Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Over two short seasons and one Christmas special, the writers of the BAFTA-winning Misfits (Best Drama Series 2010), marshalled by Howard Overden, have proved themselves singularly adept at coming up with plot devices that justify, narrative-wise, well, pretty much anything, and thereby leave the field wide open for their surrealist brand of comic pikey super-heroism.
As you may or may not recall, the super-(and-not-so-super-)powers Overden and co bestowed on their quintet of ASBO jumpsuits include invisibility, lust, mind-reading and (with brazen pragmatism) the ability to rewind time, enabling even the most Gordian plot scenario to be unknotted in literally the blink of an eye. Chief of the chavs, though – god of incorrigibility, loudmouth lord of hag-born heroes – is Nathan, the offensive, gyrating, mop-haired Irish lad whose inability to operate on any normal human plane is, basically, the show’s single narrative motor.
Misfits has been very popular, including – a little surprisingly – in the States. And now a third series is ready to air, and the big news is that Robert Sheehan (pictured right), the immortal Irishman hisself, isn’t in it. [No, it’s not a “viscous roumer” – brilliant! – @chris on the 4oD Misfits blog.]
In the natural course of thespian things, it seems, Sheehan has gotten too big for his Gitmo-issue orange onesie and jumped ship, presumably sometime after the third series was confirmed. And sure, as every Bond fan knows full well, you can’t start a drama with the demise of the lead character (though if there were ever a franchise that might’ve tried…). So the writers have drunk deep of their own tricksy medicine and, availing themselves of the time-travelling, watch-again nature of internet television, have inserted, for our recombobulation, an eight-minute, 18-rated online short: a bridging episode, if you will, in which Nathan returns for one last triumphal blast… and they completely ignore the problem.
“Have you ever seen a man shit a rabbit out of his anus? Prepare to be amazed… and disgusted!”
Nathan has a kid now. And a missus. And a new superpower (unexplained: but let’s just say a baby isn’t the only thing he can make pop out of people). And he’s doing what we’d all be doing if we could bend the rules of reality: trying to clean up in Vegas.
Needless to say, despite his new magicianal powers, the boy Nathan still – oh yeah – manages to fuck things up big time. The episode ends, typically unresolved (“cliffhanger” would be gilding it), and simultaneously, shamelessly, sets up “the new guy” without so much as giving us his name.
