Being Human (USA) season 2 episode 13 review: It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To

This review contains spoilers.

2.13 It's My Party and I'll Die If I Want To

Here's how you know you've written a bad episode of television: no one can track your characters' motivation. I honestly don't even know where to begin listing what went wrong with this episode, so I'm going to break it down into our three main characters.

Josh is probably the least egregious - we know why he wants to kill Ray and it's perfectly in-character with the Josh we met last year. He hates being a werewolf and now he's been handed the way to cure it not only for himself, but for Nora, too. Easy enough.

He and Sally hatch a plan to lure Ray to the woods by Sally possessing his wife, but there are a few gaping plot holes here. Did Val break down on her own, or did they somehow sabotage the car? If she broke down on her own, it's incredibly lucky that she broke down in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the woods within walking distance of the shack Josh plans to murder Ray in. And what happened to Val after Sally saw The Reaper upon possessing her? Did she take Val somewhere and then jump back out of her body? One minute she was Val, the next she was in the hospital.

More importantly, you'd think that given how integral Josh's friend Stu was to the goings on of this episode (he was in love with poor, deceased Julia and was Ray's other victim the night Josh was turned), he'd have put in an appearance. Obviously in a mostly-packed episode and given how expensive it probably is to get Jay Baruchel on set, that wasn't going to happen, but his absence is conspicuous given how tied he is to these events.

But I digress. Josh's story, though filled with plotholes, is the least egregious character-wise.

Aidan's story, while it tracked less than Josh's did, wasn't too bad, either. In fact, it's not even Aidan I have a problem with. It's Mother. Mother has, until now, been portrayed as a fairly smart woman who understands the machinations of those around her. She's a woman who gets motive. She can predict what will hurt the worst and guess what her enemies are about to do before they do it. In this very episode, she reveals how deeply she understands love - Suren isn't just her progeny in the way Henry is Aidan's, Suren is her human daughter, too.

It's out of character, then, for a woman that aware of how other people think and feel (and what those thoughts and emotions can cause them to do) to genuinely believe that Suren could stake Aidan. She at least thought there was a chance - she'd have staked her from the beginning if she thought there was no hope that Suren could turn her back on Aidan. And as for the staking itself, I'd have probably been more upset about it if Suren had expressed a personality at all this season outside of the one dinner party scene a few episodes back.

Sally's storyline is by far the worst, and it saddens me because the writers seem to genuinely have no idea what to do with her character this year. After hearing Nick and Danny's tales of how horrible Limbo is, this episode finds Sally suddenly deciding she wants to...go there? For some reason? The whole thing feels like the writers thought to themselves, "Oh, darn, we kinda wrapped up Sally's storyline last week and we still need something for her to do! Let's send her to Limbo!"

After contemplating stealing someone else's door, Sally asks her mom to shred her, and the whole thing is so hilarious in light of two things, the first being how the episode played up a mother's love for her daughter over in vampireland and the second being that Sally can apparently shred herself so why even bother asking her mom? The whole thing is a giant time waste to get her into Limbo, which is apparently accomplished if her begging Josh and Aidan for their help over the radio is any indication. And if she can do that, then why can't Danny or Nick or any of the other ghosts in Limbo?

And so we leave our characters: Aidan being put to ground, Sally in Limbo because apparently when in doubt the writers just have her make really stupid decisions now, and Josh in a three-way werewolf standoff with Ray and Nora.

I'd like to talk about the things I liked, but honestly they were limited to one scene with Josh and Emily in the car because I am a sucker for the Levison siblings and their delightful dynamic. That's not much of a saving grace considering that this was the time to be pulling out all the stops for the season finale.

I'm sad to see Being Human's sophomore run end on such a down note, but considering how the rest of the season has been, it's not too surprising. But despite the ups and downs, I'll still miss my favorite supernatural housemates while we wait for new episodes, so I suppose the show hasn't gone too far off track. Hopefully next year they'll pull themselves together and make the third season just as good as the first.

Read our review of last week's episode, here.

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