Making the hop from film to television seems to be increasingly common these days, so it’s no great surprise to see Halle Berry headlining CBS’s latest sci-fi offering, Extant. The show premiered on Wednesday to unexceptional ratings, and it’s unclear what sort of future lies in store for it. Summer is traditionally the season of popcorn television and casual entertainment, making the slightly over-the-top drama a good fit, but can CBS keep it going beyond the first season?
The premise of the show revolves around astronaut Molly Woods (Berry), who’s just returned from a 13 month solo mission in space, yet, mysteriously, is pregnant. That’s on top of a history of infertility, making ‘where did the baby come from?’ the question of the hour…and it seems like a number of characters have a pretty good idea, including Molly herself, no matter how much she pleads ignorance.
Mysterious baby tropes are nothing new in science fiction, but in a show with a woman of colour in the lead role, this trope is worth a second look. One of the ultimate violations of bodily autonomy, freedom, and reproductive power becomes even more so when a member of a traditionally oppressed class is involved; it’s unclear whether Extant plans to acknowledge Molly’s race and explore the implications of her pregnancy, or skate right over the issue, avoiding the topic as appears so popular in modern television.
Meanwhile, her husband John (Goran Visnjik) is hard at work on his pet project: Extremely humanoid robots, intended to act not simply as servants but as companions to the people of the future. In a world surrounded by technology, he argues in a pitch speech to the mysterious Yasumoto Corporation, people need something more human to connect to. His pilot project, Ethan (Pierce Gagnon) has been raised in his own home as his child; but while John thinks of Ethan as his son, Molly isn’t so sure.
Especially since the Ethan she sees now isn’t the boy she left when she took off for space. He’s colder, crueler, meaner, showing signs of faking humanity rather than genuinely learning it as part of his programming algorithms. Ethan, in other words, is being positioned as a pop culture psychopath with a twist; as a robot, can he have any essential humanity in the first place? Is a robot pretending to be human to cover up dark impulses just…a robot? This is likely to become a key component of the narrative on Extant as more robot children are built and Ethan’s behaviour spirals out of control.
But there’s more within the labyrinthine network of plots on Extant, like Molly’s strange hallucinatory episode — or possible alien visitation — during a solar flare. And the appearance of a man whom everyone thinks is dead. And mysterious notes delivered via a cheerful balloon salesman in a public park. Espionage and conspiracies about in Extant, where Molly is warned against trusting anyone by a dead man ‐ and she’s clearly desperate to hide some secrets of her own, too.
The world of Extant is envisioned as a future filled with tech to support every aspect of life; self-driving cars, bathroom mirrors that turn into news feeds, and more. As a science fiction drama, it draws upon many familiar elements from the genre, including eerie children, robots, aliens, mysterious pregnancies, and, of course, marriages falling apart as couples squabble over the nature of humanity, society, and technology.
It’s an odd, twisting and turning plot that could fall completely apart, even with Spielberg involved with the project to give it some extra punch. In the pilot, Berry seemed to carry it well, but it may suffer as the show progresses over the coming weeks and months. With a 13 episode order, it’s clear that CBS didn’t want to take an excessive risk, and it’s hedging its bets to see how audiences respond. As is common with science fiction projects, it’s unclear whether the network will give it full support, or allow it to flounder and see if it can pull itself up.
The lack of faith in genre shows is a continual problem in Hollywood, a community that just snubbed Orphan Black rather spectacularly in its consideration for the Primetime Emmy Awards, the pinnacle of television achievement. As the establishment refuses to accept such programming as a legitimate entry into the field of art and expression, creators, actors, and other professionals working on such shows are challenged when it comes to feeling like part of Hollywood’s culture.
Many networks shove their science fiction into terrible time slots, or against highly-rated competitors, and then act surprised over low viewership. Advertising is often minimal, and shows are positioned as cheesy and unimportant when they can actually contain fascinating social commentary (Star Trek was an early pioneer in the field) and intriguing questions about society, humanity, and where we’re going into the future.
Extant may end up asking what remains of us as a culture when we come to rely too heavily on technology, and when we begin to develop technology that is self-aware and intelligent enough to become manipulating, conniving, and sinister. Or it could end up being another soft-pedaled sci-fi show that we tune in to for Wednesday night entertainment, not deep thoughts.
Photo by Sweetie187, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license