Shaun Dooley – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Misfits: Series 4, Episode 7

“You’ve got to stop him. He’s crazy, he’ll do anything to get his cock back. He’s got a gun.”

Owing to internet outage then illness, this week’s Misfits review is rather later than usual; which has given me the unusual perspective of having had almost a week to think about it before penning my thoughts.

But it hasn’t really changed my opinion that this was rather a scattershot episode after last week’s tightly focused and fun party games. With the late addition of the amusingly prurient but rather inconsequential plotline of Alex’s missing cock, you’d have expected the focus this week to be on that. In the event, though, it took rather a back seat to various other intertwining plots, all of which it had to be said were more interesting – Rudy’s continuing (and actually romantic) obsession with Nadine, the girl he’d met at the party, and some more background on new girl Abbey, becoming a proper part of the gang this week.

That was welcome, as Abbey had already revealed herself to be a fun character last week. In order to give her a proper introduction though, she had to go through the rite of passage that is the Standard Misfits Plot ™. So she duly met an individual who was misusing their power, suffered the consequences, and banded up with the rest of the gang to sort it out.

As was customary in the very early episodes of the show, this plotline gave plenty of opportunities to cast light on her background. Having (in a bizarrely amusing scene) blagged her way into doing community service with the others, she met a reluctant mother in the community centre toilets after an antenatal class. Before you could say “up the duff”, she found the unwelcome uterine incumbent transferred to her, and then faced the decision of whether to go through with the unexpected and very near-term pregnancy.

Along the way, she bonded with the rest of the gang, then found her decision changed just as they found the recalcitrant former owner of the foetus. This was the point where she revealed what the storm had done to her – she has total amnesia and can’t even remember who she is. The baby, at least, would be someone who would care for her in a world where she has no social ties that she can remember; so she decided to keep it after all.

Amnesia isn’t exactly what I’d call a superpower, so I have to wonder whether that’s all the storm did to her. Newly grafted into the opening credits, she’s seen to be downing a can of lager; so maybe my guess last week that she has the power to consume monumental quantities of alcohol wasn’t far off the mark. If that’s the case, this is certainly the kind of show where that power might come in handy.

Not so much if she’s pregnant though, as even Rudy was forced to agree at the bar. So lucky for Abbey that the baby’s original mother ,stricken with a fit of conscience, eventually asked for it back. Along the way, Abbey had learned something about herself while the gang got to know her, and the baby’s mother had atoned for the misuse of her power. A fairly trivial example of the Standard Misfits Plot ™, but the point was really to properly introduce Abbey, and that it did well.

Rudy, meanwhile, was truly smitten with the mysterious Nadine, to the annoyance of his friends who were sick of hearing about it. Since that plot had continued from last week, it seemed inevitable that Nadine would put in an appearance, which she duly did. Rudy, forced to ‘fess up that he wasn’t the caretaker of the community centre, but actually on community service, found himself baffled when she did another vanishing act, and this time the gang followed her to find out her secret. Which, as it turned out, was that she’s a nun. Curiouser and curiouser; I guess this one will be followed up next week…

But what of Alec’s quest to retrieve his missing cock? (Misfits may be the only show where you can find yourself typing that sentence). Well, a greedy informant turned up at his flat with the info on where to find the penis-napper – down the local karaoke bar. Said informant then had second thoughts when Alex produced a gun and clobbered him with it.

Fortunately, a repentant Jess had come round to apologise for ‘accidentally’ revealing his secret to Rudy (cue much sniggering as Joe Gilgun visibly tried to contain his glee at the knowledge). Hearing that Alex was off in search of his genitals with a gun, she rallied the gang round to help find him before he did something stupid.

