The eighth dose of The Beauty we’ve received is the most refined formula yet. In just over half an hour of screentime, this episode encapsulates everything that makes this show what the Tom Tom Club once referred to as “fun, nasty fun!”
We’ll start where the episode itself does: with Byron Forst, as he rehearses his big “Beauty Day” presentation of his new miracle drug to the world. Doing his best Vincent D’Onofrio, Ashton Kutcher preens and growls his way through his pitch, centered on the phrase “NO MORE”: limits, age, sickness, “ugly,” you know, all those equally bad things humanity faces. Kutcher standing triumphantly in front of portraits of D’Onofrio labeled “MORTALITY,” “AGE,” and “DECAY” feels like everyone involved having fun at their own expense.
Kutcher continues to make mincemeat of scene after scene, channeling his older counterpart’s signature energy in his line readings. In one side plot, we watch him shut down the other divisions he bestowed his fortune upon now that he’s found the one product he feels will change the world. He shuts down space colonization because “it’s going to benefit future generations, and not me, not me at all,” badly disappointing his bookish division chief (Anthony Rapp).
He faces a more formidable opponent in the head of his robotics division (Ari Graynor). Dressed in a white power suit, hair tied back like Dedra Meero in Andor, the woman strongly makes a case for the superiority of computerized life over the unpredictability of “organics,” decrying her rival scientist Ray’s slipshod methods in the process. Byron tells her tough luck, it was all a big bake-off and her project lost — but she’s welcome to try a Hail Mary on ten percent of the budget. Meanwhile, she’s to leave her “deacons” out in the wild, where he suspects humans have already fallen in love with them. That seems worth keeping track of!
Byron’s biggest breakthrough this week comes with his failsons Gunther (Kevin Cahoon) and Tiger (Eric Petersen), two hideously dressed middle-aged men whose best business idea is basically restarting the Spike network. Devastated by their dad’s rejection, they fall back into their addictive ways and OD on fentanyl. Before his wife Franny knows what hit her, Byron produces newly Beautified versions of the sons (Brandon Gillard and Ray Nicholson) — one of whom is Black now because of a tiny percentage of Nigerian heritage in Byron’s background. (“I’m kinda like Drake!”)
The three hunks try to convince Franny to give in and get poked, but in a series of gawjuss declarations of defiance, she declines. “The natural order will have a say!” she tells them, before informing Byron “I will ensure that vengeance greets you until my last dying breath. You have been warned.” She blows the billionaire boy’s club a kiss and exits. Byron, uncharacteristically, is speechless.
Byron’s end of the episode is where most of the black humor and camp comes in. For those unfortunate enough to have received his drug without the protection of the Forst name, things are far more unpleasant. The padded room where infected Condé Nast employees were taken for quarantine has devolved into a Salò-like spectacle of beautiful young people immiserated and encrusted in filth. They lie around in puddles of their own viscera and goop in soiled undergarments. A tube extrudes green slop into containers from which the imprisoned must drink.
And no sooner do we get to know two employees who’ve become smitten with one another’s beauty than gunmen descend on ziplines and brutally murder everyone in the room, leaving their bodies where they fall. It’s into this abbatoir that Cooper and Jordan are eventually dumped…along with Antonio and Jeremy, who have been deceived and betrayed. Doubly so in Jeremy’s case: The FBI agents inform him the Beauty infection is an explosively terminal one, an inconvenient truth hid from him by Antonio.
But the unlikely foursome has a man on the inside. Having accepted Byron’s Faustian pact to exchange his services for a dose to save his daughter’s life, Cooper and Jordan’s Beautified boss Meyer (now played by Patrick Luwis) oversees the execution of the quarantine patients. But when Cooper and company arrive, he yanks the agent out of the chamber and repeats the phrase “DO AS YOU’RE TOLD” at him.
The command is frightening, maddening, like “Is it safe?” from The Marathon Man — until Cooper realizes Meyer’s trying to tell him how he can get out of there alive. When another quartet of gunmen descend on ziplines, this time they’re there to rescue everyone. Cooper, Jordan, Antonio, and Jeremy climb aboard and are whisked away from the moodily lit killing floor.
There’s one last scene that ties together the two strands of the episode, I think. At the end of Byron’s rehearsal, an ad for The Beauty plays. In one of those beautiful sunlit urban-suburban town squares you basically only see in pharmaceutical ads, a succession of sad sacks in pastel garments. They’re old, fat, ugly, Alzheimer’s patients, cancer patients, the usual — “I became a cop to help me cope with my big-boned huskiness,” says one woman (Tiffany Commons) — until they’re transformed into smooth, sanded-down, sexy young people while the Tubes’ gloriously over-the-top “She’s a Beauty” blares.
“No need to consult a doctor!” proclaims the announcer. “The Beauty is approved for everyone!” Then, in the voiceover equivalent of the fine print, “ignition ketosis” — spontaneous combustion — is listed as a side effect. Probably nothing to worry about!
But even though its aesthetic is more in keeping with the parodic bombast of Byron’s material, the commercial is, in its way, as horrifying as the slaughter of dozens of people by masked gunmen. Both are symptoms of an underlying problem: When Americans get as rich as Byron Forst, literally nothing and no one exists who can stop them from doing whatever they want anymore.
Look around you. If Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Sam Altman or Donald J. Trump decided to start selling poison to the world tomorrow, who would stop them? Congress? Capitalism? RFK Jr.? The better angels of their own nature? What if the United States government, ruled by a billionaire on behalf of a billionaire caste, decided to start killing people indiscriminately? WE already have our answer to that one. The Beauty isn’t a glimpse into some horrifying alternate reality. It’s more like a slightly distorted window on our own.
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.
