Mitchell

Mitchell is the first character encountered in the BBC television series Being Human (2009–2013), and its most sustained embodiment of the vampire caught between appetite and conscience. Appearing to be in his late twenties while actually born in 1893, he carries the glamour of the Byronic vampire but experiences immortality as isolation, guilt, and an apparently endless failure to become human again.

Identity and Background

Mitchell was played by Guy Flanagan in the pilot episode and, after the series was commissioned, by Aidan Turner as a brooding, curly-haired Irishman whose striking appearance and social confidence make him seem almost designed for vampire mythology. Yet the role is deliberately unstable. Mitchell looks like the creature of the night that popular culture promises to romanticize, while his inner life is dominated by resentment toward the condition itself.

His transformation was not a freely chosen initiation into supernatural power. During the First World War, Mitchell was attacked with the men under his command and was given no option but to allow himself to be changed in order to save the rest of them. The origin of his vampirism therefore binds survival to coercion: he lives because he accepted the condition, but he never ceases to regard the resulting existence as something imposed upon him. Immortality grants him abilities and opportunities, yet its first meaning is dispossession of the human life he would have chosen.

Life Between Human and Vampire

Mitchell works as a hospital porter, a position that places him close to illness, vulnerability, and ordinary human care while requiring him to conceal the predatory nature of his body. He tries to walk a narrow line between human conduct and vampire appetite, and the hospital becomes an especially pointed setting for that effort: he belongs among the living only by constant self-management.

That self-management is not evidence that he has become harmless. Flashbacks reveal that Mitchell has sometimes acted with the coldness and cruelty associated with the most frightening bloodsuckers. His compassion is instead a precarious lifeline, something he clings to while fearing that he may become a fully fledged monster. He has not stopped killing altogether; his moral struggle is selective, imperfect, and therefore more troubling than a simple conversion from evil to goodness. The vampire remains present in him, but it is not allowed to be the whole of him.

Mitchell repeatedly experiences the contradiction as social exile. He is isolated and lonely even when surrounded by his housemates, and he withholds parts of himself because he believes that George Sands and Annie Sawyer would despise him if they knew everything. Their acceptance is the secure element of his life, and precisely because it matters so much, he feels unable to risk exposing the history and appetite that might destroy it.

George Sands and Annie Sawyer

Mitchell’s friendship with George Sands gives his existence a form of stability. George is an unlikely and unassuming werewolf, but he shares Mitchell’s difficulty in fitting into the outside world. They rent a house together in Bristol, seeking an arrangement that can make supernatural life resemble ordinary domestic life. Instead, the house acquires a third occupant whose condition makes the household even more impossible and, paradoxically, more humane.

Annie Sawyer is close in age to Mitchell and George, but she is dead. As a ghost, she can be seen and touched by the vampire and the werewolf when ordinary people cannot perceive or interact with her. The three rapidly become close friends, creating a household organized around mutual otherness rather than normality. Mitchell’s attachment to George and Annie is not ornamental companionship. They are the people who make his continued attempt at moral life conceivable, and losing them is the prospect he cannot afford to face.

Josie and the Possibility of Restraint

Mitchell’s relationship with Josie provides the clearest proof that his humanity is more than self-description. In the present day, he recognizes her as a hospital patient who, forty years earlier, should have become one of his victims. Flashbacks reveal that the expected act of predation was interrupted by love. Rather than killing Josie, Mitchell entered an almost human relationship with her.

The distinction is crucial. The evidence does not suggest that Mitchell stopped killing or that love cured his bloodlust. It shows that he chose not to kill one particular human being, and that he was capable of sustaining intimacy without reducing the person beside him to food. Josie turns his moral conflict into a concrete action: Mitchell’s humanity survives not as innocence but as restraint, discrimination, and the ability to recognize another person as someone whose life matters.

Choice and Tragic Ending

Mitchell’s central objective is not dominion, romance, or even comfortable immortality. What he desperately wants is to be human. That desire can never be completely fulfilled, because the transformation that saved him during the war also fixed him permanently outside the category he longs to re-enter. He is neither fully human nor entirely beast, neither securely accepted by ordinary society nor at peace among vampires.

The conflict becomes explicit when Herrick tells Mitchell that he must decide which side he belongs to in the struggle between vampires and humans. Mitchell answers, “I choose them.” The declaration is both a moral decision and an admission of impossibility. He can choose human beings, defend his bond with them, and resist the vampire order, but he cannot become identical to those he chooses. His tragedy lies in the distance between ethical allegiance and embodied identity.

Mitchell therefore functions as a round and deeply contradictory vampire character rather than a fixed monster or redeemed hero. His beauty, charm, wartime origin, murders, friendships, self-loathing, and capacity for love continually pull against one another. The result is not a clean return from darkness into humanity. It is a permanent threshold existence in which every act of care is valuable precisely because the appetite for violence has never disappeared.