Greetings SciFi/Fantasy Fans!
Spoiler Alert: The following is a complete recap/review of Being Human, Episode 108 (Children Shouldn’t Play With Undead Things). If you have not yet seen this episode and prefer to watch it without spoilers, stop reading now and check your local listings for opportunities to watch the episode. Right now only episodes 1-3 are posted at Syfy.com, with a promise for more full episodes to be available there starting on April 1.
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This week’s episode is built around the idea that we all lie to ourselves and each other, some more successfully than others. The opening voiceover:
One of mankind’s greatest abilities is the power to lie. Whether it’s for good or bad, profit or survival, we bend the truth. It’s a skill we pick up early and hone over time. Pulling the wool over the eyes of our parents, our teachers, our boss, even ourselves. We tell ourselves we’ll lose weight, quit smoking, that at the end of the day, we’re really a good person. What happens when we call our own bluff, when we can’t convince ourselves that deep down we really aren’t the stuff of nightmares?
[Awesome song playing the opening sequence by The High Dials, called “Killer of Dragons.” You can see the music video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQtHM_uibEU.]
This week’s action starts out with Aiden (Sam Witwer) doing a little surruptitious video viewing in his bedroom. He has hidden Rebecca’s (Sarah Allen) vampire erotica DVD between the pages of a book. The viewing doesn’t get very far, though, because Josh pops in to get him. Sally (Meaghan Rath) is insisting that Josh (Sam Huntington) and Aiden take her to the bar.
At the bar, they see Nora (Kristen Hager) with a man who turns out to be a Dr. Reed who works at the hospital. [Am I crazy or did the hospital have a different name during the first few episodes? It is now the Suffolk County Hospital.] Sally goes over to eavesdrop and decides Nora’s interaction with Dr. Reed is too much like a date and causes the good doctor’s beer to shatter. Sally wants Josh to take the opportunity to go over and talk to Nora, but Josh is uncomfortable and leaves. Sally did say the Josh was rockin’ the sweater vest.
The next day at work, Josh mops the floor while he and Aiden watch Nora with Dr. Reed. As Aiden tells Josh that he should definitely have made a move last night, Sally pops in for a visit. Aiden is glad to see her because he wants to show her something. He takes her to the original hospital building that was built in 1878 and closed down in 1989. He wants Sally to see it because it is extremely haunted. Sally is nervous and doesn’t want to go in by herself, but Aiden says he can’t go with her because he is responsible for some of the ghosts in there. Reluctantly, Sally goes in. What she finds is a corridor that slowly fills with deeply unsettled ghosts and ghostly messages inscribed on every available surface, mostly either desperate pleas for help to move on or looking for some lost loved one. Sally is really freaked out.
As Aiden walks home from the hospital, he encounters two neighborhood bullies picking on Bernie (Jason Spevack), the little boy that lives across the street. Aiden gets rid of the bullies by outing one of them as a bedwetter. I guess that enhanced vampire sense of smell can be a blessing and a curse. Bernie has forgotten his keys and his mom won’t be home for a while. He asks Aiden if he can wait for his mom at Aiden’s place in case the bullies come back. Aiden definitely thinks it is a bad idea, but finally agrees.
Nora approaches Josh at the hospital and asks where he has been hiding. Nora asks about Josh’s sister, Emily, and small talk quickly moves to Josh telling Nora that he happened to see her with Dr. Reed at the bar. He takes the opportunity to clarify with Nora whether her outing with Dr. Reed was a date. He also says he wants to go out with her again, and she invites him to her place for dinner that same night. While they are working out the details, Sally pops in right behind Nora and starts shouting at Josh about what she has just seen and experienced in the old hospital wing. Poor Josh is having a terrible time trying to hear Nora over Sally’s shouting, and trying to respond to Nora coherently. Sally gets exasperated and knocks over a cart just down the hall. This freaks Nora out and she leaves, after confirming Josh will be coming over for dinner that night.
