The Beauty Season 1 Episodes 8 & 9 Review: A Lesson in Trust

Critic’s Rating: 4 / 5.0

4

At the end of The Beauty Season 1 Episode 7, when The Assassin finally captured his target, many of us wondered how Cooper and Jordan would get out of their situation.

Well, The Beauty Season 1 Episode 8 quickly turned that question on its head, as The Assassin soon learned that he should be careful about whom he trusts.

Then, The Beauty Season 1 Episode 9 delivered an epic twist that makes us need the final two episodes of the season.

The Assassin Should Probably Not Trust Anybody

The Beauty Season 1 Episode 8 starts with The Assassin and Jeremy thinking they’re in control, but only The Assassin is oozing confidence, because Jeremy is starting to pay attention to the other adults in the room.

Sure, Cooper and Jordan point out to Jeremy that there is a lot The Assassin hasn’t told him about the virus he now has, and Jeremy is a little fearful.

They’re doing the FBI thing of making criminals doubt each other, but in this case, it’s not all a lie or for the sake of getting out of trouble.

There’s a look in Jeremy’s eye that makes it clear he knows his mentor hasn’t told him everything, and the FBI agents know far more about what’s happened to him than he knows himself.

There isn’t the time to play with this fear, though, as the focus is soon put on The Assassin and Jeremy, also hooded and taken to a secret room with Cooper and Jordan.

You see, Byron has decided he doesn’t need Antonio anymore — and that’s who he becomes at this point of the story, rather than The Assassin that we’ve known him as up to this point.

You can see the hurt and anger Antonio feels, and while he doesn’t seem all that surprised, part of me thinks this is a defense mechanism.

Hearing his backstory during The Beauty Season 1 Episode 7 led to this feeling of betrayal, and it’s hard not to feel bad for him, despite his villainy.

After Antonio’s disfigurement, his former boss ignored him, and it was Byron who came to his aid.

He put his trust in this man who saved him, feeling like he owed Byron something for creating this younger version of himself that he is now.

Clearly thinking that Byron would always have use for his skills, he didn’t even think that the toying around that he had done would cause a problem for his own life.

He, like so many others, underestimated Byron, and he didn’t take him at his word. When someone shows you who they are, you need to believe them, and Byron has shown his disdain for everyone time and time again.

And here we are, with Antonio now trapped in a padded cell — where everyone from the office space who had been infected had been held and killed — with Cooper, Jordan, and Jeremy.

Cooper, as the only one looking for a way out of the room, stood out to me.

He is a man who can remain calm in a crisis, and we’ve seen it time and time again.

I questioned that when it happened before, but now I realize that it was all leading to this moment. The Beauty just needed time to build to this.

Jordan remains useless, and it’s a wonder she was considered a good FBI agent at the very start of the series.

Antonio and Jeremy are fighting, and like with Antonio, it’s hard not to feel bad for Jeremy, despite him being a villain. He didn’t really ask to be put in this exact position.

Cooper is the one with the brain, knowing there are doors to get people in. He needs to figure out how to open them from the inside.

Since we had already seen where people came in from to kill the previous people — who were still shockingly in there, clearly as a way to unsettle the four prisoners — there was that sense of dread.

Yet, all these individual storylines from The Beauty Season 1 have a way of converging, and Cooper’s remains connected to Meyer’s.

It’s Meyer who helps. Despite helping Byron, Meyer also knows that Cooper is a good FBI agent.

Throughout The Beauty Season 1 Episode 7, Meyer didn’t want to give in to Byron, but he sacrificed his own wishes and wants for his daughter.

That doesn’t mean he’ll play by all the rules, since he wants to save Cooper as well.

The conflict in his eyes is right there, clearly not able to say too much, but able to say enough that Cooper understands.

Yet we know Meyer can’t be acting alone, which leads us to Byron’s current storyline with one of his lead scientists, Diana.

When she doesn’t get what she wants, she turns on Byron. Everyone needs to be careful about whom they trust.

