Episode 8 of Beauty in Black Season 2 doesn’t feel like an ending, since it isn’t one, really. It’s the finale of “Part 1”, which means it’s the midway point of the season overall, and you can feel that, given it revolves entirely around very dramatic things happening with no resolution to any of them. Some of these things, like what happens with Rain, come so completely out of nowhere that it almost plays out as a joke, as does the preposterous excess of Charles’s chainsawing bodies up in his tastefully appointed ensuite.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s break down everything that happened in the “finale” of Beauty in Black Season 2, Part 1, since we’re no doubt going to have to refer back to it a lot when Part 2 rolls around.
Rain Is In A Predicament
In the penultimate episode, Rain caught Sylvie having sex with a handsome stableboy named Glen and irrationally chased him off a balcony with a pitchfork. He fell a couple of stories, presumably to his death, and Rain turned to the only person she could given the circumstances – Alex, who had already killed two people on her behalf earlier in the season.
(I should just jump in here to say that if you need a breakdown of the entire season until this point, not just the finale, we’ve got you covered.)
Alex kindly informed Rain that Glen wasn’t just a random employee – he’s Jules’s beloved son. Oops. Hilariously, given the structure of the episode, this is left on the back burner for almost the entire runtime, until Kimmie has her big moment in the boardroom and finally returns home.
Alex finds Rain having barely hidden Glen’s body and made zero effort to disguise the giant bloodstains weaving all the way around the property. How the butler didn’t spot any of this is anyone’s guess. Alex checks Glen’s pulse and realises he’s alive, albeit barely, and comes up with the bright idea of pretending he fell off a horse and hoping he has amnesia. Kimmie also catches them conspiring, so Rain drags her away to tell her what happened.
Boardroom Bonanza
Kimmie finally gets her big moment in the boardroom in “Hold the Pleasantries”. After making everyone wait for her arrival and then sit around doing nothing while she toured her new office, she eventually took her seat at the head of the table with Horace in her ear via an AirPod. He’s also watching through the CCTV from his Italian (I think?) experimental treatment room.
But Kimmie takes matters into her own hands quickly, declaring Mallory’s marketing campaign outdated, reallocating all the ad expenditure to wipe out spiralling debt, and very publicly calling Olivia and Norman out on their offshore LLCs that we later learn they’ve been using to funnel kickbacks. Horace is impressed by her research, even if she did go off script.
Olivia considers this the right moment to lean on Varney, threatening him not to look into the LLCs, lest she reveal to the world his relationship with Charles. I’m surprised she can even remember that revelation, given how wasted she was, but there you go. It hardly seems like it’ll be enough to dissuade Kimmie, though. Even Jules’s assurances that he has blackmail material on every member of the family fall on deaf ears, since Kimmie immediately counters by threatening his wife and kids, not even knowing that Rain has already damaged his son, perhaps irreparably. Now that she has made this threat, though, Jules is immediately going to suspect she was involved in what happened to Glen.
The Charles Chainsaw Massacre
After foiling the robbery at his home by killing all three of his assailants, Charles didn’t know who to turn to for help. He called Varney, but given how they left things, he – understandably, in my view – didn’t pick up. He also considered telling Jules, but – again, understandably – decided he couldn’t trust him. As far as he was concerned, he was on his own.
With his hackles raised after a brief conversation in the boardroom, Varney decided to go and check on Charles, only to find him chainsawing through the corpses in his ensuite bathroom. Both of them running to the kitchen sink to throw up is explicitly played for laughs, but the situation takes a much more serious turn when several armed “police officers” – do the police typically wear balaclavas? – burst into the place and “arrest” them.
Is Varney now going to be on the hook for the killings as well as the attempted cover-up? Right after saying that he couldn’t be involved? That’d be terrible luck. I guess we’ll find out in Part 2.
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