Being Human Recap: Like Mother, Like Daughter

Previously on Being Human: Sally started hanging out with teen-aged boys, Medea was a vampire called “Mother,” and Nora forgot to tell Josh he scratched her when he was turning, leading to the inevitable.

Pasty Dutch vampire: The other white meat.

Cold open of Josh, mid-transformation, as Heggeman takes aim to kill him but hesitates long enough for WereNora to leap into frame, knocking him down (with the gun firing for continuity!) before tearing his throat apart. As Josh finishes his transformation, we rejoin Levitating Annie as her voice over begins.

Sally just misses sleeping. She died in her pajamas, so she never got that last moment of rest and all she wants now is eight hours where she can shut down and get some rest, dream. We see her running around the house, turning on all the lights and screaming for Aidan, terrified, because dreams aren’t always good.

Oh damn. I really need that hot oil treatment.

Meanwhile, Aidan’s escorting an homunculus to the basement of the Halloway as Sally continues on that there’s no rest for monsters, nor for the audience as we listen to some emo douchebag strum his guitar singing about some dream he had last night, and that sleep is just a nest to hatch more nightmares. The homunculus sees a couple of human men, because I guess you can’t get too homoerotic with the feeding, and vamps out before she drinks from, but doesn’t kill, a parade of willing idiots and Aidan’s all “Damn, bitch. Slow down.”

As Sally continues her voice over about how monsters don’t get the release of waking up and realizing their nightmares were just dreams, Aidan carries the freshly revived vampire to her suite where she starts purring at him to feed with her and that she never expected him to dig her up. Aidan looks like he wants to vomit, but just tells her he doesn’t drink live anymore, and she laughs because being undead and buried for 80 years will drive a vampire around the bend.

80 years underground and I still look like an ingénue. My secret? I’m batshit crazy.

Out in the woods, Josh wakes up the next morning.  He’s still in the spot where he was shot and finds Heggeman’s gun surrounded by HeggeDust.  He immediately starts screaming for Nora. He finds her car, with the interior shredded from where she clawed her way out, but she’s long gone. Sally finishes up her voice over that for the monsters among us, nightmares really do come true because they already have, and Nora finds herself in someone’s yard, naked, dirty, bloodied, and covered in leaves because this is basic cable.

Nora’s managed to clean off the blood before she stole some clothes and is waiting for Josh on the doorstep. He’s cautiously happy to see her because girl is wrecked from the night before. He sees the scratches on her arm and realizes he turned her, but she just needs some rest. Josh randomly tells Nora he’ll make her some tea, because what do you do for your girlfriend the morning after you both realize you turned her into a werewolf and Sally Sallys over to them, telling Josh she has a new social development.

Josh is so spooked and guilt-ridden over Nora that he doesn’t even manage a snotty rejoinder, he just tells Sally this isn’t the best time, but Nora tells Sally she had no idea she was so beautiful. Sally immediately wonders how Nora can see her but is really happy, at first, because she FINALLY has another woman her own age to talk to until she remembers that only dead people and monsters can see her. Sally immediately thinks she’s a ghost, but Nora’s sad, pretty face tells Sally she’s a wolf. Sniff.

Finally. That’s how you shut Sally up.

Luckily, there’s a group of dumbass, teen-aged boy ghosts punching each other in the nuts and evaporating to break up the sadness. Sally introduces Nora and Josh to her new “friends,” Stevie from the reunion, Dylan who looks like he could be Jack Barrowman’s son, and Phil aka Boner, but Sally won’t call him that. Dylan, because he looks like Jack Barrowman, thinks everyone’s attracted to him and starts eyeing Nora, who’s still in shock and excuses herself to clean up. Josh is in good boyfriend mode, so he goes with her but all she wants to know is if there have always been that many lunkheaded ghosts and she just couldn’t see them.

Josh, being Josh, wants to understand everything because things need to make sense for him. He asks Sally about ‘the lost boys,” but Sally is still Sally so she starts with her nightmare and thinks the thing she dreamed actually flew. Josh is, “Great, let’s file that away for a later conversation. Still want to know about the idiots.” Sally guilts him a little about how since she was all alone in the house after the nightmare, she went looking for Stevie who taught her about how ghosts could sleep, but when she found him at some sketchy diner with the mooks she invited them all back.

