New York.
Manny, Britt, and Harper are having lunch in a busy restaurant. The conversation is banal, ordinary, almost irrelevant. Until something changes in Harper. Her body begins to burn from the inside. Within minutes, she explodes, repeating the pattern seen in other infected victims. Manny is also contaminated. This becomes the new case that Cooper and Jordan must investigate.

In Venice, Cooper faces the consequences of the attack he suffered in the previous episode. Subjected to a long interrogation, he tries to explain what happened, but nothing seems to make sense. After hours of pressure, he is released. His concern is elsewhere: Jordan does not answer, does not respond, shows no sign of life. Cooper is tested. The result is negative. He has not been infected.

The narrative then returns to the assassin. Interrupted by the Corporation, represented by Byron Frost, he receives a new mission: to travel to Indianapolis. In a revealing conversation, it becomes clear that the Corporation itself ordered the FBI investigation to be halted. The operation, however, failed. Cooper escaped. Now the problem is different: the doctor responsible for Jeremy’s transformation.

The assassin must find him and deliver him. He fulfills the mission, but the doctor is killed anyway. Jeremy, meanwhile, is immersed in the delirium of his new identity, consuming time and bodies around him. When confronted by the assassin, he manages to escape narrowly. The mission shifts focus: they must find the woman with whom Jeremy had sex and who was infected.

The episode’s title, Christopher Cross, emerges as a metaphor. The assassin is inspired by the song Sailing and by the trajectory of the singer, who, in the 1980s, was a phenomenon but lost relevance because he did not fit the beauty standards of the industry. For him, the pursuit of beauty is a crossing. A voyage. An inevitable destination.

When they arrive at the woman’s house, she is already collapsing. She had warned Jeremy by phone: she had a fever. Now she is in the final moments of infection. She attacks the assassin. Jeremy kills her.

Facing the imminence of his own execution, Jeremy makes an unexpected request. He begs to be killed immediately. He says his life is not worth saving. The confession, paradoxically, fascinates the assassin. He decides to spare him. Between the two, an agreement is formed.

In a clinic, Cooper deals with the survivors of the attack involving Harper. Meanwhile, the series makes it clear that the beauty virus is no longer just an uncontrolled phenomenon. It is beginning to be managed, negotiated, and instrumentalized.

In its third episode, The Beauty reveals its most disturbing move: the transformation of the monster into an ally. Jeremy ceases to be merely a victim of the system and becomes part of it. And Ryan Murphy suggests that, in the world of beauty, true monstrosity lies not in deformation, but in the logic that sustains it.