Sunday, December 4, 2011

Review of Being Human U.K Season One, Episode Two

This episode opens with the most amazing description of what happens to George's body when he transitions into a werewolf.
He should be dead within thirty seconds. The werewolf heart is about two times the size of a humans, but in order to shrink, first it has to stop.  In other words, he has a heart attack.  All of the internal organs are smaller so while he's having his heart attack, he's having liver and kidney failure to. If he stops screaming, it's not because the pain has dulled. His throat, gullet and vocal chords are tearing and reforming.  He literally can't make a sound.  By now the pituitary gland should be working over time, flooding his body with endorphins to ease some of the pain but that too has shut down. Anyone else should have died with shock long ago but it won't kill him.  That's the thing I find most remarkable. It keeps him alive and even conscious to endure every second. An impossible curse spread by tooth and claw, victim begets victim. It's so cruel, it's perfect.
When said that way, just wow.   George wakes up in the morning to find himself naked in the forest.  A man is squatted down asking, "how the hell do you get home? You've got no clothes, you've got no transport. I suppose you ring someone, but God only knows where you keep the change for the phone".  When he gets up to runaway, the man calls out, "George I know what you are".  George asks, "why would you say something like that?"The man says, "cause I'm one too".  He tries to engage George, but George tells him that he doesn't want anything to do with him.

When George gets home, he finds that Mitchell has invited the neighbours in.  It seems that Mitchell believes that they aren't really participating, if they don't interact with people.  He suggests that they hide in plain sight, and that interacting with people and having them in the house, gives them a non threatening appearance.  When Mitchell leaves the room, Annie pops in. George tells Annie, "He doesn't understand, these people are British. You're not allowed to talk to your neighbours, until you have nodded at them for fifteen years."  Okay, I lost it laughing at that one. When George looks out into the living room, he finds the werewolf who had attempted to talk to him earlier.  George drags him out of the house in a panic

Once outside, George tells him, "I like to keep things separate. I transformed here last month and it does not belong here".  The werewolf responds, "let me teach you how to manage the condition. I can make it safer for you, and not just for you, for everyone". After the neighbors leave, they have him inside and he explains that he has been sleeping rough while searching for George. He tells that sometimes he is is own worst enemy, "Tully is as Tully does."  Tully then proceeds to charm Annie saying that she is more like an angel than a ghost.  He then turns to Mitchel and says "a mirror reflects a mans face, but his friends reflect who he really is".  Being completely charmed, Mitchell offers to let Tully sleep on the couch for a few days.  George is clearly unimpressed by this suggestion.

In the kitchen, George tries to convince Mitchell to change his mind aboutTully stay there.  He says the house is his way of closing that door, "and if I want to close that door, then I'm allowed to close that door".  Mitchell does not understand why George is resistant saying, "if someone could teach me to control who I am, I would jump at the chance."


Later, Annie walks in the kitchen to find Tully making eggs for her.  She tells him that she does not eat, and he then asks if she sleeps.  When Tully sits down to eat,  Annie asks if she can watch him eat.  It reminds her of being with Owen. He tells her that he would like that.  Am I only one that thinks that Owen is sexay as hell.  MMMMMMM.

Over the next couple of days, Tully teaches George how to change without being a danger to himself, or to others.  George is clearly impressed by what he is learning. Tully continues to charm Annie, though I have to say, it was quite patronizing when he waved his empty tea cup at her for a refill.  Slowly but surely, you can see that Tully is beginning to get on Mitchell's nerves.  When Mitchell wants to sit on the couch, he can't because Tully is there, and when Mitchell wants to use the bathroom, he can't because Tully is in there. 

When Mitchell leaves the house to get a break from Tully, he finds Lauren on his front door step. He yanks her into the house and puts his hands around her neck.  She makes a sarcastic comment about not being able to breathe, and then says, no worries you already killed me. Mitchell wonders if she is there at the behest of Herrick, but Lauren asks, "What is it with you two? You act as if you're gay." Really?  I feel at this point it is once again necessary to remind everyone that there has yet to be a gay character in this series. She tells him that she has been thinking about when he transformed her, and that he can have that feeling again.  Mitchell says that he can't, because of the cost, but Lauren answers that he doesn't need to feed, and that they can just play.  Mitchel tells her that he chose humanity and then throws her out of the house.

In a restaurant, Tully is flirting with a waitress.  He asks George how long it's been since he's been wet. George says that he has not had sex since he became a werewolf.  Tully tells him that he has an advantage over men, and that women can smell the wolf. Apparently all women want a truly dominant alpha male and not the nice guy. How perfectly sexist and reductionist. Tully says he is surprised that Mitchell has not told him this, and then suggests that Mitchell said nothing, because he wanted to keep all of the women to himself. Right, cause women are positions that women can hoard

Tully is starting to have an effect on George.  Annie refers to George as Tully's mini me, because he begins speaking about himself in the third person.

