Beauty and The Beast: S01E22 - Never Turn Back.

I'm glad this is over...

So this week Gabe is running out of time and takes Cat hostage in order to get to Vincent. However the whole time Gabe tries to play the sympathy card, parading his tragic backstory around. Sadly he dies soon after so his character arc is a rushed inconsistent mess. Goodbye Gabe, we barely knew you and most of what we learnt was moments before your death. Vincent arrives, gives up his chance to be human once and for all and saves the day, then, then Cat's Dad shows up. Her real Dad. Yeah....

And really that probably doesn't do justice to just how tired and hamfisted this whole episode feels. A monsters battle with their humanity is a staple of this genre, as is the human and the monster contemplating their future together and I see nothing wrong with using both of these devices. What I do have a problem with is when it simply repeats every notion ad nauseam as we're forced into a circle that never once goes anywhere. There is lots in this episode that would have been really thrilling, if we hadn't already done it a hundred times over throughout the season. As comfortable as Cat and Vincent seem around each other, very little of what is learnt at the end of an episode seems to carry over to the next.

Honestly my problem with the show as a whole is exactly the opposite, though. When I think back over this season, I can honestly barely remember anything about it, and that is because it lacked any kind of unifying focus. Each mini arc the show has had across this season has felt lifted from an entirely different show, with dramatic changes to format, content and themes. With Cat especially seemingly getting completely rewritten to suit the sweeping changes the show has gone through over this one season, eventually reduced to a pile of nothing. And I just feel that when you're a professional show and are given millions to make it, it shouldn't feel like each episode was made up on the spot and each writer hadn't seen any of the episodes previous. It was just a huge mess, I'd expect this from the young adult Twilight knockoffs on some kids blog, but not from an actual TV show.

Why do American action shows suck? Despite Hollywood's dominance of the blockbuster scene when it comes to creating action on TV shows they just can't seem to manage. While Japan has inferior tech and a lot less money to throw at its shows, they manage to produce Toku shows that depict action that rivals that in the Blockbusters, just made a lot more cheaply, so it just seems inexcusable just how shit American action show action really is. I mean you strip away the initial thrill of two beast's going head to head and what you get is basically two men growling in a carpark, some incredibly shit CGI and in the end it's ended with bullets, not the two beast's destroying each other. Bullshit! The lead up to the beast clash was more thrilling than the actual beast clash, how epic would it have been if Vincent and Gabe were throwing cars at each other and chucking each other through walls? That would have been epic, this should have been epic, instead it just feels like a cheap novelty.

I don't actually blame everything on the production team, either, at the point of writing this they had no idea if Beauty and The Beast would get a second season and so sacrifices obviously had to be made in terms of creative integrity for the sake of the audience and I admire that. It's just a shame that the finale turned into a chaotic mess, with so many scenes feeling so irrelevant and going nowhere, I had barely a paragraph written for this review by the end of the first watch.

Does this finale make me want to change my mind and come back for the second season? No, not really. Although I did finally get my beast on beast battle, the finale still did little to raise any real tension and it threw out so many unnecessary twists in a cheap way of baiting the audience and I ain't gonna be playing your game any more. I don't think I'll even go back and watch this season again, honestly. Although I will miss JT.

Pros;

• The beast clash was at least initially thrilling, especially the lead up to it.
• I will miss you JT. 
• Most of the plot this episode retreads isn't uninteresting.
• Okay so it wasn't all their fault.

Cons;

• Gabe was basically just a huge wasted opportunity.
• Although the plot itself isn't uninteresting, it's the fact that it's been retread into the ground now is the problem.
• Incoherent. 
• Inconsistent. 
• Weakly written. 
• Poorly plotted. 
• Lifeless characters.
• The beast clash was still a load of shit overall though.
• That JT wasn't in a better show.

Think About It!

-Locke

What would you rate, 'Never Turn Back'?