TV Jots

Three Rings In One

The “Nadia” episode of The Beast is all about Roman Petrescu (nicely played by The Invisible Man‘s Vincent Ventresca), a rich Romanian diplomat’s Harvard-educated son running a thriving prostitution and slavery ring in the United States, courtesy of his home country’s poorest villages. The action gets underway when one of his sex-slave victims hangs herself rather than talk when the police bring her in for questioning.

After the Romanian ambassador agrees to waive immunity, Charles Barker (Patrick Swayze) decides the easiest way to get to Roman is through his ever-present goon Slava Dobre, a fat older man who did time in a Romanian prison and now spends his days being Roman’s shadow and collecting strong-arm money from various businesses.

While Ellis Dove (Travis Fimmel) pretends to be a customer and visits one of Roman’s “massage” parlors to establish his own in with one of the girls, Barker drops by Slava’s favorite bar and pretends to be a fellow former Jilava Prison inmate in order to lure him into backing his fake budding prostitution business. Both Feds fail initially, but Nadia (Angela Gots), the “massage” woman Dove meets, slips him a matchbook begging for help during the police raid he arranges later.

Barker is forced to try again with Slava and does an okay job being the crook’s drinking buddy … until he trips up and confuses his Romanian universities. Given the phony Romanian accent and the actual Romanian he’s speaking, that’s understandable. Unfortunately, poor Slava ends up dead of a broken neck when he pulls a gun on Barker after pointing out the mistake.

This gives Barker the opportunity to take his business proposition — money in exchange for hooker slaves — directly to Roman, who laughs and suggests he go back to his farm in Romania. Next thing you know, Roman is braining one of his own men with a lamp after Barker and Dove ambush him and kidnap two of Roman’s fresh-off-the-plane girls.

No worries, though, because Roman gets his own taste of braining after Barker and Dove take out his two hoodlums when they try to kill the Feds during a meeting to swap the sex-slave girls for money. Barker gleefully busts the slick criminal and then let’s Nadia get a little pistol whipping-to-the-face in when Roman claims he doesn’t know where her son Alin is.

Yep, that’s right — Roman has three rings in one: a prostitution ring (girls taken from poor Romanian villages), a slavery ring (girls forced to work as prostitutes until they pay up ridiculous amounts of money), and a baby-smuggling ring (girls’ kids bought and illegally sold for adoption in the United States).

Barker and Dove eventually track down Alin, but Nadia decides to let him stay with his new parents to keep him safe. The State Department’s immunity waiver for Roman is rescinded, however, so the government can enjoy increased cooperation with Romania. No worries there, either, because Barker just calls somebody, says a few things in Romanian, and voilà, the news is reporting Roman was murdered in his Bucharest hotel.

Despite his earlier claim to Ray Beaumont (Larry Gilliard Jr.) that he has no intention of ever betraying Barker, Roman’s death inspires Dove to load a virtual lockbox program on his computer that contains a photo of a cute little blond girl and a heavily redacted document about Barker being the agent in charge during a 1991 operation in Yugoslavia. The end.

Although the pilot had me convinced The Beast possesses enough potential to make it must-see TV, that opinion is starting to weaken after just three episodes. For starters, the cases we’ve seen up to now are way too cut-and-dried and standard crime-TV stuff to be interesting. They get wrapped up by the end of each episode and in a manner so simplistic you can see the resolution coming a mile away. Silly me, I thought the show was going to be more of a serial antihero drama.

My main peeve, however, is the disappearing subplot about Barker’s potential corruption. Larry Gilliard Jr.’s Internal Affairs Fed Ray is the most intense character on the show — sorry, Patrick — and now he’s barely making an appearance. Really good things start to happen whenever he’s on-screen, so it’s hard to imagine maintaining interest in The Beast if his role is diminished.

Let’s hope there’ll be more Internal Affairs action — and less Travis Fimmel/Ellis Dove smirking, underacting, and reciting lame jokes about snails crossing the street — on future episodes. Otherwise, I’m going to have to demote The Beast from my must-see list.

NEXT UP: On February 5th’s “Infected,” Barker and Dove investigate a boy deliberately infected with a deadly virus in order to blackmail his mother. Nasty stuff.

“Nadia” Original Air Date: January 29, 2009