
“Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.”My husband and I are fans of some of Patrick Swayze’s work and so we’ve DVR’d his latest endeavor, The Beast, in which Swayze plays unorthodox and hard-edged FBI undercover agent Charles Barker. While it’s an average or okay series as far as television goes, Swayze is amazingly convincing even if the scripts and actors around him aren’t up to snuff. He plays Barker like an older and more jaded and deeply broken version of characters he’s played in the past—like Black Dog’s Jack Crews, Point Break’s Bodhi, Next of Kin’s Truman Gates, Roadhouse’s Walton and even Red Dawn’s Jed. There's an added depth to Barker because of Swayze's experience. It’s a bit like watching Clint Eastwood play the aging gunfighter William Munny in Unforgiven.
—a quote from novelist Marie Louise de la Ramee that opened the first episode of A&E's The Beast
“If you're not careful, the beast will eat it all, and you have nothing, and you are nothing.''
—Charles Barker
So, we’ve enjoyed the series for the most part. But as we watched a recent episode, I was somewhat irritated to find myself feeling increasingly uneasy and troubled by something I just couldn’t put my finger on.

But as we sink deeper into that world and the horrors associated with it, I found myself feeling things I didn’t like so much—like vindication when Nadia finally has a chance to pistol whip the man who sold her son and kept her in prostitution and a brief surge of satisfaction watching Barker order the execution-like death of the man who headed up it all. Then it dawned on me why I was so troubled: This series not only explores but also seems to advocate the idea that to fight darkness we—or, at the very least, some of us—must become darkness itself.

But in The Dark Knight and other such explorations, there are voices of integrity and alternatives whispering, if not forcefully speaking out, in the dark. In The Beast, however, any “good” in the series is portrayed as ineffective and cobbled by a myopic vision of the law. If Barker is too focused on the ends, these folks are all too blinded by the means. So far, there hasn’t been a viable or believable alternative, so our whole sympathy rests with Barker and his methods. And that makes me feel like the series is stacked, like it has no other effective answer to the evil in the world other than for some people to become darkness to protect the rest of us from it.
I find the question of how to fight evil one that we desperately need to explore—but if we’re going to explore it, let’s not stack the deck but put more than one viable option on the table. I haven’t given up on The Beast as giving us a way to do that. I’m hoping there’s redemption for Charles Barker. And I’m hoping there’s a voice or person who reveals another way, a way that calls for healing as well as justice, life as well as right-ness, love as well as judgment.
(Images: A&E) miscctgy