Being Human shows us the most sympathetic cannibal you will ever see

This graphic is via zombie hippie whose tumblr can be found HERE. Disturbing, right?

This season of SyFy's "Being Human" has been a real rollercoaster ride for a couple of the show's characters. Josh the werewolf is the kindest most decent man you'll ever meet who also murders other people and buries their bodies in the woods. This may be a real turn off for some, but heck, I'd be Josh's friend. He's actually a good person. It's just circumstance that requires him to bump off some fellow human beings when no one else wants to get their hands dirty. Let's not even mention the fact that a natural born werewolf has now reinfected him with lycanthropy, and the only other cool werewolf we've ever met in the series is probably dead from a vampire attack (that kind of makes me sad cause I really liked that old geezer).

Former ghost, Sally is now the coolest zombie you'll ever meet.
Sure she wants to eat the flesh off your bones, but honestly, she's
trying to go vegan and really hates that she ate a mouse.

And Sally? What to say about my poor favorite Sally. I love her so much, but she's basically the best looking zombie you'll ever meet. I mean she looks better than R did in the movie adaptation of "Warm Bodies" when "R" was almost human. Not following me? A little explanation may be in order.

See, last season they had this cliffhanger where Sally had destroyed her incorporeal form to go find her buddies (also ghosts) who were trapped in Limbo. They got out because Josh (the guy that gets stuff done) dug up her body, provided a heart from someone he murdered, and then dug up her corpse for a witch to resurrect. Damn. Now that's friendship folks. Most people just ask to borrow money every once in a while, right? I could imagine having that conversation: "Yeah um, I know we're friends and I was wondering if you could do me a favor? You can? GREAT! So...can you dig up my corpse, kill someone, and bring their heart to a witch so she can get me out of Limbo? SAWEEET! Thanks hon XOXO."

In life there are toilets and no one wants to scrub them. Josh, however
will do just that. In "Being Human" he takes care of a lot of tasks
that no one else seems to want to do. He's got to be the kindest
looking mass murderer I've ever seen.

But instead of resurrecting just Sally, the witch also brought back her buddies Nick and Stevie who happened to be hanging out with her in Limbo. And Stevie is the most sympathetic cannibal you'll ever see. Like seriously guys. And here's the deal...Nick, Stevie, and Sally don't WANT to be cannibals. They just are because there happens to be a few "tiny and unmentioned" side effects at being brought back alive by the witch. Of course, the witch didn't tell them, because (as it turns out) she's a pretty wicked witch and just wants their souls to stay young forever. And when she isn't doing that, she's like a cook at a homeless shelter, so I guess as far as her soul goes, it's all good. The woman can make some great soup (or so we've seen).

So yeah. Sally, Nick, and Stevie started ROTTING (as in full on body parts dropping off). And the only thing that would make the "rot" go away was to satisfy an indescribable hunger for flesh. Sally ate a live mouse and Nick ate his cat. When Nick tried to eat his girlfriend, she killed him with a baseball bat making him a ghost again (and we can assume that his ghost has now been consumed by the witch off-screen because that's what she does). Well Stevie went the furthest, and I think Stevie has been pretty adorable thus far these last three seasons. Just, his hunger struck and he didn't know what to do about it. So he ate his parents and then ate a United States postal worker who just wanted to deliver the mail.

This is the face of the new cannibal. Stevie ate his parents and a postal worker. Interesting eh?

I've never seen cannibalism passed off like this. Up till now, it's been pretty much one cannibal: Hannibel Lecter, and that dude is scary. Don't get me wrong, the "Being Human" way of approaching this last taboo is incredibly horrific. But it also manages to be other things. It's tragic, sad, and kind of funny. Yes, how can you not laugh when Josh and Sally find an arm in a breadbox and say, "Stevie! Come explain this?!" And Sally wins my heart over when she says offhandedly in her hipster getup and GAP skirt. "Josh, I don't know how much time I have 'cause...I really want to eat that arm." Sigh.

I have sympathy for Stevie, who asked Josh (of course) to kill him. And Josh being the man that does everything in the show, did JUST THAT in the garage of Stevie's home. Josh has gotten so jaded to killing that he's now at a point where he can kill people and still go to lunch at McDonald's afterwards to talk with you about your love life with his puppy dog eyes.

"Being Human" has gotten really dark, and I guess that's appropriate considering that it's a story about monsters who desire humanity more than anything. And yes, it's the kind of dark fiction writing that I'm really attracted to with sympathetic characters forced into incredibly unreal situations. I have to say though, I never expected a television show to address cannibalism with such bravado. I mean, my reaction wasn't "Stevie frickin' ATE his parents!" it was "Awh...poor Stevie...it must have broke his heart to eat his mom and dad like that."

Perhaps taking the horrific and giving it a new spin is what writers do these days to forge a new path in a world filled with sameness.

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So the Being Human season 3 premiere was a real disappointment

The cast of the US version of "Being Human" from left
to right: Sally, Aiden, and Josh the werewolf. SyFy
shows new episodes on Monday night.

