Beauty and the Beast - Season 1 Episode 11 - Recap and Review - On Thin Ice
Recap and review of Beauty and the Beast - Season 1 Episode 11 - On Thin Ice:
"On Thin Ice", tonight's new Beauty and the Beast, is a decent episode, though it isn't nearly as effective in its love triangle plot as last week's solid hour. Vincent (Jay Ryan) is having troubles readjusting to the life he's been living now that he's been confronted with an aspect of his past that he can't simply just push aside. I mean, I suppose he could just give Alex (Bridget Regan) the cold shoulder, and yet, for as much as Vincent clearly cares for Catherine (Kristin Kreuk), there's a part of him that seems to be grasping at the normalcy of a past he can never get back. As torturous as this is for Vincent, it's every bit as miserable for Cat, who's being forced to see a police psychiatrist before she'll be approved to return to active duty. Her shrink is the worst kind of psychiatrist, the Hollywood type that passive-aggressively badgers their patient for not wanting to lay everything out on the table from the word "go". However, his presence allows us to get to the root of Cat's feelings about Vincent, her resentment of Alex, and her lingering PTSD over her mother's death. In addition, we get a bit more insight into Vincent's myopic desire to recapture his old self and be free of Muirfield, once and for all. All in all, it's a pretty active episode, which is something I can definitely appreciate.
Credit: The CW
Vincent is getting used to the notion of having Alex back in his life, although she's more certain about their future together than he is. When Cat spies her stealing drugs from the hospital, Vincent confronts her, at which point Alex reveals that she's taking the drugs and redistributing them among the less fortunate, sort of like a narcotic Robin Hood. Vincent accompanies her on one of her visits among the downtrodden, and for a moment, he's back to being Dr. Vincent Keller, reestablishing some semblance of the life he'd lost. Treating patients, having a bedside rapport, even preparing a little boy for a painful shot, Vincent is comfortable and confident, and it's easy to see how he'd miss something he was this good at. As if sensing this nostalgia in Vincent, she attempts to sell him on the idea of a Doctors Without Borders-type organization working in Africa, telling him that they can have a life together traveling the world and helping people. This hard sell is part of a romantic moment in an ice rink, which the couple breaks into for a private night together. But it all goes haywire when the cops show up and are ready to haul Vincent away. Vincent has no identification, and he refuses to give his name, knowing that it will bring Muirfield directly to their location. The officer is about to put Vincent in the back of the police car when Cat, who Vincent had called earlier, arrives and gives the officer a verbal dressing down, explaining that Vincent is one of her informants, and that if he doesn't release him immediately, she'll bring down "a world of hurt" on him. It's one of the first times Kristin Kreuk has communicated any real, palpable sense of authority as a detective on the show, and it's one of her best scenes in the entire series, for that reason alone.
Credit: The CW
Cat is annoyed that Vincent doesn't seem to appreciate the risks she takes to keep him safe, and her psychiatrist follows up on her admission that she has feelings for the most complicated man on the planet. The doctor gets Cat to admit that she's in love with Vincent, and that perhaps she should fight for him, since Vincent is grasping onto something that he thinks he wants, but doesn't actually need. Emboldened by the encouragement, Cat confesses her feelings to Vincent, telling him that she doesn't want to give up on their relationship before it's even started. Vincent, however, says that he's not sure his choice is as clear. Cat makes the astute observation that Vincent hasn't told Alex about his affliction, rendering their entire rekindled romance a fantasy. She tells Vincent that, until he tells Alex the truth, that's all their life together would ever be. I'll say this for the plotline, I was impressed that they actually pulled the trigger on Cat admitting her feelings. Moreover, I found myself appreciating that it wasn't Vincent chasing Cat, for once. It was Cat, coming to a conclusion about what she wants in her life, and going after Vincent. It would have been too easy to have it go the other way, with Cat falling for Evan (Max Brown) and having to make a choice of her own. This was an encouraging subversion of the "brooding loner chasing the beautiful girl" trope, though it might simply be that the series is trying to, more straightforwardly, adapt the story of Beauty and the Beast - or at least its "girl chases boy" elements.
Credit: The CW
The other developments this week see JT (Austin Basis) continuing in his cross-species DNA research with Evan. The research sample, from a body Evan was able to get exhumed, is corrupted by an inside man - in this case, a woman whom Evan has been seeing, whom we learn is an agent of Muirfield. To what purpose they corrupted the sample, I have no idea, but I imagine they're getting closer to discovering Vincent's whereabouts and finishing what they started, and that creates a nice bit of narrative tension as we move forward. The other plot of the episode, however, is not nearly as substantial. Tess (Nina Lisandrello) investigates the death of a multi-millionaire businessman's wife. The couple had gone skydiving together, but the chord to her parachute had been cut. The investigation leads Tess to an employee of the businessman, who was "the other woman" in his life. Her jealousy and spite led to her cutting the chord and dooming the wife to a particularly gruesome death, although it's implied she wouldn't have gone so far if the businessman hadn't made a point of telling her how much he loved her and wanted to be with her. The case itself is pretty by-the-numbers, and it kind of drags the episode down, given how much of the time given to the case could have been spent elsewhere. It felt tacked on to the episode as if to fill some "crime procedural" necessity, and so it was pretty hard to care about it in any substantial sense. The thing is, it wasn't even particularly bad, as some of the cases in the past have been. It just felt strangely toothless, and devoid of purpose, in contrast with the rest of the episode, which felt purposeful in a way that few episodes have. I wouldn't mind the show becoming more serialized, to a point where it has to rely on fewer of these cases to fill out an episode.
Credit: The CW
"On Thin Ice" was perfectly acceptable television, and it's closing act really sells some of the drama that we can expect, going forward. Vincent and Cat's romance actually feels substantial, and so I find myself looking forward to see how they eventually get to their hookup, whether it's through Vincent realizing that he can never really regain his past, or if they go the easy route and just kill Alex off. There are plenty of different storyline possibilities on the Muirfield front as well, with the agents getting closer to Vincent and, potentially, those he cares about. There's a lot going on this week, but it all serves a larger story purpose, so I can't really complain, even if there were elements, namely the crime procedural aspect, that don't work nearly as well as the serialized story.
