When Humans Be Things: Part The Sixth

Hmm. I've managed to go a whole week again without putting up my thoughts on Being Human.

Here's the thing, though; I'm just not thinking about it at all, anymore.

It's not that last week's episode was bad. In fact, you could make a case for it being one of the strongest episodes this series, if not the outright winner. It's just that "this series" qualifier that's the problem.

So Annie finds a mystic and uses him to help ghosts talk to their loved ones. That's a perfectly reasonable idea, and it was done well, but it's just kind of... ordinary (within the context of a fantastical show, I mean). There's nothing to say about it, other than it was genuinely emotionally affecting (this may or may not be reflective of still having my Granddad's passing still on my mind, of course). The same is true of George's decision to move in with his new girlfriend and her child. None of it was at all objectionable (and I'm really getting to like Molly), but it pretty much just slides off the mind entirely. As ridiculous as Werewolf Tourettes was, at least that was something you could talk about. Mitchell didn't even have a story, just a drawn out scene of travelling to somewhere we assume a story might be. By now I'm not really considering each aspect of the story as I see it, I'm just noting it.

Of course, we're about to start the descent into the series finale, so I guess getting an episode which just feels like treading water isn't entirely surprising. I rather thought though that an upside to only getting 6 to 8 episodes a season would be that the filler episode was no longer something show-runners needed to resort to.

I really hope the next two episodes pick up. Maybe, as some have suggested, this is all just difficult second album syndrome. Or maybe it's simply that once the show's central concept stops being unusual and different in itself, there isn't anywhere else to go (though the brilliance of the Gatekeepers plot suggests otherwise, and once again makes me wonder what the hell they were thinking wrapping that up in two episodes). In either case, the news that Toby Whithouse has recently completed the first script for Season Three fills me with total ambivalence, and that's pretty clear evidence that something is wrong.