Half Man’s fourth episode is its best so far—or at least the first to live up fully to the queasy power of the premiere. The usual caveats apply. This is a 65-minute episode with maybe 40 minutes of story. The characters still have a habit of stating the show’s themes out loud, in ways that can feel unnatural. And Richard Gadd has yet to solve the problem of how to make Niall worthy of our sympathy, outside of repeatedly making Ruben look even worse. But the intense one-on-one confrontations that have been Gadd’s strength throughout this series are especially explosive this week. The mayhem is spectacular.
The biggest change in this episode is that the flashbacks jump ahead 14 years, which means we now get Jamie Bell playing Niall full-time, and Gadd as Ruben. The gap is quickly closing between the drama at Niall’s wedding and who these two men used to be. When last we saw them, they were in their early 20s, and Ruben was being hauled off to prison while Niall was on his way to Oxford. In their mid-30s, the situation is wildly different.
Much of the first half of the episode is a deep wallow in Niall’s squalor. When we first catch up with him, he’s indulging in one of his regular nighttime activities, hanging out in a dark alley to have sex with anonymous men—or sometimes to masturbate alongside a line of other guys while watching two other men get it on. When he’s not screwing or wanking in the street, he loiters in the library, where he hassles a clerk into giving him free printing privileges and occasionally sneaks into the gentlemen’s lav to boink some more randos.
Gadd and director Eshref Reybrouck—and Bell, who is remarkable—don’t spare us any of the bleak details of Niall’s life at rock bottom. As we gradually learn over the first half hour, Niall dropped out of Oxford not long after arriving, claiming that some combination of post-trial stress and annoyingly posh classmates drove him out. He then spent some time in a mental hospital, before pulling himself together enough to write a published novel, which bombed. After that he fell into his current rut of, well, rutting.
All of this might be intolerably dark if not for Bell, who makes Niall’s sexual compulsions and self-pity mesmerizing. He gives us a creature of pure need, who takes whatever he wants: books from the library to sell online, money from his mom and from his friend Joanna (Kate Robson-Stuart), sex from whomever’s offering, you name it. Yet he doesn’t consider himself to be a homosexual. When he runs into his old school bully Gus (Sandy Batchelor) getting railed in the alley, they go out for a beer and Niall tells Gus that he can’t be gay because he’s never fallen in love with any of his sexual partners. (Um, okay.)
It takes a little while for this episode’s plot to kick in. When it does, of course it involves Ruben. Niall gets word that his former best bud has been out of jail for a while. This terrifies him at first; but then it becomes infuriating, as Niall fills in the story. He learns that both his mother Lori and Joanna knew that Ruben was free. Even worse, Ruben met with Joanna as part of an apology tour, which did not include a stop at Niall’s door. Worst of all? Since he’s been out, Ruben has landed a six figure job as an oil rigger, and lives in a nice house with his wife Mona (Amy Manson), the former teenage sweetheart he so memorably shared with Niall.
The episode builds slowly to the inevitable face-to-face between Niall and Ruben—an electrifying 10-plus-minute scene that is well worth the wait. We get there via several suspenseful moments, starting with Niall cyberstalking Ruben to learn more about his post-prison life. Later, Niall lingers outside Ruben’s house, triggering an alarm when he steals the hood ornament off Ruben’s car. This leads to a chase through the backyards of a cushy suburban neighborhood before Niall—fittingly—takes refuge in a child’s playhouse.
I say “fittingly” because one of the main ideas this series has been getting across is that Niall is stubbornly immature. He needs a Ruben in his life, either to fight his battles or to be a convenient scapegoat for his failures. It’s telling that when Niall discovers that Ruben’s mother Maura got brain damage from a failed suicide attempt—after breaking up with Lori, due to Niall’s testimony against Ruben—he quickly agrees with Lori’s plea that he shouldn’t blame himself. After all, nothing’s ever Niall’s fault, according to Niall.
Another case-in-point: How Niall reacts when the library’s manager, Nigel (Simon Chandler), catches him getting orally serviced in the loo. Nigel reveals that he has hidden cameras in the bathroom, and says it’ll cost £2,000 to stop the videos from being posted online. Niall scrambles first to Joanna, who regretfully tells him to stop asking for help, because she’s trying to lead her own grown-up life as a wife and mother. Then he goes to Lori. (“What happened?,” she asks coldly. “Gay stuff?”) But alas, his mom has depleted her “rescue Niall” emergency fund.
Lori also tells Niall something that shakes him to his core. Ruben has been helping Lori out financially, and by extension helping Niall. He’s still seething about this when—after crashing his car outside Ruben’s house—Niall wakes up in a hospital bed with Ruben glaring at him. The two of them have a lengthy shouting match, peppered with some physical violence (including Ruben shoving his hood ornament up Niall’s bum). They also speak some truths that should’ve been aired long ago.
Like I said up top, a lot of this conversation comes off as too blunt. Ruben cackles that his ultimate revenge on Niall is living well while his “brother from another lover” flounders. Niall hisses that Ruben is sub-gutter filth, and that any success he’s had is a cruel joke on humanity. Ruben boasts about being Niall’s muse, saying, “You might be the painter, but I’m the rolling hills.” Niall fumes that he shouldn’t have to suffer from paranoia and guilt because he told the truth in court. And so on. As is often the case with Half Man, nearly every possible bit of subtext between these two gets blurted out.
But Bell and Gadd generate such a crackling energy between them, surfacing feelings of rage, lust, disgust, and bitter disappointment. The bond between these two men—as dangerously sour as it may be—is so evident that when their big scene ends with a hug, the moment makes sense. That hug then dissolves into the episode’s chilling twist ending.
Back in the present day, we see that after Niall and Ruben’s faceoff in the barn, one of them was wheeled out on a stretcher. It’s Ruben, looking dead-eyed. There is apparently another reversal of fortune coming for these two. It’s bound to be ugly—and something to see.
Stray observations
- • How well-loved and well-respected is Ruben in his new life? When he trespasses in a neighbor’s backyard while chasing Niall, the old lady is actually happy to see him.
- • How much does Niall worry about being thought of as gay? When he thinks Ruben might drop by his flat, the first thing he does is sweep it clean of all of his porn.
- • The episode begins with Ruben giving a toast at the wedding, in which he says of Niall, “He’s funny, he’s odd, he’s awkward, he’s determined, he’s devoted, he’s self-sacrificing. He knows what he wants and he takes it.” I hope we get to see this more rounded Niall before the series ends. Outside of his scenes with Alby, we’ve rarely seen him be likable.
- • During that same toast, Ruben tells back-to-back stories about playing hide-and-seek with Niall when they were youngsters. One story ends with Ruben giving up hunting for Niall; the other ends with Niall giving up hunting for Ruben. In both stories, Ruben somehow makes himself the victim and Niall a knob.
- • Niall’s career as a novelist stalled out because his publisher thinks he doesn’t put enough of himself onto the page. (Also, in his last sloppy book proposal he “spelled ‘Glasgow’ with a 7.”) Want to bet that part of the reason Ruben’s so mad at Niall now is that Niall wrote a book about his awful old pal?
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