Summary
Richard Gadd promised that the ending of Half Man would be neither happy nor conclusive, and he was right. On the upside, though, it’s a strikingly brilliant hour of television.
In a feature for Variety, Richard Gadd said that, “I don’t think happy endings, or even conclusive endings, are really true to life.” He wasn’t specifically talking about Half Man, but he might as well have been. Episode 6 seemed like it had a fairly simple mandate, which was to fill in the final few blanks between where Niall and Ruben left things after Niall calculatedly led him to assaulting Mona’s friend (perhaps with benefits), Benji, and Ruben being carried out of the barn in the present day in a body bag. And, in fairness, the finale largely accomplishes that, in typically harrowing fashion. But it also throws in a last-minute twist for good measure, and dips out to the credits before it can even think about clarifying it.
The overall effect is striking. To be clear, this is a remarkable hour of television. But it’s also potentially frustrating in its refusal to allow Niall and Ruben’s relationship to reach a logical terminus. Niall killing Ruben in self-defense would have been, I suppose, too easy for a show like this, one that delights in pulling the rug every time it feels settled and wringing every drop of tension from each impossible scenario its characters find themselves in. It’s a superb exploration of masculinity, identity, and dysfunction, but one that is perhaps too ambitious for the confines of a six-episode HBO drama. Either way, we’ve got a lot to discuss.
Where Do You Love Me?
As ever, the present-day sequences bookend the episode and constitute a tiny amount of the total runtime (the longest in the season by a margin, for what that’s worth). But here they’re both particularly illuminating. The first finds Niall and Ruben in the barn, with the latter stripping off to the waist and wrapping his hands for a fight. We’ve seen some of this way back in the premiere. But Ruben’s question of not just whether Niall loves him, but how he loves him, is basically Niall’s arc in microcosm.
We knew this about Niall, of course, that he loves Ruben like a chemical dependency, constantly feeling the pull to get high on him despite the often bleak comedowns that follow. Whatever difficult-to-articulate thing Niall feels for Ruben, it’s just about the only thing he has ever felt for anyone. That awful sexual experience in their childhood bound them together in ways that are almost impossible for either of them — though especially Niall — to understand. Niall hated and feared Ruben while also wanting, on some level, to be just like him, and he sabotaged his own life and the lives of several others because of that.
How Things Stand
Time has elapsed since Ruben was sent back to prison for assaulting Benji (who apparently survived). Niall is now a best-selling author, having published a book that’s being hailed as a modern masterpiece about male violence that is based almost entirely on Ruben. He’s annoyed that the press only seems interested in asking questions about Ruben and his highly publicised prison sentence, but that’s the price you pay for disguising a biography as fiction.
Niall still has a relationship with Ruben, whom he visits regularly in prison. Mona has had a baby named Baird, who is obviously Niall’s, and is planning on telling Ruben the truth about his parentage, which is where we begin to see how Niall is essentially turning into Ruben in his absence. He’s physically threatening with Mona, constantly on drugs, and just generally a mess. But that lifestyle isn’t innate to him the way it is to Ruben, so it causes him profound stress that he works off — or tries to, anyway — through irresponsible chemsex parties.
Niall is such a mess that when Maura is about to pass away from her recurrent cancer, he turns up high and vomits all over her. Lori is typically disgusted — not that she has much room to judge Niall, given how she’s been — and insists that he both visits a sexual health clinic to get himself checked out, which is fair enough, and tells Ruben that his mother has died, which is mostly just selfish.
Niall Can’t Get Out of His Own Way
Niall does as instructed, more or less. He gets himself checked out, and it’s at the sexual health clinic that he finally meets adult Alby. It’s not exactly the most attractive meet-cute venue, but Alby’s presence there helps Niall to come to terms with the fact that he has syphilis and chlamydia, and, more importantly, that he got them from sleeping with men. Niall is still pushing the idea that he’s not gay; the closest he can get to self-acceptance is saying he’s bisexual, but Alby sees through it and offers him genuine understanding and support, which is something that he isn’t used to.
Niall also tells Ruben about Maura, but he doesn’t take the news well, blaming Benji, of all people, for stealing the years from him that he could have spent at her bedside. It’s an insane viewpoint leading to another aggressive outburst, so it isn’t like he has been rehabilitated, which Niall explains to Alby when they see each other socially. But even though their relationship clearly has legs, Niall immediately goes back to the chemsex party, crashes his car while driving under the influence, and is photographed while being folded into a police car by someone who recognises him. He later tests positive for meth and crack cocaine and is charged; the photographer, meanwhile, sells the story to a newspaper.
