We open to another crime – Vincent hearing a heartbeat
falter and then stop. This prompts him to launch into a series of random
gymnastics. Having shown off for the cameras, he finds the guy in a dumpster,
drags him out and performs chest compressions to get his heart pumping again – and
hustles him to a hospital where he blurts instructions to someone with a gurney
before disappearing into the night – like a much more poorly equipped batman.
Catherine, meanwhile, is failing badly at baseball, which
is apparently bad because they’re playing a game against the firemen and
winning is Important. She would be good if she could only learn to trust her
instincts (pay attention to this clumsily lampshaded message, it’s the episodes
theme). Vincent’s also watching the game, because stalking her and randomly
appearing any time she happens to be alone is his idea of a good time and
totally not creepy, honest. He tells her about the guy he dumped at the hospital
because this then magically makes it her case
Tess and Catherin meet at the police station to start
with all the preliminaries. The comatose kid is Tommy, he’s 19 and still has
his wallet so it’s not a robbery. He has a lot of old, healed injuries that
point to long term abuse meaning they cast a suspicious eye at the father. When
he arrives they do the suspicious interview but he reveals Tommy had ADHD and before
he took his meds he had terrible impulse control leading to him getting into a
lot of fights and got into a lot of petty crime, mainly theft. He’s worried
Tommy may be off his meds because he has a new Xbox and a really shiny watch.
Case summary with Joe (what does Joe actually do all
day?) reveals 3 lines of inquiry: the father who has a reputation for having a
short fuse. Tommy to see if he has dipped back into his criminal ways after no
longer taking his meds. And a picture in Tommy’s wallet of a pretty girl to see
if there’s a relationship problem…
We interrupt this crime investigation for a sinister
government agency intervention! JT reminds us (again) that Vincent being in
touch with Catherine is putting them all at risk blah blah Muirfield blah blah
hide, just copy and paste last week’s warning and lines about ulcers, it hasn’t
changed. This sets us up for Catherine to get into a fight with some Muirfield
goons and be kidnapped! She’s taken to an ominous warehouse where a Muirfield
agent tries to convince her they’re the good guys. His argument is not
convincing.
The man tries to convince her that Vincent is a monster,
not a person. That he could snap and kill at any time – showing photographs he
alleges are from a village destroyed in Afghanistan – it was blown up and set
on fire (which is pretty good for a man who becomes bestial and monstrous when
he loses control). Catherine tries to pretend not to know what he’s talking
about but can only feign it for 5 seconds before slipping. Still, she’s
disinclined to be all that trusting of the men who killed her mother. But he
shows her another picture of a man called Simon with a pregnant wife who he
says Vincent killed. Catherine is disturbed by this totally trustworthy
evidence from this totally trustworthy source (got to admire those detective
skills). And the Muirfield man asks why would they spend so much money if
Vincent wasn’t dangerous (because it’s not like they have a vested interest in
covering up their experimenting on soldiers, killing them like animals then
faking their own death… right?) There’s some added blatant lies about not hurting
Vincent, wanting to fix him (at least she challenges these) and a promise that,
if Catherine hands Vincent over, they will give her all the information she
wants about her mother – and show a picture of her working in their labs.
She’s released – but with a number to call which will
work for 3 days, after that they will reutn to more threats and kidnapping.
In the meantime Vincent has returned to where he found
Tommy to look for evidence with his super senses. And he finds a very large
watch which he moves so the police searching the scene can find it easier.
Uh-huh – a point of note, don’t do this. Where evidence is found can be very
important to an investigation and it’s not like the watch was small or not out
of place or likely to be missed without Vincent’s super-senses here. The techs
would have to have been pretty inept to miss it.
Tess and Evans are trying to discuss the case. Well Evans
is, while Tess is worried about Catherine, her running off on her own and being
so secretive – she had hoped she was running off for quickies with Evan, but
alas not. He points out the strange, circular bruises on Tommy, the cuts on his
back that indicate he was dragged and a tox screen that says he was still
taking his ADHD medication
Catherine returns to her flat to find her stalker, Vincent
there waiting for him. She tells him he was kidnapped and that he has to go.
She’s visibly shaken and frightened and tells him that she’s putting him at
risk as he always said (finally she gets it!) and the safest thing for her
would be if he just left and stayed away. At work, she’s still fixated on
Vincent and looks up Simon, one of Vincent’s supposed victims, on the crime
computer.
Alas, Tess interrupts with this pesky police case she
insists they work on. The watch has been tracked down – it was bought by Lois
Whitworth from the Westchester Polo Club and she also runs an organisation that
helps rehabilitate troubled youth – and Tommy was one of those troubled youth.
