Even under the best of circumstances, families can be a pain. The tradeoff for being lucky enough to have a close relationship with your parents and siblings is a lifetime of minor hassles, like coordinating holiday plans, keeping a group text chain going, or worrying that you’ve let a loved one down if you forgot to send a birthday card. Or—if you’re Niall Kennedy—being asked to tell a despicable lie in court.
The big flashback in Half Man’s third episode picks up a few years after where the last one left off. During that time, Alby spent six months in a coma; and then after he woke up, he laid low for a while before suddenly deciding to press charges. Ever since, Ruben has been sweating out a court date and a potential prison stint. He’s also been trying to show that he’s turned his life around, by volunteering to help with the kids at a community center. Meanwhile Niall has been on a tear at Glasgow West University, doing such impressive work that he pretty much has his pick of grad schools—including Oxford.
Then Niall’s mother Lori shows up at graduation with upsetting news. Ruben’s planning to defend himself against Alby’s charges by claiming that he was fighting off a sexual assault. And he expects—heck, the whole family expects—Niall to back him up.
Unlike last week’s episode, this week’s doesn’t feel like a jarring lurch forward. Niall’s relationship with Ruben makes sense again. (In short: He’s terrified of the guy, even as he still feels some fraternal connection.) No, what keeps this episode from hitting as hard as it should is that there’s not really enough going on in it to fill 55 minutes. It can be rewarding to spend an hour a week in Half Man’s world, because Richard Gadd has such a keen sense of suspense and he’s so willing to push into uncomfortable places. But this show is never going to be an easy watch, so it could use more plot than we’ve seen so far. (Or shorter running times. Most of Baby Reindeer’s episodes were around 30 minutes.)
This week’s story does take some dramatic turns toward the end of the episode, due to its two central questions. 1. Is Niall going to perjure himself and betray Alby to save Ruben? 2. Has Ruben really changed? Because if Ruben is still Ruben, Niall will be doing society a disservice by keeping him out of jail.
There is definitely a softness to Ruben when Niall sees him around the kids at the community center. The youngsters love him, and he looks happy to see them. Ruben also seems more optimistic about his future. His juvenile criminal record was expunged when he turned 16. (“Makes me wish I did more before the cut-off point,” he… jokes?) And no one he works with seems overly concerned about the current charges he’s facing, because they’re “as outraged as I am” at the thought of some swishy foreigner groping him.
That last remark does make Niall flinch. But he still seems inclined to cut Ruben a break—especially when Lori tells him that Ruben’s mother Maura is dying of cancer. The way Lori sees it, Niall’s about to disappear into academia in England, so he should at least make sure that Ruben can take care of his mum.
Three people end up complicating the “Niall corroborates Ruben’s statement” plan. The first is Joanna, Niall’s college flatmate, who has been crushing on him since the day he arrived at uni. Niall treats Joanna very shabbily in this episode, by giving her false hope. Every time someone in Niall’s family makes an offhanded comment that suggests he might be gay, he responds by cozying up to Joanna, even going so far as to parade her in front of Lori as his girlfriend. This aspect of Niall’s personality—overreacting to having his sexuality challenged—hasn’t exactly been handled subtly in this series, but I do appreciate that it just consistently happens, without comment.
Joanna loves the attention from Niall, until she learns why it’s happening. As much as she wants to be with him, she can’t get behind the whole Pallister-Kennedy perjury scheme. She’s still friends with Alby. Also, when she visits Alby, he outs Niall. Joanna, who seemed so fragile and flighty when we first met her, proves to be quite strong when it matters. She tells Niall, “What you are is okay.” And she says of Ruben, “Snakes can shed their skin… but they’ll always crawl on their bellies.”
Which brings us to the second person who bollixes the plan: Ruben Pallister himself. If there’s one argument to be made for this episode running so long, it’s that Gadd and director Alexandra Brodski want to show how Ruben slowly cracks under the pressure of having to play nice. The more he senses that Niall isn’t wholly committed to the “self-defense” testimony—and especially after Niall says that the story doesn’t even make sense, given that Ruben has been in plenty of fights without beating someone into a coma—the more Ruben starts to frazzle. This is where this week’s story finally starts to pick up some momentum, beginning with a scene where Ruben gets so mad that he wrecks the center’s van.
Alby is the third person to complicate the plan. It’s easy in theory for Niall to stand up in court and say that Ruben was reacting to Alby’s sexual aggression. It gets harder when he has to do it in front of Alby. It becomes impossible when Ruben’s defense attorney pushes past the simple “yes, Ruben is telling the truth” statement Niall thought he was going to be making, by asking questions like, “Would you say he was a sexual deviant, Mr. Kennedy?” To his credit, Niall ultimately flips on the stand, admitting that Ruben is lying—which then causes Ruben to doom himself when the jury sees him fly into a violent rage.
This episode is redeemed by those scenes at the end, so fraught with tension. I also liked one of the less obvious insights that Gadd offers into the Niall-Ruben dynamic, which is that when you start doing favors for a bully, the demands never end. It’s not enough to do what he asks; you also have to like it, and to believe in it.
In one of this episode’s other finely crafted scenes, Niall brings Joanna over to Lori and Maura’s home for dinner—days before the trial—and Maura pulls him aside to acknowledge what he’s about to do. She says, “I waited the best part of six years for you to do something for me and all I had to do was get cancer.” But as we know from episode one, Niall went out of his way to help Ruben pass his big exam. Has Maura forgotten?
The point is: You can never do enough for the Pallisters. Those family ties are binding.
Stray observations
- The framing device this week doesn’t offer much to talk about… yet. The opening scene has Niall and Alby discussing the Ruben situation at the wedding. In the final scene, Ruben rises at the reception to give a toast, beginning, “I’m gonna tell you about Niall Kennedy.” We’ll have to wait until next week, presumably, to see how that plays out. (Maybe next week we’ll also move on to Niall and Ruben’s adult years? Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell have been excellent but I’m ready to see more of Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd.)
- Remember how Alby assumed Niall was a theater major? Well, while he finished his degree in English, he did also lead his college’s dramatic society. (Or, as Ruben puts it, “You did all those gay plays.”)
- Lori exacerbates Niall’s self-serving cruelty toward Joanna by treating her like a future daughter-in-law, saying, “Call me mum.” (Niall: “She doesn’t have a mum, so that’s gonna make everything worse.”)
- There’s some story we haven’t been told yet about Ruben and his dad. This week Ruben says the only time he ever cried was when he was 8 years old and his father had a heart attack. But it wasn’t his dad nearly dying that rattled him, but rather when his dad came home and… what? He leaves that anecdote incomplete. I hate to say it, but I wonder if this has anything to with Ruben’s all-too-knowing rant to Niall about how sexual assault attacks “your fucking soul, who you are as a man.”
- Interesting comment from Lori, who says to Niall, “There’s a lot of you in Ruben.” Thus far, this series seems to be focused on the reverse, showing how Niall lets Ruben be his dark and aggressive side. I’m very curious to see what may be revealed in the show’s second half.
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