[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvcoXbVUtDU]
When it comes to Being Human, the only thing more painful than, you know, the whole show, is waiting for the new season to reach the States. (Hey, not everybody downloads and streams). But at last, BBC America has begun running the show’s final season as a part of their Supernatural Saturday lineup.
It’s a testament to the show’s strength that despite the departure of its entire original cast, the story can carry on with a new trio. The balance of darkness and emotional weight with perfectly timed humor and wit has never ceased to amaze me, and I expect to be just as impressed with these final six episodes.
Season five began where season four left off – with Hal strapped to a chair by Tom and Alex, sweating out the blood lust at Honolulu Heights. During his rehabilitation, the place has become a pigsty and he and Tom have lost their café jobs. So finally, after swearing on the memory of Eve that he will not drink blood again, Hal is set free.
Alex can’t be arsed with a chore rota when her body is missing, having been carried off by the mysterious Mr. Rook and his men. And quite frankly, she doesn’t feel she owes Hal anything. It’s his fault she died in her date clothes, after all. Unfortunately, by the time she and an overly-chivalrous Tom track down Rook’s evidence storage, they learn that Alex’s body had already been returned to her family with a cover story (accidental drowning) and buried three weeks ago.
Stuck for the time being, Alex tags along with the boys at their new job at a hotel, where the manager thinks Hal is a total babe. As fate would have it, there’s something strange about the hotel, surrounding its star patron, crotchety old Captain Hatch.
As flashbacks of Hal’s long existence reveal, there had once been a trinity formed between himself, the werewolf Lady Cathrine, and the ghost Emil, to trap and kill the Devil, who was benefiting from the war between the vampires and werewolves. Hal sacrifices one of his men instead of using his own blood, thus creating an incomplete trinity, and the Devil escapes in the vessel of a mad man. Who’s the mad man? None other than the Captain, who with a whisper in the ear of a waitress drives her to suicide after writing “He will rise” on a wall in her own blood.
Hal’s already got enough on his plate, though. After revealing his fangs to a nobody office worker named Ian Cram, he chases Cram down to explain, running him right into the path of a speeding car. Unable to bear having another person’s death on his hands, Hal turns him and keeps him in the basement to wait out the worst of his initial bloodlust. But when Alex and Tom find Cram, they let him go. Unfortunately, Cram (known as Crumb by his jerk boss) now has the tools to exact vengeance on his coworkers, who ignore him despite his rather enthusiastic efforts to be friends. By the time the trio catch up with him, he’s already killed his boss’s nephew, and it’s up to Rook to clean up the mess.
Between the Devil, Crumb, and Rook, our three musketeers of the supernatural world have a lot to deal with, and only five episodes left to do it. For those of you who haven’t already come by these episodes by mildly nefarious means, I’ll be watching intently with you through the end. If you’re looking for a sign to start Being Human for the first time, this is it. Normally I wouldn’t suggest starting a show from anywhere but the beginning, but I feel like if you like what you see in Alex, Tom, and Hal, you’re going to want to go back and see what happened, with the original three, Annie, George, and Mitchell (I’m getting choked up just typing their names).
And don’t let the cheesy-sounding premise – a vampire, werewolf and ghost sharing a home together – fool you. It’ll make you laugh, cry, cry some more, and think about what it means to be human. Even when I wasn’t caught up with the show, I was sad to hear it was ending, and I’ll be savoring these final episodes.
Need a tease to get you going? Check out the first few minutes of episode 5×01, and get ready for episode two this Saturday!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aq41YGtg9I]
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