The BBC horror-dramedy Being Human was a fan-favorite show that aired on BBC Three from 2009 until 2013, in addition to being one of the most popular shows on BBC’s iPlayer. Running for five series and introducing about seven different people continuously as a rotating main cast throughout the show, Being Human has been off the air for nearly a decade and somehow still maintains its cult following.
In all these rewatches, though, people are starting to realize all the little details they missed the first time around about their favorite characters.
Annie Knows What’s Beyond Death
The thing about being human is there’s no way to actually tell what comes after death -- people can only guess. The thing about Annie is, she’s no longer human: she’s a ghost and, as a ghost, she seems to be able to understand what comes after death, or at least comprehend more than living humans do.
When Annie’s death’s door appears, she closes it (an apparently unprecedented move) and gains all sorts of new abilities from it, including telekinesis and the ability to move objects around like a poltergeist. However, her ex-fiance, Owen, is incapable of comprehend what’s beyond death, going literally insane and ending up in an asylum when Annie whispers the “secret of the dead” in his ear.
Eve Sands Is A Paradox
George and Nina’s daughter, Eve, is not raised by George and Nina, but instead by Annie. Well, in theory. Though George and Nina die while Eve is still a baby, when Annie takes over raising her, she decides she would do absolutely anything to protect her. Annie even knows this is true when an adult version of Eve comes to visit her from the future, calling her “Mum” and insisting that the baby version of her has to die to save the human race in the future.
Annie does this, effectively killing baby Eve, and so there can be no adult Eve because that timeline no longer exists, so her baby self is dead, so her adult self is dead … oof. You might not have noticed Eve just … doesn’t exist anymore.
George Can Speak Seven Languages
George can be a little bit of a dunce socially and he doesn’t have the easiest time talking to people, but he is certainly an intelligent man, that much cannot be denied.
Few viewers actually caught small details about George’s intellect. For example, he comments that he possesses an IQ of 156, which is considered a genius IQ score. With this score, he falls in the category of “highly gifted, which makes it no surprise that he’s able to speak seven total languages: English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Croatian, and a tiny bit of Russian.
Lord Harry’s Mysterious Origin
When the new additions to the trio are introduced after Mitchell and George are gone, it’s hard to pick up on all the little details about their lives like viewers had been doing for so long with their old favorites. Hal is no exception, especially for the fact that he actually has two personalities: Hal, the “good” personality and Lord Harry, the “evil” personality.
Lord Harry is the evil, violent version of Hal that never seems to quite be fully explained. However, that’s not the case! Hal is rather neurotic and keeps careful control of everything in his life to repress his violent vampiric tendencies and this is meant to be where Lord Harry comes from: a personality created out of those repressed impulses.
Mitchell’s Birthday
While characters like Annie and George are the audience’s contemporaries and people who were born and raised in the modern-day, this is not the case for all the characters on the show. This applies primarily, of course, to the vampires. Vampires like Hal, who have been around an incredibly long time, don’t really know their birthdays anymore -- all Hal knows is he was born in the 1400s to a sex worker in the brothel he grew up in, and … that’s all he knows.
However, Mitchell not only remembers his birth year, he remembers his exact birth date, and he shares this information once on the show: July 29th, 1893.
Annie Can Still Taste
One of the running gags on the show (in series one, at least) was that Annie is constantly making cups of tea that she just leaves around the house to go cold and dump out. When George asks her why she does this, she tells him that she can’t drink the tea, but that making tea was part of her old routine. She feels more comfortable continuing to do it.
Later on in the run of the show, however, Annie actually discovers that she can feel what other people are feeling when she puts her hands on them. She informs Mitchell of this and then informs him she figured it out because, when she touches him while he’s eating, she can taste what he tastes.
George’s Faith Lapsed
George wears a Star of David pendant around his neck and makes no secret of the fact that he’s Jewish. Though others comment to him that it’s interesting that he’s still religious, he proves that the pendant he wears is effective for multiple reasons: it’s able to keep vampires at bay just like a cross would.
Mitchell, because of how much he loves George, is immune to the powers of the pendant. George, in the pilot, mentions he is also slightly immune to the powers of the pendant. He comments that he doesn’t really believe in Judaism all that much anymore because he doesn’t think the community would be welcoming of him as a werewolf.
Nina Is A Victim Of Abuse
Though Nina sometimes discusses her life before she met George and moved into the house with him, Mitchell, and Annie, little is actually known about her. At first, what happened to Nina before she was with George is only hinted at. There are a number of visible and severe scars on her torso shown in the first series and Nina explains that they’re burn scars. While these scars are later explained to be caused by a previous abusive boyfriend, Nina also tells George in the third series that her mother abused her, as well, both physically and verbally.
Most audience members missed this, but Nina actually states directly what happens in passing later on and she almost decides not to have her baby because of her past abuse.
Tom Names His Stakes
Tom, like George, is something of a lovable dunce. However, where George was kind of socially unaware but had a wonderful intellectual intelligence, Tom seems to have absolutely none of that. He does have a good deal of charm and innocence to him, and a sweet kindness that can’t be denied, but he also hates vampires with a burning passion, which is rough in a show with so many vampires!
Since Tom was raised in isolation with his “father” in the woods, he’s not very smart, but that upbringing did give him a pretty cool skill: he makes his own stakes (for destroying vampires, of course). In fact, he even says the stakes have names and they are Thor, Conan, Duncan, and Beowulf. Name all the references!
Mitchell Gave The Show Its Name
Mitchell is considered by many to be the primary antagonist of Being Human, especially in the first few series. Though George and Annie are certainly the main characters in addition to him, the story tends to follow him more heavily than anybody else, as well as involving vampires in the plot more often than any other plot elements.
Because of this, it makes sense that he’d be the one to give the show his name, which he does in the very first episode of the show. Since Being Human opens with Mitchell finding out he’s turned Lauren into a vampire, he decides to leave behind his vampire ways and try “being human” again instead!