So the "Being Human" season 3 premiere (U.S. Version) THAT I HAD WAITED A YEAR to see was a real disappointment. For those of you who are fans of the show, you probably know what I'm talking about. For those of you who aren't, the season 2 finale ended with 1) a gunshot in the dark and the question: is Josh dead or did Josh kill his werewolf master 2) Aiden the vampire got buried in the ground by the Mother of vampires (a great villain) after she killed Aiden's true love (the Mother of the vampire's own daughter) in front of him and 3) Sally the ghost stuck in Limbo trying to save her ghost friends with only her voice coming over the kitchen radio asking for Josh and Aiden to help her.

How could they possibly leave me hanging like this? Season 3 has got to be amazing. I had all of these things dreamt up in my head as to where the writers could go with these great characters. Well here's what they did (SPOILER ALERT):

1) Aiden just got dug up by some person I've never seen before. The vampires all have a sickness, and it's 15 months later and they think Aiden is the cure. One vampire tells Aiden "Mother is dead." Really? This great villain is just "dead". That's like getting to the Empire Strikes Back and someone saying, "Oh that Darth guy died of a heart attack." WTF?

2) Josh shot his werewolf master (no big surprise there). The lameness started with Josh taking 15 months to even begin questioning where the hell Aiden is. Really? We're just to assume that Josh couldn't get any information on Aiden's whereabouts during this whole "disappearance" even though Josh knew Aiden was trying to leave the vampires with Saorin.

3) Sally gets resurrected by an evil witch. It's the evil witch thing that really pisses me off. It's copying the season 4 True Blood plot from two years ago where the evil witch and her coven became the big badass of the season (because True Blood ran out of villains when they got rid of Russell Edgington). Being Human had so much invested in these wonderful characters that they really didn't need to go to this whole "witch" thing. They already had a villain in Mother and they could have done that instead of just saying "she died" off screen. So now the whole Season 3 thing is going to be fixing the vampire plague and fighting the witch who is doing something with Josh's dead werewolf master that she found in the woods.

4) Oh and in order to resurrect Sally, the witch needed Josh to bring her the heart of a person he killed. Conveniently, that person was his werewolf master. Inconveniently, this deed was done 15 months ago and the dude's body was buried in the woods. Josh went out there and was able to retrieve the heart? Seriously? Over a year has passed and it hadn't decomposed to the point of just being soil and some bones. Maybe I don't know decomposition all that well, but it seems to me that a person buried in shallow earth will rot in 15 months unless the ground is frozen. Seeing as this takes place in Boston, that wasn't happening.

Both Josh and Aiden did a chat on io9 yesterday, but I was so mad at the season premiere that I didn't read it. I'm still going to watch the rest of the season, but I think the writers really dropped the ball.

Fellow blogger and writer Elise Fallson has teamed up with science fiction author Stephen Tremp who wrote Breakthrough and Opening, Carolyn Brown (author of the Protector series), and writer Mark Koopmans for a simple blogfest scheduled for January 28th. On that day, post a short snippet that you think others might find interesting about your life. You can locate the sign up on Elise's blog which is HERE.

Cindy Borgne posted a review of my book. If you'd like, you can visit it HERE.

IF YOU HAVE TWITTER, COULD YOU COPY/PASTE/TWEET THIS? Muchos gracias in advance :)

Sex in a sci-fi novel? Yes, please. George R.R. Martin shouldn't have all the fun. Review of #Oculus #Yaoi http://dreamersperch.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-review-of-oculus-by-michael-offutt.html PLS RT

Have a great Wednesday.

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When music and words collide...

Have you ever listened to a song and thought that the words captured the impact and emotion of a scene that plays out in your head? Or that the song somehow captures within its tune the very essence of a character?

I thought about this when I watched the season 2 premiere of one of my FAVORITE shows this past Monday. It's called Being Human. And it's on #SyFy :)))

To explain the cast a little bit starting in the upper right corner...

The "Lady Killer" is Aidan. He's a really nice vampire who has some difficult choices to make because his desire to be a "nobody" collides with the vampire political elite who want him to be involved in just about everything that is going on in Boston.

The "Wild Man" is Josh who through no fault of his own has been infected with lycanthropy.  He's impregnated his girlfriend and spread his disease unwittingly to her (it would seem). So he's got a lot of tough choices too. Tough in the sense that the "paranormal" won't stop for an instant and allow him to be "normal" which is all that he ever wanted.

And then there's "Sally". She is my favorite character in Being Human because her story is so incredibly sad. Like tear-jerker sad. It really moved me when I discovered that the reason she's a ghost is because her good-looking and charming boyfriend/fiancee murdered her. She didn't know it either. We find out about it about the same time that she does. And boy does he show his true colors. She had so much love and was such a kind person. But just like in real life...those types of things in no way insulate a person from experiencing the worst that life has to offer. I'm not one that believes in karma. Bad things happen to good people all the time.

At the end of season one, there's a scene where Sally looks on from the door and the song by Oasis called "Don't Look Back In Anger" plays. It even  has the line "And so Sally can wait, she knows it's too late as we're walking on by...Her soul slides away, but don't look back in anger I heard you say..."

And it really is just perfect because it has her name, she's a disembodied spirit, and she's been very angry and because of that, it's trapped her on earth. It more or less seared her story into my brain so that I'd come back for season two. And I think that's just amazing and clever writing.

Have a great Wednesday :)

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