We’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff on The Beauty. A billionaire with a conscience is the craziest yet.
That’s what we get in Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson’s cliffhanger season finale. While Byron Forst wants his wife, Franny, to take the Beauty, he’s left it entirely up to her. Until now we haven’t gotten the sense he’d care enough to try to force it on her. His loathsome, Beautified sons, however, feel no such compunction. Thinking it’s what he’d want, they inject their mother with the drug against her will (after cavorting with her to “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”) The boys surprise their dad with the new version of their mom (Nicola Peltz Bekcham) like she’s a Christmas gift.
But Franny wants to send this gift back. Her scars, her stretch marks, all the things that made her body her body, earned over a lifetime — they’ve all been taken away from her. “I was a goddamn work of art!” she shouts. Byron is blind to the fact that “some people are perfect just as they are.” Unable to take the feeling of being trapped in another person’s body, Franny shatters her favorite vase and slits her own throat, bleeding out in Byron’s arms.
Franny’s near-death — she’s now in a coma on life support, likely alive only because of the Beauty’s restorative power — has a seismic effect on her husband. He realizes that he’s loved and needed her all along, saying so both to her before her suicide attempt and to his son Tig and board of directors afterwards. He now appears able to understand that other people are real, too, and that it was wrong to unleash the Beauty on them knowing full well it might hurt or kill them.
The results, apparently, are completely horrifying. The company has sold six million doses, and there are already 450,000 incidents of aggression, mutation, deformation, detonation, and god knows what else. Even the unnamed president has turned against the drug after the Secretary of Defense (Shouldn’t that be “War,” citizen??) turned into a nine year old. The most horrifying case is that of Bella, the heroine of the previous episode. Conor, the man she pays to fuck the drug into her system, injected himself with an unauthorized second dose in hopes of ensuring a positive outcome. But he’s no scientist, and by the next morning Becca has transformed into a Brundlefly-like monstrosity straight out of the goopiest, grossest 1980s body horror film you can think of. “Mommy, please, help me!” she wails through her unrecognizable face as her mother screams in terror and grief.
Byron informs his board he’s fully reversing course. He’s canceling all sales, recalling all products, closing all clinics, settling all lawsuits, giving away boosters for free in perpetuity, donating to the health care costs of the victims, and dedicating all his remaining resources toward finding a cure. (Okay, so we later find out that he also has Dr. Ray Lee, the inventor of the Beauty, killed off screen. A tiger can’t completely change his stripes.) Tig brought Dr. Diana Sterling along to help stage his coup, but his dad rests everything on her expertise with nanotechnology while kicking Tig to the curb.
But Diana and Tig are definitely playing some game of their own. Taking a meeting with Jordan, Antonio, Jeremy, and Li’l Cooper, all of whom are dressed like they’re from The Matrix, the scientist and the heir to the empire lie and blame Byron for dosing his wife with the Beauty, ostensibly a sign he’s too far gone even for his own family. (To his credit, Byron is truly outraged his sons didn’t leave it up to Franny.) Saying nothing about the billionaire’s complete change of heart, they claim that the late Dr. Lee stumbled across an antidote, which they’ll give to Cooper if the team promises to help them take Byron out for good.
The episode’s cliffhanger ending shows the other three staring at the transformation that results in shock. We in the audience, however, will have to wait for a theoretical Season 2 to see what crawls out of that cocoon.
The Beauty has been one of the season’s most pleasantly unpleasant surprises — nasty, horny, catty, bloody, and beautifully disgusting. The production and costume design is first rate, referential of past horror/dystopian classics without feeling derivative. Ditto the body horror, which like that in The Substance is reminiscent of Cronenberg and Carpenter but blazes vile new snail trails of its own.
The show’s approach to its titular concept has been multifaceted and frequently fascinating. Fully acknowledging that beauty standards are draconian and arbitrary and designed to be profited from, the show also uses a variety of characters — a lonely shut-in, a depressed teenage girl, a trans woman, a sick child — to make the point that it’s not always shallow to want to look and feel like an idealized version of yourself. The question of “Whose ideal would that be, anyway?” is never far below the surface.
Plus it’s fun as all hell. Beautiful people running around bare-assed. Assassins and mutants and loose-cannon FBI agents (oh my!). Sci-fi lab facilities and pastel commercial parodies. Impeccable stunt casting. Mac Quayle’s creepy synth score. Frank sex talk. My favorite Ashton Kutcher performance ever. If the season had lasted just five seconds longer and shown us the new old Cooper instead of leaving us with a shrug of the shoulder I don’t think I’d have any substantive complaints at all. If they make a booster dose available in the form a second season, I’ll be first in line for a poke.
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.