That led to yet more angst from the lovelorn Finn, who initially hung up the phone on her request then was amusingly horrified at his own impoliteness. That’s an amusing trait; but I have to say, none of the writers yet seem to have a consistent handle on Finn’s character. When introduced, he had a sly but inappropriate sense of humour, prone to confabulating tasteless gags about having been, for example, sexually abused by his uncle. That aspect seems to have been dropped in favour of the rather more naïve old-fashioned romantic he’s been in later episodes. His attempts to learn the ways of the opposite sex from the less than ideal tutelage of Rudy echo a similar plot in previous years when the inexperienced Simon turned to the less than ideal advice of Nathan – is it really worth doing that plot again?

Still, if Finn’s character is inconsistent and unoriginal (albeit charmingly played by Nathan McMullen), enigmatic new probation worker Greg continues to fascinate. Played by Shaun Dooley as a barely contained pressure cooker of rage and fury, this week he displayed an unexpected softer side when the gang encountered him at the karaoke bar performing (it has to be said) a stunning rendition of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’. Caught off-guard by their appreciation, he seemed to be half-heartedly trying to step back into his usual sibilant, rage-filled persona, but not quite able to. Is there a deeper mystery about him, or is his character just colourful background? Whichever it is, he’s been one of the highlights of this very uneven series.

And yes, Alex did get his cock back – without causing unnecessary death. Having tracked down its current possessor, he forced it into view; the camera giving us plenty of looks at a very convincing prosthetic rubber penis. Interesting that we can see a fake one, but real ones are still rather taboo…

After, basically, holding the cock hostage with a broken bottle (I’m sure plenty of men in the audience winced at that one), the penis-napper relented and returned the organ when Alex decided to hold himself hostage, saying life wasn’t worth living without his schlong.

The script could have made more of this implicit idea that, despite organs like the brain or heart, this is the one that men value the most; in the past, it’s certainly passed slyly ironic comments of that nature on human sexuality. That opportunity wasn’t taken up, but we did learn (as Alex finally got his end away with Jess, only for her to realise he spent the whole event staring at himself in the mirror) that, with his cock returned, Alex is a shallow, narcissistic git. It was at least a telling point that Jess found him far more sympathetic without a penis than with one.

As you can tell from the above, this week packed in an awful lot; perhaps too much, with no real depth given to any of the multifarious plotlines. It was fun, sure, but less enthralling than last week. At least we have a new addition to the increasingly small gang with the welcome introduction of Abbey as a regular; but it’s been a very uneven series overall, with a less than surefooted approach to reinventing itself after losing most of its original characters. Next week, it’s the season finale, and apocalyptic events may ensue. Let’s hope it pulls out the stops to redeem a show I find I’m loving far less this year.

Misfits: Series 4, Episode 3

“There’s three of me. The two you’ve met already – and me.”

Well, that was… different. About as different, in fact, from the Standard Misfits Plot™ as it’s possible to get. No new one-shot character misusing a power the consequences of which the gang have to deal with this time; instead, we got an intriguing exploration of a power we already knew about, with numerous subplots moving other characters around like chess pieces. But to what ultimate end?

You can usually sum up a Misfits episode in one handy phrase – “the one with the Nazis”, the one with the zombie cheerleaders”, etc. If you had to find one for this episode, I suppose it would be “the one with the three Rudys”, for that was the biggest plot point of the week. But it also dovetailed neatly into (finally) exploring some of new girl Jess’ background, and making her more than a snarkily defensive enigma.

The idea that Rudy could be more than just two people was well done, and not contradictory to anything we’ve previously learned. At no point did he ever tell us that his power split him into just two Rudys, so it was a perfectly logical progression that there might be yet another. So we have boorish Rudy, sensitive Rudy, and now another – psychopath Rudy. And he’s insane.

It’s actually a shame that last week’s “next time on…” gave this away, as otherwise it would have been far more baffling to have been suddenly presented with Rudy being released from prison. The three Curly Wurly bars (his only possessions apart from his ukelele) placed atop each other would have been a good clue (if we hadn’t known about it already), but that mystery would only have lasted until he showed up at the community centre, much to the shock of the other two Rudys – “Why have you got a ukelele? You know that reminds me of… him.” Oh dear.