Back at the hospital, Tully wants to know why George is working as a porter, and he tells him that it is a low profile job, and Mitchell can walk for hours inside without the sun bothering him.  When Mia approaches him to apologize for being rude earlier in the episode, George tries the same line on her that Tully used earlier in the restaurant, and fails spectacularly.  She tells George that she is going to tell all of her friends about him, and that he can expect to get a lot of attention from the nurses now.  Clearly, as much as George wants to be like Tully, he is too socially awkward to pull it off. Tully applauds and tells him that eventually he will be holding them off with a taser.

Back at the house, Tully tells Annie that he never sees her outside of her clothes.  When he squeezes her arm she says, Owen, I mean Tully that hurts. Tully tells her that all he has is a lumpy sopha, and balls like concrete.  He then starts to invade her space, asking if she can feel a kiss, and then if she can fell fuck.  He tells her, "I think it's about time we head upstairs".  Annie pops out of the house and into the street.  When no one can see her, she starts chasing an ambulance, but when it stops in front of a house, Annie witnesses a body be taken out and Herrick struggling with Lauren.

When Mitchell returns Annie is distraught.  Mitchell tells Tully that it is time to leave.  When George walks in, they tell him that Tully needs to go because he is eating up the food, pissing off the neighbours and that he has upset Annie.  George does not take what happened to Annie seriously because she is dead.  Just great, dismissal of rape.  In fact, for as upset as Mitchell is, he is not presenting the real harm done as Tully's attempted rape of Annie. This far out weighs any other inconvenience he may have caused. George tells him that he is my friend.  He says, why is it Tully who has shown me how to manage my condition, and how to talk to women.  Mitchell says, "turning you into a clone, does not make you independent".  Finally, Mitchell looses his temper and says "for Christ sake, he pretty much assaulted Annie" and George answers, "I bet she loved it".

This entire scene was disgusting.  Mitchell only really focused in on the assault of Annie when George was clearly not taking it seriously, and even then he said pretty much to qualify what happened.  I know that we are supposed to believe that George is so much under Tully's spell that he does not know what he saying but the the caviler dismissal of assault plays into a world view in which women bodies already exist to be violated.  Woo Woo does not make either Mitchell's or George's reaction acceptable.

In the shed, Tully tells George that he is proud of him, but George almost seems a touch horrified. Tully tells him that his friends will never understand him. He tells George that it has taken him two years to find him, and that he is the one that made him a werewolf. He says, he doesn't know what happened that night, but he that he read in the paper that someone had survived a wolf attack.  George starts backing away, saying that's not true. George says "this isn't a gift, this is God stamping on us with his boots".  George runs out of the cabin, with Tully running after him saying don't leave me.  Tully is truly a disgusting person, but it is clear that the loneliness is what prodded him to find George.

When he returns home, he apologies to Annie. "It's becoming a habit. I look at the wreckage and I say sorry."  He looks at Mitchell and says, "My name is George and I am a werewolf."  What pisses me off about all of this is that it's not Tully's assault of Annie that upset George and forced him to seek seperation, but the truth of how he became a werewolf.  This once again downplays Annie's assault.  In fact, in George's apology he never addresses the assault at all.

They then sit down to watch a cd that was slipped under the door.  There is a man sitting on a bed talking, and Mitchell immediately recognizes that he is talking to a vampire, because apparently vampire images cannot be captured on camera. The man strips off his clothes and begins to have sex. After a time it becomes clear that the vampire not only feed from him, but killed him. George asks, "Who would send you something like that?"  Mitchell tells him, that Lauren did, and that the video amounts to porn.  He says she did this to remind him of what I did to her.

When George goes back to the hut, he finds Tully ready to kill himself.  Tully says, I knew you would come back and knocks the chair away.  George walks away, and then changes his mind and comes back to save Tully. The begin to fight, and then the changes takes hold of them both. George manages to toss Tully out of the room before he completes his change.  In the morning, Tully wakes up face first in the dirt, with George standing over him. "The first time we met you didn't know what you were doing. I understand that.  "The second time", George says and he throws a bag at Tully. He finishes with, "there won't be a third," as he walks away. Tully says, "This is you now, there's no cure, there's now way out.  The only thing left is your conscience, but there will come a time when you'll surrender that to". 

Back at the house, Mitchell takes the cd out of the garbage....