In Thursday’s new episode of Beauty and the Beast, titled “Chasing Ghosts,” Vincent and Catherine were surrounded! … By family, that is. Which, for them, is a more terrifying threat than a horde of serum infected New Yorker’s. A 24 hour virus spreads through town, giving the locals uncontrollable super-powers, all in a bid by the mysterious Big Bad to lure out our heroes.
As their wedding draws near, both Vincent and Catherine have to face some suppressed issues they have on the subject of family. For Vincent, he wishes to reconnect with his distant relatives as they are all he has left after his brothers died. Catherine, on the other hand, doesn’t want anything to do with her family, especially when it comes to discussing her mother.
Blood Isn’t Always Thicker
I felt bad for Vincent in this episode. Here his wedding is coming up and Heather’s pushing for a large church in expectation of a packed guest list. But who does Vincent have to invite? His brothers are dead, his father (and presumably mother) is dead, and he’s been MIA for a decade and lost contact with all of his old friends and relatives. Family is extremely important to Vincent and he was very close with his brothers. I think that when they died his signing up for the army was partly to make a difference on their behalf and partly a death wish. Which, in a way, is what he got. To the world he has been dead for ten years. No wonder he’s confused about how to reconnect. I barely know what to say to my own cousins. He doesn’t even know these people anymore.
It makes sense that he would have mixed feelings with the surprise visit of Hank and Nephew #1 and Nephew #2. No, I don’t remember their names and they had a total of like four lines, so I don’t care. The one to focus on is Hank. Seemingly cheerful and wanting to present Vincent with a good time. He’s not able to hide his resentment for long, however. Turns out he has always been jealous of Vincent’s side of the family and the lauded heroes they became. His feelings of never being able to live up to their accomplishments is understandable, yet shallow. Vincent’s brothers died trying to save people, not for any glory they might get from it. Glory is all Hank wants and feels that the only way he is going to get a taste of it is by using Vincent, the long lost war hero. Hank’s running for city council and thinks having Vincent in his circle will secure his good standing with the public. I guess that’s why he ran out after Vincent under a hail of bullets. No better way to introduce their pairing than a public viewing of the hero in action.
Unfortunately for him, all he got out of it was a bullet in his leg. Vincent has spent too much of his recent life being used by others for their own gain and is not about to be used as some poster boy for his cousin’s political agenda. I guess it’s lucky Vincent got such a poor example of family, because it pushed him to realize who his true family is. JT and Tess are always there for him and Catherine and when you have friends like that they are all the family you need.
Can’t Forgive, Can’t Forget, Can’t Fake It
I found myself really not liking Catherine during this episode. She was acting beyond rude to her sister and her aunts and her anti-Vanessa attitude seemed to come a bit out of nowhere. But I guess that’s because I thought she had dealt with her issues regarding her mother. Obviously, I was wrong, and now that I think of it I don’t think there really was a time that she gained any true closure on the matter.
After her mother was killed, and even before, she had built up this image of this saint of a woman who loved her daughters more than anything and worked to make the world a better place. Her death was the crux of so many of Catherine’s decisions and sent her on this path that ended up leading her to Vincent. But early in the first season that pedestal that she had placed her mother upon began to crumble as it was revealed to her that Vanessa had been working with Muirfield. Not too long after, Vincent’s own memories brought to the surface the fact that Vanessa was the lead scientist in the genetic experiments on soldiers and had administered the beast serum to Vincent herself.
This was the first example of the lies and deceit surrounding her family, but the worst to reconcile. In Catherine’s mind, none of the struggles of her and Vincent’s life would be possible if it hadn’t been for her mother. Her anger makes sense. I wish she hadn’t blown up at Heather in front of everyone at her party, but I for one know that repressed feelings come out at the worst time, in the worst way, and to the people you care about most.
Initially I rolled my eyes at the videotape left for Catherine (convenient that they skipped over how she even has anything that can play that tape anymore) and how afterward all her anger towards her mother was gone and she was hunky dory and ready to get married. Luckily, I have these reviews to write, which force me to really try to see where the characters are coming from, why they feel the way they feel, and why they do the things they do. Again, I know a thing or two about repressed emotions. You can talk to others all you want, but until you talk to the person who actually made you feel that way you will still hold onto those feelings. Catherine couldn’t talk to her mother, for obvious reasons. While her father has been able to explain to Catherine why he did what he did, Catherine has never been able to have that same conversation with her mother. No matter how much she’s been told by others (Gabe, her father, even Vincent) about the good her mother did and how she tried to protect her family, Catherine needed to hear it from her mother. That’s what the video did for her. To see her mother, to hear her speak the words, to see that this happened right before she died and be reminded that her final act was to come help her daughter… It hit her hard. She finally released all of her pent up emotions. It doesn’t fix anything or change what her mother did, but at least Catherine can let go of her anger and move on.
That was another piece of advice she would only take from her mother, to not sacrifice her happiness and her future in an attempt to save the world. No matter how her mother got involved with Muirfield, or the good she tried to do in counterpoint to their evil, in the end she was trapped. She was in too deep and it was all she could do just to keep her family safe, but she herself was doomed. Catherine walks the same road. She’ll do anything to protect the ones she loves and it may just end up getting her killed. I don’t see her changing her stripes anytime soon. Her devotion to helping people is too strong. But maybe she can put saving the world on hold long enough to get married.