It’s previously appeared that Rudy’s two ‘halves’ were component parts of his personality – one crass, boorish and driven by lust/appetite, the other sensitive, caring and more levelheaded. Two extremes, but both basically goodhearted, perhaps too much so. Which is why Psycho Rudy made sense as the third ‘half’, all the really nasty parts of Rudy’s personality boiled down to nasty extremes.

With Psycho Rudy having absorbed his nicer components to become dominant, we got to see just how versatile an actor Joe Gilgun is (though if you’ve seen him in This is England you probably already knew that). He went convincingly from being the comic relief to being broodingly intense and bizarrely actually more attractive – certainly to Jess. His sudden contempt for her “mask” and interest in her as a person rather than a sexual receptacle ultimately broke down her walls and allowed Karla Crome to actually give a proper performance.

Jess, it turns out, is a pretty damaged person. Perhaps it was Rudy’s newfound self-awareness of his own damage that prompted her to open up to him, in a Silence of the Lambs-like scene in Greg’s office, as each revealed a secret to the other each time the rehearsing wedding DJ paused playing the Macarena (only in Misfits could that be a cue). Or perhaps she just likes the bad boys.

She certainly seems to have a history of that. We now know that she had a bit of a breakdown after being ill-used by a supposedly compassionate ‘friend’ whose interest in helping her over her eating disorder only lasted as long as it took to get her into bed. Following which was an attempted suicide.

Which, it turned out, Psycho Rudy was more than happy to help her complete, as his interest in her extended to sharing his long-held fantasy of finding out how murder really felt. It was a genuinely creepy scene as he held her tight and began to throttle her at the same time; fortunately she was resourceful enough to stab him in the gut with a pair of scissors. But again like Clarice Starling, she couldn’t seem to quite give up her feelings for him, giving him one last kiss as he relented and released the other two Rudys – unharmed.

It was a pretty intense plot, but took up surprisingly little of the episode as a whole, which was equally concerned with setting up some rather soapy plots for the rest of the gang. Finn spent the episode dodging the unwanted sexual advances of his sort-of-stepmother (she never actually married his dad), only to fail at fending her mouth off his penis; leading to him being rather bizarrely labelled “stepmothersucker” by Curtis.

But if you thought that was just a it of fun, it soon turned pretty serious. Said stepmother was plainly pretty damaged herself, constantly sloshing wine while trying to seduce her ‘stepson’ before bursting into tears. Rejected by Finn, she went straight to his dad and told him everything. In many shows, that would be the light-hearted B-plot, but here it ended with Finn’s dad not only rejecting him, but also telling him that he wasn’t his father after all. For most people that would be pretty devastating, but Finn seemed to take it in stride, on top of all the other bad luck he’s had since the series began; he’s plainly being shaped as the relentlessly resigned but optimistic one.

Curtis finally got something to do this week, spending the episode flirting with ‘trainee probation worker’ Lola, who’s still pretty enigmatic but says she likes “bad boys”. Curtis was more than happy to oblige, stealing her a wedding cake from the community centre, which earned the wrath of hardass Greg. Greg is getting increasingly bizarre; at one point he cornered the baffled Finn to menacingly ask for “the magic word”, which he revealed to be “potato”.

I’m still sticking to my theory from last week that somehow Greg has inherited Curtis’ old gender-swap power, and he and Lola are actually the same person. After all, Seth (absent this week) was still dealing powers at that point. And as a friend of mine pointed out, the name ‘Lola’ could well be a reference to the Kinks song of the same name, which contains the lyric “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola”. Or is it the other way round? Could Lola be the ‘real’ person and Greg her alter ego?

