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In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, CBS
In the UK: Available on Amazon Prime
Three episodes into Extant – essentially Solaris meets Rosemary’s Baby mixed with just a hint of AI, Gravity and Moon, in which astronaut Halle Berry comes back to Earth after a year alone in space hallucinating her dead boyfriend and discovers she’s pregnant – and it’s clear that this is less science fiction, more an exercise in coming up with this year’s Under The Dome. It’s certainly got as much plot as Under The Dome, because after filling the first episode with every card it had it in its derivative pack, it’s slowly been eeking out those few puzzles and mysteries over a somewhat dull and unexciting chase-around storyline for the following two episodes.
Every episode has been pretty much the same: Berry runs around a bit in an effort to verify everything that the audience already knows and/or suspects, while artificially holding off from jumping to any logical conclusion or entrusting anyone with any new secrets. After experiencing minimum peril, she then discovers… not much.
Meanwhile, she and scientist husband Goran Visnjic watch while their creepy robot son acts creepily and yet fail to spot anything is awry. Of course, Visnjic and robot son have secrets, too, and none of them are in a sharing mood either. If anyone talked to anyone else, this would all be over a lot quicker.
As I pointed out in my review of the first episode, the show misses out on doing anything truly interesting with its quasi-futuristic setting, too. Following the pilot, which did at least make a stab at futurology, ever since we’ve had a future where we can send people up into space regularly, create an artificial intelligence that can be placed into a human-looking body, yet doesn’t have self-drive cars and has everyone carrying around mobile phones that do little more than what last year’s iPhone could. There’s definite intelligence behind the scenes in the writing staff, but it’s clear that because of either the budget or a belief that the audience isn’t that smart, the show would rather not push anyone too far intellectually and would rather wave its hands distractingly when ‘the science bits’ come up. Hell, in this episode we’ve just had someone talking about ‘sending postcards’ – does anyone even do that now, let alone in a world that should have 7G-enabled contact lenses and invisible tooth and ear implants for instant communication and information access?
So despite a pilot that did at least have a little promise, it’s time for me to leave Extant. So far, it’s all promise with no pay-off. Hell, I’m not even sure what it’s promising, it’s so frustratingly coy about letting us know what the aliens, corporate entities, et al are really interested in doing: communication, invasion, control? So many secrets and I’m not sure I really care what the answers are. So given what happened with Under The Dome, I think I’m going to bow out early rather than get strung along again. And if I ever change my mind, the whole thing will be on Amazon Prime forever so I can play catch-up.
Barrometer rating: 4
Rob’s predication: Is supposed to be only one season and hopefully it’ll stay that way
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In the US: Sundays, 10/9c, Lifetime
Did you know the world’s fertility is slowly decreasing? No one’s exactly sure why, although chemicals, particularly those with oestrogen-like properties, that have been flushed into the ecosystem is among the more likely suggestions. Of course, with the world’s population heading for 7 billion and likely to hit 9.6 billion by 2050, it’s not exactly an immediate global issue, even if it does affect some people quite deeply.
But imagine what would happen if by 2020, suddenly everyone, everywhere stopped being able to have children and no more kids were born at all. What would that be like?
Well, lots of people have already had a go at answering this question. Margaret Attwood projected a similar future in The Handmaid’s Tale, which effectively imagined what would happen if Islamic law were implemented by a Christian US.
PD James’s The Children of Men, adapted by Alfonso Cuarón and Timothy J. Sexton as a movie starring Clive Owen, imagines a similar dystopian future for the UK in such circumstance, albeit one that’s more fascist than theocratic.
All of which is bleak – way, way too bleak for basic cable, let alone Lifetime, home of very fluffy female-friendly fare such as Army Wives, Devious Maids, Drop Dead Diva, The Client List and Witches of East End. So I can’t imagine that when Sexton re-pitched Children of Men as a TV series, he did it without thinking it might need to be toned down a bit and made a bit more hopeful.
Certainly, given his co-producer partner is ‘practising friend of popular science’ Danny Cannon (CSI, Eleventh Hour), edginess was out of the question for Sexton’s The Lottery. Within the first 10 minutes of the future extinction of humanity being announced, scientist Marley Shelton (also Eleventh Hour) has already come up with a viable treatment that fertilises 100 embryos.
Now science being largely a collaborative subject and this being a highly urgent issue that the whole world needs solving within the next 70-100 years, you’d have thought the most obvious coda to all this is that Shelton would then have been working with other scientists around the US and the world to perfect her technique and get a new baby boom underway. Meanwhile, those embryos would be being implanted in the most genetically and physically hospitable environments: their egg donors.
Except that wouldn’t be very dramatically interesting, so instead, brace yourselves. First, US President Yul Vazquez (The Good Wife, Magic City) wants to keep the discovery secret and impregnate 100 female soldiers with the embryos. Just like that. Because women join the army to have babies.
But then chief of staff Athena Karkanis (The Border) is hatching a cunning plan to ‘give the nation hope’ – a lottery, with 100 lucky winners being given the chance to have a child. And then we add on a conspiracy theory to make it all just a little bit sillier.
Here’s a trailer.
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