Being Human #2.13 “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” Recap & Review

In the second season finale, Josh, Aidan and Sally decide lots of murder will solve all of their problems.  Clearly, there couldn’t be any complications or hurdles in doing these simple tasks, right?

Recap:

The three roommates cope with last week’s revelations and events.  Sally considers going through someone else’s door to get to limbo, but stops at the last minute. Aiden goes to see Suren, who says she left so Aidan could have real freedom.  Suren tells him that he is her weakness, and she could never be asked to watch him die.   Josh goes to Julia’s funeral in New York, but Emily tells him not to go in to prevent receiving the brunt of everyone’s anger.

After receiving a phonecall from the hospital, Josh returns to Boston to find Nora, who fell down the stairs during her surprise transformation in the eclipse.  Nora reveals that killing Ray would cure the entire bloodline—including her—but she’s happy Josh didn’t kill another man.  However, fed up from seeing the women he loves continually getting hurt, Josh makes up his mind to kill Ray that night.  Aidan, who has returned home, gives him the idea of trapping Ray in the same shed they faced the twins in, and Aidan will meet him there—as soon as he kills Mother.  Aidan is fed up with being kept from having love too, and decides that Mother has hurt enough people and deserves to die.

Flashbacks reveal that Aidan visited Suren every year on the anniversary of her burial for a while, and one year found Mother, drunk on blood, over Suren’s grave.  She drinks on Suren’s anniversary, and tells Aidan she is only hard on Suren because she wants her to be strong.  Back in the present, Aidan convinces Henry with his plan to help kill Mother at her house.  However, when he arrives, Henry and his allies have already been discovered, beaten and tied up, and Aidan is captured.  Mother makes an announcement to the Dutch, saying Suren will now be her successor as leader of Boston—as soon as she overcomes her emotions and kills Aidan, who is brought in.  Suren is unable to do it, and in response, Mother hugs her, comforts her, and stakes her.  She then throws Aidan in a coffin to have him buried, but Aidan tells her there is no worse punishment than a mother having to live with killing her own daughter.

Sally comes up with the idea of possessing Ray’s wife and calling him to fix her car on the side of the road; he falls for it, and Josh leads him into the woods with Hegeman’s gun.  However, possessing someone brings back Sally’s Reaper side.  Desperate to end it, she finds her mom at the hospital, and says she thinks she can go into limbo, find the answers she needs, and possibly find a way out.  The only way to do that is for her mother to shred her.  Her mom refuses, but Nora arrives, and Sally accidentally spills the beans about Josh’s plan to kill Ray.  Still feeling guilty, Sally returns home and sees her mom, who finally admits that she regrets not being in Sally’s life more and does want to spend time with her—causing her door to appear.  Her mom offers to let Sally go through the door, but Sally is unwilling to let her mom make that sacrifice.  Instead, Sally shreds herself.

Josh waits for Aidan to get to the shed, but when it’s clear he isn’t coming, Josh decides to shoot Ray anyway—only for Nora to come rushing in to stop him, distracting him and letting Ray escape.  Josh chases him down, and after a tussle, it ends in a standoff: Ray is pointing the gun at Josh, and Nora is pointing another gun at Ray.  Josh tells Nora not to take a chance; she should shoot him to save herself from the curse.  Two shots are fired.

In the empty Boston house, a radio spontaneously starts playing, and we hear Sally’s voice, begging for Josh and Aidan to help, and saying she’s made a terrible mistake.

Review:

Well, here we are folks.  The second season of Being Human started off a little rocky, but got top-notch (and in the overall TV landscape, highly underrated) in the last half.  A good finale wraps up the subplots, and either caps off the major arcs or moves them into a completely new direction.  While this episode isn’t a perfect finale by a long shot, it delivers some substantial action and exciting developments for next season, even in the midst of some problems.

Oddly enough, there isn’t much that really happens in this episode plot-wise.  Everything’s fairly straightforward with simple goals: Aidan wants to kill Mother, Josh wants to kill Ray, and Sally wants to kill herself.  It never strays from these goals, which keeps things very focused, even when divided among three plots.  While I’ve expressed my preference for one singular plot in this show, the “Triple A” structure is stronger than usual here because each main character’s plot manages to get an ample amount of screen time.  Even better, the each storyline crosses over with the other at multiple points, giving the episode a sense of cohesiveness.  Things flow at a brisk pace, quickly setting the pieces into place and giving plenty of attention to the three climaxes.

Acting-wise, the three leads put on some very strong performances.  Each character walked the line of desperate and distraught, bringing them to the disastrous decisions they make.  And while all of their decisions are arguably kind of stupid, the recent torturous events and the characters’ portrayals by Sam Witwer, Sam Huntington and Meaghan Rath makes it hard to blame them.  They still carry the idiot ball—Aidan even had it spelled out to him how bad his idea was—but it’s a believable idiot ball.  We all do beyond stupid things in desperation, and the climax was all about the consequences.  Maybe our everyday decisions don’t lead us to getting buried alive, or held at gunpoint, or caught in limbo, but we can still relate.

Most of the supporting actors did well, too.  We saw Dichen Lachman’s best (and final) performance this time around, for sure.  I’ll be the first to admit that Suren and Aidan’s relationship hasn’t really unfolded on screen very well over this season; there wasn’t much chemistry in the early episodes, the flashbacks with Henry didn’t make it seem like Suren cared about Aidan as much as he did her, and then out of nowhere we’re given a long, torrid history with romantic stories of black orchids.  There was genuine chemistry once they full-on described their love and not lust two episodes ago, but there’s a bit of a problem when that underlying love isn’t apparent until it’s spelled out completely.  So in terms of the season’s arc, that love story didn’t play out as well as it could have.  Episode-wise, though, Suren’s demise was awesome and heartwrenching, thanks to Lachman’s and Witwer’s performances.