It also occurred to me to wonder precisely what Curtis’ current power actually is; in an episode light on powers actually being used (except Rudy’s), there was one reference to his old time-travel power (from Rudy, who could never actually have seen it since Curtis traded it away before he joined). I actually had to rummage through my memory before coming to the answer – Curtis is presumably still ‘blessed’ with the power of raising the dead, which Seth gave him in order to resurrect his deceased girlfriend. As that resulted in an outbreak of zombie cheerleaders, it’s hard to fathom how Curtis might actually find his power useful again. But perhaps Howard Overman has some idea…

So, an episode with one interesting premise, done rather well, but lacking prominence amid soap opera chess-piece manoeuvring. Plainly, there’s some larger plan shaping up here, involving Greg and/or Lola, not to mention hunky new barman Alex, who revealed that he’s not gay, but still seemed pretty desperate not to go home with the eager Jess. This melee of plots meant that, despite an intriguing and well-played A-plot, the episode felt a bit all over the place and unfocused. Still, the hints of bigger things to come, coupled with the always-amusing dialogue, meant that it was never less than enjoyable.

Misfits: Series 4, Episode 1

“I just came here to do community service and now I’m going to die locked in a freezer.”

The end of Misfits’ third season felt like a proper ending for the story – at least as far as the characters we’d come to care about go. Alisha was dead, Simon was off back in time to die saving her previously, Kelly was together with Seth, and all the rest of the gang could do was get on with the rest of their lives.

Given all of that, I was actually a bit surprised to see that it was coming back for a fourth series. But it’s a popular show, and the central premise – that the mysterious storm gave lots of people in the area strange powers – has never been resolved, and leaves plenty of room to introduce new characters.

The trouble is, with Nathan, Simon, Alisha and now (we discover) Kelly all gone, it feels like the human core of the show we’d come to love has been somewhat eviscerated. New characters can come in, but we won’t have the level of emotional investment in them we did with the previous set. This episode faces a high hurdle in accomplishing that. Like the recent series of Being Human (to which it’s often compared), it effectively has to reboot itself, and give us a new set of characters in the hope that we’ll come to like them as much as we did the old ones.

This was helped by the way that we’d already come to like Rudy, who’d stepped in last series to replace Nathan. Joe Gilgun was as great as ever, with perfect comic timing as Rudy got up to his usual un-PC antics. Seth was back too, explaining that Kelly had chosen to stay in Uganda and user her ‘rocket scientist’ power to defuse landmines. He said that he was only back to “pick up their things”, but the fact that he’s there at all makes it seem likely that he’ll be a permanent fixture this series.

For me, though, Seth never felt like a proper part of ‘the gang’ last year, and (through no fault of actor Matthew McNulty) it’s going to take a bit of work before I give much of a damn about what happens to him. For some continuity, original gang member Curtis (the only one left) is still around, but he’d been sidelined so much last year (despite an interesting subplot about his gender-swap power), that he felt like a bit of a loose end. Again, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett has always been great in the part, but since his ‘origin story’, it’s always felt like the writers have struggled to come up with much for him to do, preoccupied as they were with the bigger sturm und drang of the Simon/Alisha epic love story.

So, it’s not all change. We still have Rudy (terrifically funny, but usually incidental to the main action), Seth (broodingly good-looking but with only one previous storyline which is now concluded) and Curtis (whose usual function last year was to sit sulkily on the sidelines and make snarky remarks). Perhaps some entirely new characters will help?

The jury’s still out on that one. Two new characters popped up; seemingly genial, soft-spoken Scouse lad Finn (Nathan McMullen), and piercing-eyed Jess (Karla Crome). They’ve turned up to do community service, as usual. Yes, that aspect of the show could have been dropped; it’s getting increasingly contrived for the old characters to still be stuck doing community service. But then it wouldn’t be Misfits. It’s a central plank of the show that it’s about young offenders forced into comic book situations when they’d rather be out getting pissed, shagging and breaking stuff – the very misfits of the title. Move it into the wider realm of the outside world being affected by superpowers, and you just turn it into Heroes – and we all know how that ended up.

Unfortunately, the new characters didn’t make that much of an impression. Jess seems… well, nice is about the best you can say so far. No idea what crime she committed, but her power appears to be the ability to see through walls. Other than that, the script for this first episode gives us very little of a handle on who she is, and what she’s like, which you’d think would be rather important.

