Summary
A deliberately weird and ambiguous flashback episode is weaker than the first three, and the lack of clarity in how it relates to the overarching plot might be frustrating for some viewers.
Episode 4 of Beacon 23 Season 1 leaves Aster and Halan to fend for themselves for a week, instead wheeling back 180 years for a flashback episode exploring some of Beacon 23’s backstory and fleshing out the wider lore and conspiracies that underpin the paranoiac character drama we’ve seen thus far. Fittingly, it accomplishes this mostly through more paranoiac character drama.
“God in the Machine” is a deliberately weird and highfalutin episode that arguably revels in its own ideas about AI and consciousness a little too much. It’ll probably be important down the line, but it hasn’t yet revealed how which some viewers will find frustrating.
Beacon 23 Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
The drama here revolves around two characters we haven’t met before and, given the time frame, may not meet again. The first is Milan Aleph, a QTA higher-up who arrives disguised as a maintenance worker with clearly ulterior motives, and the Beacon keeper Sophie, who has a slightly hippie vibe and has a slightly uncomfortable relationship with BART.
Milan is clearly antisocial, to such an extent that he chooses to drug Sophie so he can poke around rather than just ask her for a look-see. He’s investigating the artifact that was glimpsed by the first Beacon keeper, which he believes could be the key to unlocking a new world – or perhaps eternal life. The name of Milan’s personal AI, Hope, who has the voice of his daughter, is one of the few early glimmers that he has any kind of empathy or human emotion at all.
What is Milan looking for?
Throughout the episode it becomes clear that Milan’s intention is to conquer death; to make human beings omnipotent and everlasting, though he’s a little vague about how exactly he plans to achieve this, and even more inscrutable about how it relates to the events we’ve witnessed in the first three episodes.
The essential conflict of the episode becomes Milan’s aggressive pragmatism versus Sophie’s rather idealized version of human connection and understanding, with a biased BART playing mediator. Milan has clearly suffered some kind of trauma that has led to his obsession with death and circumventing our mortality, but Sophie is a very lonely woman who lives alone in space and never receives any visitors, not even from her grown-up children, so both are coming from an imperfect position of bias.
Why does BART kill Milan?
BART determines that Milan’s position is slightly more worrisome since his calculations suggest that Milan will eventually wipe out the human race through his experimentation. But he also reveals that he’s in love with Sophie, which is bound to influence his decision in some capacity. Nevertheless, BART decides that the best course of action is to kill Milan.
Sophie isn’t keen on this idea and is willing to risk a potential extinction event to sit and chat with Milan about his feelings – even being willing to die with him should BART cut off the oxygen as he plans. Since he isn’t willing to do this, it buys Sophie a bit of time.
To be fair to Sophie, she does a pretty good job of relating to Milan, who is really just as lonely as she is. But the very human, almost imperceptible change this amounts to doesn’t register for BART, who decides to kill Milan anyway by suffocating him in the airlock as he’s jauntily leaving. Sophie, he tries to stop this and fails, mightily sours on her “son”, BART, much to his own displeasure.
How does Beacon 23 Season 1 Episode 4 end?
At the end of “God in the Machine”, Milan, or at least a version of him, appears to Sophie to pitch them working on the artifact research together. Naturally, Sophie is a bit put off by the idea that, before his death, Milan digitized his consciousness, essentially realizing his dream of cheating death but, at the same time, stripping away the few human characteristics he had left.
Milan needs Sophie’s help with the research since the artifact is only visible to the human eye and will therefore be inaccessible to this new version of Milan. However, the episode leaves the outcome of this somewhat unclear. All we can be sure of is that Sophie is entirely disillusioned with AI in general, determined to isolate herself from both BART and Milan both.
What did you think of Beacon 23 Season 1 Episode 4? Let us know in the comments.
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