Cooper seems to be the only one who really gets that.

When “White Mother,” as Jeremy hilariously calls her, offers this group of four a deal, Cooper is the only one who really questions if they can trust her.

Everybody else is taking in pieces of information, such as Jeremy finally learning he’ll combust in a couple of years, and everyone learning about the droids — the Deacons — White Mother has made.

Cooper remains calm, thinking things through. It’s notable that he’s the first to share his distrust, remaining a couple of steps ahead of the others.

The problem is they’re all caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no escape, so they need to put their faith in this mysterious ally.

White Mother is a clever manipulator. She knows how to get what she wants, and she does.

Although it’s not quite the way she’d like. She doesn’t really care how Cooper becomes beautiful, as long as he does, so that Byron won’t know he’s coming.

All I can think of is that, of course, she’s a master manipulator. This is a woman who has studied human behavior and emotion to create her robotic children.

If she can tell how people are feeling, she’ll be able to work out how they will react and think, and she’s going to use that to her advantage.

The best manipulators can assess all potential outcomes and determine which is most likely to occur, and it’s exactly what White Mother has done.

The downside is that it wasn’t too surprising to watch it all play out, and the entire season has been leading to this moment.

With two episodes to go, of course, Cooper was going to take The Beauty to become someone unrecognizable so that he could be the one to kill Byron.

A Reminder of the Side Effects

Cooper isn’t the only one to get The Beauty during the two episodes, though.

Byron decides it’s time to give it to his sons, and we’re immediately reminded of how this injection works.

There have been discussions of side effects, and we’ve seen that Antonio’s eye didn’t fully heal and that Byron still has his third nipple, but a side effect for one of the brothers is nothing you would imagine.

Franny asking why one of her sons suddenly became Black is an absolutely valid question. It wasn’t said with malice, but with the need to understand what had happened.

After all, Franny was looking at someone who was nothing like the boy she had given birth to and raised, and she was willing to stand by them with all their drug issues. Of course, she was standing by them now.

The whole point of this change was to remind us all that the process cannot be controlled.

This was just a foreshadowing of what would come with Cooper, who did not experience the same type of change as Jeremy and Jordan.

I honestly thought that it was going to kill him, and they would all be back to square one. What I didn’t have on my bingo card was him turning into a child.

Now, my first thought was “that’s going to be awkward for him and Jordan now,” but there was something else that stood out for me.

Cooper was in a cocoon, which goes against everything we know about The Beauty right now.

Those who got the injection would go into this cocoon that they would then need to break out of, which was something Antonio was very familiar with.

It brought this beautiful — pun totally intended — vision of a butterfly breaking free from its cocoon after going through its transformation.

Those who received The Beauty in the form of the virus would have a more snake-like experience, shedding their skin to become a new version of themselves.

It brought this darker, dirtier feeling to the whole process, and that’s what Jordan and Jeremy had experienced.

Getting a mix of these two experiences raises many questions, but the biggest is what it means for Cooper.

Will he explode in two years, or is this some sort of new variation?

It will only be a matter of time before Byron finds out what has happened, and he’ll certainly want to take Cooper and run tests.

Byron already made it clear that he only changed his sons so that they could continue taking all the drugs they wanted, allowing Byron to test his miracle cure.

He has never cared about people, including his own sons. This has all been about money.

Everything is some sort of experiment for him, allowing him to market his drug — and bravo to those who put that pharmaceutical commercial together — and get the best price.

Finding out that this could make people younger could be a plus or a negative, and as the truth comes out, nobody is safe.

One thing I have to wonder about the recent two episodes of The Beauty, though, is whether they needed to be two episodes, especially since they aired back-to-back on one night.

They could have been one long episode, as everything was neatly connected together, but this is just a small thought about two enjoyable episodes.

The Beauty Season 1 Finale will air with two episodes back-to-back on Wednesday, March 4, on FX and Hulu.

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