My first impulse was to describe tonight’s season finale of Being Human as underwhelming, but that’s probably an unfair word to use, in that it suggests I had high expectations that weren’t met. In truth, “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Me Killing You”—one more horrible, horrible title for the road—was probably the finale this season deserved. It wasn’t particularly exciting or surprising or game-changing. It had a handful of nice character moments, but the big dramatic scenes mostly fell flat. All too appropriately for a Xerox of an already-existing show, it mainly just went through the motions.
Sally, who spent much of the season just sort of hanging around, will apparently continue to do so, as her doorway to the beyond has vanished while she was at the hospital helping tend to the gravely wounded Aidan. There’s no particular explanation for this, although we can draw the conclusion that, in staying by Aidan’s side, she’s shown the great door monitors in the sky that she’s not ready to abandon her new friends just yet. She’ll presumably be able to play a more active role next season, as she’s now endowed with the ability to manipulate physical objects, and thus no longer reliant on Josh to turn the pages of her newspaper. (The Herald, Sally? Seriously?)
To the surprise of no one, Josh is still in the running for the title of wishy-washiest man in Boston. He writes a letter to Nurse Nora, presumably coming clean about everything, but when she reads it, it turns out to be nothing but a compilation of all his usual platitudes. Luckily, for those of us hoping for something—anything—to eventually happen in this storyline, she spots him heading for the hospital basement for his monthly transformation. As it turns out, Josh might have been better off telling her the truth much earlier, as Nora is actually a surprisingly good sport about the fact that her boyfriend turns into a giant dog. It’s not all puppies and rainbows, however, as she apparently suffers a miscarriage just as Josh is wolfing out. Not only that, but she’s got a few fresh scratches on her arm, which may eventually lead to the happy couple picking out matching his-and-her kennels.
The biggest letdown of the night is the vampire showdown that’s been teased for weeks now. Aidan survives his near-fatal staking with the help of old girlfriend Celine, while Bishop recovers from his own wounds by feasting on Sully the cop. Josh and Sally come up with a plot to lure Bishop to the hospital basement so Josh can go all Cujo on his ass, but that turns out to be a ruse to get dog-boy safely out of the way. Instead, Aidan and Bishop have their final battle in an abandoned warehouse (always a fresh location for such things), where Aidan finally prevails by garroting Bishop with a strand of barbed wire, causing his head to pop off and turn to dust. Sure, it sounds cool, but for some reason this sequence was garnished with some exceedingly cheesy slow-motion effects that completely took me out of the moment.
That’s about it, aside from a handful of flashbacks to the first meeting of Aidan and Josh, none of which added anything to my understanding of their relationship. The shrug-worthy tag at the end of the episode has Hegeman notifying Aidan that he now runs the city, and that “she wants to meet you.” Chills I did not get. Honestly, my favorite part of the episode was the scene immediately preceding that one, with our supernatural trio sitting in their smoke-damaged living room, shooting the shit about farmer’s markets and taking Krav Maga classes. In a way, that makes this finale a microcosm of the season as a whole. The characters could be engaging and fun to hang out with, but all too often, the show insisted on putting them through familiar paces, always leading back to the same conclusions we’d already drawn. I wish I could say “A Funny Thing Happened” offered up an array of exciting new possibilities for a second season, but I’d be lying if I said I can’t wait to see it.
Stray observations:
- Once again, a supernatural Mark Pellegrino character has been reduced to ash. Where will Pellegrino take his malevolent charisma next? (I hear Two and a Half Men is looking for a new actor.)
- Is this roughly how the first season of the British show ended? One thing that might make me a tad more enthusiastic for season two would be some indication that the American version will become much less reliant on its predecessor from now on. Even though I haven’t seen the original, I’ve read the comments here from those of you who have—and very few of the comparisons have been favorable to the U.S. series.
- What did everyone else think? Anyone planning to stick around for season two?