shouldn't have been more daring and varied the gender within their various ghost-vampire-werewolf trinities. Okay, you can't make Leo a woman because the Leo and Hal backstory is tricky enough as it is (if you count webisodes, Leo is a black man in chains when meeting Hal who put him there), but why not make Pearl a man? Or why not make Hal a woman, come to think of it? Lady Kate instead of Lord Harry. You can still have the relationships with Tom and later Alex develop the same way. (No change to Alex. Alex is my darling best beloved after Nina left us, and she must stay as she was.) Yes, Tom has been raised by McNair with an old fashioned attitude, and there's his natural sweetness, but I think any notions of chivalry towards Female!Hal, aka Kate because Shakespeare, would be counteracted by her being a vampire and giving him the same attitude male Hal did in the beginning.
Now on to the season proper. Which I like a lot - amazingly, given it's the one where the vampocalypse finally comes to town, it also feels like a breath of lighter air after the tightly written darkness of later s3, the introduction of the new characters is handled well, and you know, I do approve of the fact Annie stays for this one more season. Because Tom and Hal needed someone at the start who was in a position of semi-authority over them - Tom looks up to her, and it's Annie's house, so Hal is obliged to her - in order to make it believable why they would live together before they start to bond, for starters; and also because the heartwrenching arc she goes through - having to kill the child she has come to love along with the Old Ones in order to save humanity, with no one else to give her an out or take that burden from her - is in a gruesome yet effective way a culmination of Annie's story in the way George's and Nina's endings at the start of the season are not. Annie's big moment in the previous season was putting the lives of Mitchell's past victims and the lives of his future ones before her affection for him, or rather, see in that affection not something that's worth ignoring said lives but rather something that obliges her to make him stop and atone, not to enable him to continue. It figures Annie would end up with the most gruesome "life of the one versus life of the many" scenario of them all.
The MacGuffin of letting adult, grown up Eve find out this is the way to save humanity and return from the future (in a ghostly way) to engineer her own death manages to pull this off without ignoring that baby Eve, too, is a person with a right to live. It's also a great deconstruction of the savior/chosen one trope without making the chosen one in question evil or a caricature or incompetent.
And while I'm still on the arc, before getting to the characters: this, too, would have worked better than the Devil the next season does as a final arc. You can of course hold the opinion Being Human should never have any arcs and big bads at all and only been about daily interaction problems and joys between its main characters. But the show has been toying with a vampocalypse scenario since Herrick brought it up in season 1, and the Old Ones have been name dropped throughout the third season, so after that build up, some delivery was due. Not that I don't still dislike the show doing the usual Nazis-as-pop-culture appropriation in its futuristic imagery of those scenes set in adult Eve's world, but you've heard that rant from me more than once already. Still: Mr. Snow, the Old Ones and the threatened future of a vampire run world which in one timeline already happened work as antagonists in a way Captain Hatch/The Devil does not in s5. Part of this is because the show wisely keeps Snow and the other Old Ones - but Snow is the one doing the talking, and Mark Gatiss is truly magnificent in the role, creepy to the max without having to kill a single person - off stage until the last episode, thus building up anticipation and avoiding two traps: letting your supposedly fearsome foe go through a weekly "curses, foiled again!" routine, or letting him/her do exactly the same things other opponents also managed, when he's supposed to be so much worse than them.
All the Old Ones are off stage for most of the season, that is, except for Hal, and of course the fact that Hal over the season is someone the audience bonds with makes the revelation in the last two eps that in Eve's timeline, he has become a global scale mass murderer such an effective blow, too, and a goal to be avoided by stopping the vampocalypse from ever happening. Having a sympathetic character revealed to be a villain in an apocalyptic future isn't new - several shows and comics have done it - but if done well, it works, and it also ties with one of the shows more optimistc aspects: that fates still come by choice, and thus can be averted by other choices. With Hal we're back to the "regular male vampire struggles with being on the wagon" storyline the show finally stopped giving Mitchell in s3, but Hal's personality is different enough, and the major narrative space is given not to this but to his bickering and bonding with Tom, so that it doesn't annoy me, not even upon rewatch. That Tom, despite being a vampire slayer (in addition to being a werewolf) by raising and inclination, would still come to eventually like and befriend Hal is believable not just because of the aforementioned natural sweetness but because Tom is the character who last season upon discovering that his father wasn't his biological father but the man who killed his biological parents and turned Tom himself into a werewolf was majorly upset, yes, but also came to the conclusion he stil loves his adopted father, wants to be with him and judges him by intentional actions only.
