Last week we were treated to Part 1 of “There Goes the Neighborhood,” the pilot episode for Syfy’s new series, Being Human. This week the story continues with “There Goes the Neighborhood: Part 2.”
Spoiler Alert: The following is a complete recap/review of Being Human, Episode 102 (There Goes the Neighborhood: Part 2). If you have not yet seen this episode and prefer to watch it without spoilers, stop reading now and go to Syfy.com where you can watch the full episode online. You can also watch it for free on iTunes.
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And now, on with the show!
In Part 2, the opening sequence is once again narrated with a voiceover track:
“Life is a series of choices. As it turns out, death is the same. Not for the ones that are ready. They embrace their fate, move on. For the rest of us, we linger. After our survivors pray and throw dirt on our coffins, we’re still waiting. Because for some of us, there’s a bigger question. ‘What am I now?’ ‘Where do I go from here?’ We find ourselves in an eternal nowhere, between ‘human’ and ‘thing.’ Monsters. Some of these monsters refuse to simply accept what they’ve become. Some don’t. Which leaves us with the most important choice: Do you accept what you are, or do you refuse? And which is the true curse?”
The visuals taking place during the narration describe Sally, Aiden and Josh’s first moments after their respective transformations into ghost, vampire, and werewolf.
Sally (Meaghan Rath) moves unseen through the mourners at her wake. She tries to interact with some of the people there, shouting “I’m right here!” but no one hears. Later, presumably after some days have passed, the house looks empty and everyone has gone but Danny. He takes a last look around, Sally reaches out to touch him but he passes through her as he heads toward the door.
Next we see Aidan (Sam Witwer) dressed as a soldier, staggering through the woods after a battle. He comes across Bishop (Mark Pellegrino) and some other soldiers checking the bodies of the fallen. Aiden wakes as a vampire, lying on a pile of the dead.
[Are there any military history buffs out there? Aidan and Bishop’s uniforms appear to be from the American Revolutionary War, which took place from 1775-1783. The brief synopsis of this episode on Syfy.com says that this scene is happening during the Civil War, which was from 1861-1865. Last week, Bishop indicated that Aidan had been a vampire for about 200 years, which would make it more likely he was turned during the War of 1812. Can anyone clear this up for me?]
I am not quite sure what happened to Josh (Sam Huntington). It looks like a camp of some kind, things are strewn about and Josh is lying bloody on the ground next to a dead man. Cops with flashlights are there and a helicopter can be heard flying nearby. I guess Josh was attacked by a werewolf but was only wounded. [Syfy.com says “Josh was attacked by what he thought was a wolf….”] Nothing in Josh’s conversation last week with his sister gave any indication that he told his family about a violent incident. There doesn’t seem to have been an investigation into Josh’s possible involvement in the death of the other man. Who was the other man? Was he the werewolf? Was it a friend Josh had been camping or hiking with? I am so confused!
In any case, Josh has no idea what has happened to him until he suddenly begins his first, painful transformation. [When it happens, he doesn’t know what’s going on, right? Why does he run into the woods? If you were suddenly in pain, wouldn’t you seek medical attention? Wouldn’t he have at least waited until the first part of the change took place before running away from civilization? Or are we meant to think it was instinctual? Again, confused.]
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Back to present day, quick flashback of Aidan draining Rebecca (Sarah Allen), and –surprise! Rebecca wakes up in the morgue with Bishop there to greet her. I guess she wasn’t actually dead after all, and I don’t think Aidan is going to be very happy to see her made into a vampire. What is Bishop up to?
At the end of last week’s episode, Josh was locked in a basement room with his sister, about to transform into a werewolf and kill his favorite sibling. Meanwhile, Aidan was indulging in a little blood offering at Bishop’s vampire nest. Well, good thing he was not so far gone on the blood that he couldn’t answer the phone or pick up his messages. Aidan hears Josh’s desperate plea for help and shows up just in time to grab sister Emily (Alison Louder) and get her out of there just in time. Not only is she saved from certain death at the hand of her own brother, Aidan manages to get her out before she can see the change happen. Emily still has no idea that Josh is a werewolf.
