The Beast this week has Dove and Barker looking into the son of a Russian diplomat who is trafficing children and women, then selling the children while setting the women up as prostitutes. It's actually a big improvement from the first two episodes and while the show hasn't yet hit it's stride the story was enjoyable, fast and avoided the normal plot cliches quite well.

Read about accents, dvds and human traffic beyond the link...

Just like both previous episodes Swayze was on fire and giving a phenomenal performance throughout this episode. While I'm no expert on Russian accents I was impressed with Swayze's greatly, especially when combined with his ability to switch in and out of it in a single scene. Travis Fimmel (as Dove) on the other hand is still struggling, while he's OK in scenes with guest actors he's out of his depth when acting alongside Swayze or Gillard, they're just far more accomplished and believable actors than he is.

The main plot of the episode follows the titular Nadia, a Russian immigrant who came over to America in order to chase after her son, she knew she'd end up being forced into prostitution but didn't care because her son was important enough to her. Angela Gots was very accomplished in this role and while her character isn't one with much depth she did bring a lot to the episode as well. She was very good in the last few scenes she appeared in.

There's still not a lot more depth to talk about where the show is concerned though, we're getting hints of Barker's 'corruption', especially when it appears he had the Diplomat's son killed even though the man was all the way back in Russia. This happenstance has resulted in Dove looking at a copy of Barker's DVD file, but there's not much there to hook you in, just a torn up picture and a redacted letter so far. While it's good to tease things out when you're dealing with something like this the writer's need to be careful, because the rest of the show isn't gripping enough yet so they need to give us a real hook into Barker instead.

All in all I found this episode interesting, easy to follow and well performed, the show still needs to lift it's game higher if it wants to become a must watch show. But The Beast has real potential here and I genuinely enjoyed watching it. Everything else just needs to rise up and match Swayze and Gillard's performances.