Summary
The Beauty wastes “Beautiful Patient Zero” on backstory that we didn’t really need, filling in blanks that the audience could have easily figured out for themselves.
Even though the titular product very much twists through the entire DNA of The Beauty, I’m pretty sure we didn’t need any more explanation about it. This kind of thing is better conceptually than in specifics. The rationalisation provided by the previous episode – billionaires are dumb and greedy – felt like plenty, especially since the particular dangers of the virus, and the allure that allows it to spread, have been pretty capably displayed since the very beginning of the series. Episode 6, “Beautiful Patient Zero”, feels redundant because of this, a frustrating forced exile for Cooper and Jordan while Ashton Kutcher caresses himself and does a song-and-dance routine.
There’s just nothing here that we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves through pure assumption. I didn’t leave this hour – one of the longer instalments, as it happens – feeling like I knew much more about what was going on, just that I’d had the usual points reiterated to me. It also features another, albeit minor, instance of a “Ryan Murphy grapples with trans issues” subplot, which always makes me a bit nervous.
Things begin with Forst, picking up shortly after his massacre of his billionaire associates, now enjoying his new form with an air stewardess, while Ray, still a hostage, has no choice but to watch on. He’s pretty jubilant about having the most potentially profitable drug in history solely in his hands, but Ray has to caution him about possible side effects. After all, he rushed the product through before it could be adequately tested. It’s sexually transmitted. The spread could be uncontrollable.
This is the genesis of Forst’s present-day approach of cutting off any potential spread by straight-up killing anyone who might have been exposed. The stewardess is presumably first. We don’t see it, but the gesture Forst makes to his henchman is pretty clear, and the framing of the shot does some heavy lifting. I don’t think this was totally necessary to include, but I’m not mad at it.
The aspects of The Beauty Episode 6 that I actually like all involve Franny, Forst’s wife. She’s so utterly sick of his nonsense that it’s genuinely hilarious, but she also represents an interesting viewpoint, the one person we’ve met thus far who is totally immune to the pull of the virus because she’s satisfied with who she is, warts and all. Sure, she’s rich and snooty and probably isn’t a very nice person in the grand scheme of things, but at least she’s comfortable in her own skin.
“Beautiful Patient Zero” also charts the process of getting The Beauty to market, which means it reveals the moment when it became clear that eventually – after a period of about 855 days – there will be a catastrophic ignition ketosis reaction, and the infected will simply combust. I have always wondered why this pretty significant flaw was considered a standard part of the product, as though sales wouldn’t radically plummet once everyone was dead, but we get an answer to that question. And the answer is, predictably, money. The flaw can mandate the sale of an add-on stabiliser, and increase interest around a – lucrative, presumably – cure.
The risk is part of the package. The downsides beget more profit. This is how Byron came to reinvent himself as the Corporation, the living manifestation of greedy capitalist exploitation. Again, I don’t think we needed it spelled out to us.
The back half of this episode is particularly weak. This is all supposed to explain how the virus escaped containment in its unstable state, but it relies heavily on ideas we’ve already seen play out multiple times. Mikey, one of the scientists working in the lab, is socially awkward and insecure and is in love with a colleague, Jen, who rebuffs him without even having realised he was making a move. He’s basically the original version of Jeremy, just less cartoonish. But the underpinning idea is the same. He wants to be someone else, and he’s drawn to the virus as a way to make that so.
With his intentions catalysed by his relationship with Clara, a trans woman who also works in the lab and is fed up with being lumbered with a body that doesn’t represent how she feels internally, Mikey steals the compound and injects himself with it, becoming Patient Zero in the process. The transformation is immediate and profound. He becomes the person he wanted to be, the kind of person Jen might be interested in.
Mikey also stole a sample for Clara. She’s a bit more reluctant to take it, since she’s unsure how the virus will interpret the hormonal changes in her body. But she bites the bullet anyway, and miraculously, the virus changes her into the woman she always imagined herself as. This raises all kinds of questions about how the virus actually works, because it seems to be based almost entirely on thought at this point, but I strongly suspect these aren’t questions the show is going to answer. Perhaps they don’t really matter.
Either way, The Beauty Episode 6 ends two years later, with Mikey being killed by the assassin. He was obviously the guy we saw him kill way back at the start of the series, for stealing the formula in the first place. He never made it to the point where he would have spontaneously combusted, though I can’t tell whether that’s a mercy or not. I wonder how Clara’s doing.
