Misfits: S03 Ep06

What happened?

Rudy searches for the girl he slept with, that used her powers on him to cause his penis to apparently rot and drop off unless she prevents it. With Simon’s help he tracks down the girl and manages to convince her to reverse the damage and claims to be a changed man.

Curtis discovers that, as a girl, and as a consequence of masturbating as both male and female, he has managed to get himself pregnant. Ultimately he turns to Seth, asking him to get rid of his power. Seth, however, has just acquired the power to bring people back to life and requests that Curtis take the power in exchange and use it on his dead ex-girlfriend to bring her back.

Thoughts

This was perhaps my least favourite Misfits episode ever. It feels like a harsh statement because there’s nothing about it I can directly point to and say, This is why this episode sucked. But tellingly there’s nothing I can point to in this episode and say, This is why the episode worked. It was fundamentally a filler episode, and whilst Misfits has often thrown out episodes that don’t particularly further the drama they’ve never felt like they were bridging a gap.

Misfits episodes usually feel like they’re the best of a bunch of ideas; ones that made the cut, concepts that were too cool to ignore. And here we had the issue of Cutis becoming pregnant as a girl, which was a massive (and potentially powerful concept) and yet it felt like a b-plot. Trouble is, the ‘a-plot’ of Rudy trying to find the girl he slept with also had a distinctly low-rent feel to it.

The girl who used her powers on Rudy was a total unknown. Misfits generally affords its villain-of-the-week some screentime and personality exploration (or, at least, clarification) but with this girl we got nothing but a sense that she’d been treated badly in relationships before and so had inherited a power that allowed her to emasculate men in the worst possible way. Yet, by the end, all it took was a couple of clumsy sentiments from Rudy over a DJ microphone to have her reverse her rather terrible actions.

And with that all was well that ended well!

Unconvincing.

I did actually enjoy Rudy, though. If anything he carried the episode and made it entertaining, managing to crystallise what he was about. His little speech at the end where he basically admitted that his bravado and selfish actions were merely a cover for his insecurities was a nice admittance, but nothing we as an audience couldn’t see for ourselves. I still don’t feel like the two ‘halves’ of his characters have been as distinct as they could have been (the previous episode did it better) and I was actually rather annoyed that their dispute from last time, where they refused to be ‘together’, had evidently been brushed over and forgotten about. That was a promising angle, I thought, utterly squandered.

Simon and Alisha were absolutely wasted in this episode. Alisha being an amused bystander to Curtis’ plight I can understand, but Simon has his own fate to fulfil and surely wouldn’t still remain the grinning wallflower he appeared as here. It was like Simon from series 1 dropped by to tag along for Rudy’s ride.

The explanation as to how Curtis managed to get pregnant was glossed over, but it made sense since it basically came down to his best guess. As an audience we could have arrived at our own possible explanations as to how or why it happened. For a brief moment there did appear to be the chance that Curtis, as ‘Melissa’, was contemplating the magnitude of having a life inside him when s/he was looking in the mirror. As such, his decision to terminate the pregnancy by the act of having his power taken from him ought to have carried more gravitas. Effectively he was committing abortion.

As it was, the episode ended with the promising set-up that Seth, having finally obtained the power to bring people back to life (kudos to me for predicting as much a few weeks back!), was now set on getting his girlfriend back. Clearly this is going to be problematic for his and Kelly’s relationship. Kelly is at the point where she’s put herself at her most vulnerable and so means she’s not going to take it well, although I did like how she handled Seth questioning her if she was pregnant. That was the one flash of ‘old Kelly’ we got here – the rest was a bit soft and smitten (understandably so, and she’s always had that tender underbelly to her steely façade).

Ostensibly if this episode doesn’t at least mark a distinct change in Rudy’s personality as a consequence of his experiences then it’s basically just been a long-winded detour to get to the point where Curtis will resurrect Seth’s ex-girlfriend, Shannon. Filler, basically. I’ve come to expect better.

What was the best part?

Slim-pickings, but I was highly-amused by the telephone exchange between Curtis and Rudy. Curtis called Rudy to ask him if he had raped him, to which Rudy flatly denied it and then in the next breath was remarking about how he had to go because his cock was going to drop off. The look on Curtis’ face was priceless; the guy knows how to pull off a disgusted expression to a tee!

What do I think will happen next?

The preview for the next episode looked ace – zombie cheerleaders! I got the impression that the consequences of resurrecting the dead bears with it a kind of Pet Sematary vibe where the returned-dead aren’t quite the same as they were alive and harbour evil intent. I expect that Seth perhaps wants to resurrect Shannon to apologise and atone for what he did to her – though I anticipate Kelly and bitter jealousy is going to assume he wants her back properly. Whatever, it looks like it could be quite the riot.