Beauty and the Beast - Recap: Light and Easy
Recap and review of Beauty and the Beast - Season 2 Episode 21 - Operation Fake Date:
If last week's episode was about just how hard it can be to change who you really are, "Operation Fake Date" is about how difficult it can be to get back to the person you used to be once you do change. Beauty and the Beast has set up Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy) to be this season's most conflicted character: he spent the first half of the season as a penitent good guy, and the second half as a relentless bad guy. Yet, more than any of those things, he's unreservedly flawed.
Credit: The CW
So I'm going to get into the things I liked best about the episode, which is one of the more consistently entertaining penultimate episodes of any season in the 2013-2014 broadcast season. A lot of that boils down to structure: the episode largely sidelines Vincent from the action, but the story compensates by essentially giving him a choice that recalls one of my all-time favorite movies, bringing me to the first positive that really stuck out to me...
Credit: The CW
THE MOULIN ROUGE PRINCIPLE
If you haven't seen Moulin Rouge, then this will be a minor spoiler. But here's the short end of it. Christian is in love with Satine, but she's a courtesan who is promised to the Duke whose money is needed to keep the Moulin Rouge afloat. She needs to put on a facade of infatuation to convince him to invest his money, essentially playing the role of a girlfriend who's infatuated with a guy who's not nearly as good-looking as Ewan McGregor. A little more than halfway through the movie, Satine leaves for her fated meeting with the Duke, to finally consummate their relationship. She's icked out by the entire thing, but she feels she doesn't have a choice. Everyone is relying on her. So she pleads with Christian, before she leaves, to allow her to take care of this. She basically asks him not to be the hero, to resist interfering no matter how bothered he is by all of this.
I was sixteen when that movie came out, and I never understood then why Christian actually stayed put. He remains in his room and respects Satine's wishes, even though it absolutely tears him up inside. I just didn't get it. At least not until I watched the DVD commentary that Christmas. Director Baz Luhrmann explained the scripting process for the scene and said that the original intention was for Christian to save the day, despite Satine's pleas for him to stay put. But the scene was ultimately rewritten when it was decided that it would actually be more heroic for Christian to respect Satine's wishes and trust her to take care of the problem on her own than it would be for him to play the action hero and burst in, and potentially make things worse in the process. Do you see where I'm headed with this?
This Moulin Rouge Principle (for lack of a better term), applies directly to "Operation Fake Date," as Vincent is forced to stand idly by while Cat goes on a date with Gabe. Much like Satine, Cat isn't exactly crazy about this date idea, but it's Gabe's one, non-negotiable condition before he'll call off Beth, Cat's high school friend-turned-reporter who is relentless in trying to expose Vincent's modified DNA to the world. Beth is going off of Gabe's information, so he holds all the cards. Maybe it's not the most elegant setup for an episode, but it works because the central conflict of the episode is a potent one. It's a conflict that tests the romance that anchors the series: will Vincent trust Cat to take care of things herself, or will he do his usual Vincent thing and burst in to save the day? Is he even capable of keeping it "light and easy" like Cat requests?
Well, yes and no. Vincent does his best to remain true to Cat's request, but his beast side is under constant threat of coming to the surface. He wants to track her, to follow her, to keep an eye on her and make sure Gabe doesn't try anything funny. He swears he won't interfere, he just needs peace of mind. And that could be considered admirable, in that Vincent really isn't wrong not to trust Gabe. In fact, he'd be insane not to be distrusting, so it makes sense that he'd want to make certain Cat was safe. But, ultimately, I think it proves more heroic that Vincent followed the Moulin Rouge Principle and exhibited enough faith to let Cat handle things on her own. Then again, a lot of it was JT keeping Vincent seated with a tranq gun. But if I'm going to give Gabe credit for having his heart in the right place in the first half of the season, Vincent gets a free pass for pretty much having it there all the time.
Credit: The CW
SWEET, SWEET FREEDOM
Naturally, Gabe plans a date that exhibits just how oblivious the guy really is. It's hard to imagine an assistant district attorney could be this dense, but Gabe genuinely doesn't seem to realize that he has absolutely no chance of winning Cat back. It's bad enough that he kidnapped her last season, but he made it about a thousand times worse by kidnapping Heather (Nicole Gale Anderson) two weeks ago. He thinks that if he just apologizes and explains his side of the story that everything will be okay. But if he really knew Cat as well as he swears he does during their cake decorating date (SERIOUSLY, cake decorating! What is this, The Bachelorette?), he'd know that his past behavior means that winning her back would be functionally impossible. But I suppose what gives Gabe his certainty is that he ultimately got Cat do go out with him this season even after all the crap he pulled in Season 1, so there's precedent for Cat forgiving the unforgivable. But this is a bridge too far.
Speaking of a bridge too far, Gabe kisses Cat at the end of the date. And Cat lets him.
