“Our lovers sculpt us. They define us.”
Being Human
This week on Being Human: Annie decides to haunt Owen, Mitchell joins the evil vampires because his neighbours were nasty to him that time, and George potters along pretty much as usual.
I see on Wikipedia, the Fount of All Knowledge, that this is the penultimate episode of the first series. This makes sense, on the whole, because it’s a story about endings. The conclusion that it comes to is that Endings are Human, and thus Good. The evil vampires are evil not because they go round killing people but because they deny the people they turn an end; they deny them their humanity.
And: Owen the Evil Psychopath is evil because he’s not “human” either. Because “human” in this context means “freaks out when there’s a ghost”. This is why Annie gets to win, in the end: her desire for revenge is, Mitchell tells her, human, even if she’s not. And her human desire for revenge dovetails neatly with her human desire for an end. For closure.
So: it’s good to be human. Humanity is important, because reasons. Sometimes humans are human and sometimes they’re not very human at all. And sometimes things that aren’t human are actually human after all. Humanity isn’t a DNA code; it’s a state of mind. And so on.
This is not actually a terribly coherent message, and nor is it particularly groundbreaking, but it doesn’t particularly need to be. As drama, it may not be memorable, but it’s gripping. Owen is utterly chilling and utterly rage-inducing. George and Nina are perennially adorable, even when they have about three lines each. Aidan Turner is present. And that ending!
The point, I suppose, is that sometimes (only sometimes) platitudes are enough.
The English Student 