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The Beast: The Complete First Season
Score: 85%
Rating: Not Rated
Publisher: Sony Pictures Home
                  Entertainment

Region: 1
Media: DVD/3
Running Time: 590 Mins.
Genre: Crime/Mystery/TV Series
Audio: English 5.1 (Dolby Digital),
           Spanish, Portuguese

Subtitles: Portuguese, Spanish, French

Features:
  • 13 Behind-the-Scene Featurettes
  • Episodes:
    • The Beast
    • Two Choices
    • Nadia
    • Infected
    • The Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo
    • Hothead
    • Capone
    • Mercy
    • The Walk In
    • Tilt
    • My Brother's Keeper
    • Counterfeit
    • No Turning Back

If you caught The Beast during its television run, there will still be plenty on this collection to keep you occupied. A cadre of features showcase making-of stuff that wouldn't have hit your radar, including more background on the characters and actors. Seeing Patrick Swayze doing anything but Dirty Dancing, beating dudes down in Road House, or floating around in an incorporeal state in Ghost, may be hard to accept at first, but The Beast is good stuff. Swayze as Agent Barker and Travis Fimmel as Agent Dove are very watchable, and the show's premise is like a "best of" from the past 20 years of cop/detective television.

Take a pinch of Mulder and Scully at odds with each other from the early days of The X-Files, add in the tough/bad-cop images we've seen recently in The Shield, and sprinkle a dash of procedural suspense inspired by any of the C.S.I. spawn. Also take from C.S.I. Miami or Las Vegas a liberal helping of cheese laced with some very Michael Mann-inspired atmosphere, and you start to get yourself in the right head space for The Beast. It really is an extremely watchable show, especially in the wee hours of the night when cable programming starts to fold in on itself with that brain-drain slurping sound.

The plot of The Beast is driven as much by intrigue as action, with the outstanding question being whether Swayze's character Barker is running a scam on the F.B.I. and his partner, Dove. The bait is set repeatedly in each episode, then pulled back when Barker saves Dove from an untimely death or redeems himself in some way as that "good cop" we really want. Dove waffles a lot, but the doubt he carries is within us as well. As Dove is being tempted to turn on Barker and become part of an internal investigation, things become more interesting. The characters apart from these two exist only as local color, dressing for the set where Swayze and Fimmel strut their stuff. The old man/young man dichotomy is played a bit, but we've never under any illusion as to which of the two would win in a fair fight. Especially when Barker is clearly the kind of guy that would never lower himself to a fair fight...

Sadly for the actors and fans, The Beast appears to have run its course with this first season, because Swayze contracted cancer and isn't well enough to see things through. We can always hope for a reprisal, but fresh-faced Fimmell isn't enough to hold down the store. Swayze lends solid ground to what would otherwise be thin gruel, playing his character with a great balance between wild-eyed zeal and monkish sagacity. Time would tell if The Beast had legs, but this collection of the first season shows lots of promise.



-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications
AKA Matt Paddock
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