Contributor: John Keegan
Despite providing a solid follow-up to the previous episode, this still felt like part of a much longer, more substantial setup phase for serious trouble down the road. As it currently stands, everyone is still keeping it together, at least on the surface, but it doesn’t seem like it would take much more to trigger massive consequences.
I’ll start, as always, with Aidan. We get to see a lot more regarding his relationship with Suran, and it’s complicated, to say the least. Aidan is drawn to Suran’s particularly alluring brand of insanity, and it has gotten him in trouble before. At this point, he’s happy to kill for blood, and it seems like only a matter of time before he and Suran unleash a terrifying killing spree on the masses.
Part of me wonders if that was, in fact, part of the point of bringing Suran back into circulation. Bishop always wanted Aidan back off the wagon, after all, and Mother must know how influential Aidan can be. Why not bring out Suran to turn that moral switch in Aidan’s head again? It’s even possible that Aidan’s company brought some measure of stability to Suran, thus making them a good pair to work together from Mother’s point of view. (The “Being Human” version of Spike and Drusilla, perhaps?)
Josh is in a similar situation. He finds himself in the company of twin werewolves, a brother and sister born to the curse, and discovers that they struggle every day with the urges and instincts that compel him once a month. They need to drug themselves just to maintain a semblance of human normalcy. They talk about the possibility of a cure, and Josh is instantly thrilled. With their kind of money behind the effort, a cure seems like a sure thing.
What he doesn’t count on is perhaps the most obvious misinterpretation. The twins don’t want to cure themselves from the wolf. The twins want to cure themselves of their humanity. They don’t want to have to hold back anymore. Josh is about as disgusted with the notion as he can get, but it does highlight a particular problem. While “cursed” humans may want to escape their fate, there’s an entire class of “pure blood” werewolves that embrace it, and look down on those who feel differently. It would appear that these werewolves are not simply going to disappear, and it would be interesting to see what happens if Nora were to come under their influence.
In an unexpected twist, Sally is still working with the psychic from the previous episode, and while it does provide for some of the lighter material of the hour, it’s still disturbing in its own way. Sally is presented with a chance to reconnect with an old flame among the spirits in town, but this potential outlet disappears when the psychic, unable to form relationships with actual living people, starts a relationship with him instead.
It left Sally in a bit of a quandary, directionless, and the therapy sessions that were meant to give her purpose instead served as a breeding ground for some awfully bad ideas. So what does Sally do? She finds a couple making out and promptly possesses the young woman, indulging in precisely the kind of temptation that she adamantly refused just a couple episodes ago.
But that’s the thing about this season so far: the characters are acting like struggling humans afflicted with their supernatural conditions, just as the premise dictates. And with the introductory phase of the season rapidly ending, the writers are obviously preparing to unleash a horrific set of complications to up the ante.
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Rating: 8/10