Aidan tells Emily that Josh has a “condition” and that he is “dealing with some stuff, yeah, but aren’t we all?” Emily thinks Josh had a nervous breakdown two years ago and ran away from his family. She says, “I can’t believe my sweet brother went mad” and reveals that their mother also had some kind of “incident” that is a big family secret. When Aidan tells her that “we’re all a little cursed that way,” Emily’s response is, “Please. You’re hot.” Awkward! Kind of a weird response from a girl with a girlfriend, talking to a guy about her family’s history of mental illness, and in the next breath she is referring to her girlfriend as a “goddess.”
In the morning, Josh returns home to find Sally deep in thought on the sofa. She feels badly that she was no help the night before. She says she tried to leave but she just couldn’t. But—good news—Danny (Gianpaolo Venuta) is coming over! Josh is not too excited about it, but Aidan tells him that Sally really, really, really wanted to see him. Apparently she talked Aiden into calling Danny over to repair the backed-up kitchen sink.
Josh is worried that Danny will somehow be able to see Sally, and that if that were to happen it would be very bad for everyone. Aidan insists that Danny would have to be “pretty open mentally” in order to see her, but Josh is unconvinced. Eventually they all agree that Sally will stay upstairs, just in case. [I was puzzled about the idea that Danny might be able to see Sally. He had never seen or heard her before, and yet Josh was making a very big deal about the possibility. After watching the first episode of the British version of the show it made a little more sense. In that version, the ghost becomes more and more visible to people the more time she spends with her supernatural roommates. She is even able to make tea, carry things around the house, clean up, and generally appear normal most of the time.]
When Danny arrives, it turns out that he doesn’t know anything about plumbing and says he will have to come back with some books. But before he leaves, he asks the guys if everything has been okay with the house. Previous tenants told him that it was “creepy.” Aidan tells Danny that he thinks “every home has an echo of the people who lived there before,” and, looking at Sally, “There’s a good echo here.”
At this point we finally get to hear Danny’s version of how Sally died. He says, “We’d just moved in, and the electrical was all, you know. We watched Marly & Me but she made me turn it off the second he had trouble getting up the stairs. We went up to bed. She had this thing where she would always get up to go to the bathroom the second after she got into bed. And there was no light in the hall and she turned the wrong way and…[Aidan: “She went down the stairs.”] And when she didn’t come back to bed I went to see if she was okay. I found her. Right there [at the bottom of the stairs].”
Later, at the hospital, Cara the replacement nurse (Katy Breier) makes a play for Aidan, suggesting that they meet at the bar near his house. Aidan is seduced by the sound of the blood pulsing through her veins, but shakes it off and leaves her standing at the nurses’ station.
Meanwhile, Josh steps outside the hospital, when he sees someone that looks a lot like Rebecca gazing at an informal memorial to the missing girl. He runs after her but imagine his surprise when she attacks him inside a nearby gardening shed. She is just about to bite down on his exposed neck, but she can’t stand his scent! [I guess Twilight isn’t the only vampire/werewolf scenario in which vampires find werewolf smell repulsive.] Rebecca is nearly as surprised to find out that Josh is a werewolf as Josh is to find out that Rebecca is a vampire
Josh is furious with Aidan for making Rebecca a vampire (and probably for lying to him as well, letting him believe that she was just missing). He finds Aidan in the locker room and confronts him about what happened to Rebecca. When Aiden protests that he did not know, Josh replies, “You didn’t know what? That you turned her into a monster or that she’d be such a good one?…What’s the point of any of this, of playing house, of drinking beers, of joining Costco, if you’re just gonna kill all of our friends?”