Before Josh can get too judgmental, Aidan comes home and Sally Sallys that he looks worse than Josh who just learned he turned Nora. She really needs to work on that whole filter thing. Josh agrees and asks her why she would do that, but she just says she can’t hold onto bad news and has to just let it out, like vomiting after food poisoning. Josh’s brain starts rattling around in his head trying to parse Sally-logic while Aidan wants to know why there are ghosts in his kitchen punching each other in the nuts. Sally has successfully made the whole scene about her and asks Josh to explain them to Aidan.

Wait, is that how you do “emo face” or “chrome-sucking lips”?

Once in the kitchen, Aidan just wants some blood straight from the bag while Josh feels sorry for himself. Aidan has no patience for anyone at the moment and yells at Josh not to be Josh and make it all about him. So Josh explains that the worst part of it all is that he now owes his life to the woman whose life he ruined because her wolf killed one of the Dutch vampires who was trying to kill him. The spooky music cues Aidan to get righteously freaked as he asks if it was “Heggeman” but Josh doesn’t know names, just that it was the boss one with the beard aka Heggeman. Aidan has now made Nora’s situation about him and wants to know if there were any other vampires, but Nora needs Josh and he just asks Aidan not to let her know what happened. That she can’t know she killed someone, even if it was just a homicidal vampire.

In the living room with the ghosts, Dylan’s explaining how Boner got his nickname and Sally’s kind of disgusted but confused because they’re dead and don’t have physical bodies anymore, but Stevie, the most mature of the ghosts, explains that they can still “mindwack” it. Josh and Nora meet up at the landing to the stairs, and at least she didn’t have to hear that, because she’s still very shocked and confused and wants to go back to her apartment. Josh wants to go with her, but she says she’d rather go alone.

Sally uses this opening to order Josh into the living room with them, but doesn’t push it because Aidan’s on his way out and she corners him to find out what teen-aged boys do besides beat off and play X-Box. Not much, but when he asks when they all turned (and Stevie continues the retcon of Sally’s age by saying “01” making them both 28 instead of 23) and Dylan says “86” which is confirmed by his Teen Wolf wardrobe, Aidan just suggests they watch Scarface. Because, coke, profanity, hilariously over the top bad Cuban accents and Caesar cuts spring eternal.

I think I hung out with these guys.

Aidan’s back down at the Halloway to meet with Suren, Mother’s daughter, and she wants to know how he ended up being her babysitter again. Aidan doesn’t take kindly to that characterization so he says he’s more of an advisor. Suren jokes that’s not comforting because he was also Bishop’s advisor and, well, look at how that turned out.

Aidan tries to make it all professional, saying that the Bishop situation was complicated (Aidan McCollin, master of understatement) but this is different and he just promised Mother he’d look after Suren’s best interests and wants her to focus on reining in Boston. She just wants to know how it feels to be without a maker which should have totally made bells, whistles and big, flashing red lights go off in Aidan’s head, but instead he confirms that it’s strange but not all bad. Because Aidan’s not that bright some times.

Suren backs off and asks why he would take the job. Aidan’s still not reading the room and says that when Mother orders something you don’t really argue which makes Suren get pouty and bring on a flashback to the 30s and Aidan’s awful, fake moustache. She says the drapes were different and the lighting was better in the past, but Aidan wants to refocus the discussion on who will succeed Bishop in the Police Department. Showing that he’s taken to sycophantic middle-management like a duck to water, Aidan’s already lined up some embedded successors for Suren to interview.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

She continues that she’s not the same naïve girl she was back in the old days and he admits he’s changed, too. Suren jokes that he’s vegetarian but he wants to put the past in the past, which is hard to do since Mother’s put them right back in the place that led to Suren being buried for 80 years. She says it’s just like Mother to exploit her weakness and we see a flashback of Suren standing in the middle of a massacre.

Aidan blue skies it that they just need to show Mother that she’s ready to lead and Suren wonders if she can. Aidan thinks so, if she can block out distractions, but she says she’s had 80 years to think about what she wants and as we see a flashback of her being carried out of the ballroom screaming she says she won’t let anything distract her this time. But she also slinks up the stairs in her silk mini-dress and heels which distracts Aidan because, duh he’s considering that mindwack, and ignores all the clues she dropped like anvils.

