Beacon 23 Co-Showrunner Glen Mazzara On Bringing Humanity To The AI Stories Of Season 2

Warning: Spoilers for Beacon 23 season 2!

MGM+’s epic sci-fi show Beacon 23 is halfway through season 2, but the mysterious plot has plenty of steam left. Based on Hugh Howey’s short stories, the series followed Aster Calyx (Game of Thrones‘ Lena Headey) and Halan Kai Nelson (Homecoming‘s Stephan James) as they travel through outer space on a lonely lighthouse. After overcoming their initial suspicions of each other, the two characters grew close until tragedy struck.

Things have changed drastically following Aster’s death in Beacon 23‘s season 1 finale, with Halan’s story taking center stage and several new characters entering the beacon’s orbit. Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead) and Joy Blake (Ghost Whisperer) took over as co-showrunners for Beason 23 season 2, and helped to further build out the world. Joining James, the ensemble cast includes Natasha Mumba as Harmony, Wade Bogert-O’Brien as Bartholomew, Eric Lange as Milan Aleph, and Ellen Wong as Iris.

Screen Rant interviewed Mazzara about how Beacon 23 shifted intentions over the course of two seasons, which character arcs will come into play for the climax, and how much further he hopes to explore the unique space setting of the series.

The Challenges Of Beacon 23 Season 2

Screen Rant: Given the unique setting of Beacon 23, what are some of the challenges of expanding the universe in the second season while keeping fans still engaged with the source material?

Glen Mazzara: Well, the challenge was how to continue world-building when our characters are so isolated from everyone else. We really want to play this as an outpost on the edge of the galaxy, so they’re just getting scraps of information. Sometimes they get the wrong information. It plays as a lighthouse, so we literally have people washing up on their shore once in a while. That’s important.

What we can’t do that other sci-fi shows can do is cut to the Emperor’s court. You can cut to another starship and find out what’s going on in other shows, but we don’t have that. It was a real challenge, and I feel like it added to the sense of isolation from the original novel and from Zak Penn’s original conceit of the show. That’s part of the DNA of Beacon 23.

Did you shoot season 2 back-to-back with season 1? If not, how did the fan reaction influence what you did in season 2?

Glen Mazzara: Great question. We did shoot them back-to-back, and I took over as a co-showrunner with a woman named Joy Blake. The challenge was how to give season 2 its own shape and story, so that it doesn’t just feel like a serialized series. We wanted season 1 to have its own arc, and then for season 2 to have its own arc.

Fortunately, season 1 did a lot of the heavy lifting of setting up the mythology, setting up the terms of what AI is in this world, and what the different political entities are. It answered the question, “Who are our characters?” Of course, we were able to push deeper into the character histories and add some new elements, but all roads lead back to Halan and Beacon 23. I’ll admit that there were a few weeks where we were trying to figure it out, but I think it came together, and I’m really happy with it.

The beacon itself is almost a character in the story, representing isolation, hope, and danger. How do you continue to develop it in season 2?

Glen Mazzara: I’m excited to talk about this. There are some events in season 1 that changed the character of the Beacon, so we wanted it to feel like a different place. We wanted it to start to feel like a prison — a dungeon or a madman’s house, if you will. We didn’t change the set, but we changed the set dressing. You can see it’s in disarray. There are more creaks and more groans. We wanted it to feel like a haunted house in a way, so we put a lot of effort into how it photographs and what it sounds like.

When season 1 started, it was very clean and well-lit. But as we go deeper into our characters and our story gets darker, so does the beacon.

Breaking Down Beacon 23 Character Arcs

I want to talk about one of the main characters at the center stage here, and that’s Aleph. What can you tell us about Aleph and his upgrades?

Glen Mazzara: Aleph is an AI that’s based on his creator’s humanity. A lot of times we see AI and science fiction as this cold, disembodied, inhuman, sentient force trying to take control or impose order. As people, we’re all screwed up, so we spent time in season 1 showing how screwed up Milan is. He has issues; he can’t connect, he lacks compassion, and he’s a narcissist.

All of that’s ingrained into his type of AI, which is Aleph. AI is not an answer in our world; it’s just another complicated character with its own flaws and character traits that makes mistakes. It’s integrated a little bit differently than I’ve seen in other shows, and a lot of that came from Zak’s original vision. We just built on his foundation.

