Beauty and the Beast - Season Finale Recap: Human Again
Recap and review of Beauty and the Beast - Season Finale - Never Turn Back:
Well, it's a good thing Beauty and the Beast got renewed for a second season, or that would have been the cruelest possible way to end the series. Yes, the season finale concludes with a cliffhanger that whets our appetites for season 2, while resolving some of the lingering plot threads of the show's freshman year. In the case of the cliffhanger in question, it does both simultaneously: after a season spent building their threat, Vincent (Jay Ryan) is finally captured by Muirfield, an inevitable plot turn that's immediately set on its head with the revelation that the Muirfield head honcho is Cat's biological father. Of course, Cat (Kristin Kreuk) doesn't know this yet, creating a potential for high stakes drama as we move forward into the second season and Cat is tasked with rescuing the man she loves from the father she doesn't know. But that's all in the future. And like last week's "Date Night," "Never Turn Back" is an episode that's focused on the future -- or, at the very least, the promise of the future.
Credit: The CW
Cat and Vincent have an unconditional love, yet neither party can seem to escape the feeling that there are conditions on that love: Vincent tries to make his biological change to normalcy permanent, because he thinks it's what Cat wants; meanwhile, Cat pushes for Vincent to run away with her to a sleepy little Colorado town because she assumes that Vincent wants a quiet life with kids and all. Both parties are working on bad information, as Cat's assumptions are based on Vincent's gung-ho attitude about a peaceful life, which only exists because Vincent assumes that this is what Cat wants, thus perpetuating the cycle. It's funny how on-the-money the show can be about relationship problems, since these assumptions could have been nipped in the bud if both Cat and Vincent had simply been honest with one another. More amusingly, the moment Cat and Vincent decide to start being honest with each other about the future is the moment the fight against Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy) turns around for the better, as Cat accepts Vincent for all his beastliness, and provides him with the means to reclaim that beastly form and win the fight (well, with assistance from Muirfield). But we'll get to that in a bit...
Credit: The CW
The first half of the episode has a lot going on, as Gabe and Tyler (Shantel VanSanten) continue to lay the groundwork for their plan against Vincent, setting up a meeting with him to stage an ambush in which they'll capture him and dissect him, taking his marrow, spleen and other vital parts in order to cure Gabe of his condition. However, J.T. (Austin Basis) has been tailing Gabe and Tyler, and is able to figure out what they're planning. He breaks into Gabe's apartment and destroys Tyler's laboratory after warning Vincent about the plot against him. A desperate Gabe is left with little recourse but to abduct Cat to force Vincent to show up to their meeting...at the mansion where Gabe was raised. Vincent, whose DNA has essentially been rewritten by the pills so that he's pretty much cured, decides to abduct Tyler to force Gabe to make a trade. However, Gabe claims not to care about Tyler, inviting Vincent to just kill her. His plan thwarted, Vincent has to figure out another way to rescue Cat, who is being held in the prison-like chamber where a young Gabe spent his childhood. This is merely one facet of the many lousy things that happen to Cat this week.
Credit: The CW
Though Cat and Vincent spend an idyllic day in a quaint little town upstate before all this unpleasantness happens, she returns home to a phone call from her father, imploring her to meet up with him immediately. Cat hurries to meet her father, wondering what he has to show her. As they meet eyes from across the street, a stranger pushes Cat's father into oncoming traffic, where he's struck by a speeding, jet black car. The "accident" has all the markings of a Muirfield setup, and after she gives blood at the hospital (in the event her father needs a transfusion), Cat sets out to get to the bottom of the hit-and-run, over the protests of Heather (Nicole Gale Anderson), who pleads with Cat to stay at the hospital with her. Tess (Nina Lisandrello) fears that Cat may be looking too deeply into the accident. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and so Tess assumes that Cat is seeing Muirfield involvement where none exists. Tess encourages Cat to go back to the hospital to be with her family, and then offers to take Cat's father's iPad and phone to tech in order to get it checked out. After a bit of jockeying with the tech nerd of the precinct, Tess discovers what was on the computer: news that the Muirfield head is back in town. Tess heads over to the apartment to warn Cat, only to find J.T., who's handcuffed to the radiator after being tricked by Tyler. Vincent is gone, having left to go rescue Cat, relying on his experience as a soldier in lieu of his powers. And with that, we barrel towards the climax...
