“Love should be the opposite of death.”
Being Human
This week in Being Human, George goes on a date, Mitch tries to help Lauren not kill people, and Annie meets a fellow ghost who tries to help her find her purpose in, um, death.
It’s an episode that plays rather cleverly with the twin themes of love and death, and the tricksy ways in which they seem to become intertwined. At the beginning of the episode, they seem quite separate: death (or undeath) is antithetical to love (Annie can’t be with Owen, George hardly dares to have dinner with Nina), and the forces of love and the forces of death are forever disparate. By the end of this third episode? Love has become a mask for death, a mask and a conduit.
Perhaps there is a Shakespearian pun here. There probably isn’t, actually, but it comes from the same Lacanian place as this episode does: the Real (the violent physical force of death, in both senses) erupting into the Symbolic (that is, romantic structures, hearts and flowers, the traditional trappings we associate with love rather than with lust). These are quintessentially New Adult characters learning that life (or death, haha) is rarely as simple as we’re taught to think it.
This is, then, probably the most moving and the most complex episode yet (not that that’s saying too much). I enjoyed it as you might enjoy, for example, a Jaffa Cake: sweet and moreish, goes down well, but not too much substance to trouble the living.
The English Student 