Evan also adds in that the soil found on Tommy was unique to Westchester Polo
Club. Also a clue fairy came down from
the sky chanting “polo club, polo club polo club” and in his coma-sleep
Tommy gasped “west…chest…er…” Beauty and the Beast is not known for its subtle
clue presentation. Oh and Catherine missed her baseball practice because she
was kidnapped. It matters, apparently.
Enough of this plot interfering with our angst! Back to
Vincent who is stressing with JT (well, JT is stressing) about Catherine being
kidnapped. JT wants to head for the hills (being sensible and all) but Vincent
is determined to stop Muirfield once and for all – to protect Catherine. He
goes to watch Catherine practice her baseball and, when she’s alone, he appears
(of course… Catherine you’re never alone. Ever. Unless you need to be kidnapped
of course). She tells him about the card she has with the phone number and
urges him to leave. He wants to know why he can help Tommy but not her, if he
leaves they’ll come back and hurt her. He tells her of the plan to stop them
and she protests “how by killing more people?” Ummmmm… yes? Muirfield,
organisation that has driven him into hiding for years, experimented on him,
tried to kill him, killed his friends and now may torture anyone around him so
they can put him down. And they’re probably involved in many more nefarious
activities. Count me in for team killing and finding Catherine’s accusing moral
outrage… dubious.
She then flinches when he tries to touch her. See, she’s
not afraid of Murifield, she’s afraid of him! The monster! She asks about Simon
and he tells her he was pinning down a woman and he defended her. Catherine is
a cop! She puts people like Vincent away, damn it (what, victims of government
experiments who are being chased down by hit men and torturers? Wow, that’s a
job description for her).
Vincent is rather upset by this and goes back to his
warehouse. He fills several phials with his blood and puts them in a beaker
filled with ice and a note “proof I existed, take back your lives.” He destroys
his cell phone and leaves.
Back to the plot! Tess and Catherine go to the
not-obvious Polo Club and find it extremely exclusive and expensive. They also
note that the polo-mallet is the exact same shape as the bruises on Tommy (just
in case you missed it). They tell Lois Whitworth that they think Tommy was
attacked at their club. She confirms that tommy was on the programme and that
he finished 6 months ago but was hired afterwards because he did so well. They
show her the watch and she recognises it as one she bought for her husband and
realises that Tommy may not have rehabilitated as they thought. She also
recognises the girl in the picture Tommy had as her daughter, Clarissa – but
she wasn’t Tommy’s girlfriend, she has a boyfriend, Sean.
On to Clarissa, and it turns out she gave Tommy the watch
– because she loved him (Sean is yesterday’s news), or so she thought. But that
changed when she found out that Tommy was doping the horses so he could gamble
on the games! He even doped her horse, Whiskers! She kept it really quiet
because she feared people would disapprove with rich her and poor, criminal
him.
Sean has his own 2 cents to add as both Clarissa’s ex and
the chairman of disciplinary committee – he would certainly have been angry
with Tommy, but he was leaving to go to Florida anyway – so he didn’t need to.
Far too much plot, time for JT to call Catherine after
finding out Vincent has disappeared. They meet up and, looking at the note,
they see the blood phials and conclude that this is their contingency plan –
should Muirfield come after them they can reveal the truth (eeerrr… Catherine
has already checked Vincent’s DNA on 6 cases – scientists look at it and say
“huh, corrupted evidence” so I’m not sure how well that will work). From this
they decide Vincent has decided to turn himself in… no I don’t know how they
came to that conclusion either.
Catherine tells JT about the number on the card – which
she no longer has, Vincent sneakily took it from her. But she remembers the
agent driving her – he must have left finger prints behind! With them they can
run it through the database, find out who he is then track his position with
his mobile phone!
INTERJECTION – what? There’s so much wrong with this I’m
struggling to decide where to begin. She can do this in 2 days? All of it? And
how come last time she tried to check on Muirfield she got her computer wiped,
but she can track down their agent’s finger prints and requisition their mobile
phone GPS no problem? And where is she even getting the authority to access all
this information?
Ok, disbelief SEVERELY suspended. It’s not so much
suspended as beaten thoroughly into submission.
Catherine also takes the chance to ask JT if he’s ever
been afraid of Vincent. He says no because even though he’s freaked out when
Vincent loses it, he knows he’d never hurt him. He just does (this would the
instinct theme thing, I think).
Vincent talks to the Muirfield people and agrees to hand
himself over so long as they agree to leave Catherine Chandler alone – and he
warns them about the contingency plan he set up (couldn’t he set that up anyway
and tell them to leave him alone as well?) They assure him she’s safe because
he hasn’t even told his bosses about her – after all, it’d look bad that he’d
let Vincent’s existence come to the attention of an NYPD detective. (Great,
kill them all Vincent, you’re both safe…. Right? Alas no).
