Being Human (USA) season 2 episode 9 review: When I Think About You I Shred Myself

This review contains spoilers.

2.9 When I Think About You I Shred Myself

I like to think I’m pretty good at figuring out the “twist endings” of things. I knew it really was God all along in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, I knew Harry Potter was a Horcrux, and I knew River Song was Melody Pond. I studied writing in school, so I know the rules. And as much as I love all three of those things, if you know the rules, they’re fairly easy to deconstruct. It’s really not that often that something in fiction surprises me. So when I say to you that I was genuinely surprised by this episode of Being Human, I am paying it a compliment. I’m good at figuring things out, and yet I had no idea that the Reaper had been Sally all along.

But we’ll get there. Let’s talk about Aidan and Henry first.

Aidan arrives at the house with a freshly skinned Henry and asks Josh to invite him in. Josh does, and though Sally and Josh find their new house guest to be gross, they allow him to stay. Aidan then heads out and compels two girls to come back to the house with him for a “party.” While Henry feeds from the half-naked ladies, Aidan watches on in a super creepy fashion. Luckily, this is paired with flashbacks to how Henry was made, which at least manages to make me care about the character for the first time since his introduction.

Unfortunately, the charm wears off on the girls, who come to and realize what is happening. They begin to scream, and a panicked Aidan snaps both of their necks. While he freaks out, Henry continues feeding on one of them claiming, “Five second rule,” and admit it: you laughed. So did I. The dark humour on this show doesn’t always work but when it does, it’s particularly hilarious and this was one such instance.

Josh, meanwhile, runs into the infamous Stu (played by Jay Baruchel, who previously worked with Sam Huntington on the grossly underrated Fanboys), his best friend who went camping with him the night he was turned into a werewolf. Time and time again Stu warns Josh to stay away from his ex, Julia, because he knows that they won’t be able to just stay friends as they are both “all-in” kind of people. Josh ignores his warnings and the two of them have a drink, but Josh opts to leave before things take a turn out of the platonic.

And then, he suddenly rushes back in and we smash-cut to the two of them stumbling through Julia’s apartment, clearly about to have sex. And just when we’re left wondering what on earth is going on, Stu reveals himself. Having possessed Josh, he has sex with Julia.

Josh, obviously, is not happy about this and proceeds to chew Stu out for it, only for Stu to reveal that he was always in love with Julia, but was too afraid to ask her out, and just wanted her to look at him the way she looks at Josh. Josh, however, rightly points out that if Stu really loved her, he wouldn’t have put her in a position to be hurt by Josh either by him rejecting her, or by having a repeat of what happened with Nora.

Julia, however, is blissfully unaware and happily curls up against Josh when he returns back inside, intending to go back to sleep. And Josh, unable to resist the temptation, kisses her.

Sally, meanwhile, tells the Reaper once and for all that she won’t take the job and begins to panic, particularly once she discovers Stevie’s friend Boner in her kitchen. Turns out he’s still around, so the Reaper was definitely lying to her about Stevie’s crimes.

Distraught, she turns to ghost whisperer Zoe and ex-boyfriend Nick for help, neither of whom know anything about Reapers. They suggest, however, that Sally come back later for Zoe’s ghost support group meeting. When she does, however, only Zoe remains, repeatedly asking Sally how she could do this. Sally repeatedly insists it’s the Reaper, but Zoe demands that she leave, so Sally heads home to create a salt circle around her. Before she can finish, however, Nick arrives, offering her his help and repeatedly insisting to her that there is no Reaper.

Sally, however, sees him over Nick’s shoulder and the Reaper begins to tear Nick apart. He begs her to stop, and suddenly, we’re flashing back to last season when Sally’s first ghost friend told her that the longer a ghost sticks around, the more they “circle the drain” and lose their sanity. Sally, it appears, has lost hers.

Josh and Aidan burst in, begging her to stop, but she tears Nick apart and begins to make a whirlwind in the house, spinning objects at her friends. Aidan finally dissipates her with an iron poker from the fireplace and he and Josh trap her in a salt circle at the bottom of the stairs where she died. She wakes up, acting confused, and Josh very nearly destroys the circle to let her out. But when he doesn’t, she begins to yell in the Reaper’s voice: the Sally they knew and loved really is gone.

I’ll admit to being mostly uninterested in this episode for the bulk of it: scene after scene of Aidan staring creepily at Henry while he fed on two half-naked women in Aidan’s bed was a bit much, as was still more scenes of the Reaper telling Sally she has to become a Reaper and her using the exact same argument as to why she doesn’t want that. But the last few minutes really made up for a lot of that. A twist ending doesn’t save something out of mediocrity (as M. Night Shyamalan’s recent filmography can attest) but it can hook me in and make me excited for next week. That’s what this episode did, really. Its purpose was to whet my appetite for next week’s show, and it did just that.

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

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