Beacon 23 is yet another science fiction show that thinks adding holographic displays and control interfaces serve as an adequate substitute for the "science" part of the genre's name.
A beacon in space serving as the eventual evolution of present-day lighthouses to aid space travel is an interesting idea, until it becomes obvious that is as far as the idea was developed before this train wreck was greenlit and put into production.
I seriously doubt the book it's supposedly based on is this bad. Five minutes in and I had to turn off this minimum-effort train wreck.
First we start with a flash forward where three characters stand and watch something bad (?) happen without taking any action, then we jump to "earlier" because the writers apparently never bothered to plan out their timeline, or learn how to establish their setting.
Next we see a ship that seems to be engaged in some form of FTL travel, yet it approaches the beacon at a normal rate that allows them to use radio communication and visually see the beacon.
That's because the titular beacon turns out to be a literal beacon of light (LOL). Good luck picking that out of the vast blackness of space, especially as slow as it's rotating (when the effects team remembered to make it rotate). It's also rotating on a two-dimensional plane. A two-dimensional plane. In space.
Even worse, the beacon is supposedly warning that there is "too much dark matter" in the area. Did someone dump the dark matter before jumping into hyperspace, or was the dark matter always there and the reason for the beacon? Funny how they can detect the dark matter and even display it as random blobs around the sector (on the aforementioned holographic display), even though there doesn't appear to be anything nearby with which it can interact in order to be detected.
Of course the computer suddenly malfunctions for no reason, projecting the "safe" white light instead of the red "danger" light that would be even more difficult to see in space. The communications are also magically malfunctioning so the caretaker can't warn the ship as it slowly approaches at light speed (?). In response, we get a scene involving gravity that defies physics. Forget science and logic as long as it looks cool, right?
The hilariously bad choices continue when the caretaker reaches the actual light, which is alternately rotating and stationary depending on the shot. His solution is to take a space prybar and wedge it between two big gears which presumably are part of the mechanism rotating the light, yet his actions instead cause the light to flicker between white and red. Seriously? They wrote this on a machine that has access to the world's knowledge yet couldn't be bothered to look up a single detail
The entire idea is moot, of course, since ships would navigate via mathematics and computer tracking of the stars. If you needed a beacon to warn of threats it would would emit a constant radio signal at a standard power level that would be picked up and processed automatically by every passing ship, and there would be multiple redundant systems to ensure reliability. More likely there would be multiple beacons surrounding the entire sector at a safe distance to warn ships away, not wait until they are close enough to see a light, which would place them inside the sector or even past it.
Storytelling and science fiction in particular have gotten so brain dead to be unwatchable save for the very rare exception, and Beacon 23 is definitely not an exception.
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