Misfits series 2 episode 5 review

This review contains spoilers.

Joe Jackson once sang “Pretty women walking with gorillas down my street” in his hit song Is She Really Going Out With Him?. But little did he know how prescient that sentence would be 32 years after its release.

At the community centre, there’s a killer on the loose and poor Nathan finds himself becoming the first victim, beaten to death within the first two minutes. “Why would anyone want to kill me?” he asks, as if there’s not enough reasons.

Before his head was remodelled into a lump of bloody meat, he copped an eyeful of athletic daddy’s girl Jessica. Instantly linking the two events, he tries to warn the lovestruck Simon away from her, which leads to tension between them.

Meanwhile, Kelly meets someone new. Shy awkward fugitive Bruno, who doesn’t have a dishonest thought in his head and there’s an instant animal attraction between them. Though she seems to not notice his love of fruit or prehensile grip on building walls.

Misfits this week is a more subdued affair after a fantastically tense and fast paced episode. Far from being a tedious 45 minutes of filler unworthy of even Heroes, it pulls the focus back to the strong character interaction that makes this show such a joy. You’ll see the twist of the killer’s identity coming a mile off, providing you have an attention span longer than the time it took for you to read this sentence. But there’s much more to this episode than a formulaic ‘villain of the week’.

Richard Riddell as Gorilla turned human Bruno, brings the right amount of sensitivity to his part, portraying him as a gentle lovelorn giant. And Zawe Ashton is convincingly nervous around Simon as their romance starts to blossom.

The tension between Simon and Nathan, as the former starts to assert himself and the latter feels his position compromised, is well handled instead of overdone. And it’s impossible not to have your heart melted a little bit when they reunite at the end. You can’t help but feel a bit sorry for Nathan, though, seeing him let down gently by Kelly for a bloke who used to eat his own excrement.

There’s a bittersweet final parting for once-lovebirds Alisha and Curtis, as Alisha realises she can’t give him everything (nudge nudge wink wink) Nikki can. But then there’s the promise of her and Simon on the horizon, as she sees their future falling into place after Simon’s shy revelation that he’s lost his V plates.

And as the gang down cans of beer in the final shot, Nathan exclaims, “I think it might take more than you getting laid to make you a superhero,” to Simon, unaware how prescient that sentence will be.

You can read our review of episode 4 here.

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