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‘Half Man’: Richard Gadd Explains That Shocking Body Reveal

The most dread-inducing wedding scene in television history continues on Thursday’s (April 14) new episode of Half Man, with a delightfully shocking reveal at the very end of it. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Half Man Episode 4.

This episode is the first of the series to fully center on the adult versions of Niall (Jamie Bell) and Ruben (Richard Gadd), though it does still take a trip back in time.

It starts with the wedding, per usual, as Ruben gives a speech about Niall: “What can I say about Niall Kennedy? He’s funny. He’s odd. He’s awkward. He’s determined. He’s devoted. He’s self-sacrificing. He knows what he wants. And he takes it,” he says. As complimentary as it might seem to others, Niall looks sheet white the whole time. Ruben then regales the crowd with memories of how Niall has been terrified of him since they were seven years old, playing hide and seek together, and everyone’s giggling but Niall (and Alby, of course).

From there, we flash back to a truly bitter period in Niall’s life. He’s stealing from the library, hooking up with random men in parking lots while others outside watch, hooking up with random men in the library, and then watching as other men hook up in parking lots.

Worse, he soon learns that Ruben has been freed from prison. Not just that, but it’s been two years, his mother has known the whole time (and borrowed money from him to pay for Niall’s various needs), and now Ruben is thriving with a six-figure job, a house, a nice car, and a happy marriage to Mona, the girl he dated so many years before (and shared with Niall once upon a time).

Niall, who’s being blackmailed by the librarian over footage of him and his menagerie of men in the stalls, sneaks into Ruben’s driveway and narrowly escapes the raging clutches of his “brother from another lover” when a neighbor intervenes in the pursuit. Instead, Ruben locks eyes with him as he drives away … and smashes right into another car head-on.

Niall awakens in the hospital to Ruben at his most brooding. Ruben attacks him by shoving his fist in Niall’s rear and listing out all of the ways Niall is a failure. “It kills you, doesn’t it? To know that even in my absence, with all the f***ing opportunities at your feet, all you’ve done is kick up dust, while I, with my back against the wall and a glass ceiling above my head and a f***ing army in my way, climbed over you to the top,” he says, among other things. He resents Niall for sending him away to prison; he couldn’t be there for his mother after she attempted to die by suicide and became infirm as a result.

HBO

Eventually, Niall does give it back to Ruben. He admits to being bitter, but only because he’s spent the last 13 years in relentless fear over what Ruben will do to him as punishment for his betrayal in the courtroom. It’s been crippling to the point that he has been hospitalized and operated on, and he’s done absolutely nothing with his life, even dropping out of Oxford.

Ruben is calmed by hearing of Niall’s own sense of suffering for all of this time and offers to pay his blackmailer off if he does one thing: apologize. And so Niall does. Surprisingly, though, Ruben apologizes to him as well. Soon, the two are sharing a very tender and long-overdue embrace. It feels like coming up for air after both have been drowning in their individual agonies.

Cutting back to the wedding as they also embrace, though, it’s a more menacing gesture.

As Ruben offers a “proper toast” to Niall and Alby, he says, “To the happy couple on this special day, at the start of a beautiful journey together, hand in hand, heart to heart, forever and ever, Amen.”

Those warm words are played above footage, though, of something terrible. Alby, Niall’s mother, and other wedding-goers are horrified as a swarm of police and medics break into the barn where Ruben summoned Niall before. They pull out a body on a stretcher, and when the sheet is lifted … it’s Ruben, with cold (possibly dead) eyes and a smirk.

We still don’t know how it got to this — there are two more episodes ahead to hopefully explain it — but what we do know is that the timing of this unveiling is intentionally abrupt.

“We called them the book endings, the wedding scenes, because they book-ended the start and end of every episode,” Gadd, who wrote and created the series in addition to starring as its bewildering lead, told TV Insider of the narrative decision. “I realized quite quickly, probably at the end of Episode 3, that these bookends needed to change and surprise the audience again. It’s more of a storytelling choice in a lot of ways.”

Gadd continued, “At the end of Episode 2, we got that one when Niall goes down the aisle, and then he sees Alby turning, and that’s why I felt like these bookends achieve their artistic weight… They did stuff that was surprising and shook up the timeline again and again and again. By the time I got to Episode 4, I thought, ‘OK … Ruben’s done his speech at the wedding, how do I twist this?'”

The answer, it turned out, is showing the ending in the middle of the story. “I can’t remember how it came to me, but I knew almost the second I thought, ‘Oh, what about if we reveal that now?’ … In a show that plays with atypical structure, it felt only natural that we shouldn’t end at the very last point of the chronology… in a show about the kind of chaos of structure and time, it felt right not to finish the show at the actual chronological end.”

Does that mean Ruben is dead in that moment, though? “I couldn’t possibly say,” Gadd said with a smile.

Guess we’ll have to wait and see whether the final two episodes answer that question, or how Ruben ends up in this position when Half Man continues.

Half Man, Thursdays, 9/8c, HBO

This article first appeared on TV Insider and was syndicated with permission.

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