This season, we dive deeper into the AI aspect of the show. What does that mean for Harmony, and can you talk about her journey this season?

Glen Mazzara: Harmony’s journey is central to the story that we’re telling. And that came together in an interesting way because I don’t know if that was always the case.

I would say that we always knew we wanted to tell a particular story, but Natasha Mumba who plays Harmony does such a fantastic job that we kept leaning on her and kept going to her. She gives such a nuanced performance because she is playing an AI, but she found the humanity there. We wanted the second episode to really showcase her world and her journey, and she just crushed it. So, we just kept going back to that well this season.

We had other characters following her from the AI world, so she just became very central. And to have a Black woman as the key to it all was interesting to us. Unfortunately, in a lot of these epic genre shows, you have white savior tropes. I do think Aleph bumps up against that — I think he thinks he’s that — so we wanted to explore other avenues. That’s a very important storyline to us.

We also meet Dev in season 2. What can you tell us about Dev?

Glen Mazzara: First of all, Dev was played by a fantastic actor who just brought so much. And that was a character that we originally only had a limited storyline for, but because the actor did such a fantastic job, we brought them back and kept developing the story. It was just a lot of fun to write. As writers, we were excited about that character, and asked, “What else can we give them?”

I’ll say that Dev plays an important part and adds a lot of mischief to the Beacon. Sometimes Halan and Harmony may or may not have too much of a sense of humor. I think Dev a lot of fun and adds a chaotic element, so it was just a pleasure to write.

Episode 2 was fantastic because it’s so different from everything that we had seen before this show, and that’s why Dev absolutely stands out. My other favorite episode introduces us to a new character who instantly became one of my favorites: B67. What can you tell me about her as a beacon keeper?

Glen Mazzara: Ellen Wong’s character, Iris, added so much because here was someone else who was coming into the story with no agenda. She’s a hero who wants to do good, and she’s coming into a very dysfunctional space but doesn’t realize what she’s getting into.

Ellen plays her with a certain amount of innocence, without being goofy or feeling like she’s from a different show. She is just another element in our universe. I thought Ellen did a fantastic job, and I was excited to work with her. I actually just was texting with her this morning. I would love to work with her again. I just think she’s fantastic.

But her journey when she comes to Beacon 23 is like a traveler on the road to Dracula’s Castle. There’s a gothic element, and she’s Belle trapped on the road. I won’t say there’s a romantic element like Beauty and the Beast, but she doesn’t know what she’s getting into. She doesn’t know what story she’s in. Ellen just played her with warmth and humanity, but also fierceness and toughness. I think she really holds her own in the episodes.

Opening Up The World Of Beacon 23 In Season 2 & Exploring Aster’s Backstory

We’re also introduced to new cultures this season, and the way that episode 5 ended left me shocked. What can you tell us about the Sabarians?

Glen Mazzara: They’re hardworking people. They are basically shipbreakers. What happens to all these defunct space stations and spacecraft? They would break them up for parts. I think you would have tough people who do that. They wear outrageous outfits because if they’re on the outside of a spacecraft breaking it apart, they would want to easily be able to identify each other. Their costumes are made to be identified at a distance. It also sort of plays as a throwback to Medieval culture. We like that. They would maybe not be able to communicate with each other. They would have hand signals or whatever.

We really gave a lot of thought to the culture. How do these people communicate? How have they come together? Our director, Ayo Chenzira, worked very hard with the choreographer to develop their hand systems and ways of communicating. We paid a lot of attention to make sure that that culture felt authentic, not just a weird race of people our heroes are encountering. We really wanted to give some thought to how they come together.

I was very happy with that. I was really happy with the actors that we cast for that, and I thought they did a great job. They came in, they took it seriously. I’m really excited about that episode.

Aster was not in the best of situations last season, to say the least. But we do get to explore more about her this season. Can you talk to me about Aster’s backstory in Beacon 23 and her connection to the artifact?

Glen Mazzara: Well, a lot of what we wanted to do was explore. We do think Aster’s story is tied to the central story of the beacon, and we needed to figure that out. A lot of that is wrapped up in Halan’s story, and the way Lena played certain things in scenes with Stephan in season 1 made me wonder, “Why would Aster do that as opposed to this?”

