Posted in: Movies | Tagged: e4, misfits

Five Thoughts About Misfits 3.8 – The Snake Eats Its Own Tail

Published Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:03:56 -0600

Last updated Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:15:49 -0600

Tonight saw the final episode of this year's Misfits air on E4 in the UK. It still has to be scheduled in the US. I hope the success of the first two series on Hulu, and it's planned remake won't somehow conspire to prevent you lot from seeing this third series.

Because it tried to do something this year, which it hadn't bothered with as much previously. To make sense. And it succeeded.

1. Cameos All In A Heap

Mark Heap is one of Britain's greatest modern actors. I worked with him once in some radio ads i'd written and directed that may have been the particular highlight of that career. But in Spaced, in Lark Rise To Candleford, in Big Train, in Brass Eye, he's created larger than life characters and then grounded them in reality, with a variety of tics, mannerisms and stumbling over words that takes the impossible person and makes them so believable. Here it's a very mundane medium, a little bit on the skeevy side, concerned more with the minutiae of life than the grander scale of it all, and whose power seems to give dead spirits form. And now he's bringing people back from the dead. And it's all our favourites…

2. Yes, It Is A Theme

I'm going to guess that this show has seen more significant figures killed and then brought back to life than any other. Curtis' time travel reset button power was always reliable for that, but with zombie cheerleaders last week, the Nazi parallel reality seeing dead people in our world given new life in that. And then there are probation workers. It's been played for laughs. You become one of the Misfits' probation workers, you die. By accident, or deliberately, you end up a corpse, you get buried under the bypass, you get forgotten and replaced. It's become a joke. Not now. For all the revivals we've seen, people die and they stay dead.

3. Probation Workout

One of the more memorable scenes of the first episode of Misfits was gobby, mouthy, indestructible Kelly being chased down by a Hulking-out probation worker. And as we welcome said probation worker back from the dead, that scene is reprised beat for beat. An older, slightly fatter Kelly getting chases down by a killer, intercut with the religious mind controlling woman getting over the fact that there is no God,… but there are penises. Again, there is no show on television that could get away with this kind of sex-and-death-and-something-in-between balance.

4. The Necrophilia Episode

Will people please stop having sex with dead people? You just know it won't end will, it never does.

5. Simon Says

And now the motivation for Simon becoming Super Hoodie is clear. His speech about destiny fulfilled. And the plotlines neatly tidied up – why Simon chose to return, why he was immune to Alysha's power of desire, how he goes back in time, why he stays, how he pays for it all.

Because here's the thing. When Super Hoodie was created back in the first series, he wasn't Simon. He wasn't played by Iwan Rheon, they didn't know who he was meant to be. Which is why there's some website footage of him speaking in a decidedly South London accent.

In the second series, they decided that, but the actual mechanism of how our Simon would become Future Simon wasn't decided, and in the rush to get everything together, they even made a rather obvious continuity flub of Simon having footage that only happened in a now-forgotten parallel reality that was destroyed by Curtis' power. Basically, they were rushed and forgot.

In series three, they took all their playing cards and threaded a storyline through them, gathering all the loose plot points and tying them together, then writing episodes that hinted at the ending to come. All while introducing a new lead character, and playing with the powers format. And it honestly worked. It looked like it was all planned this way, everything was intentional. It's a hell of a trick to be able to play, even if they use the Xena-style "a wizard did it" to get around things – "a power did it." But for all the structure, the continuity, the powers, it also succeeded at telling a really human story about people, about power, about the fact that not everybody wants to rule the world.

The curtains come down, the doors close, we all go back to the beginning. If they wanted, they could end it here.