The Tom and Hal double act provides much of the comedy relief through the season, and Hal's reaction to the indignity of having to work at a fast food restaurant still cracks me up. ("Peasants were once flayed for looking at me the wrong way. I had a shield! A red one!") (And again I say, suck it up, Hal - if it's good enough for Buffy Summers to earn cash that way, it's good enough for you, and Annie and Tom were right: you can't expect Tom to finance your (un)life.) Speaking of Hal's social interactions, it's interesting that the incredible awkwardness of his every scene with Alex as long as she's still alive immediately vanishes after her death. Part of this is that Ghost!Alex chews him out instead of trying to flirt with him, of course, which allows him to fall into bickering mode with her as well, but I think it's also that Hal didn't really see her as a person before, just a walking temptation. And here's another reason why despite of two previous seasons with Mitchell struggling to stay on the wagon I wasn't irritated to see this with Hal again - I don't think the show ever did something as drastic with Mitchell as it did by letting Hal lick Alex' stale blood, complete with maggots, the same that are also by then in her dead body, from the floor. It's as graphic and undignified an illustration of the depth of addiction as you can get, and the truth behind that visual of looking at desirable necks. Similarly, Hal's OCD and strict observance of rules might come across as quirky at first but the longer the season continues the more you understand he's really not kidding when he says he needs them to hold on. ( By contrast, Hal in full blood drinking mindgame playing psycho mode in the Cutler flashbacks moves fluid and easily, and of course has no problem with the social graces, charming the soon to be doomed Mrs. Cutler when saying hello.)
Speaking of Cutler: Season 4 boasts of some of the most memorable guest characters. (Including of course Alex who won't become a regular until s5.) If Mr. Snow being off stage for most of it helps making him an effective menace for the finale, then Nick Cutler being on stage throughout makes him such a three dimensional, memorable and ultimately tragic Little Bad long before his origin story with Hal is revealed. The show also uses Cutler to lampshade the obvious problem with its Vampocalypse on the horizon - that it's all very medieval in planning and doesn't take into account modern technology and the way humans would respond through it - though it never tells us how the vampires get around that problem in Eve's timeline. Not via Cutler's plan, which these days has eerie current day politics resonances, with its "get people to give up their freedoms and bow to the vampires by presenting them with the
Then there are Yvonne (who comes with returning guest star Adam, still managing to be the only vampire of the show who hasn't killed someone), who is the best and most creative version of a succubus I've ever seen in any media, book, comics and tv alike, and Allison, who manages to be adorable and geeky without being trite, who actually looks like, say, Hermione was supposed to (nothing against Emma Watson, but the only Harry Potter film where they bothered to make her look like the book descriptions of her was the first one), and Regus ("I am the vampire recorder"), whose "Team Edward" t-shirt stays as hilarious upon rewatch as it waas the first time around. I think Yvonne as a 40 something school mistress who looks just like a 40 something school mistress could only exist on British tv; that the revelation about her succubus nature comes with the particular horror of having to wonder whether any emotion anyone felt for her can be real (given anyone she touches HAS to be in love with her) in addition to realising she killed her previous lovers without meaning to is delivered from Yvonne's pov is crucial for the episode to succeed. She comes across as a real person whose story for a short time intersects with that of the regular characters, not as a prop just there to teach the regulars something about themselves. And the fact it ends well for her and Adam still makes me smile. (Despite, yes, the awareness that if Yvonne ever gets sick of Adam, that cancelling-each-other's-dangers-out-arrangement runs into a heavy problem.)
Allison is and isn't a girl of the week; she's a first love for Tom, yes, but that he falls for her is prepared in previous eps (that developing fondness for female barristers, which Allison is preparing to be), and her influence on him is shown after she leaves again, most obviously, but not solely, in the scene where Tom talks to Cutler using talking points as he learned from Allison. Most importantly, though, again: Allison feels real, and watching her episode, I could imagine her life before and after it. And be profoundly grateful she makes it out of the show alive, because losing one female werewolf I love has been bad enough.
And then: Alex. Who gets sneakily introduced as a girl of the week as well, set up to be fridged, only for that trope to be turned around completely. I already mentioned how her mode of interaction with Hal changes immediately once she's become a ghost. That's also when the full force of her personality hits the audience, and rewatching the scene, I was as much in love as ever. It's not just the Scottish bluntness and refusal to let Hal make her death about himself. It's that on the one hand, you have her vibrancy and courage, but on the other, she's also allowed vulnerability - the reality of her death doesn't hit her emotionally until they leave the basement, but then it hits her hard. And, as the fifth season will highlight, she truly has a wicked sense of humour. (Since Ghost!Alex is only in the s4 finale, and I don't have s5 with me, I ended the season by going to YouTube to rewatch all the great Alex webisodes that formed additional s5 material and were put up here.) Also, Alex briefly mentioning her brothers and the fact there is no mother reminded me of something I already thought when watching Nina's scene with George in s3 when they talk about her pregnancy - in this show, if anyone has parent issues, they're Mummy issues, not Daddy issues. It's Annie's mother who needs closure with her after her death. Nina's mother, as we findout, abused her. Alex' mother left not just Alex' father but Alex herself and her three brothers, leaving Alex with a lasting grudge and wound, though, this being Alex, it usually comes out in sarcasm. (Tom, who could have Daddy issues - given the way McNair came to be his adopted father - doesn't. Hal could have them if he were Henry V., but to my everlasting regret, he's not, and we never hear more about his human background than that he was born in a brothel.) You could make something out of the fact that Annie, Nina and Alex all at different points have to take on motherly roles, but that doesn't define any of them; it's just one side of several in their stories.
In conclusion: s4, with the caveats uttered at the start of this review, was and still is a success with me. And thus I end my rewatch, and move on to the fanfiction!
