'The Lost Symbol' Episode 1: Is Mal'akh indeed Zachary? Pilot may have spoiled ending

By hinting that Mal'akh is Peter Solomon's son, 'The Lost Symbol' might have just lost its element of surprise

PUBLISHED SEP 16, 2021

Spoilers for 'The Lost Symbol' Episode 1 'As Above, So Below'

If you've read Dan Brown's 'The Lost Symbol', then you have a good idea of how it ends. That's the biggest challenge Peacock faces when it debuts with the live-action adaptation of the best seller on September 16. The pilot starts off on a riveting note and does enough to keep the audience, but the bigger challenge as we mentioned in our review would be how it keeps that intrigue factor going till the final episode. Especially when you know that the story is pretty much the tale of a son gone bad, scratch that. Evil, to be precise.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Ashley Zukerman) finds himself pulled into a series of deadly puzzles when his mentor, Peter Solomon (Eddie Izzard) is kidnapped. The CIA forces him onto a task force where he uncovers a chilling conspiracy. The opening episode establishes that Beau Knapp's Zachary Solomon aka Mal'akh is the big baddie, and he has an apparent hatred for Langdon. Brown's third book in the Langdon tetralogy decodes his character in-depth and with the series following the source material, we can expect a couple of episodes to be all about Zachary.

'The Lost Symbol': Release date, spoilers and all about Peacock mystery series

In the opening scene, we see a man tortured to his apparent death, but he is shown to survive. The scenes that follow show him entering the Capitol and planting a grotesque severed right hand in the middle of the Capitol Rotunda in a recreation of the Hand of Mysteries. Over the course of the episode, he is shown to brutally attack two policemen and in the final minutes, he meets the kidnapped Peter Solomon (Eddie Izzard) and explains his plans and the fate of his son to him.

"Your fate is in Robert's hands now," he says talking to Peter as he sits strapped to a chair. "Now, hopefully, he is not a disappointment. Like your son." When Peter counters him that he knew nothing about Zachary, the antagonist says, "I was the one who ended him." In the book, Mal'akh assumes several identities but is eventually revealed to be Peter's son. Even Peter's shellshocked expression seems to convey that he has an inkling deep down that his kidnapper is indeed Zachary.

If this theory is indeed true, then the series just might have given away the biggest plot point and will have to prove to viewers that the upcoming storyline is still gripping enough. Unless it does throw in a sharp surprise at the end.

'The Lost Symbol' drops with new episodes on Thursdays only on Peacock.