‘Being Human’ 4.05 Episode Recap and Review: Pack It Up, Pack It In

It’s party time on this episode of Being Human!

This week jumps in right on the heels of last week’s episode. Kat is rather skeptical of Aidan’s confession, to put it mildly. To prevent her from calling the nice men in white coats, Aidan lets her hear his nonexistent heartbeat and see his very existent fangs. The results are not positive. There’s a nice long montage of Not Talking About It, followed by an unfortunate breakup. Aidan goes home to mope, only to be confronted by the recurring dead girl ghosts. Sally banishes them for him, then gets to spend a couple of days in 2001 when Josh is having his first Special Time with a girlfriend. Kenny turns up on the scene and offers Aidan a guilt-free, bagged-only blood binge to help him drown his sorrows.

Meanwhile, Josh and Nora are checking in on Andrew, Caroline, and April. They meet Mark and Wendy, another werewolf couple, on their way out. Andrew is considering joining Mark’s pack so that he can better protect Caroline and April. Nora hears that Caroline is sad about missing some of the usual pregnancy milestones, so she volunteers to throw the new family a slightly belated baby shower.

While Nora is mid-planning, the gang gets a new, temporary houseguest. Josh’s little sister Emily is out of rehab and looking for a place to crash. Totally not a problem, except that the baby shower is that night and isn’t going to be dry. Said baby shower quickly becomes a much bigger deal when Andrew invites Mark’s entire pack to the gathering. It’s a little awkward with Emily trying to stay away from the booze and Mark trying to pull all sorts of Alpha nonsense. The awkwardness gets turned up to eleven when Kenny and Aidan drunkenly stumble in right in the middle of Mark’s toast to the baby/vampire hate-speech rallying cry. The vamps kind of defuse the situation by starting a “werewolf dance party.”

All the partying is getting to be a little too much for Emily, though. She escapes upstairs to get away from the alcohol, and Sally follows. Shouting comforting things at the distraught woman who can’t actually hear her is a little frustrating, so Sally casts a spell on Emily that would, in theory, allow them to communicate. It doesn’t work, but Sally gets thrown back to the 1920s and runs into “Aidan Capone.” She’s more than a little freaked out by the Angelus version of Aidan. She’s able to interact with him by possessing an old woman, but even talking to him for a brief second doesn’t change the outcome of the evening.

Sally’s spell lets Emily see through Kenny’s compulsion, which causes her to freak out in the middle of the party. A massive fight breaks out, which ends the party pretty quickly and does nothing for Mark’s opinion of vampires. One of the younger werewolves seems to have changed her mind about vampires, though. Astrid and Kenny show up at the house the next morning holding hands and (pardon the expression) mooning over each other. Emily decides that she’s too fragile to deal with the craziness of the house on top of her own issues and departs for other crash spaces.

Josh and Nora have a talk about how the housemates are their family, even if it’s a rather dysfunctional one. Regardless, at the next full moon, they decide to run with Mark’s pack and see what it’s all about when they’re in wolf form. Mark apologizes for what went down at the party, then the moon starts to rise and everyone begins to prep for the turn.

Something that I think the U.S. version of Being Human has done extremely well is keeping to the original concept of the show. The very first draft of the show was about a recovering alcoholic, a guy with anger issues, and an agoraphobic. That (obviously) turned into a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost, but you can still see vestiges of those concepts in these characters. Sally may be able to move around outside the house, but she can still only interact with a select few people. Josh still gets apologetic about wolfy things, and blood is both a drug and a necessity to Aidan.

While I know that I’d be wildly uncomfortable watching a recovering alcoholic get drunk, but for some reason, watching a giddily intoxicated Aidan kind of made my night. The Werewolf Dance Party did smack of a writer deciding to throw in a bit of comedy before the bad things start happening, but it was fun enough that I just didn’t care. I am curious to know what Mark’s vampire issues stem from. I feel like Josh and Nora are going to have some major troubles dealing with the pack in upcoming episodes. (One of the housemates in trouble? Must be Monday.)

Best Quotes:
Josh: “He’s immortal, y’know. He could mope forever.”

Aidan: “Werewolf dance party!!!!”

Things to Ponder:

  • “The Curtain” cannot be unseen, and yet it’s my new favorite dance move.
  • How badly do we think the Stepford Pack is going to end, and how much of the fallout is going to be directly related to Kenny and Astrid?
  • If Sally possesses someone in the past and manages to change something, do we get the whole Butterfly Effect?

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