{"id":670545,"date":"2026-05-15T05:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T05:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/670545\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T05:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T05:38:08","slug":"half-man-episode-4-recap-niall-at-a-nadir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/670545\/","title":{"rendered":"Half Man episode 4 recap: Niall at a nadir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Half Man\u2019s fourth episode is its best so far\u2014or at least the first to live up fully to the queasy power of the premiere<\/a>. The usual caveats apply. This is a 65-minute episode with maybe 40 minutes of story. The characters still have a habit of stating the show\u2019s themes out loud, in ways that can feel unnatural. And Richard Gadd has yet to solve the problem of how to make Niall worthy of our sympathy, outside of repeatedly making Ruben look even worse. But the intense one-on-one confrontations that have been Gadd\u2019s strength throughout this series are especially explosive this week. The mayhem is spectacular.<\/p>\n

The biggest change in this episode is that the flashbacks jump ahead 14 years, which means we now get Jamie Bell playing Niall full-time, and Gadd as Ruben. The gap is quickly closing between the drama at Niall\u2019s wedding and who these two men used to be. When last we saw them<\/a>, they were in their early 20s, and Ruben was being hauled off to prison while Niall was on his way to Oxford. In their mid-30s, the situation is wildly different.<\/p>\n

Much of the first half of the episode is a deep wallow in Niall\u2019s squalor. When we first catch up with him, he\u2019s indulging in one of his regular nighttime activities, hanging out in a dark alley to have sex with anonymous men\u2014or sometimes to masturbate alongside a line of other guys while watching two other men get it on. When he\u2019s not screwing or wanking in the street, he loiters in the library, where he hassles a clerk into giving him free printing privileges and occasionally sneaks into the gentlemen\u2019s lav to boink some more randos.<\/p>\n

Gadd and director Eshref Reybrouck\u2014and Bell, who is remarkable\u2014don\u2019t spare us any of the bleak details of Niall\u2019s life at rock bottom. As we gradually learn over the first half hour, Niall dropped out of Oxford not long after arriving, claiming that some combination of post-trial stress and annoyingly posh classmates drove him out. He then spent some time in a mental hospital, before pulling himself together enough to write a published novel, which bombed. After that he fell into his current rut of, well, rutting.<\/p>\n

All of this might be intolerably dark if not for Bell, who makes Niall\u2019s sexual compulsions and self-pity mesmerizing. He gives us a creature of pure need, who takes whatever he wants: books from the library to sell online, money from his mom and from his friend Joanna (Kate Robson-Stuart), sex from whomever\u2019s offering, you name it. Yet he doesn\u2019t consider himself to be a homosexual. When he runs into his old school bully Gus (Sandy Batchelor) getting railed in the alley, they go out for a beer and Niall tells Gus that he can\u2019t be gay because he\u2019s never fallen in love with any of his sexual partners. (Um, okay.)<\/p>\n

It takes a little while for this episode\u2019s plot to kick in. When it does, of course it involves Ruben. Niall gets word that his former best bud has been out of jail for a while. This terrifies him at first; but then it becomes infuriating, as Niall fills in the story. He learns that both his mother Lori and Joanna knew that Ruben was free. Even worse, Ruben met with Joanna as part of an apology tour, which did not include a stop at Niall\u2019s door. Worst of all? Since he\u2019s been out, Ruben has landed a six figure job as an oil rigger, and lives in a nice house with his wife Mona (Amy Manson), the former teenage sweetheart he so memorably shared with Niall.<\/p>\n

The episode builds slowly to the inevitable face-to-face between Niall and Ruben\u2014an electrifying 10-plus-minute scene that is well worth the wait. We get there via several suspenseful moments, starting with Niall cyberstalking Ruben to learn more about his post-prison life. Later, Niall lingers outside Ruben\u2019s house, triggering an alarm when he steals the hood ornament off Ruben\u2019s car. This leads to a chase through the backyards of a cushy suburban neighborhood before Niall\u2014fittingly\u2014takes refuge in a child\u2019s playhouse.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cfittingly\u201d because one of the main ideas this series has been getting across is that Niall is stubbornly immature. He needs a Ruben in his life, either to fight his battles or to be a convenient scapegoat for his failures. It\u2019s telling that when Niall discovers that Ruben\u2019s mother Maura got brain damage from a failed suicide attempt\u2014after breaking up with Lori, due to Niall\u2019s testimony against Ruben\u2014he quickly agrees with Lori\u2019s plea that he shouldn\u2019t blame himself. After all, nothing\u2019s ever Niall\u2019s fault, according to Niall.<\/p>\n