For example, there’s a scene in the second episode where the beacon has been infiltrated by the pirates, and Halan pretends he’s hitting her to throw them off the trail. But he’s really in cahoots with her, right? She pushes him off and says, “Get off of me!” Why would she do that? Why would she react so strongly? We didn’t have any takes where she went along with that; she really just didn’t buy it. So, I said, “Okay, there’s a certain amount of trauma in this character. What is the nature of that trauma?”

Then I started thinking about it, so we wrote this episode that explains where her trauma is coming from. All of a sudden I could understand that character more and why she would be so compassionate with Halan. What does she know about soldiers in this world and how they’re exploited by the powers that be? Perhaps they’re given false information or false memories. We had an episode that explored that to then look at what she thought about Halan when she met him.

That was an interesting way to push into her character, to find story that developed things we had seen and explained where we were going to go. It’s episode 6, I believe, which was an interesting one to work on. It’s really there to explain character questions that we as writers had, and I’ve never done an episode like that before. I think it works; I think it held together.

You could cut the tension with the knife in that episode, but it almost feels like a throwback to The Twilight Zone. We had the doctor working on that beacon, and it felt like she didn’t know if she could trust him or if she could trust the prisoner. We get this interesting morality play of Aster having to decide which one was which.

Glen Mazzara: Dude, you’re a genius. When we talked about that episode, and looked at the last scene of that episode, I said to the writers, “This is our version of The Twilight Zone. Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” There’s four characters on stage, and there’s an AI voice. That’s the fifth character. Those are Beacon 23’s five characters. That’s exactly a Twilight Zone episode. I thought we hid it a little bit better than that, but you found it, so thank you.

Halan goes through his own journey this season as well, and there’s some stuff that I found super interesting with his dad. Can you talk about that?

Glen Mazzara: All of our characters have wounds. It may take you a little while to understand, but all of our characters are wounded from their families, and those wounds don’t heal. We carry them for our lives. What happens is now you have a group of people who are stuck on the beacon together, all dealing with their wounds, and really now they have a makeshift family. How does that family either survive or end up at each other’s throats?

Aleph talks about his family, and he has a problem with his creator. Milan had a problem with his daughter, Halan with his father, and Aster with her parents. Other characters, like Bart and Harmony, are having trouble fitting in. They were all sort of thrown together, but now they are searching for or making their own family and coming together. That’s a journey that we explore, and you can see that in the finale. I don’t want to give things away, but then that sets the stage for the next part of our story.

Will There Be A Season 3 Of Beacon 23?

That actually leads me to my next question. The first season was great and the show got renewed pretty quickly. Is there going to be a season 3?

Glen Mazzara: As of now, season 3 has not been picked up, but I do have a plan for it. I’m talking to the studio, I’m talking to MGM+. The ending of season 2 is designed to be satisfying because I never take anything for granted. If we end with season 2, I hope it’s a satisfying story, but there’s also a trail leading forward to season 3 and more. I do have an idea in mind that I’m very excited about; something I haven’t seen before that builds on what we have and would be a lot of fun.

Shooting 2 seasons back-to-back is tough, though. People don’t really do that anymore. So, I think we’ve learned what the show is, what fans are excited about, and what excites us as creators. Now, I’m taking all of that energy and putting it into season 3, so I hope we get the opportunity to tell that story.

In a perfect world, how many seasons would you want to have for Beacon 23 to play out?

Glen Mazzara: That’s a tough question. I could see doing four or five seasons. I don’t think season 3 wraps it up, but I never want to overstay a welcome. I don’t think this story on Beacon 23 has 10 seasons, and I haven’t created that kind of engine unless there’s something else. But I would say four or five would be satisfying.

What I would do is I would open up another part of the world. I do feel like the Sabarians introduce that, or even when we cut away to Ellen’s new character. I want to know what’s going on in other parts of the universe, which is satisfying to me as a genre fan. When I buy a fantasy book, I want to study the maps. I want to know, “What’s going on over there? What’s happening over here? What’s happening beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones?”

I feel Hugh Howey and Zak created a rich world, and I would want to play with that. But I think the beacon itself, if I had my druthers, would go five seasons here. Then I would try to find another part of the universe and explore that.