Last week’s nailbiting cliffhanger was resolved fairly quickly in this episode. Aidan races in to rescue Josh from what could be the worst mistake ever, and then has a nice little heart-to-heart with Josh’s sister. He manages to skirt around the whole your-brother’s-a-wolf thing, reminding her obliquely that everyone has their problems. “Please,” she scoffs. “You’re hot.”

When Josh returns home the next day, he learns that Sally has convinced Aidan to invite Danny, her fiance, over to the apartment to fix the plumbing. Josh isn’t thrilled, afraid that Danny will turn the place into an exhibition if he finds out that Sally is still around, so when Danny arrives, Josh proceeds to act as awkward as humanly possible. Aidan does his best to keep things cool, while also alluding to Sally’s presence. He tells Danny that every house has an echo of its previous occupants and that this place has “a good echo”. It’s a very sweet sentiment.

Danny seems to appreciate it, and he opens up to the guys. He tells them that Sally died in a freak accident, taking a wrong turn in the dark one night and falling down the stairs. The close-up shot of the broken floor tiles is rather effectively disturbing.

So, it’s not even breakfast time yet and already Aidan has smoothed over big family issues for not one but both of his housemates. You might think that makes him a pretty together guy, but he’s got some big problems of his own. Rebecca the nurse is alive and well, and okay…she’s a little bloodthirsty. And most definitely annoyed by the fact that Aidan left her for dead.

Josh isn’t too thrilled about it either; when he finds out that Rebecca is now vampire, he’s furious with Aidan. His roomate’s lack of self-control has not only turned one of their friends into a monster, but threatened their tenuous grip on a normal life. When Aidan realizes what’s happened, he immediately knows who is responsible, and he goes right down to the funeral home to confront Marcus.

I have to say, I kind of like Marcus. He’s the perfect henchman: sycophantic and borderline unstable. In this story, where Aidan is the prodigal son, Marcus is a lot like the brother who stayed home, and he is clearly frustrated by the fact that Bishop is so willing to forgive Aidan’s slip-ups and welcome him right back into the family. But Aidan doesn’t want back in, and he doesn’t appreciate that Bishop’s “help” meant turning Rebecca into a monster.

A very, very effective monster.

She doesn’t want to hear Aidan’s regret, or his arguments for the merits of abstinence. She’s high on the bloodlust and the power, and she may have some seriously unresolved issues with her sister.

And while Aidan is trying to convince Rebecca of the virtues of the high road, he’s also attempting to avoid making a mistake with yet another red-headed nurse, the adorkably flirtatious Kara.

The bulk of last week’s episode was about Josh, the struggle between his two natures, and how Aidan helps to guide him toward a bit more balance. What we see this week is that Aidan, while older and clearly more experienced in the realm of all things supernatural, really needs Josh to keep him human just as much as Josh needs him. When Kara shows up at the bar, Aidan appears to be giving in to his temptation but then calls Josh in for back-up.

When it all goes very wrong and the night ends in tragedy, Josh is left hurt and confused. Having seen what happens when the monster gets too close to people, he decides to cut ties with his sister for good. But, perhaps for the first time, Josh finally seems to understand just how difficult it must be to be Aidan. Living every day among the object of your addiction but never partaking must be a monumentally difficult task, and one of the reasons why Aidan can’t afford to go it alone. None of them can, really.

Stray observations…

- We get their origin stories…sort of. A montage of clips shows Sally laying dead at the base of the stairs and later trying in vain to interact with visiting mourners, a young soldier (Aidan) meets Bishop on the battlefield, and we see the aftermath of the werewolf attack that left Josh injured (and forever changed) and his friend dead.

- I’ve heard more than a few people claim that Aidan was turned into a vampire during the Civil War. Seriously, folks? Those were definitely not Civil War-era duds, and it’s already been established that Aidan has been a vampire for well over 200 years. The Civil War was just barely 150 years ago. I weep for this country.

- Having vamps in the police force and running the funeral home? That makes a lot of sense. At least from a covering up murders and stashing bodies perspective.

