In my recap for “Trust No One,” I said that Catherine and Vincent were more about emotion than heat, and “Tough Love” got it right. We finally got our kiss, and it wasn’t in the middle of a hormonal surge. It came in the middle of a thank you and an almost-goodbye and a mutual “I love you.” It was also loaded with everything that transpired earlier in the episode, which will have ramifications down the line. On the whole, it wasn’t as strong as other episodes, but it got us where we needed to go and had a damn effective closing scene. We’ll get to that. In the follow-on, “Any Means Possible,” we were introduced to a maybe big-bad named Gabriel and a task force was organized to hunt Vincent. Oops.
So, in “Tough Love,” Heather bulldozes Cat into inviting Vincent for dinner and he agrees to come only to find that Darius has also been invited. Cat and Vincent then spend dinner falling over truths and back stories until Heather lets slip that there are pictures of Vincent among the photographer’s candids from their dad’s wedding. So that has them on edge and then Vincent picks up an elevated heartbeat on Darius when he gets a phone call during dinner.
This dissolves very quickly into bad news when Darius takes Heather to a club opening, after Heather and Cat have had a falling out over Vincent at Joe’s award ceremony. Cat follows Heather to the club and things take a turn for the scary when Heather stumbles onto Darius getting smacked around by business partners, who decide to take it outside. They tell Darius to kill Heather, and he goes so far as to level a gun at her before Vincent intervenes, but he accidentally kills Darius in the process.
Cat hears all this from Vincent, who tearfully confesses what he did and then Cat goes to the crime scene. Heather is OK but was knocked out and remembers nothing, so Cat brings her home and puts her to bed just as she gets a text from Vincent asking her to come to the roof.
Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for rooftop declarations and one of my most favorites ever is from Moonlight when Beth finally gives Mick an ultimatum and he pulls her into a smoking kiss. Here, it’s Vincent who gives the ultimatum and Cat who rejects it. He tells her will leave because he can’t be the reason her sister is jeopardized. She reminds him that it had nothing to do with Muirfield, and that crazy things just happen. She tells him plain and simple that he’s her normal. She tells him she loves him, and she laughs as she says it like it’s a foregone conclusion at this point–she says she doesn’t need walls or windows, that he is enough.
He finally hears it and kisses her and tells her that he’s in love with her, too. They kiss and kiss, and for a moment, they’re together and happy. My only nit is that we don’t see Vincent’s face when she tells him. Boo on the blocking. Put our girl on a box if you have to!
When we pick up with “Any Means Possible,” it begins with a hot and heavy love scene that turns violent when Vincent transforms and literally hurls Cat across the room. He wakes up from the nightmare terrified and spends the first half of the episode avoiding Cat until he tells her that two years earlier, he almost had sex with a woman but he transformed and couldn’t control it and she only survived because she got away from him.
Cat has her own issues because at work it turns out her awkward locker room encounter at the gym with a guy in a towel gets even more awkward when he shows up at the precinct and is introduced as the new ADA, Gabe Lowen (Covert Affairs‘ Sendhil Ramamurthy). He questions Tess, who won’t spill on why she broke up with Cat. When Cat asks for her own interview, he’s reluctant to talk with her because of the awkward, but he does tell her he also lost his mother and his hands shake after he tells her, so there’s a secret there.
Cat and Vincent do platonic recon and discover the ID of the guy Vincent didn’t kill in the alley and then meet up at a masked ball where they get to be all fancy and handsome. Cat pulls the guy away from the party and a transfomed Vincent impresses upon him that he should tell the police what happened with Darius. He says he will and asks to speak to Gabe (conveniently also at the party). We see the beginning of their chat where Gabe presses for the vigilante’s ID, but somewhere something goes south and the guy turns up dead the next morning.
This leads to Joe organize a task force with Cat and Tess and a couple of sharp shooters (one of whom is Ty Olsson). Vincent sees the press conference and then Cat goes to tell him herself. He frets that he always knew someone would kill him and Cat’s not having it. He sits down on the bed and she tells him that whatever happened with the other girl, she wasn’t her. She tells him they can handle anything if they’re together. She kisses him and they fall back onto the bed. Vincent starts to transform but dials it back and they keep going.
So, we finally have them together but there’s also all this other drama brewing. Evan is intrigued enough by the Muirfield people that he goes to see them, but he blows the interview. When he offers to bring in the same guy Cat and Vincent are working, and then he turns up dead, Muirfield thinks Evan killed him and essentially offer him a job. And Tess and Joe are still carrying on. We don’t wholly know if Gabe is a bad guy, or another Muirfield plant, or just a red herring so we’ll have to see how that all plays out.
Tonight looks dire as the task force closes in. Here’s a sneak peek of “Insatiable”:
In other news, if you’re on Twitter, follow TPTB from the show at @batbwriters or use #batbnation–they are super good about Tweeting with the fans during the show, and throughout the week and they’re working really hard to make a second season happen. They’re also maintaining a Tumblr with behind the scenes fun stuff.
Photo courtesy of Ben Mark Holzberg/The CW.