Beacon 23 Episode 4 review: “God in the Machine”

A new episode of Beacon 23 has dropped! MGM+’s science fiction series based on the novel Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey (author of Silo) has gotten off to a very solid start. This week it changes gears in a pretty major way, diving into deep questions about loneliness and artificial intelligence. However, this episode also highlights a few of the show’s weaknesses.

As always, beware SPOILERS ahead for this week’s episode of Beacon 23.

Beacon 23 Episode 104 review: “God in the Machine”

Beacon 23’s third episode ended with a huge cliffhanger as Aster (Lena Headey) murdered her lover and business partner Coley (Sandrine Holt) in order to stop her from killing Halan (Stephan James). That stands as one of the show’s most shocking scenes, and I was more than a little curious to see the fallout.

We don’t get that fallout this week, though. “God in the Machine” is a very different episode of Beacon 23 that nonetheless manages to feel very cohesive with the show’s overall themes. The entire episode takes place 180 years in the past and focuses on two completely new characters: beacon keeper Sophie (Barbara Hershey) and Milan Aleph (Eric Lange), the man who engineered the beacons in the first place. Bart the AI (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) is there too, and if you weren’t convinced that he has some serious screws loose before, then you will be by the end of this episode.

This was an intriguing episode of television, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss Headey and James. It highlights one potential weakness of Beacon 23: it leans very heavily on its lead actors to carry the story. Doing an entire episode without either of them is a risky proposition, especially this early in the show’s run. That’s doubly true when the episode is as far removed from events as “God in the Machine.” I imagine we’ll see Milan and Sophie again in later episodes, and what we learned about Bart certainly gives his malicious streak with Halan more context. But those ties are held back for future episodes, which makes “God in the Machine” feel somewhat isolated.

Perhaps that’s fitting, given how much Beacon 23 examines the psychological effects of loneliness on humans and AI alike. This episode essentially brought in two totally new actors and gave them their own full story where we see them go through similar sorts of emotional trials as Aster and Halan. And just like how Headey and James carry their part of the show through their performances, “God in the Machine” gives Hershey and Lange enough room to let their performances breathe. There were times that it almost felt a little like a theater exercise, with the script being a bit less fluid than in previous episodes. But on the whole, Lange and Hershey carry the episode well. Lange in particular turns in an incredible performance, with enough personality quirks that Milan feels like a very real person who’s hard to look away from.

Beacon 23 is starting to establish a bit of a pattern: bring in at least one new actor every week, give them meaty material, and then kill them off. Each time it has made sense, but I do hope the show switches things up sometime soon because at this point it’s happened three episodes in a row.

Of course, Bart also factors into “God in the Machine” very heavily. At its core, this episode is all about AI, from Bart’s homicidal turn to Milan’s grand plans for his own future. If Milan designed the beacons, that means Sophie is potentially the first beacon keeper for Beacon 23. Bart calls her “mom,” and the relationship between them is so dysfunctional it’s chilling. Things escalate as Bart shows that not only is he willing to murder someone for what he perceives as the greater good, but that he is calculating enough to bide his time in order to do it on his own terms.

It’s easy to overlook how big an impact Bogert-O’Brien is having on the series as the AI, since we only hear his voice, but Bart is fast becoming one of the more memorable parts of the show. If Beacon 23 can be said to have a villain, I think it might be him. At the very least, he’s the scariest thing on the series so far. I’m equal parts nervous and excited to see how he’s going to react to Aster’s decision to kill Coley once we get back to the present next week.

Verdict

“God in the Machine” gives us plentiful backstory about the origins of the beacons, with great performances from its three featured actors. However, it feels a bit isolated from the rest of the series, and doesn’t quite pop off the screen the same way the show does when it focuses on its main leads. It’s the weakest episode of Beacon 23 so far, but could age well depending on how the series utilizes the new plot points and characters introduced here in the future.

Episode grade: B-

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