Going into the fourth season, fans had no way of knowing that it would be the final 13 episodes of the series.  It was a secret that was about as well-kept as any in the industry, especially given how open the cast had been with the fans on social media.  In retrospect, it may have been easy enough to read between the lines, but who was paying that much attention?

Since the series finale, a great deal of information has come out regarding the reason for the series-ending decision.  Syfy and the studio wanted to renew the series for a fourth and fifth season to bring the series to an end.  That’s not unusual; Syfy has yet to produce a series that has run more than five seasons on the network.  The network’s budget just doesn’t allow for it.  It’s much cheaper to license a new show, even a seemingly more expensive one, than assume the full cost of a series well into its prime.

And there’s the issue: to justify the renewal through the fifth season, the budget would have to be slashed dramatically.  Everyone involved with the series, from producers to cast to crew, recognized that this would have a serious effect on the quality of the series.  Rather than allow that to happen, they negotiated to have a fourth, final season at the current budget.  Reportedly, to make that happen, the main cast members personally contributed some of their earnings to the cause.

And it’s a damn good thing they did.  I have no idea if budgetary woes contributed to the turnover in the cast of the original British incarnation of Being Human, but it’s hard to argue that the show was anywhere close to its best in the latter seasons.  The British original never seemed to understand the limitations of its budget, trying to cover too much in the space of six or eight episodes, and character exits were rarely full of hope or meaningful sacrifice.

One of my biggest complaints about the original Being Human was Annie.  While Mitchell’s vampire trials worked well as a metaphor for addiction, despite its oddly nihilistic conclusion, and George’s struggles as a werewolf made sense, Annie’s character seemed to go nowhere after the first series, caught up in ever more ludicrous subplots.

It’s telling, then, that I came to find Sally to be an equally enjoyable part of the central cast.  Even when Nora became a regular, it didn’t change the fact that Sally had substantial material, and that was never more true than in the fourth season.  Instead of remaining in neutral, Sally evolved, and her encounter with Donna at the end of the third season gave her access to magical abilities that only increased the consequences of her actions.

Addressing Sally’s character flaw was a step that the British original was never willing to take with Annie.  Sally’s tendency to act without thinking things through left Josh in a tortured state, caught between man and wolf, and caused enormous tension between Josh and Nora in the process.  And her overuse of magic ultimately took her on a journey into the past, where her underlying feelings for Aidan came to the forefront.  All of those elements were key to the conclusion of the series.

Unlike George and Nina in the British original, who combined to have one of the worst departures from a series in recent memory (one was off-screen!), Josh and Nora came face-to-face with the issues that came with their mutual curse and the new manner in which it was manifesting in Josh.  Threats to Nora and their relationship continued to drive Josh along the way, but he actually managed to find that necessary balance in the last few episodes of the season, thanks to Sally’s help.

Aidan was always going to struggle the hardest, since he was constantly whipping back and forth along the spectrum of blood addiction.  But the fourth season saw him take it head-on due to the return of Susanna, his wife, who had become a vampire herself.  Her guilt over killing their son as her first undead meal led her to kill vampires who couldn’t stop victimizing human beings, and that made it a formidable challenge for Aidan.  Even so, it wasn’t until Sally cured him of his vampiric condition in the series finale that he was free, and still he had to pay the price.  That he did it to save lives, as opposed to preventing his own future killing sprees, marks a significant difference between the original Being Human and its American successor.

What marks the biggest difference between the two versions of the show, and the greatest strength of the fourth season of the American Being Human, is that all three main characters managed to have a fully-realized character arc over the course of the series.  Sally learned the price of making impulsive decisions and committed herself to the ultimate sacrifice, with full knowledge of the consequences.  Josh stopped fighting his wolf and found peace with it.  Aidan accepted his death, but made sure that it was in service to others, rather than himself.

Unfortunately, even as the final character arcs drew to a solid resolution, the plot elements didn’t come together as well.  The writers went for the grand metaphor of tying the end of the series to the end of everyone’s residence in their house.  For whatever reason, it wasn’t enough for the various character-centric opponents to push the characters to the very edge in the finale; the house itself was embodied in the form of a demonically-fueled entity named Ramona.

If that were confined to the actual season arc, then it might have worked.  Sure, having this secret room in the house that was there all along, inhabited by this entity that was there all along, and never detected by any of the supernatural senses possessed by those living there would still be a stretch.  But the writers heavily implied that all of the terrible things that happened in the house, all the way back to Sally’s initial fall down the stairs, were at least indirectly influenced by Ramona.

It becomes a case of overselling the threat level that Ramona represents, when a lesser threat or identity would have likely been sufficient to generate the same level of thematic resonance.  As it stands, it becomes a distraction and detraction from the final push of the narrative.  It doesn’t necessarily undermine the season or the series as a whole, but it doesn’t add to it, either.

All that said, the bottom line is that the fourth and final season of Being Human was also its strongest.  The characters were given solid resolution to their inner conflicts, the tale came to a definitive end, and there was a sense that the series had been driving to this point from the start.  One distinction of Being Human is that it improved each and every season, which is a rare occurrence, and likely due to how closely knit the cast and production crew had become over the course of four seasons.