Beauty And The Beast 1.16 "Insatiable" TV REVIEW
Episode 1.16
Writer: Blair Singer
Director: Lee Rose
THE ONE WHERE There’s a copycat killer trying to frame Vincent. The police task force and Muirfield are closing in. Catherine and Vincent come up with a way to give everybody what they want. And very little angst happens.
VERDICT Beauty And The Beast manages to do it again; another entertaining episode… well entertaining right up until you give any one of the plot points a second thought and realise none of it holds together at all.
We start with the morning after the night before. Vincent and Catherine, the horny little pair, are straight back at the bedroom gymnastics. Without even cleaning their teeth... Urgh.
We like that the two of them are an actual couple now. It should mean that the angst is dialled back a bit. Because this show really needs less angst.
The rest of the show is all about the task force set up to catch Vincent, or The Vigilante as he’s known by the police. We start with a crime scene in central park, which given where Vincent was the previous night, Catherine is pretty sure must be a copycat. But who could be copying Vincent’s animal-like attacks? And why? Vincent, Catherine and JT start their own investigation to see who might be trying to frame Vincent.
Creepy ME Guy is asked by Muirfield to tamper with evidence and stop the Vigilante Task Force from catching Vincent. Creepy ME also tests a scarf Catherine leaves lying about and finds Vincent’s mutated DNA on it. We knew he’d been suspicious of her motives when it comes to the cross species DNA creature he’s hunting, but his actions here really hurt Catherine.
The confrontation with Creepy ME Guy, the possible copycat and the task force have Catherine, Vincent and JT worried. The three come up with a plan to get Vincent clear. They’re going to burn the factory down with a planted body inside, which they will make to look like Vincent’s corpse.
Muirfield hit the factory after being tipped off by Creepy ME Guy. Once again Muirfield deploy the bare minimum number of people, almost ensuring the job isn’t done. The police arrive. The ensuing shoot-out causes a big explosion.
Everybody thinks the Vigilante is dead.
All this is great entertainment until you think about it; how and why does everybody automatically think the vigilante was inside the building? Why does Joe thinks he’s avenged his brother so readily? All they had to go on was a vague tip-off from Catherine. Just as the police arrive the building blows up. When they get inside they’ll find a body which has been dead for a month; what’s more a body which doesn’t have Vincent’s altered DNA. And they’ll find three heavily-armed dead Muirfield guys.
Elsewhere Police Partner is sent out to re-interview previous victims of the Vigilante and she comes to Joe with multiple witness statements saying that people think the Vigilante saved their lives. She also has statements saying the Vigilante might not be completely human. Weren’t all these people interviewed before? Shouldn’t this all already be in police reports?
One interview leads Police Partner to a sewer entrance. You can see that she’s wondering whether the Vigilante is using the sewers to move around undetected. She goes to investigate. So, we have Police Partner wandering around in the sewers.
After the Muirfield/police raid Vincent and Catherine escape into the sewer.
Yeah... We know what’s going to happen next don’t we?
Even though New York has hundreds of miles of sewers Police Partner manages to bump into Vincent. She chases him and has him at gun point. He Hulks out and she shoots him. With Catherine there to witness it.
We’re not exactly sure how Catherine manages to witness the shooting as she’d left Vincent earlier and gone to the factory crime scene while Vincent headed off into the sewers. Just how she manages to get back into the sewer and is able to find the location of Vincent and Police Partner is again baffling. Once again let’s ephasise; New York = miles and miles of sewers.
This lack of logic totally overwhelms the fact that Police Partner has seen Vincent Hulk out, that she shoots him and the she saw Catherine come running to his rescue. We’re sure that this will lead to interesting developments next week but here we’re too distracted by the unlikeliness of it all at the moment.
We did get to see more of JT this week than we have for a while though, so that was nice.
This show is finally managing to be quite entertaining and not to generate groans every few minutes. But it still needs to sit down and think about its plot. If everything that happens doesn’t stand up to even a little scrutiny then we’re never going to buy into it. This is the sixteenth episode. It really should have sorted itself out by now.
STALKER BEHAVIOUR OF THE WEEK Nothing. Zip. Nada. That’s gotta be a first.
MURDER DEATH KILL A vigilante copycat is out there somewhere and the task force are after Vincent with a vengeance; literally in Police Chief Joe Bishop’s case. We find out at the end of the show that Deputy DA Lowan is the copycat, but exactly why is yet to be revealed.
We were suspicious of him last week as he was the last person to see Ray Scheckman alive; what we see here suggests Lowan did in fact kill last week’s witness. We also find out that new cops Garnett and Newell are working for Lowan.
Remember what we said last week about “everyone is either lying or scheming or lying and scheming in some way”? Well, it looks like we didn’t know the half of it.
FACES YOU MAY KNOW We missed this last week because he was only onscreen briefly but one of the new cops, Garnett, is being played by Canadian actor and sci-fi/fantasy stalwart Ty Olsson. You may know him from Eureka, Smallville, X2, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG1, Supernatural, Defying Gravity and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 . Here he’s listed as Ty Victor Olsson.
NEW VOICE OVER INTRO This week sees the show get a new voice intro to acknowledge Catherine and Vincent as a couple. And boy is it schmaltzy...
Catherine: "From the moment we met."
Vincent: "We knew our lives would never be the same."
Catherine: "He saved my life."
Vincent: "And she saved mine."
Catherine: "We’re destined."
Vincent: "But we know it won’t be easy. (Muirfield are still out there and they want me dead.)"
Catherine: "Even though we have every reason to stay apart."
Vincent: "We’ll risk it all to be together. (I’m so in love with you.)"
BEST L-SHAPED BED SHEET You know that TV thing where a man and a woman are in bed and the bed sheets cover him to below the belly button and cover her right up to the neck. That.
BEST LINE
Newell: "We screwed up. It’s not going to happen again."
Deputy DA Lowan: "It can’t happen again. The son of a bitch has been eviscerated."
Steven Ellis @Steven Ellis
New episodes of Beauty And The Beast air in the UK on Watch on Wednesdays at 9pm
