Have you noticed that on Beef no one unexpectedly dies? There have been a couple of times where I’ve wondered if a character had kicked the bucket, most notably when Fumi fell down the stairs and George got knocked out. In some ways, their deaths would have solved a narrative problem more neatly than having them live on, but Beef isn’t interested in neat. It wants its characters to keep living and face the music. Every time I think about how one lands a plane like Beef, I keep thinking that the only way I can predict this show’s ending is for Amy and Danny to die. Crash and burn, a giant ball of flame, they go down in hellish glory, etc. But then I must remind myself that the show isn’t interested in their death. It’s fundamentally interested in portraying their lives with all their flaws and failures.
Episode nine, “The Great Fabricator,†opens with Danny frantically trying to pack to leave for Mexico. He’s accidentally kidnapped June and doesn’t know what to do. Paul, who is there with him, isn’t much help either. This is just the beginning of their woes; who should suddenly be sprung from prison and come knocking but Isaac? (I think the implication here is that when Amy came clean about everything, she also called the police and told them that the road-rage incident was Danny, not Isaac.) Isaac is murderous with rage; his cousin stole his money and left him to rot in prison. But before he can beat Danny up, he spots June and, thanks to an Amber Alert, puts two and two together, realizing June is Amy’s daughter.
So Isaac hatches a scheme to get his money back before the “Filipinos can castrate [him].†(I guess Isaac also owes money?) He calls Amy, who is at Jordan Forster’s home on her tour of truth-telling. Jordan doesn’t seem to care at all about Amy’s road-rage incident or her infidelities. It barely registers to her when Amy leaves to take a call, first from George to tell her June has been kidnapped by Danny, and then from Isaac, who demands she comes up with a $500,000 ransom if she wants to see her daughter again. Amy panics; though she would do anything for her daughter, she knows you can’t just casually withdraw that kind of cash. She tries to tell Isaac this, but he won’t listen, so Amy comes up with a different plan. She tells Isaac to come to Jordan’s home, which has a collection of ancient crowns. Amy will make sure no one will call the cops so Isaac can go and steal the crowns from Jordan’s place.
I just want to pause here and say this conversation is indicative of so many idiosyncrasies in the characters. First, Jordana Forster is not just the kind of white lady asking if Asians are culturally attentive; she’s the kind of white lady who is so wealthy she collects ancient, precious artifacts of sovereignty from other nations. Crazy! Second, if Isaac were a real seasoned criminal, he would know that sure, you can come to steal those crowns, but selling those crowns for cash is a whole different story. Has he not seen the Ocean’s Eleven movies? For me, it’s weirdly endearing and confirms that Isaac isn’t necessarily an evil mastermind so much as he’s a silly, dumb guy who thinks he’s an evil mastermind.
Isaac agrees to Amy’s plan. He brings Bobby and Michael and a tied-up Danny and Paul, followed by a totally oblivious June and dog Luca. Danny tries to get Isaac to let June go by rationalizing that Isaac’s real beef is with Danny, not Amy’s daughter, but Isaac refuses — June is his only leverage. Meanwhile, Amy calls George and tells him about her deal with Isaac. She needs him to come to Jordan’s to take June home, and she specifies that he should not call the cops. Even I can tell you that George will immediately call the cops, but I guess the stress is getting to Amy, because she doesn’t think twice about involving him. Jordan gives Amy a tour of her crowns and notices Amy is distraught. Thinking the distress is about Amy’s pending divorce, she tells Amy that everything fades, a direct echo of what Amy told Danny in “I Am a Cage.†Something resembling a realization breaks across Amy’s face.
Then, with as much ceremony as a game of ding-dong-ditch, the heist begins. Isaac and Michael burst into Jordan’s house wearing Dick Cheney masks, forcing Naomi, Jordan, and Amy to their knees. They say they want everything in the house worth over $10,000, which Jordan quips is everything in the house, so Isaac and Michael demand more bags, which Naomi gets. (“They’re Goyard!†will make me laugh forever.) It seems like the heist will end smoothly as Isaac and Michael clean up, but they hear sirens in the distance. Isaac panics and accuses Amy of calling the cops. This admonition leads Naomi to put two and two together and figure out Amy is involved, but Amy is beyond the point of caring.
