“I thought I lost you.”
“Not a chance.”
Those were the words exchanged by both JT and Tess during the final minutes of Beauty and the Beast‘s Season 2 ender. JT was nearly at death’s door until two mysterious men showed up and saved his life using a method unknown to the medical field: an experimental nanoplasma to retrigger the molecule regeneration. How the injection he got made him better and if it comes with any side effects is something JT will be grappling with.
“He’s scientifically stumped and frustrated and freaked out because he has recovered and he shouldn’t have,” JT’s portrayer Austin Basis tells OMFGTV in an exclusive interview. “He’s been able to figure out serums, all this other stuff, but he can’t figure out why he got better and what was in the serum that allowed him to have recovered, and so that freaks him out. It’s an ongoing thing throughout the season for him to grapple with internally but also externally in seeing if there are any side effects. He’s constantly his own lab rat and that comes into play definitely in the middle of the season.”
JT’s growing obsession in search for answers in addition to the magnitude of the incident that had his life literally hanging by a thread, has not only affected him, but his friends as well. “Tess, Vincent and Catherine are concerned,” he says. “The traumatic experience has left him in a space that he is self inflicting this condition on himself. A little bit more of his hypochondriac comes out with this traumatic experience and that’s affecting his relationship with Tess. She wants him to re-enter the world, go back to school and teaching, move on with his life as Vincent and Catherine has. There’s a little discord and tough love happening in JT & Tess’ relationship in the beginning.”
RELATED | Read Part 1 of Our Austin Basis Interview
As for the pairing that make up “JT&T,” Basis says their relationship mirrors that of Cat and Vincent’s but to a whole new degree. “There’s a whole arc to JT & Tess that parallels the big moments and the romance and epic moments from Vincent and Catherine, but it’s at another level. It’s hyper-real — what everyone wants in their life is a version of a fairytale romance. With JT & Tess, they are a Beauty and the Beast in essence, but they are on a more realistic level. They are dealing with sci-fi, supernatural problems in general, but they digest them and absorb them into their relationship as a lot of the audience would in their real lives.”
While JT’s friends are extremely happy that he’s out of the woods — for now, at least — fans can rest assured that one character who did die last season is a done deal and that Catherine’s help in resurrecting Gabe Lowen was just a season-two, one-time thing. “[Gabe is] gone for good — a sigh of relief is felt in Beastie Nation. It was great to hang out with Sendhil [Ramamurthy] and work with him. As a character, both he and the writers felt that Gabe had swung between two really extreme points back and forth where he was really evil trying to earn his credit back with Cat and then turn back to the evil side. There wasn’t much more creatively that they felt they can do with the character. Working with him was always a positive experience because he’s just a fun guy and pleasant person.
“Anyone can die,” Basis continues, “but behind that character that dies is a real actor that loses a job and one who you stop working with. Anytime a character leaves or gets killed off, even if it’s a guest star or recurring, if they’e been on enough episodes, you get to know them as a person and then it’s almost as if you grieve for losing the person; there’s a lot there.”