‘Being Human’: House Hunting

[reaper]

After four seasons, we know quite a bit about Aidan’s guilt for the monstrous misdeeds that his hunger has nudged him toward, Josh’s fear that his own inner monster will one day overtake his life and everything he loves, Nora’s worries that she and her husband will never live a normal life, and Sally’s newfound fear that she isn’t good enough for Aidan, but we’re not the only ones.

In the penultimate episode of Being Human‘s final season, the focus once again turns inward as the main group endures a bit of psychological warfare thanks to their brownstone’s fierce Hill House impression and Ramona the creepy ghost child’s separation anxiety; which is set off by the group’s decision (though, it’s not like they had much choice in the matter) to leave the house.

An obviously growing threat during last week’s episode, Ramona elevates her evil beyond expectations, bubbling over after the group steps away from her innocent seeming pleas so that they can go talk at the grown-ups table. Once there, Josh briefs the group on his worries about Ramona following last week’s massacre while Aidan and Sally trade coded lover’s looks despite their relationship’s relative youth. When they return, though, Ramona has departed, only to return when her twin sister, Beatrice, shows up.

Clean and concise, Beatrice’s insight into Ramona’s awful backstory clears up any residual questions about the girl’s parents and how her ghost wound up in that hidden room, but when Ramona reacts violently to her sister’s presence – essentially force choking her to death – it pushes the gang to run for the exits, setting off the “game”, as Ramona calls it.

Mixing an icy confidence that all of her new-found dominoes will fall and a general sense of glee over the festivities, young Helen Colliander steels this episode as Ramona, an evil ring leader who is more than a mere corduroy clad ghost and deeply connected to the house. Ramona craves blood, and so, she sets out to extract it by tricking the group members into spilling it themselves.

To do this, she isolates them, pairing them each with a familiar (but not entirely expected) ghost from their past to play on the above mentioned insecurities while slowly driving them to their end, the camera floating and pulsing throughout to signify the nightmare state.

Aidan and Josh get the worst of it, with Aidan’s vampire off-spring, Henry, singing him to shipwreck by convincing him that atoning for his sins and saving all others from future harm will allow him to truly be with Sally in the afterlife – a stake conveniently rolling across the cold basement floor as an increasingly bright white light bathes the room to underwrite Henry’s divine promises. Only Sally – who figures out Ramona’s “game” before the others – can stop him from pushing the stake into his chest, same as Aidan stops Josh from putting a knife into his chest after he his worst fears seemingly come true.

The glamour faded, the group seeks out Ramona, who promptly starts round 2, utilizing Kenny to deliver a message to Aidan before that Aidan’s other vampire spawn makes his (real or imagined?) exit from the show; a message that puts Aidan into position in the fatal dance between him and Josh that Sally saw in episode 9 when she time-jumped.

Though last night’s episode ended with Aidan’s hands on Josh’s neck, it seems unlikely that the show will end on such a dark note. In fact, after dispatching every lingering plot thread and dealing with each character’s deepest fears in such a direct way, producers have cauterised those veins (and how thankful are we that the show will never have a chance to get truly circular wit, leaving the fight for survival and some kind of resolution and closure for these characters as the only two boxes left unchecked. Will they come through, or leave fans with a sour taste in their mouth as they check in one last time? We’ll find out next week when Being Human comes to an end.