Finn gets a little more depth, and a hint of mystery. He seems a likeable, enough ordinary bloke; his power is an extremely crap variety of telekinesis, which so far has enabled him to shake a plant pot and singularly fail to mind-throw it at Rudy. But we’ve established that he has a tendency to make things up about himself that are often singularly inappropriate – such as telling Jess that he was raped by his uncle to “lighten the mood” when they’re locked into a freezer to die.

And we later discovered that his ‘dog’ Sadie, who he was so concerned about looking after, is actually a bound and gagged young lady strapped to his bed. Interesting idea there – that one of the main characters might actually be a bit of a baddie. Or a nutter, at least. Of course, we still don’t know the full story here, but certainly Finn gets a better shake of the dice in the character depth stakes than Jess, which seemed a little unfair.

With all this weight on the episode to reboot the show, the story (such as it was) felt pretty inconsequential. Rudy, Curtis and Seth had been ‘infected’ by the power of a greedy thief who’d stumbled into the community centre with a briefcase full of money cuffed to his wrist. The effect of his power was to make anyone he touched as fanatically covetous of the money as he was, thus pitting the regulars against each other in an increasingly homicidal, paranoid escalation of mistrust.

It’s basically the ‘standard’ Misfits plot – the gang meet someone else affected by the storm who’s misusing their powers, become affected themselves, find a way to break the spell, and effectively, punish the power-abuser by killing him/her and/or removing the power concerned. True, it was told in an interesting, non-linear way, opening on the rooftop with the gang literally at each other’s throats, weapons drawn, fighting for possession of the case full of money. The story then unfolded with flashback within flashback, with a self-aware Rudy acknowledging that, “I’m what’s known as an ‘unreliable narrator’”. Nice to see he was paying attention in English Literature GCSE.

Along the way, there was a fair bit of fun. Rudy pretending to be the new probation worker (while caught wanking over internet porn) was a laugh, and the script actually had you wondering for a (fairly short) while if he was telling the truth. There was the business of him trying to drug everyone’s drinks left, right and centre, which was played well for laughs (though where did he get these ‘drugs’?), and Seth being somewhat discomfited by Rudy and Curtis wanking themselves to sleep next to him (“it’s a sedative, isn’t it?”).

I said last year that the show was in danger of collapsing under the weight of its complex, massively self-referential time paradox plot arc, so it’s probably a good idea that it’s going back to the episodic, self-contained nature of its first series. The trouble is, not only did it feel inconsequential by comparison, it also felt very much like we’d been here before. It didn’t help that, in a bit of presumably amusingly-intended lampshade-hanging, Rudy kept commenting on the show’s established tropes – “oh, the storm. Yeah, it’s always the storm”, and, of the new, hardass probation worker (an excellent Shaun Dooley), “don’t worry, he’ll probably be dead within a week”.

That last actually points to an increasing credibility gap (insofar as it’s fair to complain about that in a show which features superpowers). The death of the gang’s first two probation workers, back in the first series, led to all kinds of worry about police investigations. But last series they managed to kill off two, one of them in the middle of a major zombie outbreak, and the Thamesmead police don’t seem to have concerned themselves with it at all.

Still, new probation worker Greg is a breath of fresh air, since the show got rid of the lovable, lackadaisical Shaun last year. Given a great establishing scene – “if you cross me, I will fuck you. And it’ll feel like being fucked by a train. Choo choo.” – he’s presumably going to be around for a while, resetting the balance the show lost with no authority figure to hate.

I have to say, as a longstanding fan of the show, I actually didn’t enjoy this very much. It didn’t help that the plot required the regulars to be acting very out of character, and that at least one of the new characters seemed to have very little depth at all. To be fair, if you’ve never seen the show before, this could be an ideal jumping in point, without the heavy burden of all the old characters’ backstories. But on the basis of this first episode, I’m still unconvinced that it was a good idea for the show to carry on after the finality of the third series’ ending. I’ll stick with it, to see if it pulls off the trick Being Human managed of making me like the new characters as much as the old. So far, though, there’s little evidence of that.