What ensues is pure and utter chaos. Naomi and Jordan make a break for their panic room. Jordan stumbles while running and, thanks to Naomi preemptively pushing the close button on the panic-room door, gets crushed to death by the steel door. (I take back what I said about no one on Beef dying; only white people die, apparently.) Danny and Paul, who until now were stuck in the van outside with June, Luca, and Bobby, manage to knock Bobby out and put June in Amy’s car, only to be found by Michael. Danny and Paul are marched at gunpoint back into the house and locked in the outdoor alcove of the Forster home. Amy negotiates to save the Cho brothers by saying she’ll call George, who she’ll get to tell the police that it was Danny and Paul who have them hostage, but Amy’s call with George gets cut short, the cops come in, and a shoot-out occurs. Michael dies, and Isaac and Bobby are marched to police vehicles. Naomi is shaken but fine. Amy, too, is physically unharmed, though she’s devastated to learn that George has taken June home and filed an emergency custody order, which also includes a restraining order against Amy.
As for Danny and Paul, Danny manages to give Paul a boost over the wall of the alcove they’re locked in. There are so many instances of genuine love from Paul in this episode: when he says he, too, would have taken Isaac’s money and left him in jail; when he tells Danny he’ll look past his mistakes; when he and Danny share a genuine moment of childish joy when Paul successfully scrambles up on the ledge of the wall. But soon, it becomes clear that Danny won’t be able to get up there too, so he tells Paul to go without him. Paul refuses, and so Danny pushes him away by confessing the house burned down because of his faulty wiring and that he threw away his college applications. Finally, Paul hears what Danny is saying. He’s been holding him back; like Amy told him on the Las Vegas hotel room floor, Danny is no good for him. Paul drops down from the wall, leaving Danny alone. But just as Danny can breathe a sigh of relief, he hears a cop shouting and two gunshots. He calls for Paul to see if he’s still alive, but horrendous silence is the only reply. When Danny manages to shimmy through a grate and escape, Paul is nowhere to be found. Danny steals one of Jordan’s cars and tries to call Paul, but there’s no answer. As he drives, he pulls up next to someone who is also sitting in their car. It’s Amy. A chase ensues, reminiscent of the first episode’s road-rage incident, but this time it’s Amy chasing Danny. Together, they drive recklessly in the dark. It’s almost romantic when the cars lose control and careen off a cliff, one after the other, taking their drivers down with them.
Beef’s season finale, “Figures of Light,†begins with a chase that reminded me of Michael Mann’s Heat, where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro chase after each other on a darkened airstrip. Somehow mostly unharmed, Amy chases Danny through the dark California underbrush, gun in hand and white coat flaring behind her. It seems like she might have the advantage until Danny ambushes her and pushes her down a hill, where she sprains her ankle. Waking up the next morning with no cell reception, she desperately tries to limp away when she hears rustling in the bushes; she thinks it’s someone there to save her, but in reality, it’s just Danny farting into the wind. After shouting at each other from their various perches, they come to an uneasy truce — since Amy is hobbled, Danny will carry her while she tries to navigate them to safety.
Danny walks around, carrying Amy piggyback as she tries to find their way out of the wilderness. Their dynamic has devolved from grown-up enemies to sibling hostility. They’re sniping at each other, baiting each other, and for a second it seems like they’ll get out of this alive until they stumble across what looks to be the gun Amy had the night before. They wrestle each other for it, and Amy breaks Danny’s arm to win it, using a move Paul taught her back in Las Vegas. She waves her gun around and demands Danny go look for edible plants: aloe vera, agave, elderberry. I guess she’s qualified to say that sort of thing because she owns a plant business, but the aloe vera and agave combination really feels like something a Los Angeles girl boss would order in a smoothie. Anyway, Danny finds what appears to be elderberries, and the two eat them. For a second, some peace is achieved, but that peace is totally shattered when it turns out that whatever those berries were, they were not elderberries. They’re poisonous, possibly hallucinogenic, bringing Danny and Amy to their knees to vomit viciously.