Another case-in-point: How Niall reacts when the library\u2019s manager, Nigel (Simon Chandler), catches him getting orally serviced in the loo. Nigel reveals that he has hidden cameras in the bathroom, and says it\u2019ll cost \u00a32,000 to stop the videos from being posted online. Niall scrambles first to Joanna, who regretfully tells him to stop asking for help, because she\u2019s trying to lead her own grown-up life as a wife and mother. Then he goes to Lori. (\u201cWhat happened?,\u201d she asks coldly. \u201cGay stuff?\u201d) But alas, his mom has depleted her \u201crescue Niall\u201d emergency fund.<\/p>\n

Lori also tells Niall something that shakes him to his core. Ruben has been helping Lori out financially, and by extension helping Niall. He\u2019s still seething about this when\u2014after crashing his car outside Ruben\u2019s house\u2014Niall wakes up in a hospital bed with Ruben glaring at him. The two of them have a lengthy shouting match, peppered with some physical violence (including Ruben shoving his hood ornament up Niall\u2019s bum). They also speak some truths that should\u2019ve been aired long ago.<\/p>\n

Like I said up top, a lot of this conversation comes off as too blunt. Ruben cackles that his ultimate revenge on Niall is living well while his \u201cbrother from another lover\u201d flounders. Niall hisses that Ruben is sub-gutter filth, and that any success he\u2019s had is a cruel joke on humanity. Ruben boasts about being Niall\u2019s muse, saying, \u201cYou might be the painter, but I\u2019m the rolling hills.\u201d Niall fumes that he shouldn\u2019t have to suffer from paranoia and guilt because he told the truth in court. And so on. As is often the case with Half Man, nearly every possible bit of subtext between these two gets blurted out.<\/p>\n

But Bell and Gadd generate such a crackling energy between them, surfacing feelings of rage, lust, disgust, and bitter disappointment. The bond between these two men\u2014as dangerously sour as it may be\u2014is so evident that when their big scene ends with a hug, the moment makes sense. That hug then dissolves into the episode\u2019s chilling twist ending.<\/p>\n

Back in the present day, we see that after Niall and Ruben\u2019s faceoff in the barn, one of them was wheeled out on a stretcher. It\u2019s Ruben, looking dead-eyed. There is apparently another reversal of fortune coming for these two. It\u2019s bound to be ugly\u2014and something to see.<\/p>\n

Stray observations<\/p>\n

\u2022 How well-loved and well-respected is Ruben in his new life? When he trespasses in a neighbor\u2019s backyard while chasing Niall, the old lady is actually happy to see him.
\n\u2022 How much does Niall worry about being thought of as gay? When he thinks Ruben might drop by his flat, the first thing he does is sweep it clean of all of his porn.
\n\u2022 The episode begins with Ruben giving a toast at the wedding, in which he says of Niall, \u201cHe\u2019s funny, he\u2019s odd, he\u2019s awkward, he\u2019s determined, he\u2019s devoted, he\u2019s self-sacrificing. He knows what he wants and he takes it.\u201d I hope we get to see this more rounded Niall before the series ends. Outside of his scenes with Alby, we\u2019ve rarely seen him be likable.
\n\u2022 During that same toast, Ruben tells back-to-back stories about playing hide-and-seek with Niall when they were youngsters. One story ends with Ruben giving up hunting for Niall; the other ends with Niall giving up hunting for Ruben. In both stories, Ruben somehow makes himself the victim and Niall a knob.
\n\u2022 Niall\u2019s career as a novelist stalled out because his publisher thinks he doesn\u2019t put enough of himself onto the page. (Also, in his last sloppy book proposal he \u201cspelled \u2018Glasgow\u2019 with a 7.\u201d) Want to bet that part of the reason Ruben\u2019s so mad at Niall now is that Niall wrote a book about his awful old pal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Half Man\u2019s fourth episode is its best so far\u2014or at least the first to live up fully to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-670545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}