Beacon 23: Grade the Premiere of Lena Headey’s MGM+ Sci-Fi Thriller
Game of Thrones alum Lena Headey is trading Westeros for outer space in her new MGM+ series Beacon 23 — but she’s still locked in a tense power struggle.
Sunday’s series premiere kicks off with a flash-forward to a man named Halan (Homecoming’s Stephan James) trapped in an airlock as a mystery ship approaches his space station. He yells out to Headey’s character Aster as the ship docks and another character tells her, “They’re forcing the doors open.” But that was just a taste of what’s to come; we flash back to Halan alone on the space station and getting a message from an incoming ship. His space station, or beacon, is sort of an interstellar lighthouse, guiding ships around dangerous obstacles, and he tries to tell the incoming ship to reroute because it isn’t safe, but they can’t hear him. He puts on a space suit and manually shoves a metal rod into the beacon’s mechanism, making it flash red to warn the ship, but he loses control of the rod — and the ship collides with an object and vaporizes.
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Halan gets a sign of a life form, though: a pod that he brings onboard. Inside it is Aster, who gasps for air as she emerges. He helps her acclimate and introduces himself as Solomon, informing her that her ship has crashed and she’s the only survivor. Well, she was alone anyway, she tells him, and she’s charmed by the old-school drone he has as a companion. In fact, she was headed for this beacon: She’s read his reports about unprecedented mineral deposits, and she’s here to verify them. But when she asks to see his samples and data, he turns her down flatly, and when she presses, he gets angry, insisting he needs to fix his equipment first. He tells her to get some rest, and she agrees — but she grabs a knife, too, just in case.
Aster asks her AI assistant Harmony to help her access the data, and Harmony warns her to be careful. As Aster looks around the space station, she sees lots of notes “Solomon” has written to himself about which button does what. Does he have memory issues, or…? Meanwhile, he complains to his drone that it didn’t warn him she was coming: “If I’ve got to get rid of her, that’s on you.” (!) As he gazes at a picture of a man in a lighthouse being engulfed by a tidal wave, he starts to hear voices, and the picture starts to move. Uh-oh. Aster gets the drone to help her access the files, and among them is a video of a different man (played by Stephen Root) identified as Solomon. Uh-oh again. He catches her snooping, and he admits his real name is Halan: “The real Solomon stole my ship and left.” She’s not convinced, and when he tries to stop her from leaving, she pulls out her knife and stabs him, but he still manages to get her in a chokehold, holding her there until she’s unconscious.
She wakes up tied to a bed by the ankle, and her AI assistant Harmony takes human form as a hologram (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Natasha Mumba), helping her escape. When Halan finds she’s gone, Harmony lures him into an airlock where Aster locks him inside. She thinks he’s a deserter who went AWOL, and the drone — whose name is Bart, thank you very much — accuses Halan of torturing and killing the real Solomon. Aster takes pity on him, though, giving him food and offering to put in a good word for him. She thinks he’s suffering from PTSD, which isn’t even a thing anymore with all the drugs they have in the future. “I know what it’s like to be alone,” she tells him, and when she offers him some drugs to help quiet the voices in his head, he reluctantly takes them.
A grateful Halan volunteers to help Aster find her mineral samples, and he advises her to push a button marked “Never Touch” that reveals a remote section of the beacon that hasn’t been used in a hundred years. Sure enough, when they flip on video of that section, they see boxes of samples stashed there. Aster and Halan go check out the section together, but when they get there, Halan starts having a trauma reaction, running away in terror. “There was something there,” he insists. “It came at me. I saw it.” She gives him a sedative and puts him back in the airlock while she finds the samples she was looking for, and when she returns, she tells him she can’t let him go. “Who are you?” he demands to know, but she doesn’t answer. Then we’re back to the beginning, with a mystery ship approaching the beacon and Halan trying to warn Aster from his airlock. Aster tells Harmony to lock down the lower levels, including where Halan is being held (“No one comes up”) as the ship docks and helmeted gunmen board the beacon.
Are you planning to spend more time on Beacon 23? Give the premiere a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments to share your thoughts and tell us if you’ll keep watching.
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