Josh is on his lunch break and sees Nora standing in the cafeteria line, just…standing. He joins her and asks if she shouldn’t have taken a sick day but she says working makes her feel normal. Then she has a practical concern. Can she still drink mochas since chocolate’s toxic to dogs. But, as I mentioned in the minicap, it’s also by weight so while a Maltese can’t even eat an M&M, I have it on good authority that if you make a large batch of pot brownies and only take half to a party but leave the other half on top of the refrigerator away from your hippy college professor dad but your Great Dane climbs on the counter and eats the rest of them, all that will happen is your dog will get really super high. And your dad will leave the obvious question unasked.

Remember, you can see ghosts so…are you SURE I can have a mocha?

Josh wants to reassure Nora that she’s not a dog, or any other canine, except one night a month. All the rest of the time, they’re…them. A sweet, adorable couple that doesn’t have sex. But this spurs on Nora to say, in her outdoor voice, that every time she does something she thinks “I’m a werewolf inserting a catheter” or “I’m a werewolf peeing in the ladies room,” and here is where I bond with Nora because, seriously, I would have those same randomly dumb thoughts because…werewolf. Realizing she’s in a vulnerable and heightened emotional state, Josh thinks now is the best time to dig to see how much she remembers about the night before. Good timing, Josh. She talks about the transition but confirms that she doesn’t remember anything the wolf did.

Then Josh asks the question I’m surprised he hasn’t asked yet and wants to know why she didn’t tell him about the scratches earlier. She says she wasn’t sure if she was infected but Josh says he could have prepared her if he’d known. Nora, showing how well she already knows Josh, says he would have just freaked out and that she tried to talk to him. Josh’s guilt-meter is reaching the red-zone and he tells her he didn’t want to talk because he didn’t know why she was asking.

Before they can have a full-on meltdown, Jesse, the neighborhood watch nerd from last season, comes walking up. He tells Josh that he’ll see him later and Josh remembers the new med student mixer and looks ill. But he remembers his manners and introduces Jesse to Nora. While Jesse’s all “Nice to meet you, Nora,” she just hightails it out of there. Josh tries to beg off the mixer but Jesse tells him he has to go because no one wants to be the lone student who doesn’t go and gets gossiped about by all the other students. Really? Is he talking about medical school or middle school?

At least one of them is glad to be there.

Back at the house, Dylan and Boner are acting out Scarface and Sally is seeking advice from Stevie, the 16-year-old who committed suicide. It is striking that he’s the most level-headed ghost to date. Sally wants to know why her nightmare seemed so real, but Stevie tells her that he’s never heard about their dreams being real because if they were he’d have walked through his door ten times by now. Sally’s still in Sally-time and can’t believe that she’s doomed to a life of watching teen-aged boys act like numbskulls, so Stevie suggests to Dylan that they take her to the bridge. Dylan wants to do something that’s “actually fun” and suggests they “rage.” Sally’s up for anything so she says yes, but Stevie just shakes his head ineffectually.

Aidan’s none-too-discretely trying to sneak about five blood bags when he bumps into some random woman who jokes that someone’s thirsty. Aidan covers about as well as Josh and just stands there, mute, until she asks if it’s for a trauma patient. He manages to regain the power of speech and says “anemic” then asks if she works there. She’s there for an interview, but the conversation is just a ruse for them to flirt. Until Suren calls and purrs into the phone that she needs Aidan to come down to the hotel.

Because dating humans worked out so well for him last season.

Nora and Josh are sitting on a bench discussing “two werewolves going to a mixer.” Josh is trying to talk her down and remind her that they’re not werewolves, they’re still the cute, “gorgeous nurse who’s dating the weird orderly” couple they were before, but when she mentions that she’d been dreading the mixer even before all this, Josh knows they’re finally in his wheelhouse. He springs into action reminding her that hatred of awkward social situation is a perfectly reasonable, human response and is his basic mode of operation.

