Beacon 23 made me think that maybe it's okay if some projects don't include queer people. On paper, this show has all the ingredients to make me love it. First of all, it stars Lena Headey. Honestly, that's all I knew going in and it was enough to give it a try. I love Lena Headey. Second, Lena Headey plays a bisexual badass.
Third, it is based on source material written by the same author who provided the source material for Silo, an Apple TV+ show that I really enjoyed. And fourth, it's on MGM+, the same network that brought us FROM, one of my favorite sci-fi shows of the year. Unfortunately, despite having all the right ingredients, Beacon 23 didn't end up being palatable.
Creator: Zak Penn
Stars: Lena Headey, Stephan James, Wade Bogert-O'Brien
The titular Beacon 23 is a kind of beacon that floats in the far reaches of space, scanning for dark matter and telling passing spacecraft whether passage is safe or not. Ultimately, the show is more about Beacon 23 and its AI Bartholomew than it is about any human characters. To its credit, the show does a great job of impressing upon its audience the stifling nature of living in Beacon 23. Every episode feels like a bottle episode; Some episodes feel like a home invasion movie. The show imagines a future in which humanity has expanded throughout the universe, colonizing many planets in many solar systems throughout the galaxy, but we never see these other planets and colonies. We never left the Beacon.
The show takes its time, unraveling Beacon's present and past, while also revealing a mystery that connects it all. And when I say reveal I simply mean reveal, not explain. The audience is as much in the dark as the characters, if not more so, about this mystery. Some parts felt a bit like reading the book Annihilation, intentionally vague, intentionally without explanation or clarity, occasionally to the point of disorientation. And yes, Lena Headey's character Aster is weird.
We briefly meet someone Aster is dating, Coley, played by Sandrine Holt. Her relationship is contentious and volatile, and considering Coley is only in one episode, and Aster's queerness no longer has any bearing on her character or the story, I'm not sure it was worth it. I firmly believe that a person's queerness doesn't have to be inherently tied to a relationship, so it's not that I wish Coley had stuck around longer (although I do).
It's just that the queer thing felt more like someone decided they needed a queer character and chose Aster and Coley at random, rather than considering the implications, based on the dialogue and planned plot for these two characters. In theory, it's pretty nice to be included, and the costumes definitely got the grade. But if Coley hadn't been in that episode, we would never have known Aster was queer, and I think that got lost.
I loved Aster. She is very sarcastic and has a lot of charm and arrogance! I could spend the rest of my life watching Lena Headey act queer. But at the end of the day, I'm not sure we can add this one to the "win" column. I have more egregious reasons, including more than one bad queer trope, but they're extremely damaging, so I'll have to hold my tongue for now.
However, there were things that I did like about Beacon 23. For example, the casting; Lena Headey is brilliant, of course, with Natasha Mumba acting up a storm alongside her. Additionally, Barbara Hershey makes a major and glamorous appearance in one episode. They also did a great job of world-building; They managed to express the immensity of space in the confines of a building. Without too much exposition, but also without being too confusing, they clue the audience into different companies, factions, and communities. I was also a big fan of the costumes.
Even in the first two episodes, I suspected Aster was weird because of how she looked. And finally, I really enjoyed Beacon's AI Bartholomew. It was a lot of fun and I'm always impressed when sci-fi shows can make a spaceship sentient enough to turn you into a character, even though it was never in human form. All in all, though, it wasn't enough to balance out the aforementioned bad tropes, nor the slow, confusing pacing.
If you have no expectations of positive representation and just want to hear Lena Headey joke about spending time in quarantine "masturbating" and see Lena Headey's hair in braids and Lena Headey's arms in a tank top, you might enjoy Beacon. 23 more than me.
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