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Beauty Day arrived sooner than anticipated. For those who expected the debut season of The Beauty to climax with the drug’s release and a last-moment assassination attempt in the final episode, creators Matthew Hodgson and Ryan Murphy had a surprise in store. The twist of the drug being unveiled occurs halfway through the penultimate episode, catching viewers off guard. (It’s worth noting the finale actually airs consecutively with this episode, but the timing remains unexpected.)
This approach mirrors the actions of Byron Forst himself. As our group of (anti)heroes lounges in their luxurious hotel, they scramble to devise a new plan. Their key asset, Cooper Madsen, has been inexplicably transformed into a young boy. Jordan, who harbors romantic feelings for him, faces a bizarre dilemma. “He doesn’t have any pubic hair!” Jordan exclaims, wrestling with the unsettling reality of being enamored with an FBI agent now trapped in a twelve-year-old’s body.
Despite his new appearance, Cooper remains the same person inside and is determined to see the assassination plot against Byron through. They just need to rethink their strategy if Cooper is still to act as the triggerman—or rather, the triggerboy.
But Byron outmaneuvers them. Suddenly, every screen in the hotel blares the ominous advertisement for the Beauty, repeating the line “No need to consult a doctor!” And just like that, the secret is out. Cooper laments, “We’re too late.”
Indeed, they are. The scene shifts to a high school one week later, where we witness best friends Ruthie and Bella (played by Annabelle Wachtel and Emma Halleen) grappling with the aftermath of Ruthie’s botched nose job. Ruthie, seeing only her father’s features when she looks in the mirror, is reassured by Bella. “You are beautiful,” Bella insists, reminding her friend that she is more than her appearance.
But as is so often the case for…I was going to say teenagers, but it’s true of everyone: People don’t like taking their own advice. Despite being a conventionally beautiful kid, much the same way that Jordan Bennett was a conventionally beautiful 40 year old, Bella feels she leads the life of an invisible woman. She’s not bullied, no, but neither is she courted or crushed on or much of anything, really. She blames all of this on her looks in an argument with her parents (Maria Dizzia and Daniel Stewart Sherman), but it’s clear that’s just a peg to hang her overall discontent and depression from. The existence of the Beauty, with it success stories going megaviral, provides her with the proverbial One Weird Trick she thinks she’ll need to become a brand new, happier, better person.
And she’s not hearing otherwise from Mom and Dad. Doesn’t her mother enjoy the double-takes she gets walking down the street in tight jeans? Doesn’t her father take Ozempic and off-label diabetes meds for weight loss? Doesn’t Lexapro have side effects too? And okay, fine, let’s say her dad does take that stuff for health reasons: The Beauty cures all illnesses and reverses the aging process! No heart disease, no cancer, no Alzheimer’s like Grandma had. Okay, fine, so there’s a tiny, measly, five percent chance you will explode. A 95% on a test is considered an A+ though, right?
All she wants to avoid is a life unfulfilled. And besides, she turns 18 in a week anyway, at which point there’s nothing her parents can do to stop her. They taught her to follow her dreams? Well, this is her dream. The beauty of the scene is that it’s generous to both sides of the generational divide: Bella’s emotional problems and unhappiness are absolutely real, and her parents are absolutely right that this isn’t the way to deal with them. But how are they gonna convince her of that? And why would she believe them, given the intensity of her emotions?
Then Ruthie steps in with a solution. Actually, she struts in, tall and blonde and skinny and resplendent in her Beautified form (Paige McGarvin). The kids had previously seen some of the Beauty’s uglier side effects right there in school — a Beautified girl beating the absolute dogshit out of her bully, a kid who took the shot in the morning convulsing and puking up orange goo. But Ruthie received the platinum treatment, a full spa situation with a phalanx of beautiful Beautified men serving as her staff. Her dose is doped so she doesn’t experience the painful convulsions and transformation at all: She simply goes to sleep and wakes up a model, promptly abandoning her dreams of being a journalist. (That’s a job for ugly people, apparently!)
But Conor (Carson Rowland), her concierge throughout the process, has passed her his business card, promising her that he can hook up any friends of hers who aren’t as financially well-off. It’s not hard to guess how the guy plans to administer Bella’s dose.
You might think that its short, sitcom-length runtime would make this episode feel slight, but that’s only in the sense that there’s not a whole lot of time for stuff to happen. As a viewing experience it’s got a lot going for it. Ruthie and Bella’s conversations about their looks ring painfully true in terms of how society conditions teenage girls to see themselves as perpetually not quite good enough. (There’s even a visual shoutout to Twin Peaks when an unidentified high school girl runs across the quad crying, TP being another story about young girls who grow up before their time.) Jordan and Cooper’s new dynamic, meanwhile, is genuinely unsettling, thanks in large part to young actor Hudson Barry’s cool, calm performance.
But more unsettling than anything else is the speed with which this almost entirely untested product, which is so festooned with gruesome side effects that they need to knock their rich patients out to hide it from them, takes over society. It blows past the usual testing and government approval. In fact, it has the full backing of the unnamed, unseen, but Beautified president (you know who it is: he threatens to run for five terms as a result), whose entire cabinet takes the shot by way of endorsement.
This is, in effect, the world we currently live in. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI, a technology known, for a fact, to induce psychosis in its users, to reduce the cognitive abilities of children, to produce child sexual abuse materials and spread Nazi propaganda at scale. This is being done with the White House’s approval and encouragement. Major governmental departments are fusing with AI as fast as they can. There are no guardrails when the people in charge are too insane and corrupt and evil to want them in place.
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.