Imagine living life as a teenager, being an A+ student in science, and your whole life is ahead. Now imagine that stopping completely at age 13, only to start back up again at 25, with no clue about what’s happened.
Beyond tells the story of Holden Mathews (Burkely Duffield), who as a teenager is caught in a chase into the woods on his motorcycle by his best friend’s brother after an attack. The chase results in Holden being thrown from the bike into an unconscious state. Not dead, he remains in a coma until he finally awakes 12 years later in the present. It seems all normal, right? Well it is, except for the fact that he’s completely healed, can walk without assistance (despite being immobile for all this time), and has “super powers.”
Turns out that while Holden’s body was in the hospital, his consciousness was in another plane of existence, The Realm. In the Realm, Holden learned how to focus this power by controlling objects, starting fires, and even destroying barriers. The problem is, after his miraculous recover, the powers have arisen, along with random memories from this time, only Holden has no understanding of this period in his life, nor consistent memory of his life in the Realm.
It doesn’t help that a strange brunette, Willa (Dilan Gwyn), insists they spent these 12 years together, and that her grandfather needs Holden’s help to get out of his own coma. Add to this the cult that has been hunting him down since he awoke, the difficult concepts of earning both his GED and driver’s license, talking to girls when he easily made it through puberty braindead, and the fact that his old friends have move on with their lives, and his life is far from the normal he ever considered at 13 years old.
When Freeform (also known as “ABC Family thinks this is a decent rebranded name”) began showing commercials for Beyond, I was extremely skeptical because it looked like another attempt at on older YA show in a similar fashion to Stitchers. Since I was not able to get into Stitchers, I shrugged this off, figuring it for a quickly replaced Winter fill-in to follow alongside Shadowhunters (a show I do avidly watch). I had shrugged it off so fast I didn’t even bother scheduling it on my DVR the night it premiered. Thankfully, it was available on-demand on Freeform’s website and app because after testing out the first episode I was hooked.
While the supernatural aspect is a bit hard to catch on to at first, the show’s use of memories to tell Holden’s backstory during these 12 years does so without telling two stories in each episode in the manner of shows like Lost or Once upon a Time. Instead, it only shows the audience parts of Holden’s life as he remembers it, leaving out information that has no pertinence to the major story going happening in the real world. Meanwhile, the show’s mystery and spy thriller surrounding the cult and their relationship to Holden drives the show up until its last episode.
Last episode you say? The show isn’t completely over yet; there may be a couple episodes remaining. But if you have the Freeform app, or visit their website, you can binge all 10 episodes of season 1. So if you haven’t checked out the series yet, there is still plenty of time without waiting for a marathon to show.