Half Man Season 1 Episode 6 Concludes an Intense But Exhausting Series

Critic’s Rating: 4 / 5.0

4

Now that the entire thing is out there in the open, I have no idea how to feel about it.

Half Man finally comes to an end after six intense weeks, and I don’t mean intense just for the characters, because this show has made me work.

Somewhere between Half Man Season 1 Episodes 1 and 3, I realized I had no idea what I was supposed to be watching, so I looked to others to tell me what to think.

Richard Gadd has claimed in interviews that Half Man is a multi-decade interrogation of masculinity, but the final product suggests he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

By trying to make the show about everything — codependency, homophobia, generational trauma, and mental health — it ultimately ends up being about nothing at all.

And so, Half Man Season 1 Episode 6 serves only to fill in the gaps of the period between Ruben once again stomping on another man and his death during Niall’s wedding.

True to form, the finale leans on a massive time jump to clear the board, leaving Ruben behind literal bars while trapping Niall in a domestic prison of his own making.

Most of what happens this hour isn’t shocking because that’s the only way the show could have maintained the tension.

The fact that Mona delivered a baby by Niall? Totally expected. And that Niall, to this day, is attached to Ruben by the hip even when the latter is locked up? Not a mystery.

But the mystery of why their bond is so intense still remains. They have told stories about their childhood, but it doesn’t justify this much intensity.

I’ve had a recurring thought that maybe both of them are mad.

I’m not psychologizing them, but why would they keep doing the same thing and expect different results?

For example, Niall is back into engaging in risky sexual behavior because Ruben is no longer around to act as the scarecrow.

The show is trying hard to make us dislike Niall, and I just don’t buy it. Most of his problems end up affecting him, while Ruben’s affect everyone else.

Is Niall messed up? Maybe even a danger to himself? Totally. But he’s not a textbook conniving villain who manipulates or abuses people to have his way. He might wallow in problems of his own making, but he’s no more fucked up than everyone else.

His only mistake in life is being boring and using Ruben for the dopamine. That’s why he keeps coming back.

And Ruben? I’m inclined to say that his biggest mistake in life was being born. I have developed Ruben fatigue after six short episodes.

Come to think of it, I’m exhausted with all the characters in this show. 

Ruben, especially as an adult, is not someone you want to see regularly because he’s a walking ball of anxiety. Who will he kill next? Meanwhile, Niall is such a crybaby and professional victim that it causes me second-hand embarrassment.

Even Maura. When she appears, I know it has something to do with Niall’s addiction to risky sex.

“Aren’t you dead yet from screwing every creature around here?” I can see her think whenever she sees Niall.

So by the end of the seventy-minute episode, I’m just glad this is over.

The episode finally slows down long enough to tackle mysteries it spent the whole season avoiding.

Niall’s sexuality is confronted head-on in one of the more believable scenes in the show. It’s natural for people to talk like that in prison. But a screaming contest in a hospital? No.

Niall starts with being bisexual, then admits he’s gay. Or is he bisexual but admits he’s gay to please Ruben?

And anyone could see from Mars that Ruben never really had a problem with Niall’s sexuality. He might have used a slur here or there, but people used those words like we use “fuck” nowadays.

Ruben imagined this monster and spent his nights under the bed, even when it posed no threat.

Meanwhile, Ruben admits that he faced multifaceted abuse from his father. That was also not a secret.

My only issue with how these topics are handled is that he show doesn’t give them the weight they deserve. That has been a recurring theme throughout the season, and explains why no one can put a finger on the real issue.

Because so far, they have tackled various forms of bullying and abuse, sexuality, loss, queerness, and even masculinity.

But between the time jumps, a short season, and recurring shockers, there is no time to really dive into them.

Ultimately, some end up being discussed instead of explored.

Niall and Ruben’s deaths also do not come as a surprise. Maybe I’ve been too involved with the theories that I expected them to happen.

I know the show was gunning for a shocking ending, but it just fell flat. It might have been poetic, but there are no consequences: they both die, and the show is a limited series, so there’s no fallout or repercussions.

Gut Check

Episode 6 is a satisfying conclusion to the story, even if the show’s overall delivery was not the best.

Autopsy

Now that it’s over, we can look back, see where the show went wrong, and try to fix it.

The first issue was dropping us into the story without any exposition on these characters, their personalities, or their histories.

We had to piece together who they were in real time, and that rug would be pulled out from under us every episode, so we had to start afresh every hour.

Here, the show could have benefited from a narrator, if only for the first and last few minutes.

Then came those time jumps that were totally jarring, sometimes changing the show’s tone. Telling a three-decade story in six episodes is a tall order, and I’m not sure how Gadd could have done this, but the current approach was not it.

The idea of starting with the wedding was a good one, but once the next scene was set 30 years earlier, there was no fixing that. Sometimes viewers couldn’t tell the time period if they weren’t familiar with it.

Finally, the violence. I understand wanting to show how dark it could get with Ruben, but there better be a good justification for watching him do all these things, only for a time jump to absolve him of the penalty.

This is a rare instance where the golden rule of television — show, don’t tell — completely backfires. 

Gadd treats us to endless cycles of graphic skull-stomping and sexual assault, but because the script refuses to engage in any thematic dialogue or narrative reckoning, the brutality quickly mutates from psychological horror into pure, gratuitous exhaustion.

Overall, Half Man was an arresting watch, even if we didn’t know what the charges were.

Over to you, Half Man fanatics. What did you think of the finale? Did it satisfy you? Is it possible for Ruben to die after being stabbed once? How could nobody have found him fast enough?

Let’s keep the conversation going — it’s the only way the good stuff survives.
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