It should be a rule cut into the concrete of the community centre: No one is ever as nice as they appear. On Misfits, people who come across as well-meaning or even the slightest bit kind are usually hiding some dark ambition or a malignant skill, and it’s never left undiscovered or unleashed for long. So, Alex the pleasant barman, what’s your game?

In trying to find out we come unexpectedly across a lot of lazy and old stereotyping about being gay – the kind of stale assumptions about clothing or culinary skill that you’d have seen Rigsby sneering about in Rising Damp in the 1970s – and Finn’s unrelenting insistence about Alex’s sexuality quickly begins to grate. It’s only in retrospect, when Alex corners a man and demands to see his cock, that you realise Misfits has been trying to wrong-foot the audience: have us disagree with Finn’s juvenile insistence so that we become certain Alex isn’t gay, only to have the episode spin round, point a finger, and go ‘A-HA! Or is he!?’

We bet he isn’t. Because that’s another rule that should be chipped into the grotty stone of the estate: Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. It’s more likely that Alex is looking for a man with a distinguishing feature on his tackle. A man who has something to do with the one photo on his fridge maybe? Or he could just be cursed with a power where he needs to keep looking at someone’s privates every now and then to prevent from turning into the Incredible Hulk. There’ve been weirder powers on the show. You’d have to go a long way to top the milky killer of Series 2.

The fact that Finn is so childish about Alex’s sexuality and Jess’s prospective relationship plays in direct contrast to how grown-up he is about finding his father and dealing with his illness. Finn’s real dad is dying of cancer, and the show pulls no punches about how unpleasant that is.

As Finn’s half-sister Grace (Charlie Murphy) keeps him alive with her cancer-slowing power, it’s quickly apparent that this is a dramatised debate on euthanasia. A super-powered argument over the quality of life versus the quality of mercy. It’s quite a feat of character that Finn can make a rational, compassionate decision about his father’s health when you think that just three episodes ago he had his girlfriend tied to a bed and defecating in a bucket.

We’d not to be doing our duty if we failed to mention Shaun Dooley among all this, his face so taught with fury that it constantly looks like it’s going to rupture and turn itself inside out. In an episode that played it safe and by the numbers, his deranged jig was a moment of delicious insanity. Please, Misfits, don’t kill this Probation Worker off anytime soon.

Speaking of deranged, while we don’t usually mention the trailers for the next show we feel we have to make an exception this time for the thirty seconds of madness that followed. Anyone else see the giant rabbit? Maybe we were wrong. Maybe Alex is a Furry.

Aired at 10pm on Sunday 25 November 2012 on E4.

> Buy the complete Series 1-3 boxset on Amazon.

> Order Series 4 on DVD on Amazon.

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