He’s going home and putting on his blazer and khakis and he wants Nora to wear her “female equivalent” to that and says they’re going to “mingle.” When she’s still not convinced, Josh goes all stern father on her and says that if there are six-year-olds in the hospital with leukemia who can still manage to smile, going to that damn mixer shouldn’t be that tough. Nora’s coming around and sneer/jokes that she can’t believe he played the cancer card so Josh goes puppy dog on her and says “Yes, and I brought you a mocha.” Cuteness equilibrium has been reached.

Yes, yes. That’s the spirit. Fear everyone. People are awful.

Down at the Halloway and Aidan walks in on Suren, who’s really come around since her trippiness earlier and is entertaining a pretty, if slightly butch, woman named Cecilia with an amazing rack on full display. As Suren flatters Aidan calling him gorgeous, Cecilia’s eyeing him so aggressively, I’m surprised her eyes didn’t fall out of her head. Aidan’s not unflattered or undistracted by all this but when Cecilia mentions that she would have remembered meeting him at the hospital he thinks she works there but she’s actually a cop. Suren brought her by because they’re looking for “security.” Suren walks off, leaving them to talk. While Cecilia’s checking out Aidan and humming Tube Snake Boogie in her head, Aidan get’s a “D’oh,” face when he realizes that Suren’s played him.

He runs after Suren and reprimands her because “they agreed” they’d recruit from the vampires already on the force. Suren smartly counters that they can’t just work with Bishop’s leftovers who won’t be open to taking orders from a woman and the vampire who killed Bishop. They need people who will be loyal to them. Aidan thinks they’ll be loyal to whoever has the power and with Mother placing Suren, she has all the power she needs. Further, he adds, rather smartly for Aidan, that you can’t just turn randoms, you need to know a little bit more about them. Proving his point Cecilia starts whining that she feels abandoned.

This tank top is regulation.

Suren’s over talking to Aidan and tells him she’s smart and ambitious and anything else Cecilia needs, he can “mold” her into. Aidan plays his own last trump card and tells Suren that if she wants Cecilia she’ll have to turn her. First she mocks him then shows that maybe she has learned at Mother’s foot when she makes a veiled threat about focusing on Heggeman’s sudden disappearance. She says she could always let the others sniff around and see what they find, like she knows, and more importantly she knows Aidan knows, exactly what happened. D’oh redux.

Sally and the boys go to a party at Boston University, but she’s unimpressed, thinking they’re just there to watch. While Sally looks bored and Stevie looks nervous, Dylan and Boner oblique a little about what they’re doing but they’re idiots so they just walk up to two drunk guys and leap in, taking over their bodies. Sally’s amazed but Stevie’s still nervous, so she chooses to ignore him.

How drunk do you have to be not to feel that?

While Josh and Nora awkwardly walk through the mixer before she beelines to the bar as soon as Jesse and his girlfriend wander up, Sally’s questioning Stevie about how it all works. He’s surprised that she’s never “taken over” someone so she tells him about the exorcism last season and how it jacked her up. Stevie’s impressed so he shares some tips that drunk and/or high people are the easiest (duh) but some people are just naturally willing while others are impossible. So like with everything else in life, it’s easier to manipulate drunks and fools?

Sally wants to know why Stevie doesn’t do it anymore, but he says it really messed him up and took him to a pretty dark place. Despite knowing that he killed himself at 16 so he knows from really, really dark places, this doesn’t dissuade Sally in the slightest. Stevie continues that it’s like crack and gets more and more difficult to stop the further along you go.

Unsurprisingly, the word “crack” doesn’t freak out Sally since she’s already dead and she admits she’s thought about trying it and would totally do heroin if she knew she was dying, anyway. Then she takes her turn at trying to take over a few people, disastrously making one girl vomit and one strapping hunk of a guy twitch around before he goes back to dancing, and finally settles on a girl who’s both drunk AND stupid, so SCORE! Sally’s insanely excited about being able to feel and drink and eat that she does all three with absolutely no shame.

FOAMY!

Stevie’s amused by how ridiculously Sally’s behaving and some random comes up to her, impressed with how much she likes beer. She pauses briefly to catch her breath and tell him it doesn’t make her slutty, because that will be important later. Random is impressed with how stream-of-consciousness nuts Sally is, assuming she’s baked because she’s scarfing down the chips, but she says she’s super alert before she nearly cries over how much she loves seven layer dip and random realizes that baked is better than crazy and walks off. Sally continues her celebration as she dances through the party as Dylan watches on.