Now Aidan is angry too. He asked Bishop for help cleaning up an unexpected death, not this. In response, Bishop accuses Aidan of being selfish and excuses his actions by saying they just wanted to know what was so special about this one since Aidan rarely slips like that. But, he says, Rebecca is “a little wild,” and suggests Aidan could help to break her. But “we worked hard on orientation, Aidan. Don’t go putting silly ideas into her head.”
When Aidan finds Rebecca in the park, she is (understandably) bitter about what he did to her. Aidan wants them to go away together and help each other to be strong, but Rebecca says she is not sure that she wants to “take advice from the man who fell off the wagon into my neck.” She is enjoying how it feels to be a vampire, and apparently she ha some major family issues that Aidan did not know about before. She says, “Dad never thought I’d amount to much. Wait till I grab him by the throat and eat his heart out.” When she starts talking about sucking the life out of her sisters’ kids, Aidan just walks away.
Meanwhile, Danny returns to the house with his plumbing tools and how-to books. No one is home (except Sally) so he lets himself in. Sally talks to him while he works, but he does not see or hear her. Frustrated, she shouts, “Danny! Do you even care?” and the pipe bursts. Josh comes home to find Danny wrestling with the broken pipe and Sally apologizing for somehow causing the pipe to break. She tells Josh, “I just got upset. I’ll fix it, I’ll figure it out. I’ll think happy thoughts or something. Do you know what would make me happy? Tell Danny to stop ignoring me.”
Danny and Josh agree that he will shut off the main and send over a plumber. But as Danny passes by Sally on his way to the door he stops and looks uncertain, but then moves on. Afterward, Sally tells Josh, “Maybe I’m not supposed to leave. Maybe he couldn’t see me but he felt something. How could I not pursue that?” But Josh tells her, “Because you’re a monster.” But Sally still wants to try to make Danny see her, even if it might mean she will have to go through the pain of losing him all over again.
Aidan is drinking away his sorrows at the local bar. Cara is there too, and when she sees him she goes over to his table. At first he discourages her attentions, but he can hear the blood pulsing through her veins and he invites her to sit and have a drink with him. Knowing he is dangerously close to causing another death, he calls Josh and asks him to come to the bar. Josh understands right away and starts running. But now Rebecca arrives at the bar and joins Aidan and Cara at their table.
She does her best to make makes both of them uncomfortable and Cara eventually rejoins her friends. Rebecca wants Aidan to feed with her but he refuses, insisting that they should help each other stay clean. She says, “You screw me, you kill me, you never call. You really know how to mess with a girl’s self-esteem.” Rebecca invites a man standing at the bar to leave with her, which he eagerly accepts. Aidan intervenes, but while he is convincing the man to just go home, Rebecca disappears.
Josh arrives at the alley behind the bar and sees Rebecca there. But it’s too late. Cara is on the ground, bleeding heavily from a wound to her neck. Aidan comes out and he and Josh try desperately to stop the bleeding, but there is nothing they can do. Rebecca tells Aidan to just “give her a sip, she’ll be fine.” Josh begs Aidan to do something to save Cara but Aidan refuses. He would rather see her die than turn her into a vampire.
While they wait at the hospital for the official pronouncement of Cara’s death and the subsequent police investigation, Josh realizes that Cara will be traced to Rebecca, Rebecca to Aidan, and everything they have done to have a “normal” life will be over. But Aidan, though saddened, is not worried. He points out that vampires have been around for thousands of years and explains that the vampire network is wider than Josh might suspect. Bishop is down the hall, the official police investigator.
Back at the house, Sally and Josh watch Aidan from the window, sitting on the front stairs. Josh says, “I never really thought about it before, how hard he must work every single second of his life, not to be one of them.” Sally asks, “Do you think he should’ve saved her?” and Josh tells her, “I think he did“.
I hope you have enjoyed the review of the pilot of Being Human. Check your local listings for air times.
Being Human returns on Syfy Monday evening at 9 PM EST / PST. Well that’s all for now, scifi fans.
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