Being Human (USA) season 2 episode 10 review: Dream Reaper

Parts of the latest Being Human (USA) may be laughable, but overall, Dream Reaper is an enjoyable episode...

 

This review contains spoilers.

2.10 Dream Reaper

This week’s Being Human is about delusions. At heart, each of our characters has created a persona of who they believe themselves to be, but very rarely does that identity mesh with reality. This is most obvious in Sally, who spends most of the episode in a ghost coma after the events of last week. Her delusions are so far-reaching that she has created an entire world for herself in her head in which she is living in a bright and beautifully decorated version of the house not with Josh and Aidan, but with the Reaper, otherwise known as Scott.

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Josh and Aidan are determined to bring her out of this, but the only person they know who can help is Zoe – the same Zoe whose boyfriend Sally shredded at the end of the last episode. Choosing to leave out that little tidbit of information, they bring Zoe back to the house for her help, and she offers to do a “mind meld” with Sally’s energy in order to talk her into coming back to reality.

I’ll be honest here, I think we can all accept a certain amount of camp from this show. It’s kind of just inherent in the premise, isn’t it? A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost walk into a Boston apartment… If that doesn’t scream “campy fun,” then I don’t know what does. But there’s a line between fun levels of camp and a point where it just goes over the top and becomes a mockery of itself, and this episode bounded past that point and kept running. I don’t know if it was the bad lip-synching, Meagan Rath’s facial expressions, or the Dusan Dukic’s voice acting, but the whole scene where Sally tries to stop the mind meld by taking a trip to the department of info dump and locking them all in the house was unintentionally hilarious. It wasn’t scary or creepy, it was over-the-top and looped back around to funny in the bad way.

After finally confessing to Zoe why they need her to get Sally to snap out of it: it’s the full moon and Josh is going to turn tonight, not to mention that Aidan hasn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and Zoe is looking delicious, Zoe tries again and makes it into Sally’s delusions.

Once there, she tells Sally what is really going on and Sally slowly starts to remember that Nick, here serving as Scott’s best man, couldn’t have set them up as he died by drowning. Sally eventually chooses to return to reality by throwing herself down the stairs, but all is not as it seems. Once she’s let out of her salt circle, Sally is left alone and turns to find the Reaper still in the house with her. She asks him to go, but he says he can’t, and that one day she will slip and he will be there to catch her.

Aidan, on the other hand, is living with the delusion that he can be a good vampire who doesn’t take human lives. This is obviously false given the two nubile young necks he snapped last week, and also the fact that he feeds on Zoe while her mind is off in Sally’s dreamland. He and Josh get into a fight about this because Josh can’t handle Aidan killing humans in a place he considers “sacred.”

Finally, Josh rolls up his sleeve and offers Aidan his own arm, he’s strong due to the moon and Aidan clearly needs to drink. Aidan insists that he can’t drink Josh’s blood because drinking werewolf blood is “just not something vampires do.” Josh asks why and Aidan says he always figured the bad smell was just a warning to vampires to avoid it, but he finally gives in at Josh’s insistence.

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And then things get really awkward really quickly. At his first drink, Aidan says it “tastes different” and Josh moves to take his arm away, but Aidan takes it back and drinks again. This time, he takes only a quick sip, but immediately jumps back, energetic to the point of bouncing around. Josh asks if it was bad and Aidan says that it was too good because his whole body feels “tingly everywhere” and “I barely even touched you,” and a thousand fanfics suddenly burst into existence.

The euphoria doesn’t last for long, though, as Aidan begins to cough up the blood and streaks of red come pouring out of his eyes. We’re not given a proper explanation of this in the episode – why the dizzying giddiness that suddenly changes to illness after drinking werewolf blood? – but Aidan eventually recovers and heads upstairs to lie down after making sure Sally is okay.

Josh has arguably the least to do in the episode, but even his storyline is predicated on an illusion: he believes he is the only one truly trying to be human anymore and that he will hold on “for all of [them].” Yet it’s hard to make his vision of himself as a human martyr trying to save his friends when he spends a good portion of the episode digging out the contents of the refrigerator so that he can change into a wolf inside of it, should push come to shove. (Speaking of which, I can’t be the only one disappointed we didn’t get to see a refrigerated werewolf.)

I found this episode dragged a little during Sally’s dream sequences, but back in the real world, Sam Witwer and Sam Huntington were on top of their game as Josh and Aidan finally had a confrontation that has been brewing for weeks. Susanna Fournier did an excellent job of portraying Zoe’s conflicting emotions upon finding out that her ghost boyfriend Nick had been shredded as well as her final confrontation with Sally as she left the house.

I was rather hoping that we’d be done with the Reaper after this episode, though it looks like he’s going to continue to rear his head as we move forward.

All around, a strange but mostly enjoyable episode that would’ve done well to spend less time in Sally’s delusions and more time focusing on the reality. But then, that’s a lesson our characters need to learn as well.

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