At the house, Aiden is playing Go Fish with Bernie. When Josh and Sally get home, Josh is excitedly sharing the news that Nora had been at the bar with Dr. Reed for an after-dinner drink—not a date—and Josh has a date with her tonight. At the same time, Sally is calling Aiden names for sending her into the freak show hallway of death. Josh is surprised to see a kid in the house, but completely understands the problem when Bernie tells him about getting bullied. Josh seems to be very familiar with the details of what it is like to be a victim of bullying. Josh distracts Bernie so Aiden can go into another room to talk with Sally. Sally is really angry but Aiden was just trying to help her get a different perspective on her situation. He tells her that if she doesn’t start doing things differently, after a while she will be just like the creepy spirits she insists are not like her, “searching for the pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t even exist anymore.” Sally forgives him (sort of) and asks about Bernie. She says, “Are you telling me you’re a kid person?” Aiden flashes back to a scene from his life, a happy time with his son. His reverie is interrupted by Bernie’s mom, Cindy (Cindy Sampson) arriving to pick up her son. She is upset that Bernie has gone into a stranger’s house but she also seems a little taken with Aiden.
As Josh prepares to head over to Nora’s for his big date, Sally checks him out to make sure he is properly prepared (antiperspirant and breath being the two major considerations). Sally has no sense of smell anymore and Aiden thinks Josh just smells like dog, so neither are any help in that regard. Josh is worried because this is the night before the full moon and he knows that on the eve of transformation he is more aggressive than usual. Sally and Aiden encourage Josh to “be the wolf.”
The date is a big success, at least most of it. Josh and Nora have finished their meal and work their way through some awkward small talk, but then Nora makes the first move and it looks like they are going to go to a higher level of intimacy. But as Josh starts to let go and really experience the moment, a low growl escapes his lips. Nora doesn’t notice but Josh is a little freaked out. He jumps up, makes some lame excuse, and leaves Nora standing in her apartment wondering what just happened. [The song playing during this scene is called “New Kanada” by Solid Gold.]
Aiden arrives home again to see Bernie hanging out on the steps. Bernie invites Aiden to play with him and Bernie’s mom gives permission. She says something I didn’t quite understand. She tells Aiden, “I guess there’s no guidebook for how to handle this, is there?…Letting him go. Be a normal kid and all that.” I wonder what she means by that. Is there something about Bernie that is not normal?
Back at the house, Josh is vacuuming the same spot over and over. Looking up from the newspaper, Sally asks if he wants to talk about whatever is bothering him. He tells her that when he was with Nora, he growled. Nora didn’t notice but it bothered Josh because he lost control. Sally insists that Josh deserves to be with Nora but Josh feels that Nora deserves to be with someone normal, like Dr. Reed, instead of someone like Josh. Sally just tells Josh that his life, even as a werewolf, is far better than her existence, which is no life at all. She feels like he is only a wolf one day a month and that the rest of the time he gets to have a job, friends, all the things that make up a normal life. Sally says she would kill to have his life or any life.
At the Park, Aiden is kicking the ball around with Bernie. He teases Bernie about playing outside instead of being indoors playing videogames. Bernie talks a little about his father. He says he doesn’t really remember him, but he remembers that his dad had a boat and he remembers going out on the boat once. Aiden shares that when he was young he wanted to take over his dad’s printing press but the war interfered (he doesn’t say which war, of course). Bernie thinks it’s cool that Aiden was a soldier and wants to know if he ever killed anyone. Aiden evades the question, saying there is nothing good about war. As they talk, Bernie trips and falls, scraping a small cut on his hand. He tries to show it to Aiden, but Aiden looks away. I wondered about that, since Aiden works with bleeding people at the hospital all the time. Was it because he felt something for Bernie that he was afraid to look at his bleeding hand? Wouldn’t he also smell the blood and be drawn to it anyway? What would be the additional harm in looking? By his expression, I thought at first that Aiden saw or smelled something in Bernie’s blood, maybe something wrong with it. A disease maybe? But apparently not. Anyway, as they are standing there contemplating Bernie’s injured hand, Rebecca shows up.
