First look at SONA on Legendary’s Alpha

SONA, starring Ashley Clements, recently premiered on Legendary’s Alpha. Should you be watching the new series?  

SONA exists on a very specific level. If it was something even slightly different, it might be judged harsher than how it will be here. SONA was made on a micro-budget of roughly thirty thousand dollars, provided from an exceedingly successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s hard not to take that into account when considering this short-form series. For the most part, SONA is a perfectly serviceable (quasi) bottle episode-esque series that was made on the cheap and often looks like it.

The series is essentially a one-woman show for Ashley Clements (The Lizzie Bennett Diaries) as LT. Belyn Sona, who is shoved into an escape pod after the intergalactic ship she’s serving on suffers engine failure and an evacuation is called. On the escape pod with her is the ethereal computer (voiced by Lauren Lopez), who is something less than helpful.

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The majority of the series is contained in this escape pod with Sona struggling to do something productive while she’s waiting to be discovered by someone and being forced by the computer to make a recording of her progress. The other, much smaller, section of the series consists of flashbacks to her life on Earth with her alien telepathic husband Akiva (Brendan Bradley).

SONA is a series that is a bit ambitious in its modesty. It desperately wants to have these larger discussions on xenophobia and how that relates back to the current refugee crisis, and mental health and serving in a military organization like SONA‘s Space Corps (a kind of Starfleet), but it’s confined by its own main set.

It doesn’t have the space to explore these ideas, because the very nature of how this is made and the very structure of the series demands that be more about a claustrophobic survival story.

One of the greatest things working in the series’ favor is that it’s a very brisk watch. Each episode  runs well under ten minutes and, when the series concludes, should be a little under an hour to binge. At the same time, SONA is streaming on Alpha, a platform owned by Legendary, and it’s hard to imagine that audiences will be all too willing to add yet another subscription to an ever-growing list of providers.

That’s a shame because, if nothing else, SONA is interesting sci-fi that is trying for something different and should be supported in whatever way it can.

The first episode of SONA premiered on August 22 and will be continuing weekly. Are you interested in watching this? Let us know in the comments below!