‘Beacon 23’ EP on Finale Cliffhanger and Aster & Halan’s Bond

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Beacon 23 Season 1 finale.]

Did Beacon 23 just kill off Aster (Lena Headey)?! It certainly looked that way in the finale, but remember what we seen from her all season.

In the finale, Aster decides she’ll go into the artifact and receive the message that she’ll share with everyone — humans and AI — and Halan (Stephan James) agrees to join her, for 24 hours and that’s it. But Keir (Marc Menchaca) says he can’t let her do that and shoots her. Is she dead? Or will her connection to the mysterious artifact that has drawn in quite a few people save her?

“I will just say that I know the audience is going to have questions about, is Aster really dead? Those questions will be answered in a Season 2, if we run Season 2,” executive producer Glen Mazzara told TV Insider. “But one of the things that is fun about making the show, and you put your finger on it, is that the audience hopefully can never tell where it’s going. So I will say that I guarantee the audience will continue to be surprised as the entire story unfolds.”

He’s also keeping mum about any details about the aforementioned message Aster was to receive but did say it “was the point of a lot of debate for the cast and crew.” So fans won’t be the only ones eager to get that answer when the show does reveal it.

Courtesy of MGM+

The first season showed just how far Aster and Halan came, from two people who couldn’t trust each other upon meeting on the Beacon to the two standing together and her telling him she chooses him every time and in every universe in the finale.

They have “come to choose each other,” Mazzara confirmed. “Imagine two people clinging to each other, lost at sea. They need each other, but they care about the other person. So I do think that there was a real arc in which those characters are at each other’s throats early on in the season. I think they’ve each come to grow as a person by being selfless for the other, and that’s a really interesting, beautiful arc that we may not normally see in this type of show.”

After all, the show, while yes, a sci-fi mystery, is about trauma — “people dealing with trauma, people trying to get past their trauma, people trying to shut out their trauma, all of that,” the EP continued. Both Aster and Halan came to the Beacon with past personal trauma and now have to deal with everything they’ve been through in Season 1, which also “gives new layers and new understanding to past trauma.”

Moving forward, a second season — the show was renewed when it was going to be released as a Spectrum Original, then it was picked up by MGM+ — would “take place on different timelines, different levels of emotion, different levels of consciousness, and so we really want the audience to, in Season 1, buy into the world and the story and the characters, and then just as they think they know what’s going to happen in Season 2, we would pull the rug out from under them,” explains Mazzara.

“We worked very hard at taking all of the material and rearranging the puzzle pieces and giving people a puzzle piece every episode where they’re not sure how it fits, where this doesn’t make any sense, and then I promise, the whole story comes together,” he adds. “Because it’s such a limited setting — it takes place on this lighthouse in space — and it’s a limited cast, we had to keep finding ways to surprise the audience, and we just did that by telling the story in a very surprising, nonlinear way.”

What do you think is next for Aster after that shocking finale ending? Let us know in the comments.