Time for a look back at tonight’s new episode of Misfits, which saw Superhoodie get a superfan.
Simon was doing some more training in his costume when he came across a man getting mugged. His instincts kick in and he comes to the rescue, saving the victim, Peter (Michael Marcus Morgan), and getting a little beaten up in the process. Peter calls him a superhero, and when Simon gets back to Alisha and explains that his hand was stamped on by the mugger, he has the biggest grin on his face. He’s an actual superhero! Alisha doesn’t particularly like this idea of course, having seen the future version of Simon die in her arms. She doesn’t want that to be the fate of her Simon, saying that she doesn’t need him to go back in time and save her because she’s already been saved. Simon is enough of a sci-fi geek to realise that time travel doesn’t exactly work like that.
At the community centre, there’s some “preventative intervention” – where Peter is one of a number of young people who are there to tell stories of how they’ve been in trouble with the law. He tells the group of how he stole a girl’s handbag in order to seem like a hero when he gives it back to her. Later, in the toilets, he recognises Simon as Superhoodie. Simon admits that it was him and Peter promises not to tell anyone. Rudy spies both of them at the urinal and gets the wrong idea, of course.
It turns out that Peter is rather a good comic book artist, and he starts drawing panels featuring Simon. He tells Simon he’s a superhero. “Would you like to be my best friend?” is the response from Simon, which we then see was written in one of Peter’s drawings.
After an amusing interlude where probation worker Shaun sees both Rudys but thinks they’re twins, we see that Simon has broken the ultimate superhero code and let Peter into his secret lair, telling the full story of what’s happened to him and what happened to his future self. Alisha gets home and isn’t happy, telling Peter to leave. Simon tells her he is a superhero and they must terminate their relationship and sacrifice their love for the greater good. These are words that Peter has put into his mouth – he’s making a comic where everything he draws and writes comes true. Alisha later sees Peter at the community centre and grabs one of the pages he drew, working out what’s going on.
Alisha gathers the gang and confronts Peter, who runs off. Superhoodie suddenly appears and defends him, beating up our gang in just the way Peter drew. After the battering, Rudy tells the group he thinks Superhoodie is Shaun, before realising why that’s clearly wrong.
Kelly and Seth do a little more flirting in this episode. Later he explains that it was the grave of his girlfriend he went to. He was a drug dealer before the storm and he blames himself for the overdose that caused her death.
There’s still no sign of Simon, who’s been missing for a while now. Alisha uses her power to put herself in his shoes and sees that he’s with Peter, looking at comic books. They break into Peter’s flat, disabling the alarm with help from Kelly’s rocket scientist skills (and none from Rudy’s BTEC in computer science). Discovering the drawings, Alisha rips them up and suddenly Simon starts to get his own free will again.
Peter finds Simon and tells him that he was doing it for the best, he had to make sure Simon goes back in time and fulfils his destiny. Simon replies that he might have been wrong about that, adding “I won’t ever leave her”. Simon and Alisha are back together and the gang walk off in the knowledge that everything is now back to normal. Except that it isn’t, of course, as Peter looks on, wearing a Superhoodie costume with extra dashes of red, the supervillain every hero needs.
He kidnaps Alisha and takes her to a familiar-looking disused warehouse. Simon, in his costume, comes to her aid and after a struggle, Peter ends up with a knife in him. Such is the fate of most people they meet, it seems. The dying Peter tells Simon that he did it, he saved her. “A superhero has to be prepared to die for what he believes in”.
For Alisha, this brings back the memory of watching future Simon die, making her even more determined that he doesn’t go back in time, making him promise not to do so. “I don’t want you to put that suit on ever again”, she says, telling him to burn the suit with Peter’s body.
So, he burns Peter’s body. But the Superhoodie suit? He can’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he hides it in a secret compartment in his lair.
And then, movingly, we see that the final confrontation, even Peter’s death, and Simon hiding the costume were all penned by Peter, with the final frame reading “To be continued…”. He wasn’t entirely a bad guy after all, he just made sure Simon did what he believed needed to be done.
I felt this episode was the best of the third series so far. While it didn’t answer as many questions as I’d hoped when I saw it’d be a Superhoodie episode, it was an exciting step forward on the path towards Simon’s apparently certain fate. It wasn’t without its flaws (why wouldn’t a guy who was so desperate to get a girl that he stole her handbag draw himself a few love scenes using his comic book power?) but overall there was so much to enjoy. At one point in this episode, Alisha called Peter “the weird kid”, exactly what Nathan once called Simon. Seeing them together showed just how far his character has developed and grown, with Simon at one point telling Peter that one day he’ll find a girl, with the confidence of someone who has been there and done it.
Next week’s episode looks incredible. Remember how Curtis couldn’t buy back his power to reverse time because an old man was using it to kill Hitler? Looks like we’re going to find out how that went down…
Transmission 