Cecilia and her mighty rack is rubbing her leg on Aidan’s thigh and he’s half aroused/half repulsed because clearly Cecilia’s flying blind. He’s trying to make it about business but she’s still eyeing him like he’s dinner. He tells her she shouldn’t have come, but she’s going to make the most out of her one-off appearance so she’s all over him asking about what’s the deal between him and Suren, and Aidan’s never been the best with impulse control, anyway, so he vamps out right before break.

This is just procedure.

But it’s only at the ¾ mark so when we come back from commercial he barks at her to get out. He’s trying to be all “Boo, scary,” but she just walks out calling him a freaking nutcase. Once she’s gone, Aidan nearly cries like a six-year-old girl because he really is kind of a wuss.

Hey, there’s Josh and Nora at the mixer. Wonder how it’s going. Jesse’s trying to make small talk while Nora plows through another glass of wine and over-shares that she and Josh have been “on and off” for the two months they’ve been together, but that tragedy has brought them closer. Jesse gets uncomfortable while his girlfriend gets the gossipy happy face and Josh just looks like Josh as he tries to get Nora to stop drinking and maybe go to the bathroom. But telling an angry drunk to stop drinking is like telling a bull not to charge when a picador stabs him in the neck so she responds that he may THINK she should stop drinking but she woke up naked in a pile of leaves with a squirrel in her mouth so, yeah, she’s going to get blind drunk.

The face she made when Nora said she’s not nearly done drinking.

Jesse actually acts like a normal person and asks what happened, but Josh lies that they went camping and that Nora’s just joking. Then Nora hits way below the belt and says that it’s not like she’s pregnant anymore so she can drink however much she wants. While Jesse and his girlfriend bleat out “Sorrys” Josh looks wounded while Nora looks apologetic before she walks off. Josh catches up to her at the door and she apologizes, again, but she plainly says she’s way too drunk to pretend things are normal.

Josh to his credit realizes he was being a dick in making her come to the mixer but thinks she’ll accept things eventually. Nora’s not so sure. As the mournful melody of fucked-up love plucks away in the background, Nora says it’s like when parents come into the ER with a comatose child. They want to know what they can do to make things better, but there isn’t anything they can do, and Josh knows that better than anyone. Sniff.

Aidan’s headed back to the Halloway on a mission. Suren cuts him off with a “You don’t eat, you don’t kill and you can’t turn,” wondering what he’s there to actually do for her. He whines that he would have killed Cecilia because it’s been so long, which isn’t true per last season, but bah! Immaterial! Suren’s just pissed and jealous because he was so good at being Bishop’s right hand. And Bishop, Bishop, Bishop. Does she know Marcus?

Aidan says he’s not that vampire anymore, so she guilts him by saying she worshipped him, wanting to be as strong, calculating and ruthless as he was and when she saw him she thought he could help her be all that she could be…wait…be her mother’s daughter. That she practically spits that last part out goes over Aidan’s head. She further asks how he thought they could rein in a city of vampires without any killing. He mewls about how he doesn’t think there’s anything he can say about the things, the people, who have brought him to this point of being a completely whiny, emo, vampire that would make her understand so she tells him to leave, because hot or not, that’s just embarrassing.

There are limits to your hotness.

Sally’s still running around, out of control, thrilled to be in a living, breathing body again. Dylan slides on up to her, but she’s too excited to read his cues and asks him if he can smell the jasmine and to look at the goose bumps she can feel and she wishes it could go on like that forever. Dylan tells her it can because you can try on as many as you want and that’s not even the best part before he gets all handsy. Sally stops him because it’s not her body, but Dylan doesn’t care and gets even more aggressive with Sally, telling her it’s much harder to leave the body than take it, before Stevie steps in and yanks them both out.

Dylan starts pushing around Stevie asking if he wants to die again, but Stevie fights back that Dylan always gets so aggressive when he “takes”. They continue to push each other around, lighting up each time they come in contact until Dylan reaches into Stevie’s chest and it glows. Sally’s spooked as Stevie grabs Dylan by the head and shoulders and pushes him, forcing him to dissipate. Before he disappears, too, Stevie warns Sally that this is what happens when you “take” and that you lose control.

