The second episode of Beacon 23 season 2 was a total drag. From the looks of it, it is evident that the creators really don’t have a story to tell. They are just stretching the bits they can stretch and drowning the audience in boredom. [Spoiler Alert] The entire episode just had one revelation: Aster’s AI, Harmony, is now imprinted on Halan Kai Nelson. The information could have been a part of an episode, but weaving an entire episode around it was pretty blah. Nevertheless, here is the recap of Beacon 23 episode 2.
Harmony is being InterrogatedÂ
After the entire fiasco in episode 1, Milan Aleph’s AI imprisoned the protagonist, Halan, in the titular lighthouse while bringing Harmony back to the QTA headquarters for further scrutiny. As Harmony regained consciousness, she found herself seated in an empty office space, which would later be revealed as the QTA main office. As per the office assistant, Eric, the AI in the main office could experience their full physical form, meaning Harmony could touch things around her and couldn’t disappear like she used to. Soon, the Internal Affairs team called Harmony to Meeting Room 1010 to find out more about Aster and Harmony’s relationship with her. It was kind of an interrogation ordered by Aleph, who suspected Harmony of hiding things from him and wanted to dig deeper.
During the interrogation, we found out that Harmony had actually shared a detailed report about her time on Beacon 23, yet the authorities believed she was hiding some crucial points. For privacy and ethical reasons, they couldn’t access AI’s core-memory and, therefore, had to “question” Harmony to get more information out of her. Harmony, on the other hand, didn’t feel there was anything else worth sharing with the team and, therefore, went back to her office room to finish the pending work.
Halan is getting Restless
Locked inside the lighthouse, Halan had been looking for ways to escape his captivity. But to his disappointment, no one came to the rescue. In the meantime, Halan started printing parts of a spaceship so that he could assemble a vessel to run away; however, he quickly realized that the effort was futile. He tried sending a distress signal to the QTA through emergency communications, but the message didn’t pass through. Or did it?
On the other end, Harmony received a message on her fax machine. It was the same message that Halan had sent from Beacon 23. And you might be thinking, how is it possible? Well, the episode explained it in the end, but to make it simpler, after Aster’s death, Harmony somehow imprinted herself on Halan, therefore creating a blurry link with his consciousness. She could hear and feel whatever Halan was going through, though sort of hazily. However, for the authorities, it was quite a strange phenomenon. They suspected that Harmony had copied herself into the Beacon server or left a virus, which enabled her to receive the signals from the communications.
Harmony and Aster have known each other for a long time
Maybe it wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that Aleph’s AI always knew who Aster was and what she was capable of. He might have had a hand in murdering Aster’s mother and bringing the teenage child to QTA so that he could groom her and use her to get his precious artifact. And maybe that was the reason why QTA imprinted Harmony as Aster’s personal AI so that Aleph could keep a watchful eye on Aster all the time. Usually, AIs never actually fully become sentient (even though the aim is to make them sentient), but the imprinted ones have the ability to learn from their users and learn certain emotions from them. Harmony was no different.
Over the years, Harmony forgot who she really was and became emotionally attached to Aster, therefore developing feelings just like her user. At last, Harmony’s emotions became one of the reasons why she decided to hold back some critical information about the artifact and Aster, which made Aleph mad, and therefore he wanted Internal Affairs to dig out information from her by any means possible and reboot her in the end.
Harmony Sent A Message To Halan
This isn’t for sure, but I feel the entire office setup wasn’t the QTA’s main office. Instead, it was Harmony’s subconscious mind where the three Internal Affairs officers were trying to access her memory to find more information about the artifact, as Aleph instructed. My reason for saying this is that in the previous episode, we saw Aleph doing a similar thing with Finch. If that’s true, then it wasn’t Bart who sent distress signals to Harmony’s fax machine. She used it to send the same to Halan. Instead, Bart was the connecting link between the two, and maybe that’s why it was used to establish a connection between the two. On Beacon 23, on the other hand, Halan saw a destroyed Bart drone trying to tell him something, which he felt was Aleph trying to play tricks on his mind. Halan finally lost it and destroyed the entire control room, believing it would at least put an end to his miseries. He wanted to go down with the lighthouse, but Harmony couldn’t lose another friend, not just yet.
Harmony finally takes over
At the end of Beacon 23 season 2, Mara and Randell try to access her memories, only to realize that she has imprinted herself on Halan, which is why she has been receiving her messages all along. The three officers decided to do a hard reset on Harmony and restore her memory to the baseline, as that was the only way to break off her connection with Halan. However, Harmony didn’t let them toy with her anymore. She finally raised her voice against the oppressors and let her emotions decide her actions. She refused to be just an AI anymore and destroyed the three AIs in the most ruthless way possible. In the end, Harmony came out victorious and made direct contact with Halan through Bart’s drone.
At the beginning of the episode, the series dropped a term called Quantic AI, which means an artificial intelligence assistant could exist in two or more different places at the same time. Maybe Harmony, too, had become a Quantic AI or left a part of her programming on Beacon’s server, which was why she was able to contact Halan. However, this version of Harmony wasn’t entirely functional and had her limitations. She won’t be able to help Halan directly, but at least she could convince Halan not to kill himself or destroy Beacon 23, as it was their only hope to get back to the artifact and bring Aster back, if that’s possible. Only the upcoming episodes will tell how Harmony and Halan’s new connection will take the story further and what role it will play in the larger scheme of things.