On the note of Suren’s death, though, it was fairly predictable.  Either Mother or Suren was going to die, and while I’ll admit I was unsure if Suren would turn around stab her mother at first, once she broke down, it was no surprise that Mother would kill her.  However, predictable doesn’t always mean bad; the moment was decently executed, and it opens up a very intriguing side of Mother for next season.  Granted, I’m somewhat disappointed that Mother will be appearing more, since she’s the weakest recurring character and actress this season, but it does look like we’ll get more dimensions to her.  And who knows, maybe Deena Aziz will do better with this newfound guilt.  She was actually fairly strong in her drunken state in the flashback—the best she’s been all season—but when she’s collected and powerful in the present, she’s far too over-the-top and annoying.  So, here’s to hoping her guilt brings out the good stuff we saw in the flashback.

Though she didn’t have much screentime, Nora’s character now is interesting, albeit confusing.  She showed remorse in her return, but it’s still unclear if she wants to stay a wolf or not.  It’s possible that she’s partially happy Josh didn’t kill Ray because she could continue being the wolf, but her actions and Hager’s performance seemed to imply that she was being genuine with saying her “appetite was filled,” and it really is about not wanting Josh to commit murder.  While it’s nice to see Nora coming to her senses, it’s disappointing that one of the most intriguing character arcs of the season—Nora accepting the wolf—was basically resolved offscreen.  It seemed like there would be more to the story, but since nothing came of it here, what we see might be what we get.  Her heroism in the climax was still awesome, it just seems like an opportunity might have been missed.

While it was a cool shocker to see Scott the Reaper return once more, I was more surprised to see Sally’s mother thrown in—seriously, where has she been all season?!  Sure, she noted that she should have been there, but still.  This might have been the weakest part of the episode; the idea of Sally’s mother playing a role was fine, but we’d seen so little of her that it was hard to really care.  Any ghost friend of Sally’s could have been thrown in the same place (though I guess they’re all in limbo) but the problem is that it feels, again, like a missed opportunity.  We had one episode with her mom, who was extremely unlikable, then she disappeared, and now appears randomly again in a very pivotal moment.  Sure, it was a nice shocker for her to get her door, and she had a great reaction to Sally ripping herself apart (awesome moment by the way) but it hurt much of the emotion because, well, who cares about Sally’s mom?  It’s a frustrating element of this season that could have been explored more, despite her mom’s lack of likability.

The other disappointment was the lack of wrapping up or utilizing Henry or Brynn, the latter of which didn’t even appear.  They’ll play a part in next season, I assume, but it makes the seasonal arc as a whole feel a bit disjointed and unresolved.  Both were set-up with loads of foreshadowing to become powerful and vengeance-fuelled villains—like Bishop’s revelation in “Mama Said There’d Be Decades Like These,” for example—but neither did much towards the end of the season.  There were some parallels between Aidan appreciating Henry as a son compared to Mother and Suren, and even that seemed to be setting up something important, but nothing came of it.  This didn’t hurt the episode too much—again, the strength was how plot-light it was—but in terms of viewing this as the finale, it feels like two of the biggest characters and storylines introduced were sort of thrown by the wayside.  Instead we got Sally’s mother and Ray, who did play some big roles in the finale but were barely seen this season.

Despite all that, the episode was still fairly engaging.  As a finale, it unfortunately showed some of the season’s flaws in terms of flow and some plot inconsistencies, but the character arcs for the three leads were phenomenal.  As an episode, everyone brought their A-game, but while it was plotted very well, overall it was just okay.  Not quite the thriller “The Ties That Bind” was, not as emotional as “Partial Eclipse of the Heart,” and no shockers as big as “When I Think About You I Shred Myself,” but it still provided us with some genuinely great cliffhangers leading us into next season, and a sense of intrigue that could take the series in any number of directions from here on out.

Some stray tidbits:

• The last monologue of the season belongs to Sally.  It isn’t very memorable.
• Emily is a cool character when she’s not doing the annoying drunk college girl thing.
• Though I praised the episode on its brisk pace, it seemed to skip potentially pivotal scenes with Aidan at the beginning, such as Suren’s reaction when he sneaks in to find her, or his initial return home.  There was potential for good moments, but it felt awkward, like there were scenes cut.
• Between this and Smallville, I think we can safely say that Sam Witwer is really really good at angry, vengeful, crazed yelling.
• The ‘stache is back!  I know I hated it in its first appearance, but it really grew on me (no pun intended.)
• Mother’s analogy with the tigers licking the afterbirth and eating the weak babies was super creepy.
• Aidan was also oddly creepy in his scene with Henry: “I am very proud of the man that you’ve become.”  Too bad nothing came of it.
• The scene with Sally and Josh plotting the murder is hilarious. It’s basically the only comedy in the episode, but it’s perfect, and the kind of fun interaction season 2 as a whole was missing.
• Josh not being able to see Sally after being cured is very sad, and not something we often think about.  Their little moment when they say goodbye is really sweet.
• “I’m the monster they wanna keep out.”
• “You two are totally about to go on two separate killing sprees for women.  That is so hot.”
• “For our one and only hug, it would be better if you weren’t possessing the wife of the man I’m about to kill.”

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BEING HUMAN -- "It's My Party and I'll Die if I Want To" Episode 213 -- Pictured: Sam Witwer as Aidan -- (Photo by: Philippe Bosse/Syfy)