Stars: Sam Witwer, Meaghan Rath, Sam Huntington, Mark Pellegrino, Kristen Hager, Sarah Allen, Gianpaolo Venuta
Writer: Nancy Won
Director: Erik Canuel
Network: Syfy, Mondays @ 9 PM
Airdate: April 4, 2011

There are plenty of dramatic events in the BEING HUMAN episode “You’re the One That I Haunt,” but they’ll probably play better for those who haven’t seen the original, because this hews very closely to the template in two of the plot threads, while being rather brief with the third.

As the episode opens, ghost Sally (Meagan Rath) is much the worse for wear after a mostly-failed exorcism attempt by her ex-fiance/murderer Danny (Gianpaolo Venuta) – As Josh (Sam Huntington) puts it to Aidan (Sam Witwer), “She looks like THE GRUDGE!” Sally drifts around the house milky-eyed and unresponsive. However, when she drifts over to Danny’s house and causes him to cut his throat, albeit non-fatally, while shaving, Sally is restored.

Meanwhile, werewolf Josh stresses over what may turn up when his pregnant girlfriend Nora (Kristen Hager), who still doesn’t know about Josh’s condition, gets an ultrasound. Vampire Aidan, still grieving over staking vampire girlfriend Rebecca (Sarah Allen) at her request, is shocked when Celine, his human lover from forty years ago, turns up in the hospital as a terminal cancer patient. We discover via Celine’s flashbacks that she left Aidan not because he wouldn’t turn her, as she wanted him to back in the day, but because Aidan’s maker Bishop (Mark Pellegrino) kidnapped her and threatened to kill her family if she tried to continue the relationship. In the present, Celine still doesn’t tell Aidan about Bishop’s threats. Aidan offers to turn Celine, now that she’s had a full life, but Celine doesn’t want to see her children and grandchildren grow old and die. Aidan kisses her passionately.

Danny retaliates for his nicked throat by trying to burn down the roommates’ house. Josh and Aidan get home in time for Josh to put the fire out and Aidan to threaten Danny by showing his fangs. Hysterical, Danny confesses to the police/fire department that he killed Sally, who he claims is now trying to kill him. With all of this closure, Sally’s door to the afterlife appears in the living room, but before she can go through it, Bishop (with his face burning) leaps through the window and stakes Aidan, then flees. Josh and Sally gather round the impaled Aidan.

Unlike the U.K. version, where dead vamps can leave bodies behind, on this BEING HUMAN, bloodsuckers “dust” like those on BUFFY. Setting aside the fact that Witwer is one of the leads, we can tell that Aidan isn’t going to die based on the fact that he’s still corporeal, which takes just a bit of suspense out of the proceedings. A better mystery is why Bishop’s face is on fire, but perhaps that’s the result of his entering uninvited. Having Sally look really horrific for a little while is a nice, creepy touch. It’s hard to know what to make of the ultrasound business, apart from the fact that we and Josh know that the baby is growing at twice the rate of a normal fetus, while Nora thinks the obstetrician has made a mistake about the date of conception.

Celine in the present is one of the most youthful-looking sixty-five-year-olds ever seen on TV. There’s nothing wrong with the flashbacks, except that it seems like every show in this subgenre has had a version of this riff on romance between mortal and immortal, and BEING HUMAN does nothing to put a new spin on it.

Many threads here are good, but the ones that work best are the ones fans of the U.K. edition have seen before. “You’re the One That I Haunt” might have been better if it weren’t so haunted by the ghosts of episodes past from across the Atlantic.

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