Now, I'm not ready to rake Cat over the coals for this. Her explanation to Vincent that it would have been more suspicious if she'd refused him makes sense. But I'm kind of on Vincent's side with this: while I understand why she let Gabe kiss her, I ultimately don't think it was necessary. Like, at all. Forgiveness isn't a once-and-done process, and I think even a delusional guy like Gabe would have understood that he still had a ways to go before he could successfully plant one on her. In fact, allowing him to kiss her is almost more suspicious than refusing him would have been, since there's absolutely no way he should have been able to kiss her unless she was playing him. But since Gabe is out of his mind, he doesn't pick up on this. He only learns he's been duped after overhearing Cat talking smack about him when he goes to drop off her cake. This sets off a chain reaction that creates much of the drama of the episode, as Gabe gives Beth the goods she needs to expose Vincent during a press conference after Vincent turns himself in, with the understanding that Knox has a better chance of pushing the exoneration through if Vincent isn't a fugitive from justice.
But the press conference revelation about Vincent's mutated DNA doesn't stand up to scrutiny because Beth has no proof. However, that doesn't mean there aren't people out there looking for Vincent who know Beth was telling the truth. It's these people who abduct Vincent from prison, which leads to the next big positive of the episode: Vincent is exonerated! Yes, the tiresome business of running from the law, hiding in secret, and living in a youth hostel while wearing crummy disguises in public is over! But only after the mysterious, shadowy, apparently governmental agency got what they wanted from Vincent -- his blood. Who the hell are these guys? And what did they want Vincent's blood for? Are they really with the government? I mean, they kind of have to be if they were able to pull strings even Knox couldn't pull. I'll be interested in seeing how this storyline develops, especially now that Vincent and Cat have revealed the truth about beasts to Knox, which could conflict with the deal Vincent made with the new mystery agency (promising to be an asset for their operation in exchange for his release). Either way, Vincent's freedom means that we can reunite the ensemble, which is among The CW's most effective when it comes to big-moment storytelling.
Credit: The CW
BRINGING BACK THE BEAST
Cat confronts Gabe towards the end of the episode, going directly to his apartment to give him a piece of her mind after Vincent disappears from the prison. This is where Gabe's delusions fully come to the fore, as he insists that, at a subconscious level, she doesn't want to find Vincent -- she wants him. This is, of course, preposterous. But Gabe presses the issue, showing just how far he's slipped from the relatively reasonable guy he was when this season started. He tries to grab hold of Cat, she pushes him away, he gets offended and tries to grab her again, and she's left with no other choice but to give him the 
, which leaves him on the ground, presumably dead.
But we can't just kill off the villain of the show in the second-to-last episode of the season, so Cat calls JT to help save Gabe just as Vincent arrives to kill him (as per his deal with the shadowy government agency. Not a whole lot about it makes sense right now). However, in a lovely little dramatic reversal, Vincent is tasked with saving Gabe's life and restarting his heart in order to prevent Cat from facing the legal ramifications and guilty conscience of having murdered a guy -- even if it was a guy like Gabe. And so Vincent brings Gabe back to life, and Cat gets over her relief soon enough to remember she hates the guy: in a final f-you to Gabe, she tells him that there was once a time she actually did have feelings for him. Cat goes on to say that she went on that date with him hoping to rediscover the man that was lost, the man who just wanted to help people. She didn't have any romantic intentions on the date, but she wanted to see some sign that the good Gabe was still in there. However, she now knows that man is completely gone. As the recognition washes over Gabe, there's a sense that maybe he's now recognized the error of his ways. Maybe he'll change.
But this is an episode that is, in many ways, about how hard it can be to get back to the kind of guy you were before circumstances changed you. And so, it's with very little surprise that we discover Gabe has used his vial of serum to become a beast once again. However, what IS surprising is that Gabe transforms, escapes from JT and Tess (Nina Lisandrello), and confronts Beth in the street, framing Vincent for another murder by RIPPING HER HEART OUT THE WAY YOU'D RIP THAT ANNOYING TAG OFF YOUR PILLOW IF IT WEREN'T APPARENTLY A CRIMINAL OFFENSE. It's an insane stinger on which to end an episode, but I consider it a huge positive, and here's why. We can now drop the pretenses that Gabe is anything other than a detestable villain who needs to be stopped. As long as there was one ounce of potential goodness, one shred of possible justification for his actions, we can't have the big showdown between Gabe and our heroes. But now there's no justifying anything Gabe has done. And this means we have our conflict for the finale. It's going to be a LONG seven days.
Credit: The CW
CONCLUSION
"Operation Fake Date" has some other fantastic moments worth mentioning, such as JT and Tess perusing a sex shop for party favors for Heather's bachelorette party. It's from this that we learn that Heather is throwing the party to keep from being alone, since she can't stop reliving her kidnapping. Meanwhile, JT is dealing with being constantly reminded he's not edgy, only for Tess to reassure him at the end of the episode that "edgy" isn't what she wants anyway. And throughout all of this, we have Vincent and Cat finding their own sense of normalcy in what they have. Sure, it won't ever be suburbia, but this insane life they're living is what they know. It's what they're comfortable with, what they're accustomed to. And that, in itself, is a kind of normal.
Beauty and the Beast ends its second season next week, and the season finale has the potential to be the best episode of the series yet. As for "Operation Fake Date," I found this to be a compelling look into just how hard it is to go back once you've crossed the point of no return. Especially if, like Gabe, you don't even realize you've crossed that point yet.
Thanks for reading!
What did you think of the episode? And how do you think the season will end? Sound off in the comments!