- Hannah and I have joked Edward (from Twilight) and Angel (from The Buffyverse) could both compete in Olympic-level brooding, and Aidan is certainly making a play for the bronze medal. If you put Edward, Angel and Aidan in a room together, they would create a black hole of broodiness so powerful that it would eventually consume the entire Earth.

“Think of us as sort of different countries on the same continent.”

“Oh my god, that’s beautiful. Really. We’re Africa.”

So here it is: Syfy’s version of the wildly popular UK series Being Human. From old mythologies to popular culture, both vampirism and lycanthropy have been used as supernatural allegories for human urges and behavior. In the original pitch for the original series, the three characters were entirely human, but when the writers had trouble coming up with stories for their human characters with human problems, they decided to add a supernatural twist: the addict became a vampire, the agoraphobe became the house-bound ghost, the man with a repressed anger problem became a werewolf, and Being Human was born.

I know this is shocking, as I am both an Anglophile and a self-confessed TV snob, but I haven’t seen a single episode of the original series. For the time being, any past seasons that do not exist on Netflix Instant…do not exist. So I won’t be comparing the two series. I’ve been told that the early episodes are incredibly similar, but because the American version’s first season will contain almost twice as many episodes, I’ve also heard that they’ll branch out on their own very soon. But either way, I’ll be taking these episodes at face value. I’m sure that at some point I will take the time to watch the BBC’s Being Human and be roundly impressed by the vast superiority thereof. For now, I am loving this show.

We’re thrown right into the action, with an opening montage that shows two of our main characters losing control and quite literally losing their humanity. But the show isn’t about what happens when they’re monsters so much as it’s about what happens the next morning, when they need to clean themselves up, deal with the consequences, and try to be human. Again.

Aidan, a vampire, and Josh, a werewolf, are friends; they know each other, but more importantly, they know about each other. Aidan has a hard time relating to people without, you know, wanting to eat them, and while Josh only wolfs-out once a month, he feels like he’ll never be able to be just a normal guy with a normal life. Aidan tells Josh that what they really need is a place where they can look out for each other. A place where they don’t have to hide.

Of course, they would just happen to pick the one apartment in all of Boston with its own ghost. Sally’s been kicking around the place since her death six months ago and her fiance, Danny, is eager to get it off his hands. Sally doesn’t remember how she died, and she doesn’t quite understand why she’s still here, but she’s thrilled that her new housemates can actually see and hear her (even as Josh is less than thrilled to be living with “Sally the peeper ghost”).

Adding even more layers to this tale are those elements from Aidan and Josh’s past that have come back to haunt them. For Aidan, it’s the presence of other vampires. Seems our boy has become a bit of a pariah since he stopped “drinking live” (humans, that is) and Bishop, the head honcho vamp/patriarch, would very much like to see Aidan brought back into the fold. Bishop is in the police force, which is kinda creepy, but makes a lot of sense when you think about it. When Aidan slips up and kills a fellow nurse, Bishop and his crew are able to quietly cover it up, all the while hoping that Aidan will come to his senses and accept what he truly is. “You’re a shark. Be a shark.”

Meanwhile Josh is dealing with the sudden re-appearance of his sister, who he hasn’t seen since he left home over two years ago. She’s angry that he won’t tell her what’s going on with him or where he’s been. He just wants her to trust that he’s okay and leave the rest of it alone, but her refusal to do any such thing leads us to one very intense cliffhanger…

Stray observations…

- Watch enough fantasy TV and movies, and it can be hard to keep your mythologies straight. So far we know that the vampires in this “universe” can be out in the sunlight, and they produce fangs and jet-black eyes when they’re hungry and/or angry. Werewolves transform on the full moon, but for only one night of the month (unlike, for instance, the three nights that Oz would go all wolfy on BTVS)

- They definitely played up the idea that blood is like a drug to vampires. In the warehouse (vamp brothel? opium den?), after he drinks blood, Aidan stumbles backward with a sloppy grin on his face and looks half-drunk (or high). Having Bishop be the one to lead Aidan to temptation and then having him watch? Super creepy.

- I am really, really digging the soundtrack.

- Aidan has a tattoo on his chest that I couldn’t quite make out.

- It’s Mimi-Siku!

- And Crashdown / that guy that died a really horrible death in The Mist. These are the associations I make with actors.