What follows is a sequence that really shows Yeun, Wong, and Lee Sun Jin on their A game. A sequence where two characters get oddly high in the desert and learn to see past each other’s facades? Just typing it out sounds corny, but these scenes are far from schmaltz. Yeun and Wong deliver laughter and tears in equal measure as Amy and Danny lapse in and out of lucidity, discussing silly things like why Asians are lactose intolerant. They eventually discuss the deep voids inside of themselves, like how Danny was trying to return hibachi grills meant for his suicide attempt the day Amy flipped him off, or how Amy’s back tattoo is inspired by Catch-22 because life has always felt like an impossible choice to her. They continue to vomit. Night falls and exhaustion, hunger, and dehydration set in. In their utter defeat and surrender, Amy and Danny curl up side by side like sleeping children. Convinced they’re going to die, they use what they believe to be their last moments to say they see each other. Words simply don’t do these scenes justice; the lush, almost velvet quality of the night, the subtle but devastating performances, and the choice to have Yeun and Wong deliver the final minutes of this scene’s dialogue in unison and then as each other. It’s a beautiful acceptance of each character’s circumstances, heartbreak, and limits.
But, as I said, Beef isn’t interested in Amy and Danny dying. So the two wake up the next morning, laughing, like jubilant children surrounded by piles of their vomit. They’ve found their way to understanding in the night, and together, they climb out of the mountain. Their phones get a signal for a second, and they learn that people are looking for them and that Paul isn’t dead. Paul’s alive! Leaning on each other for support, they limp down a tunnel and toward the light … until who should come running toward them but George. Before Amy can say anything, George raises his gun — the same gun that Amy masturbated with, Fumi used on Michael and Bobby when they broke into the Lau house, and George pointed at Danny before Danny accidentally took June. Chekhov, are you watching this? — and shoots Danny. The screen fades to black.
And yet, Danny, somehow, still is not dead. In the final sequence of Beef, Amy keeps vigil next to Danny’s hospital bed, beaten up and in her own hospital gown. Mentally, she replays their first interaction in the Forster’s parking lot as if to ask what might have happened if she’d never flipped him off, never let her anger out on that fateful day. Amy climbs into Danny’s bed and curls up next to him. I said in the first recap that I wanted this to be a rom-com, but we got a love story more complicated than a simple romance. Somehow, these two strangers found each other and engaged in the worst, most awful parts of the other. They played on each other’s fears, anxieties, depressions, and terrors. But in doing so, they also became less alone. So much so that something like love permeates the screen as Amy clutches Danny. It’s not romantic and it’s not platonic — it’s something deeper. Maybe it’s that unconditional love Amy was looking for all along. The sun rises, another day dawning on Amy and Danny. As fingers of light reach across the bed, we see Danny’s hand curl around Amy’s back before the show cuts to black for a final time. Whatever happens next, Danny Cho and Amy Lau now have each other.
Beef Tips
Since watching the finale and writing this recap, video has resurfaced of a 2014 podcast on which David Choe, who plays Isaac, graphically describes coercing a Black woman into sex, a story Choe later said he fabricated, a position he’s maintained ever since. As of writing this (April 17, 2023), Netflix, Lee Sung Jin, Steven Yeun, and Ali Wong have not commented on Choe’s words or the decision to hire him, all of which has me rethinking my enthusiasm for the show. Sexual assault has touched my life in many ways, and I am confident I couldn’t have been as effusive about Beef if I’d known about Choe’s words (and potential actions), especially if Yeun, Wong, and Lee knew and still decided to feature him prominently in the series.
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