So much have I been enjoying Being Human, I just automatically expected the third episode to be another golden gasser. The story of ghost Annie, vampire Mitchell and werewolf George has just been so well written, so sharp, so funny and not afraid to smack you with some emotional clout that it's already a contender for series of the year. Half way through February. So why did the third episode not quite reach the high standards the previous two so effortlessly attained?

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From looking at the trailers, I honestly thought that this episode was going to be all about Mitchell and his volatile relationship with Lauren. It wasn't. We got to find out more about Annie and, specifically, how she died.

The ep started with Annie feeling very upset - it was the eve of her proposed wedding anniversary and Owen was on her mind. The flat was also gurgling and straining with strange noises from the pipes and the plumbing.

To help cheer her up, Mitchell and George took Annie to an Eighties influenced club, where they introduced her to Gilbert, a fellow ghost. He had bad hair, bad drainpipes. The type you see about a lot these days on the revivalists. Befitting such a period, Gilbert was avuncular but liked really good music, and I audibly yelped when I heard The Fall being played in the background. High Tension Line-ah!

Anyway, despite their differences, Gilbert and Annie became firm friends. Like last week's episode, where George was shown the ropes by his werewolf friend Tully, Gilbert started to show Annie how to live with her condition. He also showed her her grave, and told her that she hadn't found peace yet because she needed to resolve an unknown issue.

Annie, after being shown this macabre sight (she died in 1985, we found out), decided that to find peace there was something she had to resolve. She fathomed that it was her realtionship with her ex-fiancé Owen that needed sorting out, so she threw herself into some friendly haunting at Owen's, and was convinced that by becoming his guardian angel was the thing she needed to do to find her peace.

This wasn't a good idea. As she was getting more loved up, she saw Owen sneak back into the flat to work on the pipes. He went straight to the loo and unblocked the u-bend. To her horror he removed one of her old thongs and it all came flooding back in flashback form - we saw Annie and Owen have a row on the top of her stairs. He thought she had been sleeping with someone else, she denied it. He pushed her down the stairs. He was the one who killed her.

Gilbert, meanwhile, admitted his love for Annie. As soon as he did that a door appeared and he knew it was time to go, and pass over properly. It was his love for Annie that had put him at peace.

As much as Annie and Gilbert's relationship was sweet and touching (especially when he had to say goodbye), it didn't quite do it for me. The pairing didn't really work, and he just seemed to lurk in the background of scenes. I would have preferred it if he just came and went, all enigmatic, and for Annie to tread her path of revelation on her own.

Elsewhere, Mitchell was having to stave off a rampant Lauren, who needed to feed desperately, and George was having trouble coping with Nina, who he was getting closer to by the minute. As ever, George provided most of the humour in the episode (and arse shots), and the scene where he finally ditched his nervousness and expressed his inner wolf in a frantic sex scene that left Nina weak-kneed was very funny.

But this third episode, overall, didn't quite have the sparkling dialogue or the seamless plotting the previous two boasted. It was still a cut above pretty much everything else on the box at the moment, but it just shows you how good this series is when expectations are so high.