With their mystical tracking ability, Catherine and JT arrive
to tell Vincent to stop. They fight Muirfield – JT with a baseball bat and
Catherine with a gun which she fires from a nice safe distance then runs in and
starts wrestling. I suppose because martial arts justify more freaky camera
angles than gun fights. Vincent loses it and roars. And roars. And roars some
more. No, really – I think these guys were cancelled as soldiers because anyone
could pick them off when they decided to pose and roar rather than fight. He
throws a gas canister at a guy, it hits him then explodes some distance away
from him so we can add dramatic flames to the dramatic roaring. After some more
dramatic roaring Vincent leaps (dramatically) over the right to grab the Muirfield
man and strangles him unconscious (I think he’s supposed to be dead). Do I sound
unimpressed by the fight scene? Yes? Excellent
He tells Catherine to return to her case, he and JT will
do the clean up.
Oh yes, the case, remember that? Well Tessa and Evans have
done some more checking up and found that the horse Clarissa says was being
doped was completely clean. Checking Tommy’s financials shows no large
purchases or large sums of money – it’s unlikely he’s been involved in any scam
(or if he is, he’s really bad at it).
So time for an interview with Clarissa over her lies.
Catherine arrives late but in time for the confrontation. They match the tire
tracks of her car with tracks in the alley and point out she lied about the
doping. Clarissa claims that Tommy attacked her mother, it was self-defence,
after her mother, Lois confronted him about the doping. She just had to keep it
quiet for the reputation of the club and the rehabilitation centre. She tries
to fall back on Tommy’s record – look what kind of person he is. But it doesn’t
wash and Catherine says it sounds like her mother talking, not Clarissa
herself. Clarissa folds and tells them her mother must have seen Tommy wearing
the watch and realised what was happening – and she asked Clarissa to help move
him after she attacked him.
To the polo club! They impound the mallet and inform Lois
they’ve checked her financials and she’s completely broke. She was relying on
Clarissa marrying the very very rich Sean to pull herself away from bankruptcy.
They also found Tommy’s phone in Clarissa’s car with messages telling Clarissa
he won’t leave and from Lois arranging the meet him. Yes, she really couldn’t
have left more evidence behind
Case is over, time for the baseball game and of course
Catherine hits a home run. She trusts her instincts (apparently).
From there its back to the flat where Vincent praises her
on home run (“you saw the game?” “oh Catherine I’m always watching you from
hiding! MUAHAHAHAHA!”). She talks about how hard the situation is, she’s used
to everything being black and white but working with Vincent is so grey (um…
no?) She has trouble with the things he’s done (me too, the rampaging
vigilante! Oh, you mean all the murders he’s supposed to have done but you
still haven’t really shown us?) but she knows he can’t control it (though we
have seen him control it every time) and he has a good heart. Vincent tells her
he gave himself up because he didn’t want her and JT to be collateral damage
(did you really have to underline this? It was pretty clear). And back to the
instinct thing – like JT she has a gut feeling that Vincent would never hurt
her.
So, I think I’ve noticed a trend. Beauty and the Beast
likes “themes”. Last episode it did this with clumsy voice overs. This episode
we had the baseball game with its rather dubious “trust your instincts” and
“don’t over think it” vague messages. And like last week that was pretty much
not covered at all during the episode, but since we returned to it at the end,
I assume it was this show’s message – because
But the conflict is so… ridiculous here. She’s seriously
considering handing over a living victim to torture and death because they give
her information on her dead mother? Wow, really? And the whole idea that she is
suddenly afraid of Vincent because of what the guy who has EVERY REASON TO LIE
TO HER has said (wow, and she’s a detective?!) is ludicrous! She’s talked
Vincent down from his rages on several occasions so it’s not like all this is a
shock to her – or that she hasn’t seen that he has GAINED control.
The only bad thing she KNOWS Vincent has done is kill this Simon fellow – a man Vincent describes as having pinned a woman to the floor. Was he involved in crimes in Afghanistan? All she has is the word of a man who, again, has every reason to lie to her – and then isn’t the blame on the commanders and the people who did this in the first place? Her “deal” with Muirfield has no sense of accountability to it.
On a stylistic point – the action scenes in Beauty and
the Beast are awful. I can’t tell if they are well choreographed or not because
the minute something happens the camera man seems to have a seizure. Is this an
attempt at art or is he just really excitable? Camera shake, rapidly changing
angles and perspectives – it’s jarring and looks awful.
Maybe it’s because the show hasn’t engaged me so I’m more
inclined to pick at flaws, but I feel there are a few plot holes creeping in
that’s making it a bit shaky.
