The crew enters pod 4 and discover that Beta is some kind of "fractal" life-form -- a twisty energy being kind of thing. It is obviously intelligent, and it obviously communicates telepathically. The object is organic, though made out of elements unknown to man.

We get an in-depth backstory of Eve's relationship with Beta which goes back many years to its first discovery in a Peruvian desert. Eve is in Peru on a humanitarian mission and she "discovers" Beta as it calls to her with a simple musical passage that she thought she composed when she was a child.

Ever wonder why they called it Beta? Well, it turns out there are a whole bunch of these things in the solar system and they're all communicating with each other. The first, Alpha, is on Mars and is the reason for the previous disastrous Mars mission. The real reason they sent that mission to Mars was to find Alpha. Gamma is on Venus, Delta is on Mercury, Epsilon is on Europa, Zeta is on the rings of Saturn, and Eta is on the surface of Pluto. It turns out that the real mission of the Antares is to pick up these objects/beings (there are empty cubicles in pod 4 to accommodate all of them) and bring them back to Earth.

A real oddity at the end of the episode: Jen is staring at the object but she can't see it -- she sees only an empty cubicle. Everyone else can clearly see it.

they got gamma,and Zoe is burned kind of bad, although she doesn't look nearly as bad as how they're talking. Turns out Paula's dog got hit because the guy her mom was shacking up with (not clear if he was father, step dad, just some dude) was trying to molest her so she ran out of the house and the dog followed her. molester guy then gave the dog mouth to mouth and carried him to the sidewalk