How It All Came Together
I’ll admit it: I didn’t like this episode. The problem is… I’m not sure why. It’s possible it’s because I had such high expectations. We were going to be having family members from both sides show up and it was the return of one of the best characters and guest actors in the show’s history, Ted Whittall as Catherine’s biological father, Bob Reynolds. However, the aunts I was excited to meet and hoped to provide insight into the past of Catherine’s family tree were used to fuel Cat’s anger at her mother. Vincent’s cousin turned out to be an aggravating jerk. And even Ted Whittall’s appearance was relegated to one scene in which he was mainly used as a plot device to give advice that wouldn’t be any different if it had come from Toucan Sam: “Just follow your nose.”
I think the main problem I had was when it came to the episode’s balance and pace. I’ve talked before about the balance of tone within the episodes of this season and how well the production team has been doing, but this outing came out pretty mismatched. While each side of the storyline had merit, they didn’t seem to flow into one another or even feel like they were part of the same episode. Let’s take a look at the previous episodes to show you what I mean.
The Beast of Wall Street: All the characters were looking for their purpose in life, while the show itself was finding purpose and leading us into this new storyline.
Primal Fear: Each character dealt with their individual fears and the episode’s villain was driven by his own fear of imminent death.
Bob & Carol & Vincent & Cat: B&C were used as a future mirror and mentors for V&C.
Heart of the Matter: VinCat were able to relate their problems to those of the Zalman’s and learn a lesson about what their resentment could lead to.
The Most Dangerous Beast: The themes of faith, trust, and love informed every character’s actions throughout the episode, including Bob & Carol.
As you can see, there has been a link between what the characters were going through in their lives and the story/plot side of each episode. I think that was the issue “Chasing Ghosts” had, is that there wasn’t a distinct relation between the family aspect of the episode and the serum infected public. Perhaps it was the ambiguous nature of the threat. We didn’t have a villain to follow or a face to see until near the very end of the episode with the messenger. None of the victims of the virus were focused on, so we had no one to care about. Perhaps if the messenger was driven by a need to protect his own family, instead of being someone manipulated into thinking they were invincible, that would have given us that necessary link to the problem’s our characters were facing in the rest of the episode. The way it was, the two halves of the episode were so disparate in story and pace that moving between them didn’t feel natural and made it hard for the episode to keep my focus.
This week’s installment had a double dose of newcomers, with new BATB writer Gillian Horvath and the BATB directorial debut of Jill Carter, who has done a small amount of directing previously. I’m not sure if Gillian’s inexperience with the show’s characters or Jill’s limited experience in the director’s chair played a hand in the issues I had with the episode. Jill has worked as a script supervisor for the show since the start of Season Two, so her eye for detail must be excellent. It’s possible that kept her from having a good handle on the overall picture of the episode, her focus on each individual scene instead of how they all worked together, but I just don’t think there’s much she could do to change that. In the land of television there is not much time to change things once you get to the production stage of things.
I feel the fault lies in the script, but I don’t think the fault lies solely with Miss Horvath. With thirteen episodes this season the structure has needed to change. This was the half-way point of the season and necessitated a big push forward in the overarching plot. To make things work and move forward you can’t always have everything tied up in a nice themed bow, especially when you have to fit in a bunch of exposition about proto-beast DNA. Again, in television there is a great lack of time and to get everything you want into an episode, especially at this point in the season, sometimes you have to slap things together that may not really match with superglue. There’s also the fact that the writing of every episode is a team effort and each individual writer has a criteria they have to meet for their episode, which goes through several rewrites and polishes by executive producers. So I don’t blame Gillian Horvath, either. I just feel that with all they wanted to do for this episode they weren’t able to make everything fit together just right and it ended up a bit unbalanced.
While I feel it was a bit obvious that Jill Carter is a little green as a director, one of the fun things about having new directors is that they a generally more willing to try a variety of different shots. Things that may take more time and another director would avoid just to get the shot in the can, but which have a touch more fun and creativity to them. The car chase was an example of this, with the camera on the side of the car and giving us a first-person view of whipping around the corners of the car park. Another really good shot was having our view switch to that of the messenger’s helmet camera when he went off the ramp. Realistically used as a bid to save the time and money it would take to have a stuntman drive a motorcycle off the top of a building, it was a creative way to give us the feeling of it happening and still reach the same conclusion. By giving us the first-person view it also made it a bit more brutal, as if we ourselves had made that swan dive.
I also enjoyed the selections made by the show’s musical supervisor, Dondrea (@dawnzdrea). Of particular note is the song she chose for the scene where Catherine watches the tape her mother left for her. Grizzly Bear is one of my favorite bands and “Foreground” was the perfect choice for such an emotional moment. Dondrea and I seem to have similar taste in music and I’m always either hearing bands I love on the show, or bands to fall in love with.
To Sum Up:
An episode that had important growth for our characters and necessary plot progression, but was hampered by aggravating characters and a lack of balance between the different aspects of the episode. A misstep in an otherwise stellar season, but that heart-pounding ending breeds hope for next week.