Summary
The Beauty shifts focus in “Beautiful Christopher Cross”, focusing on a character only glimpsed in previous episodes. This sheds more light on the virus but leaves some bigger plot points — such as where the new Jordan is — on the back burner.
How many people can you see explode before it starts to get tedious? I do worry that The Beauty might be leaning a little too heavily against this gimmick, since Episode 3, “Beautiful Christopher Cross”, opens in much the same way as the premiere, with a woman getting very thirsty and violent before eventually combusting in the middle of a crowded restaurant. It still works, largely, but one imagines it won’t for much longer.
Perhaps Ryan Murphy sensed this, too, which is why the investigation of this case, which is technically passed to Cooper and Jordan, takes a back seat. We do catch up with Cooper, who’s being interrogated after his narrow escape in the previous episode, but there’s barely any follow-up on Jordan, and the focus is largely on a character we’ve only glimpsed thus far – The Assassin, Forst’s one-eyed contract killer lapdog.
This isn’t a bad thing. The Assassin provides a window into the Corporation, the virus itself, and the enigmatic Forst, who, despite being played by Ashton Kutcher, is clearly much older than he appears. This is made clear through a few lines of dialogue and his wife, who’s considerably older and sick of his bullshit. The implications are pretty clear. The virus was created as a kind of bottled fountain of youth to keep the extremely wealthy alive indefinitely, but what has been stolen was a trial version with a pretty fatal flaw, given that it makes people explode. That’s bad for business, and is why the Assassin has been dispatched to cover all of the tracks, making sure Forst can’t be exposed and the value of the true Beauty can’t be tanked.
The Corporation was, of course, responsible for the failed hit on Cooper. The Assassin is also sent to kill the doctor who introduced Jeremy to Claire, which he does, but only after he forces the doctor to find out Jeremy’s current location. Jeremy is enjoying his new appearance, but he’s still fundamentally broken inside, which turns out to be to his benefit. Even though he’s supposed to kill him, the Assassin takes him on as a protege, curious about his lack of fear of dying. We already knew Jeremy was capable of murder, since he went on a killing spree in the first episode, but it’s still eerie to see his eyes light up at the prospect of becoming a contract killer. He even proves his bona fides when he and the Assassin track down the woman he was sleeping with, who is now infected, and he beats her to death with a frying pan.
The title of The Beauty Episode 3 refers to ‘80s sensation Christopher Cross, who was a phenomenon until people saw him in person and realised he didn’t fit the standards of beauty and excellence that culture had cultivated. That derailed his career, made him irrelevant. The Assassin learned a lesson from that. Beauty makes the world go around. It’s the most powerful thing you can be.
There’s still plenty we don’t know about the Assassin. His relationship with Forst is interesting, since it doesn’t seem like an employer/employee deal based on how he talks to him, and he also has a child he’s estranged from and doesn’t seem to have any interest in seeing (though he does continue to pay for him from what we can tell). He’s a compelling character, an amoral monster who knows what he is, and I suspect there’ll be quite a bit more to come from him.
As for Cooper, at the end of the episode he’s gearing up to interview someone – one suspects Manny, the guy from the opening who got a drop of Harper’s blood in his eye, since the lab visit confirms the infection can be spread that way, not just sexually – who can hopefully shed some more light on the case and on Jordan’s disappearance. That’s probably where we’ll pick up next week, though, beyond that, it’s kind of impossible to predict where The Beauty might go. And that’s a pretty good thing in my book.
