beinghuman-310

“For Those About to Rot” seems to be under the impression that getting its Death Club Card punched early and often will get it a free coffee, but there is no delicious caffeine in this episode of Syfy’s Being Human. No, the coffee is a lie. Instead, there’s death, Puritans, death, dismembered body parts, skeevy professors, and more death. Did I mention the death? It’s like coffee, except fleshy and full of maggots and you can’t drink it. (Not like coffee at all, then.)

Aidan is waking up in strange places– barefoot, outside, and cuddled up to garbage. This understandably freaks him out, and us out, and doesn’t so much weird Sally out as give her an excuse to practice bad psychoanalysis on her favorite vampire. Sally’s brilliant conclusion, ladies and gentlemen: Aidan’s gagging for a shag. He’s just too much of a gentleman to go for dinner and stay for breakfast on the second date. (Shush, you, with your mention of projection! It’s not nice to point out that the ex-ghost walks around permanently set to “hungry” and “horny.”)

Aidan’s apparently still riding his death-flu time off from work, so he decides to indulge in both flashbacks and Kat-time by spending the day with her. This is a rather dangerous twofer that could leave his lady friend wondering why she keeps inspiring five minute, glassy-eyed pauses for silent contemplation. Luckily for all of us (except for Kat), the flashbacks are fascinating and give us a glimpse into Aidan’s life before the Revolutionary War. (They also make his wife Susanna even more impressive – turns out she’s a devout Christian, and my money would never have been on someone of that persuasion welcoming a vampire with open veins.) It’s incredibly stirring to see Aidan wrestle with his belief in God and hear his fervent prayer swearing to be a good man. Really, though, the whole flashback sequence would have been worth it based only on Aidan’s philosophical debate with the local holy man: Aidan can’t be having with these Puritan shenanigans, and punched the reverend in the face. (He was a sanctimonious, envious jackanape, so it’s okay).

What his date with Kat lacks in fascinating passion, it makes up for in sheer awkwardness. Aidan discovers that Kat’s ex-boyfriend was a bad professor, since he shows up with his latest just-out-of-undergrad conquest. Back at her place, Kat talks too much about said bad professor and her desire to build a full-on family, and not enough about the sterilization of The Hunger Games. Aidan, in turn, just blurts out that he can’t have kids. You’d think that’d have been the final nail in the date-coffin, but apparently not. The date ended with them making out at the front door, even if Aidan popped a fang-boner and decided to run away. His Brave Sir Robin impression only lasted half a block, at least, before Aidan figured out he could just pop a squat and suck down a vampire juice box before rushing back in. (Presumably he also chewed some gum, or I imagine Kat spent a moment wondering why kissing Aidan tastes like copper pennies.)

You know, that’s actually a pretty good day for Aidan. If only Sally and Josh could have had the same.

Sally is hungry. All the time. She can’t sleep, because she dreams of eating and she’s not talking about cream-filled toadstools and gummy bears the size of small children. No, just the small children. She barely gets to enjoy torturing Aidan with her one semester’s worth of psych theory (and her much larger reservoir of double entendres), before she’s having to deal with a hysterical Zoe who bludgeoned Zombie Nick to death with a bat. That’s not traumatizing at all (it totally is), and Ghost Nick is back in the mix to make it all better. I’m sure that still actually just kept running up Zoe’s future therapist bills. (You know, if she can ever find a therapist to the supes.) Nick sticks around long enough to throw Sally under the bus, before walking through his Door and into the Other Side — except his door looks suspiciously like the one Trent walked through right before he was ghost-dusted and gobbled up by the Wicked Witch of the Soup Kitchen.

Zoe heeds Nick’s last warning and cuts Sally out of her life, but the ex-ghost still does her a solid and taps Josh to help her bury Nick’s  corpse somewhere off the beaten path. (It’s a good thing Josh didn’t have to work today either. What, Nora’s working double shifts to cover all these jerks?) Their casual body disposal service is interrupted when Sally suddenly realizes that Stevie’s still out there and presumably eating his way cross-country. Then there’s nothing for it but tracking down his parents’ place, where Sally promptly begins pre-crying because they’re going the quick and painful route of just demanding perfect strangers tell them if they’ve seen their dead son around and, hey, is he craving the flesh of the living? Of course, what they find is Stevie and what they discover is that he’s cannibalized his parents’ corpses and eaten the postman. And what he tells them is that he wants them to be a couple of real pals and help him end it.

Sally loses it. She’s worked so hard to save both Nick and Stevie from Limbo and then to save them from the zombielicious slippery slope.  With Stevie’s death, she’s failed– and her hope for herself is growing smaller. Each day brings her closer to Actual Zombie Sally Malik, and Josh’s comfort and Stevie getting his Door can only do so much to comfort her.  Except Stevie’s Door doesn’t comfort her at all, because she realized it’s identical to Nick’s and that leaves her with a bad feeling of “Man, I hope we solve this mystery!”

Josh, meanwhile, has spent the episode handling all of this supernatural crap like a boss, even if he does spend much of his time with an FML expression fixed firmly on his face. He’s stopped flinching away from himself, and he’s never flinched from being there when his roommates needed him. He’s the man twice-cursed who has dedicated himself to communing with his wolf, rather than fighting it. He’s the man who deals with body disposal and wipes his fingerprints off bread boxes containing dismembered limbs. He’s the man who helps Stevie hang himself so he can’t hurt anyone else. He realizes that “in [their] world, you have to be able to make impossible choices. Not run from them.” Josh makes those choices, and still holds Sally when she hates him for it, just a tiny bit. He promises her hope.

Josh’s new-found class of badassery is going to prove mighty unfortunate for those gluttonous vampires who decided to suck down all of Hippie Guru Werewolf for the death-flu cure, because Josh is surely coming for them after he wolfs out (again) for the first time. They’ll be added to his dance card, just after Papa Werewolf, and I don’t see that going well for any of them. They’re probably lucky that he’ll no doubt be distracted for a while due to his quest to save Sally… and once they discover that Aidan’s been sleepkilling (exactly like sleepwalking, only someone gets drained).

Next week: Sally tells everyone they’re eatable, but much more ominously than Willy Wonka did! Vampire strippers on Josh’s stag night! Aidan being epic and fighting epically!