Movies / Movie Reviews

Misfits Season 4, Episode 2 Review

By Zak Edwards
November 11, 2012 - 20:41

Pure unadulterated fun.  That’s what Misfits is.  No sentimentality, no expectations of its characters, just hilarious people in situations you just can’t get anywhere else.  It’s like a Garth Ennis comic book if Ennis was three hundred times more tolerable.  This is a show that expects the very least out of itself in the most glorious of ways.  And I don’t mean the show is lazy, far from it.  In fact, the opposite is probably more true; Misfits can’t simply rely on fuzzy wrap-ups and people learning a lesson.  Good people with a good framework learning how to live in the world isn’t what’s going on here.  There’s too much cynicism, too much ridiculousness, so the realizations these characters get is just so strange, so alien, that I just don’t get how they keep making something so hilariously interesting every week.

Think about it: this week’s episode relied on a racist blind girl with an also racist telepathic dog and a girl becoming attracted to a guy who keeps his girlfriend tied to his bed.  Misfits isn’t asking you to make a moral choice here, they want you to be entertained by the ridiculousness of the situation.  In a way, this is the show Oscar Wilde would be writing (or at least watching) if he were alive today: it's art for art's sake.  It isn’t trying to moralize society while it critiques and this is probably what Ennis never got.  He’s still, like Mark Millar, an altar boy at heart and Preacher is so obsessed with moralizing, it’s humour depends on shock that comes from a recovering Catholic style of engaging with the ‘wrongness’ of society.  Misfits doesn’t give a shit.  Yeah, it’s using kidnapping to talk about people being in relationships that just need to end, but where’s the good guy?  Who did more wrong in the Finn and his girlfriend relationship?  Misfits doesn’t care and, more importantly, isn’t trying to get you to care.  It, as Wilde said, “is the spectator, not the artist, that art really mirrors,” so the big lesson to learn is that the show is really well put together.

You can imagine Howard Overman and Co. going to the pub, getting drunk, and coming up with some pretty hilarious things, but the theme of Misfits isn’t “learning and growing” or “together we can make the world a better place” or even “let’s just carve out a bit of world for us to enjoy.”  No, the theme is “you know what’s funny?  A guy getting caught by a racist blind girl using cling film and elastics as a condom.”  Why?  Cause it’s funny.  It’s unadulterated nihilism.  Misfits won’t end like Preacher, with some self-righteous idiot riding off into the sunset on a horse or a former vampire being redeemed and looking at the sunrise (gag), it will end with nothing.





For those of you sick of bad writers pretending to shock you while still feeding into some sort of strange, biblical didactic stupidity (and Ennis and Millar are only a couple of people doing this currently), Misfits represents something nice.  It expects nothing of itself and certainly doesn’t want some Joycean epiphany out of you.  It just wants you to think about how entertaining it is.

And if you decide that you want to use proper contraceptives and not screw racists.  Well good for you.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12