‘The Beauty’ Episode 7 Recap: Worse Than the Disease

Health, wellness, beauty: unobjectionably positive things, right? The last time I watched broadcast television, every commercial that wasn’t for AI or online sports betting was for products pertaining to one of the three. There’s a section in your supermarket named after them and everything. 

But whose health? Whose wellness? Whose beauty? That is to say, who’s defining what it means to be healthy, to be well, to be beautiful? What do they stand to gain from those definitions? Most importantly, who stands to lose from them?

This episode opens with Agent Cooper Madsen escorting his Beautified partner, Agent Jordan Bennett, into a fancy hotel suite. (“I splurged.”) She takes a shower, then sits around in her robe and underwear, eating room service. She’s an effortless knockout. Cooper is so taken aback when she professes her love for him he doesn’t even respond. But would his reaction have been any different if the old Jordan had said the same thing to him? She was beautiful too; she was simply older.

Now consider Julianna Williams (Kelli O’Hara), the wife of Cooper and Jordan’s supervisor, Meyer. A beautiful woman by any measure except age, she’s worrying at her face in the mirror like she’s hideous. During a bitter fight with her husband, 15 years her senior, she’s vicious about his age relative to hers, and speaks of her beauty in the past tense, rueing how she squandered it on a marriage with him. The standards she’s holding herself to are all so ageist and sexist…and they’re the market conditions that make the Beauty a blockbuster in the making.

Meyer and Julianna aren’t contacted by the mad billionaire Byron Forst simply for the usual aesthetic overhaul, of course. For one thing, Byron’s after something: Meyer’s cooperation in quashing the investigation into the Beauty-related deaths around the world, and in handing Cooper (and Jordan) over to him to be killed. They’ll only get the drug if Meyer does Byron’s bidding.

For another thing, the tradeoff being made here only incidentally involves the Williamses’ rejuvenation. Byron’s main pitch involves their daughter. Fifteen-year-old Joey Williams (Kaylee Halko) lives with progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid aging, giving her “the heart of a 90 year old” and other infirmities. Meyer wants her to have a DNR in place the next time she has a heart attack; the episode opens on Meyer sitting idly by Joey’s hospital bed as she flatlines. Julianna wants her Joey’s prolonged at all costs and blames Meyer’s advanced age at conception for Joey’s condition.

Then along comes Byron Forst, with his drug, his demands, his bonus offer — $10 million a year for life plus a house in the islands somewhere — and his disturbingly thorough knowledge about the entire family’s medical history. He lives in a world where billionaires can do whatever they want and get away with it, but of course, so do we.

Given that the Beauty is a guaranteed cure for Joey’s progeria, pitched to them as having no side effects — it will keep Julianna’s recent breast cancer scare from ever recurring, too — it’s hard to blame them for wanting to take the drug. It gets harder when saving their kid’s life comes at the explicit and direct cost of murdering another person, Cooper Bennett, but that’s sort of a side issue here. The point is, if making the kid catalog-model adorable is a side effect of saving her life, so be it.

But why is it a side effect of saving her life? Why is restoring Joey’s health inextricably linked to making her look like Shirley Temple? Can’t you be healthy with hair that always sticks up, or teeth that need orthodontics, or a face like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons?

The answers can be found in some other things Byron says. He mockingly refers to Joey as “Benjamina Button.” He describes the parents’ gradual discovery that Joey had a serious health problem the way you’d talk about finding out your house had termites. He sees the diseased and disabled as defective and disgusting. The medicine follows suit.

When the new and “improved” Williams family is reunited post-injections, Byron is moved to tears. “Happy endings,” he says. “They hit me every time.” And the thing is, he looks and sounds sincere, not sarcastic or condescending. It doesn’t even seem like he’s weeping tears of joy over the profit potential. He actually seems moved to have done something nice. 

But so what? Even if we take his dubious claim to have fulfilled more Make-a-Wishes than John Cena at face value, he’s still a murdering sociopath who, it’s clear, has a serious interest in eugenics as well. (Health/wellness/beauty bullshit often devolves into skull-measuring and undesirable-purging; that’s pretty much the entire purpose of the MAHA movement.) And even multiple murderers can get sentimental about children and family — this was the whole plot of The Sopranos.

For more evidence, look no further than Byron’s pair of ace assassins, Antonio and Jeremy. Before the episode is over, they subdue and capture Cooper and Bennett in the depths of the (presumably pre-RFK) NIH, in a pair of entertainingly staged fights. Cooper and Anotonio try to prevent the items in the room from clattering to the ground and attracting attention like something out of a Jackie Chan movie; Jordan and Jeremy draw on each other in a data center lit like something from Tron. 

But before they get the call, the two men bond over their sad pasts. Jeremy recalls how he could easily have played football in school, but after getting a sense that that’s the only way his father would really value him, he refused to do it. Then his father left, and he’s never really put himself back together from it. For his part, Antonio recalls his career path, from military to mercenary to hitman to personal security for the billionaire set. (“Zuckerberg!” Jeremy whispers.) 

After activists splashed Antonio with acid in an attempt to kill his client, Byron Forst presented him with the Beauty as a cure for his horrific burns. The treatment healed everything but his left eye — “But,” Forst tells him in his flashback, “I did make you this really awesome eyepatch thingy. OMG, it’s so cool!”

But the transformation strengthened Antonio’s conviction that being a professional killer ought to preclude him from having anything to do with his wife and son, the latter of whom in particular he misses dearly. Jeremy misses his own father, fraught though their relationship was, and wonders if his old man could have shown him how to tell him “how I got so lost.” The two men tear up; Jeremy cries outright.

Anotonio feels like the crimes they committed in their past lives will catch up with them in the end regardless of how they conduct themselves now that they’ve been Beautified. “There’s not a thing in this world that can change a soul,” Antonio he says. 

But the Beauty appears designed as though that’s exactly what it’s meant to do. Its Instagram-friendly ideal human forms weed out countless aspects of being human — not just fatal diseases, but entire age ranges, entire categories of people, entire ways of looking and being. To the Beauty, only the beautiful really have souls to begin with. Everyone else is just a broken object.