Credit: The CW
One of the more interesting things about Gabe is that, looking at it from a certain point of view, he's not really a bad guy. In fact, it's one of the things that makes him as routinely compelling as he's been. As he recounts the story of how he accidentally killed his adoptive mother, resulting in his adoptive father's implied suicide, it's hard not to feel bad for the guy. Unlike Vincent, he never signed up to be experimented upon by Muirfield, and his life ever since has just been one long, hard road full of sadness and solitude that he never asked for. Throughout the entirety of his time with Cat, he's regretful at having to do this to her, as he'd prefer there to be some other way to cure him that didn't involve taking hostage the daughter of the only woman who was ever kind to him. Yet he feels he has no other choice, and his desperation is what compels the narrative forward, as he slowly loses grip of his humanity.
Credit: The CW
Vincent, meanwhile, is getting in touch with his, utilizing his soldier skills to infiltrate Gabe's mansion and rescue Cat just before a fully-Beast Gabe kicks down the door and slaughters her on the spot. As Vincent and Cat hide from Gabe's henchmen, they come to the realization that they've essentially been lying to one another, with both assuming that the other wanted a normal life. Vincent reveals to Cat that while he could reverse the process of normalization that the pills started by simply administering a vaccine, he chose to remain normal in order to give Cat the life he thought she wanted. He feared Cat wouldn't be able to see a future with him as long as he was a Beast, but Cat declares that his beastliness doesn't matter to her -- she simply wants to be with him. Moreover, Cat doesn't want Vincent to die because of her, so she obtains a vaccine from Gabe's medicine cabinet and injects him, allowing Vincent to beast out just in time to fight Gabe. It's a brief fight, but one of the more exhilarating of the series, as the two beasts just toss each other around like bales of hay. Some of the visual effects are wonky, but this is still the climax that the finale needed. Gabe gets the upperhand and is about to impale Vincent with a gate spike when a Muirfield helicopter appears out of nowhere, and a sniper pumps Gabe full of lead. It appears that Vincent and Cat are finally safe...until a net falls from the helicopter, scooping up Vincent and whisking him away at the order of the Muirfield boss.
The boss in question exists on the margins of the episode, always present but never central. He finds Gabe's apartment and discovers it trashed. During his search for Gabe/Vincent, he comes across Tyler, following her escape from J.T. He guns her down in cold blood and then follows the bread crumbs back to Gabe's mansion, where his episode-long search comes to an end. It's heartbreaking stuff to see Cat try to hold onto Vincent's hand as he's whisked away in the net, only for his hand to slip through her fingers. As Cat watches the helicopter fly off, the sniper onboard nearly takes her out -- until the Muirfield boss orders his sniper to stand down. "That's my daughter," he says, and we're suddenly left with a bombshell to carry us into season 2. This was foreshadowed, of course, when Heather is told by the doctor that Cat's blood has no genetic signifiers with their father's, meaning that the man lying in the hospital bed with two broken ribs and internal bleeding can't be Cat's father (I guess this is as good a place as any to finally make the comment that the casting agents deserve all the kudos in the world for how much Kristin Kreuk and Nicole Gale Anderson look like sisters, even if their characters now supposedly have different fathers -- unless the Muirfield guy is Heather's father too? Hmmm...). In essence, Cat's ties to Muirfield just got even more personal than they already were, between having a mother and a boyfriend who've been adversely affected by the organization. It's powerful stuff, and it already has me psyched for next season (and the move to Mondays, which I feel is a far better night for the show than Thursdays, although I worry about what will happen to its ratings without the Vampire Diaries lead-in and stiff competition from The Voice. But the show is by no means doomed, and I wouldn't be surprised if summer reruns build a whole new following for the show).
Credit: The CW
"Never Turn Back" capped off a season of TV that I hadn't been sold on at first. However, Beauty and the Beast quickly proved itself to be one of the more compelling genre series on television -- a turnaround that happened concurrently with its decision to drop the procedural, "crime of the week" aspects of the story, instead choosing to embrace full-on serialization. What resulted was a series that privileged nuanced characterization and engaging long-form storytelling over isolated cases that held no importance on a week-to-week basis. It's one of the most interesting, and frankly, best, instances of reinvention I've ever seen from a show in its first season. The Beauty and the Beast that closed this season is a different animal than the one that started it, and I'm impressed with the work of everyone involved.
Thank you for joining me this season, as it's been a pleasure recapping this show for you guys. It's easy to see why the series has developed one of this season's most devoted TV fanbases -- of which I'm now a part. I'll see you in the fall!
What did you think of the season finale? Tweet the review and sound off in the comments!
