“It’s like going to your own funeral… but better.” – Nora
One of my biggest frustrations with the inaugural season of SyFy’s Being Human was the episode-by-episode reproduction of the UK Series of the same name.
I like the BBC Three series. I like the SyFy series. But all throughout last season, I worried that the SyFy incarnation would never dare to be its own program, that it would always present as an Americanized copy of the original.
Luckily, the near-identical storylines began to diverge near the end of the the first season, and I’m feeling fairly confident to give season two my blessing to trudge forward in its very own bloody spattered prom dress.
“Turn this Mother Out” picks up a few weeks after the conclusion of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Me Killing You.” Mark Pellegrino’s Bishop is dead (you know, for now) and Aidan is the new leader of the Boston vampires. And my god, does he have his hands full. All of the checks and balances, the rules and regulations, and yes, the clean-up crews that Bishop utilized to keep the vampire population sated and secure are gone. Aidan tries to convert everyone to his bagged blood diet and that goes over about as well as you’d expect.
But it’s cool, the vampire Mother is in town and she wants to cut Aidan a deal: she will install her daughter as the head of the Boston vampires with Aidan as her second in command. He will successfully guide her, and if all goes well, Mother will free him.
That sounds pretty ominously vague, but Aidan is cool with it, though he later warns Superman’s Pal, Werewolf Jimmy Olsen, or, you know, Josh, that he might turn into something that [he’s] not.
Foreshadowing is fun.
Meanwhile, Sally attends her 10-year high school reunion and meets up with Steve, the ghost of a classmate who killed himself during Junior year, as well as the class beauty queen, who recently lost a fight with a case of malaria while on the type of goodwill visit that professional beauty queens make. She doesn’t remember either Sally or Steve. Sally is outraged that someone who had it so easy in life, should be so equally blissful in death, and tries to harsh on Miss Malaria’s party. It backfires when she reveals that her life was actually quite stressful and that she’s been holding [her] stomach in for fifteen years. Miss Malaria’s door appears and she walks into the light. Steve teaches Sally how to sleep as a ghost and later, while dreaming about her own door, Sally inadvertently lets a dementor out of Azkaban. Or at least that’s what it looks like.
And as for everyone’s favorite werewolf couple, Nora is having a hard time coming clean to Josh about her newly bestowed werewolf status for reasons that are probably supposed to make me go “awww but really just make me think she’s a dummy.” She spends most of the episode milking him for insight into the werewolf condition without telling him why she’s so insatiably curious all of a sudden. She almost comes clean after relating a story about that time she got really drunk with a bunch of theater geeks in college and barfed her brains out while reciting Robert Frost poetry (Robert Frost? Really? What kind of self-respecting arts majors are were you hanging out with, Nora?) that Josh manages to interpret as an offer to hold his hair back as he pukes, or, you know, wait in the car while he morphs into a supernatural killing machine.
Don’t laugh it off, Joshua. That’s true love right there.
In short, a fairly straight-forward premiere, deftly setting up the dominant stories for the rest of the season, and thankfully, a different story than the one the BBC Three showed across the pond.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.