Being Human (USA) season 4 episode 6 review: Cheater Of The Pack

This review contains spoilers.

4.6 Cheater Of The Pack

In this week’s episode of Being Human, the plot is thin and married people are not allowed to be happy.

We open the morning after the change: Josh wakes up to a familiar head of blonde hair and for just a second thinks that maybe this changing with the pack thing wasn’t such a horrible idea as he’d thought. Silly Josh, he’s forgotten what show he’s on again. The blonde rolls over and it’s not Nora, it’s Mark’s wife Wendy, and she’s pretty darn sure their wolves had sex the night before. Josh scrambles away from her and heads for the rest of the pack, where Nora casually reminds him that he’s more aware of his wolf now than he was before because the knife really needed just that bit more twisting, I’m sure.

Back at the house, Sally’s brother Robbie shows up and announces that he’s planning to sell the house. Since none of them can afford to buy it at the $300,000 he’s asking, they have thirty days to move out. Aidan and Sally come up with plans to scare away potential buyers with ghostiness and possible devouring, but Josh and Nora collectively decide that it’s time they moved into a place of their own, since they’re married now. Aidan and Sally’s faces when they announce this is pretty much one of the more heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen, so I’m going to need Josh and Nora to retract this plan immediately. Not to mention that I don’t think it’d be good for the show from a writing standpoint.

Aidan, meanwhile, is really hungry since his recent binge with Kenny ate up his entire supply of blood. Suzanna finds him at the blood bank and drags him away to the bar where she works, determined to get him off the stuff in the same way that she is. But is it just me, or is anyone else seriously doubting that she stays true to the lifestyle she purports to lead? In the past, it’s been stated that in order to do a proper job at compelling someone, you have to feed off live blood, which has led Aidan to need to ask favours from other vampires since he drinks the bagged stuff. But later in the episode, Suzanna is able to compel two humans quite easily. I suppose they were far from intelligent already, so perhaps they were more susceptible to compulsion, but it’s enough to make me suspicious.

Back at the house, Sally gets desperate to scare away potential buyers that she does a spell to make the house smell bad. As a result, she time travels back to 2009, when she and Danny first moved into the house together. While there, she learns that Robbie really distrusted Danny and insisted repeatedly that he was a jerk and better treat Sally right. We all know how that turned out, of course, but it’s enough to make Sally realize that her brother has always cared for her, even if he is a bit of a screw up.

In the present, Lil Smokie is apparently still haunting the house. Lest we think she’s a nice ghost like Sally or Stevie or Nick, she appears to lure a child to her and then injures him while his parents are downstairs looking at the house. She’s here to cut foreheads and pass out appetizers and she’s all out of appetizers.

Back at the bar, Josh shows up asking Aidan for advice on if he should tell Nora about what happened between his wolf and Wendy’s, since Wendy seems to have no problem telling Mark. Aidan sighs that clearly Josh hasn’t gotten the hang of this whole supernatural being thing yet, because obviously being a creature of the night means that you lie, lie, lie to your romantic partners in the name of protecting their feelings. Did Josh not see what happened with Kat? A few feet away, Suzanna thinks about Isaac in order to cement this episode as the saddest one of season four so far. To put this into perspective for you, the only sustained happiness anyone really has in this episode is 2009-era Danny. So yeah, you could say things are pretty messed up around here.

Aidan finds some momentary happiness in the next scene, when Suzanna closes up the bar and initiates sex with him. I’m sure there’s some kind of joke to be made about frigid wives withholding sex for two hundred years or something, but you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t make it; the scene is intercut with Mark showing up at the house, Wendy in tow, to beat the living heck out of Josh and reveal to Nora what happened the night of the turn. Josh goes all partial-wolf to fight back and is only stopped by Nora’s plea to let Mark go. Simultaneously down in the basement, Lil Smokie is not content with just injuring a child, she’s got to kill Robbie, too.

Aidan and Suzanna come down from their post-coital high and challenge each other to stop doing the thing the other hates. Compromise for the marriage, or something. Suzanna wants Aidan to stay off blood and Aidan wants her to stop killing vampires. They agree to try, but Aidan’s really hungry and has a history of failed self-control. He ends up eating a pretty woman who looks like a cross between Suzanna and Kat and has to call the funeral home for help hiding the body.

At the house, Josh tries to apologize for what happened, but Nora doesn’t take excuses anymore. She reminds him that he’s told her he’s more in touch with his wolf, and that some part of him — human him — must’ve wanted to sleep with Wendy. I feel like this accusation would work better if we’d previously had a scene of Josh even so much as noticing her, so it’s hard for me to agree with Nora, but despite that, the writing seems to indicate that she’s right. Nora tells him that the wolf is winning, as evidenced by what happened with Mark, and storms upstairs to leave him on the couch. I know I like to joke that this is Being Human and no one is allowed to be happy for any length of time, but would it really have hurt the writers to give Josh and Nora a little bit of time to settle into being a married couple before throwing infidelity into the mix?

At any rate, Sally finally returns back to the present and finds that Robbie is now a ghost. I’m not really that interested in Robbie as a character so I don’t know what to hope for next week re: if he gets a door or sticks around, but I guess we’ll have to see.

Over all, not a lot happened in this episode and I think that wasn’t a good thing. I feel like the extensive flashbacks to 2009 didn’t really tell us anything new about anybody (it was clear from Robbie’s past appearance that he cared for his sister) and Josh’s infidelity with Wendy feels out of left field. The preview for next week looks promising, though, so here’s hoping it gets the plot back in full swing.

Read Kaci’s review of the previous episode, Pack It Up Pack It In, here.

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