A new player has entered the game! In this episode of The Beauty, our heroes (and anti-heroes) meet their rescuer. Fortunately for fans of television shows that are fun to watch, she’s a familiar face. And she’s out to insert herself into the plot in a big, big way.
Dragged by a phalanx of black-suited black-masked Squid Game rejects to a science-fantasy conference room walled with giant, luminous gold blocks, Cooper, Jordan, Antonio, and Jeremy meet Dr. Diana Sterling, head of Byron Forst’s recently defunded robotics division. Played by Ari Graynor like a dominatrix’s commanding sneer in human form, this former Redditor “plucked from obscurity” by Byron to create androids is apparently even more pissed about her division getting shut down than she’s let on. She’s now out to assassinate her boss.
But it’s more than the shutdown of her department and the decomissioning of her convincingly lifelike “Deacons” that concerns her. She’s as convinced as Byron that she has the key to the future of humanity in her hand — but humanity won’t have a future if the Beauty catches on and eventually kills everyone who takes it. (Dr. Lee’s much-touted boosters lose efficacy over time.) Then how would humanity transfer its consciousness into her beautiful robotic bodies and form the next stage in human evolution themselves?
The answer to all her problems is to kill Byron before his big Beauty Day presentation in 48 hours. That’s why she recruited the fab four, using money given to her by Byron’s enraged wife, Franny. But Byron’s facial recognition technology would spot any of the four long before they could get close enough to kill him. Cooper realizes what needs to happen before needing to be told: He must allow himself to become infected, so he can transform and slip next to Byron undetected to deliver the killshot.
But when Dr. Sterling — who tells them she’s better known as the Mother, and yeah, I’ll bet she is — tries to inject the drug into Cooper’s arm, he backs off. He’ll catch the bug the old-fashioned way: by having sex with Jordan, the woman he loves. (The Mother is into it.)
After an intimate dinner, with the disarmingly attractive couple looking straight into the camera at the viewer as they talk to one another at one point, Jordan gets such cold feet she nearly runs away. But when Cooper makes her realize it’s up to them to save the world, that knowledge is the ultimate aphrodisiac. They’re all over each other in seconds, and nature takes its course. Then the Beauty takes its course.
Only this time it’s different. Cooper’s bone-crunching spasms last for hours, not minutes, alarming Jordan enough to call in the assassins for help subduing him and locking him in the bathroom to keep him from hurting himself. This, of course, is dumb: The dude rams his head into the mirror almost right away. (It’s a cheeky reference to a certain other Agent Cooper; if you know you know.) And when Cooper’s ribcage explodes outward, bones poking outward like someone opened a hair clip, no one is there to see it.
It’s not clear if that part of the process is normal, since we’ve never seen one the whole way through. (We still don’t know exactly how those cocoons are formed even now.) But when Cooper finally hatches, his colleagues are stunned: He’s not a handsome young man, he’s a handsome young man. He’s a teenage boy (Hudson Barry).
From the start, I’ve been fairly fixated on what the Beauty — the drug, not the show — considers beautiful, and why, and who benefits and suffers because of it. What I hadn’t considered is right in the title of the episode: “Beautiful Evolution.” The Mother’s Deacons are meant to be the next step in human evolution. Why shouldn’t the Beauty evolve as well?
After all, the sexually transmitted version of the Beauty is a derivative of a lab-leak strain that Byron has already informed us is not the top-notch stuff, which is presumably more stable. Moreover, it’s not a one-and-done shot, but a self-replicating disease that uses the human body as its means of transmission — not exactly the sterile conditions of a liquid suspended in a syringe. There’s no way of knowing just how much the largely untested drug will mutate or evolve on its own in the wild, or how many stops it took on its way into first Jordan’s body, then Cooper’s. Creating a version of Cooper who’s handsome, sure, but not yet old enough for a learner’s permit is a logical next step for such a virus, to the extent that any of this is logical.
Of course, there’s always a darker possibility — that the Beauty is making people younger and younger because that’s what Epstein Class valedictorians like Byron Forst ultimately want — but that would be a mighty big bomb to drop, so I’ll cease speculation.
Until this question is resolved — and until they figure out how the hell they’re gonna use a child to assassinate the world’s richest man as he unleashes a bioweaponized fountain of youth — we have this episode’s pleasures to enjoy, and they are many. Foremost among them is Graynor as the Mother, a supervillain just as sexy and insane as Byron, but with the demeanor of a woman who has business to attend to, not a guy who’s got parties to plan.
Mac Quayle’s score, meanwhile, really sizzles in this one; the closing music was so good I let the credits play just to listen to it all the way through. It’s a visually splendid show, too, with director Crystle Roberson Dorsey serving up a series of little treats and terrors for the eye. Even shots that don’t need to be anything fancy, like Cooper and Bennett traveling up the stairs back to their room together, can become an Escher-esque trompe l’oeil. If sometimes that means watching a man’s ribs pop open like that turkey in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, well, beauty always comes at a cost.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