Aiden goes over to talk with Rebecca, who claims she had nothing to do with Marcus’s attack on Emily outside the bar. In fact, she didn’t even know about it until Aiden tells her, right then, in the park. Aiden is definitely very drawn to her. They hold hands and stand very near each other, breathing each other’s scent. It is a very intimate moment in such a public place with little Bernie right there. Aiden, eyes closed, experiences some flashbacks of Rebecca’s snuff film (a.k.a. vampire erotica), making his awareness of her and his attraction to her even stronger in this moment. But he gets it together and, as he moves to go back to Bernie, Rebecca says she has been watching Aiden with the boy and thinks he must have been a good father once.
Back at the hospital, Josh hurries down the deserted corridor, heading for the safety of his basement room. It is getting late and he will change soon. Unexpectedly, Nora appears in front of him in the corridor and insists that they need to talk right now. She pulls him into one of the rooms and locks the door. She thinks she knows what is going on, and why Josh ran out the night before just when things were heating up. But it is not that Josh is shy; quite the opposite. When she asks Josh if he is attracted to her, it only takes moments for him to go for it. Josh is an animal (not literally yet!), aggressive, passionate, and Nora seems to like it. [The song playing during this scene is called “Iamloved” by Catlow.]
Meanwhile, back at the house, Aiden and Bernie have just finished watching Evan Almighty, Bernie’s favorite movie. Aiden suggests Bernie should try some Three Stooges and sends him upstairs to Aiden’s room to pick out some DVDs. While Bernie is upstairs, his mom comes by to pick him up and ends up flirting with Aiden.
Meanwhile, Nora is appreciating the results of Josh’s unexpected advances but Josh is panicking. The moon is almost up and he has to get to his basement room fast. He runs out without a word and makes a bee line for the basement, but when he gets there, two nurses are hanging out, smoking and talking. Now he is really in trouble. He runs back to the house and tells Aiden and Sally to move as many breakables as they can and get out of there. He is going to have to transform in the house and there are only a few minutes to spare. Aiden cranks up the stereo to mask Josh’s screams and runs out but Sally stays behind. Josh can’t hurt her and she wants to see what happens to him. What she sees is a lot more than she ever imagined. As Josh the wolf leaps to attack her, Sally disapparates and reappears out on the front stoop with Aiden. Now she understands what Josh goes through every four weeks and what he becomes.
In the morning, Josh moves through the devastation in the kitchen, picking up broken bits of crockery and piling them into a green garbage bag. When Sally comes down, he apologizes to her, saying he never wanted to bring that to their home. But Sally apologizes to Josh for her remarks of the day before, about how at least he has a life that she would kill for. Now that she has seen him as the wolf, Sally understands Josh’s reluctance to form personal relationships. But now Josh wants Sally to get out of there. Nora is coming over, he has to clear away as much of the mess as possible, and Sally tends to make strange things happen around Nora (like bursting beer bottles and toppling hospital carts).
Aiden is helping Josh clean up the wreckage when Bernie’s mom comes to the door. She is holding a broken DVD and she is really angry. Of course the DVD is Rebecca’s vampire porn which Bernie took when he went to Aiden’s room for the Stooges discs. Bernie’s mom thinks Aiden is some kind of pervert that he would expose a little boy to pornography. Luckily for Aiden, all Bernie and his mom saw of the movie was the first part, before all the vampire teeth and blood. But the damage is done. Aiden tries to explain, and Bernie admits he saw the disc in Aiden’s room and just took it, but Bernie’s mom warns Aiden to stay away from her son. Josh is angry with Aiden too, because Aiden lied about how he felt about that disc and his promise to get rid of it.
Nora shows up while Josh is taking out the trash. They have a good talk about what happened the night before, Josh apologizes for running out on her like that, and they agree that although they both enjoyed the animal sex, they both usually prefer a little romance. And then the kissing begins.
Aiden, in the house, sees Bernie playing outside through the window curtains. But Bernie sees him too and waves, and Aiden hastily moves away.
Sally goes back to the haunted hospital wing and inscribes her own plea on the wall: Sally Malik. Ghost. Can you help me move on?
[The song playing during the closing sequence is called “Save the Day” by Pacifica (now spelled “Pacifika“). It seems to be out of print and I was not able to locate an mp3 online for download. Interesting side note: Pacifika also did song called “Me cai” on a Season 2 episode of True Blood.]
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Being Human returns on Syfy Monday evening at 9 PM EST / PST.
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