Summary
Half Man lacks any truly shocking scenes of abuse or violence in Episode 3, which is a mercy, but it makes up for it with a profound dilemma and startling emotional depth.
If you were to make a list of the happiest days of your life, for most people, getting married would be somewhere near the top. I think the fact that Niall Kennedy won’t be able to say this is a pretty neat summarisation of what’s so twistingly harsh about Half Man. It isn’t just that Ruben ruined his childhood and his time at university; he’s a recurring presence of misery in his entire life, undercutting every moment of potential joy. He’s a parasite. And in Episode 3, he wants to give a speech.
We’ll get to that. After the reveal that Niall is marrying Alby, Ruben’s presence at their nuptials is even more worrying, but the wedding is contained to the latter moments of the episode. In the meantime, there’s even more unpacking to be done in the interim, this hour taking place after Niall has left university and is weighing up a post-graduate education at Oxford. In the background, Alby, newly awakened from a coma, has decided to press charges against Ruben, and rightly so. But that has a tremendous impact on Niall’s life, too, leading him to perhaps the most profound dilemma of his life thus far.
Mercifully, this episode doesn’t include a sequence like the “sex scene” in Episode 1 or Ruben’s brutalisation of Alby in Episode 2, one that’s genuinely hard to watch. What it does instead is leave Niall in such an awful predicament that his internal dilemma, and his efforts to maintain a relationship with Joanna, his mother, and Maura, Ruben’s mother, both of whom are together romantically (it took me three episodes to figure out how Niall and Ruben were “brothers”), are as torturous for us as they are for him.
The crux of it is that Ruben, who is now volunteering with children, which he’s able to do since his juvenile record was wiped when he turned 16, wants Niall to commit perjury and claim in court that Alby groped him, provoking the attack. Niall and Ruben’s mothers – though especially Maura – try to inexplicably pressure Niall into doing so, with the logic being that the Scottish courts are more intolerant of homosexuals than they are of violent criminals.
Niall is expected to believe that Ruben has turned over a new leaf, but it barely takes any time at all for him to reveal that he hasn’t. His efforts to coach Niall in his testimony are explicitly violent and threatening. Nestled in this, though, there’s a hint of a deeper pathology stemming back to Ruben’s relationship with his father. His having chosen “being groped” as a defence for an assault so vicious that it left his victim in a coma for six months and permanently disfigured afterward isn’t an accident. There’s a strong implication that Ruben might have been groped in the past, which isn’t an excuse for his present-day behaviour, but certainly goes some way towards explaining it.
Niall must feel that too. It’s Ruben’s admissions about how scared he is – the extent to which he’s being honest or manipulating Niall here is deliberately unclear – that compel Niall to take his side and agree to lie in court. But that doesn’t make it any easier to justify, not to himself or to Joanna, with whom he’s in a wholly uncommitted relationship. Joanna’s presence here is vital because she can see through the lies Niall tells himself. Her dinner table exchange with Maura is a highlight of the episode, absolutely bristling with tension.
It’s also Joanna who, through Alby’s confession about what happened between them, finally reassures Niall about his sexuality. It’s another standout scene in Half Man Episode 3, with Joanna telling Niall that it’s okay to be gay, but not to deprive Alby of justice out of fear and misguided loyalty. Ultimately, though, the choice is Niall’s, and the big question of the episode becomes whether he can be brave enough to tell the truth.
It takes a while, but he does. It doesn’t help that the prosecution tears holes in his statement, rightly pointing out the absurdity of his being able to recall precise details about the event at the time but not, apparently, the groping, at least not until months later. There’s a deft balancing act in the writing and performance here. Alby, almost unrecognisable after the attack, is literally sitting in the stands, watching Niall testify. It would be so easy for Niall’s initial attempts to discredit him to feel like him crossing the Rubicon, something that morally he’d never be able to come back from in the audience’s eyes. But we understand why he’s lying. We understand his terror, and his confusion, and his pain, especially after a near-lifetime of being Ruben’s plaything.
But it’s ironically the defence team – Ruben’s own team – that appals Niall the most, since they attempt to frame Alby’s open homosexuality as evidence of his sexual deviance. And, of course, in so doing, they’re also attacking Niall’s most essential character. That’s the moment when he decides that enough is enough and reveals that Alby never groped anyone. Ruben goes ballistic, trying to attack Niall in the courtroom and promising to “make him ugly”, presumably not doing himself any favours, legally speaking.
The final scene, at the wedding, keeps some things back. We don’t know what – if anything – happened between Ruben and Niall following his sentencing. We don’t know how Niall and Alby went from that court scene to a married couple. We don’t know what Ruben wants now that he’s here. But we know he wants something, and that he has something to say, since the episode ends with him tapping his glass to quieten the crowd. He wants to tell everyone about Niall.
