‘The Beauty’ Episode 4 recap: Kinds of kindness

In the centerpiece sequence of this episode of The Beauty, a berserk Ben Platt has a running hospital-hallway battle with Evan Peters while wearing only a hospital gown, as blood pours from his eyes and skin sloughs off his body. Eventually Ben Platt transforms into a nude model (Isaac Powell), and the fight continues. 

As with the Bella Hadid rampage/explosion in the premiere, summing this sequence up feels like more or less all you need to know about whether The Beauty is for you. Either you want to watch the star of Dahmer get his ass beat by the star of Dear Evan Hansen in some mad surgeon’s room full of partially skinned human corpses preserved in glowing sci-fi vats of goo, or you don’t. There’s really only two kinds of people in the world, after all. 

Plotwise, this is a simple episode to sum up. Cooper conducts an interview with Ashley (Gus Halper), a hunky GQ fitness editor who had been in a relationship with the woman who exploded and is therefore likely infected. Hazmat guys brutally haul him away, to Cooper’s chagrin. Coop then talks to Ben Platt’s Vogue editor, Manny, who’s already sick from he virus. Manny hulks out, runs amok, transforms, and gets taken down by tasers.

Elsewhere, Antonio the assassin dresses up his protégé Jeremy (as in “spoke in class today”?) in designer duds, while Rick James’s immortal “Give It to Me Baby” blasts. The assassin then teaches Jeremy the proper way to have sex as an infected: no kissing, no oral, no fluid transmission whatsoever. He even oversees the process to make sure his (apparently well-hung) student is obeying.

Meanwhile, the man referred to by FX only as “The Corporation” — Ashton Kutcher’s character — announces his plans to move full steam ahead with a rollout of the drug. No more testing, no real concerns about the viral form, and no scruples rolling out a drug that eventually makes people explode. There are boosters that prevent that, and they can be sold to needy customers on a weekly basis if sufficiently watered down. 

Finally, Jordan shows up at Ethan’s place in her new younger form. Having already seen a transformation earlier that day, you can see on his face he doesn’t need convincing. This is the woman he loves, only it’s also not.

It’s character work, not plot beats, that grabbed me this episode — grabbed me harder, in fact, than anything else in the show so far. The episode opens, for instance, with a flashback to Cooper and Jordan walking by the Trevi Fountain during their ill-fated trip to Rome. Turns out they were a lot more romantic with one another than either let on during that painful final conversation the night she transformed and disappeared. And while you could read this between the lines of what they said then, both are much more open, and eager, to love and be loved than their cynicism ever let on.

Keep that in mind as you watch Coop’s subsequent actions throughout the episode. When he’s interviewing the GQ guy, he learns that the man was in love with the woman who blew up, though he knew she didn’t feel the same. When he starts to sob with grief, Cooper actually takes the risk of reaching out and holding the man’s hand. “Thank you for being kind,” the man says with shocking directness. “They’ve kind of been treating us like animals.” Light shines on them from above, transformed from the harsh glare of an interview room to a kind of visual benediction.

The same thing happens with Platt’s character. When Cooper enters the plastic-lined chamber where doctors are working on him, he’s struggling against his restraints, begging them to “talk to me like a real person” over and over. That’s exactly what Cooper does, calming Manny down by discussing their dogs and, again, holding the man’s hand. “You have a kind face,” Manny plaintively tells Cooper at one point, not incorrectly. Things go south after that, but that’s the virus’s fault, not Cooper’s. 

If you’re not a heterosexual cis man and you’re reading this, I need to impress upon you just how not done it is to reach out and hold the hand of basically any man, let alone a stranger. You have to willingly leap a pretty big gap of societal convention, patriarchal conformity, homophobia, and emotional stuntedness to do it — and you have to count on the recipient to be willing and able to do the same. I found these moments strangely beautiful as a result. Even amid all the camp body-horror shenanigans, the show makes time for men to treat each other decently. 

What’s more, Ashley and Manny aren’t simple stereotypes. Ashley, who’s kind of a gym bro, feels looked down upon by the elite fashionistas at Vogue. He knew Manny was cruisy in the men’s room — but he didn’t mind, because letting the guy check out his dick gave him a little confidence boost. “I’d give him a little show. Made me feel superior. Picked me up on down days or something.” Only after rambling like that does he catch himself: “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

It’s a humanizing comment, a funny and unexpected detail, and an illustration of how even straight gym bros who are madly in love with beautiful women and absolutely love to kiss and tell about it also engage in a little homosociality now and then for various reasons, all in one. It’s excellent writing from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matt Hodgson, and the entire hospital segment is engagingly acted by Peters, Platt, and Halper.

Director and longtime Murphy collaborator Alexis Martin Woodall, meanwhile, has a twofold task. She’s gotta do all the fun stuff, the action and the comedy, and she does it well. I did not expect a Ryan Murphy show to keep giving Daredevil a run for its hallway-fight money, but here we are.

Meanwhile, she must also handle the horror, which she does with evident glee. There’s a shot of Manny slipping out of his restraints and his skin at the same time. There’s a graphic on-screen face transplant for a chimp-attack victim. There’s a damn medical chamber of horrors overseen by an insane doctor who say Edgar Allan Poe shit like “Do not let beauty be wasted on the dead!”  

Additionally, Woodall also works deftly with imagery that evokes some really sophisticated influences: the astonishing gore of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, the bold color and medicalized body horror of both David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and Alice Birch and Rachel Weisz’s stunning Prime Video miniseries remake. 

These aesthetic influences are tied together in a brief, memorable dream. As Cooper and a troop of agents in red sweatsuits jog one misty morning, he turns and sees a horrifically disfigured Jordan in a flowing blue robe. The face is pure Mason Verger, the robe from the Mantle Twin collection. None of this is derivative, or even all that direct — it’s just there, enhancing the presentation of what’s turning out to be an original and effective work of horror all on its 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.