Being Human – Josh gets wolf and women lessons

The main reason I didn’t enjoy last week’s episode was because the three roommates didn’t interact much at all, and instead had three separate story lines. This week there was still a story line for each of the main characters, but they at least overlapped a little bit. Ray’s quickly growing disdain for Aidan, and Aidan’s advice to Sally made the plots seem less static and less sterile.

I begrudgingly like Ray and I’m glad he’s staying around for at least one more episode. With the mousy nurse getting killed in episode two, the cop from Aidan’s past killing himself, and the ’80s ghost moving on last episode, it’s a nice change of pace that there’s another minor character besides Bishop and his crony that will have more than one episode to develop some dimensionality before leaving and/or dying.

It was cool to see Josh gain some confidence in his control over the monster side of him. The rump roast trick was clever, and it’s good to know he doesn’t have to worry as much about killing some innocent campers once a month. We’ve seen previews of Josh’s god-awful pickup line for weeks now, but after seeing Ray try to teach him how to pick up women, I actually understand why he thought to try it. It was still painful to watch, but it didn’t seem so out-of-character when you realize he was trying to branch out.

Aidan’s torrid relationship with Rebecca was pretty short (although the episode must have taken place over the course of at least a few weeks since Josh had turned more than once in the episode). While she stopped blaming her daddy for her blood lust, she still annoyed the hell out of me. I’m pretty glad she left, although she did act as an interesting foil for Aidan. While you’d think having someone like himself around would make it easier for him, they just became each others enablers. Last week, An wrote about the blood and gore in True Blood, Being Human, and The Vampire Diaries. While the show has the least amount of blood, this week’s Being Human had a good amount of bloody sex scenes, thanks to Aidan and Rebecca. I’ll admit, it was pretty sexy … until the next scene when the blood had dried on their jaws so they kind of looked like marionettes. Not so sexy.

Speaking of the vamps, the tension between the bloodsuckers and the werewolves is something not really explored until tonight — heck, we’ve barely been told they know about each other as organized groups. My friend Nick mentioned in the comments of my 2nd review that in the original series vampires might hate werewolves, but there was also a good amount of bitter respect for the lycanthrope’s sheer power. Even if the writers changed things up, the relationship between these two groups should have been well-defined before bringing in a character like Ray.

Sally’s part in the episode had me questioning my previous guess that Danny was behind her murder. I’m still not changing my guess, because this could all be a trick to make the viewers think Danny is a good guy. Plus the preview for next week’s episode hinted that her death is not as clear as it seems. However, it was kind of great to see Sally be truly selfless and let Danny move on with another woman … who is also her best friend. Yeah, I don’t know if I could be that selfless, especially if I had to stay around and see their romance bloom.

Best moment of the episode? When Aidan tries to calm Rebecca down, only to walk into the bathroom to reveal how shaken he is himself. It was a short scene, but really powerful, and one of the best from Sam Witwer so far.

Clacked by Katie Schenkel
on Feb 08, 2011 @ 09:00 EST5EDT