On account of being in custody, Niall arrives late to Maura’s funeral and almost misses the genuinely heartfelt and remorseful speech that Ruben gives in his mother’s honour. Gadd is amazing here again, and for perhaps the first time, it seems like he’s being genuine. However, he’s up to his old tricks when he overhears Mona and Niall arguing again at the wake. He realises they’re keeping something from him and gives them a dramatic countdown to spill the beans before he lashes out, but the prison guard he’s with saves them from any potential consequences. The fear of the experience is enough that Mona promises to stay away from Ruben and keep quiet about Baird’s parentage.
Niall Comes Out
With the press on the cusp of publicly outing Niall, Alby advises him to visit Ruben and tell him the truth about who he is, since it’s Ruben whom Niall is most worried about finding out. He follows Alby’s advice, and Ruben… doesn’t care. In fact, he had his suspicions all along.
This is a remarkable sequence, at least in part because it shines a light on how Niall’s internalised homophobia has ruined his life, and how he scapegoated Ruben for his own refusal to accept who he was. Sure, Ruben’s behaviour was an undeniable source of stress and terror for Niall, which he’s willing to accept some responsibility for, but Niall’s issues with his sexuality are, as far as Ruben’s concerned, his own problem. Jamie Bell is incredibly good at selling the relief of the development, but also the shame of its implications, and his anger about his own failings.
In the spirit of sharing, Ruben also clarifies his father’s abuse of him. Physical violence was, he claims, “the best of it”. The rest of the abuse was explicitly sexual, and Ruben’s shame that his body “would sometimes respond”, and that his relationship with his father was, in some ways, the closest he has ever been with anyone, goes a long way towards explaining why he is the way he is. “It makes you a half man,” he claims, echoing the show’s title, justifying — at least in his own mind — his hyperaggressive masculinity, as a way to “fill up” the measure that his father took from him. Gadd and Bell should both win awards for this scene, which progresses into a giddy exchange of oversharing where each brother reveals something else they’ve been hiding from the other. It starts out innocuously enough, but Niall eventually gets carried away and reveals that he slept with Mona while Ruben was away, and that Baird is his child. Suddenly, nobody’s laughing.
Every Potential Theory I Can Think Of to Explain Half-Man’s Ending
Finally, we get back to the present day, where Ruben is trying to suffocate Niall to death. Niall, in desperation, pulls his father’s sgian-dubh, the sock knife worn as part of traditional Highland dress that Lori gifted him earlier, and stabs Ruben in the side. Ruben, though, climbs back astride Niall and finishes him off. He eventually sits up, wounded, and grunts at the sight of Niall’s dead body on the barn floor. Cue credits.
Um, what now? How does that track with the fact that we saw Ruben, not Niall, leaving the barn in a body bag? Well, here are some potential theories to explain what might have happened.
- Niall and Ruben both die. We never saw Niall alive when Ruben’s body was being carried out of the barn, so it’s easy to assume that following Niall’s death, Ruben bled out from his injury (or killed himself out of guilt, even though that seems like a bit of a stretch).
- Niall is alive. It takes a long time to die from suffocation. There’s a chance that Ruben could have had second thoughts and resuscitated Niall, and then bled out.
- The present-day sequences aren’t real. Many people have posited the idea that the present-day sequences might have been Niall’s literary mind imagining an idyllic future in which he marries Alby and “defeats” Ruben. This doesn’t entirely track with what we see, but the basic idea would be that Ruben being dead in the earlier scene was a literary flourish in the story he’s telling us (or, more accurately, the story he’s telling himself).
- Niall and Ruben are the same person. This is the most out-there theory, and it’s incredibly difficult to justify based on the text, but thematically, Niall and Ruben are essentially two distinct aspects of the same person’s masculinity. Ruben is the idealised but problematic version of himself that Niall always aspired to, which is why he has morphed into him throughout the series. The fight between the brothers would in this case be the two aspects of Niall at war with each other, and Ruben killing Niall is the darker side winning. It doesn’t explain why Ruben then gets carried out on a gurney, but it’s fun to think about.
Personally, as enjoyable as the Fight Club-style dual persona ideas are to play around with, I think the likeliest outcome is the first. Both brothers end up killing each other, just as it always seemed like they would, in one way or another. Hopefully, you weren’t expecting Half Man to have a happy ending.