It would be scarier if the light wasn’t so pretty.

Nora’ s sobered up enough to talk to Josh about how the school can’t void his acceptance because she got shitfaced at the mixer. Josh tells her he’s not going back to school and Nora mistakenly thinks it’s because Josh is embarrassed that she went TMI. He says that busting his ass to become a dermatologist seems beside the point, and I’m sure his psychiatrist father would agree because, dermatology? Really?

Josh continues that he wants to find a cure, he wants to fix this “for Nora” and she cuts him off saying she doesn’t want to bear the responsibility of him quitting med school because that is some bullshit right there. Josh wants to know what she wants, and she doesn’t know. She just knows she wants them to be together because it makes them happy and not because they have to be together. Josh comforts her by saying that even though it all happened way too fast and even though he doesn’t look like it, he is happy. That Nora makes him happy. She continues to wonder why she feels like they’re screwed, then, and he says that it’s an appropriate, non-psychotic, human reaction to their situation.

Josh’s happy face.

Aidan’s back at the hotel, again, and this time Suren’s taken matters into her own hands and turned Cecilia herself. She’s adapting nicely to her new gig, but Aidan’s still all emo about it, telling Suren that he hasn’t turned anyone since they last saw each other “Because of what he did.” That barely registers with Suren, she just asks why he took the job when he knew what it would entail. Has she met Mother?

Aidan says that Mother would never put an unwilling second in place. He promised to look after Suren and do what was in her best interest because Mother promised him that if she succeeded Mother would give Aidan his freedom to live as he wanted and with whom he wanted and he’d never have to deal with vampires ever again. This cracks a brief human emotion in Suren, sadness, but Aidan walks off.

I don’t remember you being such a wuss.

Suren taunts that it sounds lonely, but Aidan regains his upper hand and says he knows Boston as it is now and if it ever came to a fight…he killed Bishop, and that’s what matters. He says he’ll work for her, but he can never be like her, again. Suren gets flirty and says that except for that last bit, he’s beginning to sound like the old Aidan, which does not make him happy. But in all fairness, nothing does.

Sally and Nora are bonding over how lousy Sally’s night was and Sally’s scared that Dylan’s well and truly gone. She tells Nora that in a flash, she couldn’t feel his presence anymore. Sally’s stunned to learn what ghosts are capable of which brings on a flashback for Nora of her charging Heggeman, remembering that she killed him. She thinks it’s better to know what you’re capable of because then you’re better able to deal with it, but says it in a way that suggests she is, in no way, ready to deal with what she’s capable of.

Being Human: TV for ovaries

Meanwhile some ginger Dutch vampire wanders over to the Halloway wondering where Heggeman is because he was ginger’s ride. Suren like “Hell if I know, he doesn’t check in with me,” so ginger says he’ll just take it up with Mother. Suren smiles and says he should do that and ginger leaves. That was…random. Sometimes segues just fall flat.

Aidan’s down at the bar, holding a pity party by himself and pretending to get drunk. The doctor from earlier comes in and orders a whiskey making Aidan get squirrelly, obviously trying to avoid her. Which, of course, prompts her to slide on down, telling him she’s not stalking him. (WARNING: DANGER, DANGER) Aidan remembers his manners and asks how the interview went and she says she doesn’t think the hospital is the best fit for her. Aidan says that it’s probably for the best because there’s nothing worse than being somewhere you don’t belong. The doctor picks up that cue and placates his pity by saying he had a rough day, too, and Aidan flatters her by saying that it’s ending well. Then he introduces himself and she says her name is Julia (DUN, DUN…same as Josh’s ex-fiancée?)

As more annoying music blares, Aidan and Julia Basic Instinct their way out of the bar, slamming into the cigarette vending machine while they’re making out. Julia suggests they leave since it’s last call, but Aidan suddenly remembers the last date he had with a human and gets his emo face, again. Stop it, Aidan. It’s a mood killer.

It’s “emo face” or “chrome-sucking lips”. Both is just gilding the lily.

It was nice to have a little levity with Sally and the knuckleheads until it all went wrong with them, too. The doctor who hooks up with Aidan was a storyline from the UK version, which I hope is just the same set up because the UK resolution sucked. Of course, since her name is Julia, I’m guessing they’re going a different way.

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