5 Reasons to Get Lost in CBS’s Extant

CBS’s new summer sci-fi thriller Extant debuted July 9 to stellar ratings and critical reviews. The show was the top-rated drama series for the week–for good reason. The latest in a series of dystopian dramas this summer, Extant is a chilling sci-fi tale created by Mickey Fisher and executive produced by Steven Spielberg. The story revolves around astronaut Molly Woods (Oscar-winner Halle Berry) who returns home to her family inexplicably pregnant after a year in outer space during her mission. A year alone in outer space. But there’s more–a lot more. Extant, the showrunners tell us, means "Still in existence, the opposite of extinct." How did Molly become pregnant? How will she tell her husband, John (Goran Visnjic), a robotics engineer heading the Humanichs Project?

And what about their son, Ethan (Pierce Gagnon), who is actually a creation of Molly’s husband, the prototype of the humanoids he wants to mass-produce for people who do not/cannot have children. Like Molly and John.
If it all sounds a little creepy, it is. Co-starring Michael O’Neill as Alan Sparks, the head of the team investigating Molly, Grace Gummer (Meryl Streep’s daughter!) as Julie Gelineau, who works with John at Humanichs and Hiroyuki Sanada as Hideki Yasumoto, the mysterious head of the Yasumoto Corporation who has taken a special interest in the entire Woods family. Wednesdays on CBS. Watch!  

5. Gravity
Molly Fisher (Halle Berry in her best role in years) has spent more than a year in space–alone. She’s been doing research and trying to heal after ceaseless attempts at getting pregnant and having a child with her husband. But when it’s time for her to be de-briefed from her trip, her doctor and best friend, Sam Barton (Camryn Manheim) gives her the news she has always wanted to hear but which she knows is impossible: "Molly, you’re pregnant." "But I don’t get pregnant, I don’t do pregnant!" Molly exclaims.

4. Purge
Molly’s son Ethan (the remarkable, pitch-perfect Pierce Gagnon) watches her vomiting in the bathroom and goes to talk to his father, John (Goran Visnjic), about it. John explains that Mommy is having difficulty with re-entry and that she will get used to being back home, soon. But Mommy is having more difficulty with re-entry than either her husband or son can imagine. She’s remembering an event that occurred while she was in space that she can’t explain and which she knows is somehow connected to the news Sam has given her. Was she really impregnated while she was in space? Is it possible what she saw and experienced was indeed real? Even though she watched for herself that it wasn’t recorded on the space ship’s tape? A tape she erased, contrary to all the rules?

3. Inception
While Molly continues to examine her feelings and go over every detail of her time in space, the government is doing something untoward: Did they create the situation that made Molly pregnant? Is Molly herself an experiment? Molly asks Sam not to put the pregnancy in the report, but when Molly goes for the first of several exit interviews, the tension is thick in the room. Everyone knows she is lying about something and we know that Molly is being lied to, as well. But what is at the root of these untruths? We know Molly is trying to figure out what could have happened, but what exactly is the government trying to do? And is Sam really Molly’s friend or is she a double agent reporting back on the "project" that is Molly?
 

2. The XY Files
When John goes to do a presentation to get funding for his Humanichs humanoid project, he brings son Ethan with him. Ethan is the prototype John is showing off to the group who will decide whether or not the project will go forward. He explains to his son that he loves him and not to be concerned about what he will hear in the room. But as the presentation goes on, John is grilled about how humanoids can be "terminated" if they "go wrong." John, fiercely protective of the son he may not have realized he loved so much, responds in a way none of the potential investors can handle. Nor, perhaps, can Ethan.
　

1. Resident Evil
A series of aggressive incidents, including one involving another child, leave John vaguely concerned about Ethan and whether his programming might need some tweaking. But when Ethan and Molly go out for the day, an incident with an ice cream cone leads to a dead bird and some nagging questions for Molly about who her "son" really is. Later she goes to speak to John in his studio–body parts and faces of robot and humanoid litter the room, their inner-workings revealed. Molly expresses her concerns about Ethan, which are dismissed by John. We see for the first time that Molly’s absence from her family not only hasn’t fixed what’s wrong between them, it’s widened the chasm. So much so that lines may have been drawn between a father desperately in love with his son who is also his creation and a mother who suddenly knows there is  a "real" child in her womb–and now fears the humanoid living in her home who may know things about her she doesn’t want revealed to anyone, even herself.
　
　
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer and the author and editor of nearly 30 books. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 SPJ Award for Enterprise Reporting in May 2014. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Postand a contributing editor for Curvemagazine and Lambda Literary Review. Her literary criticism has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe andPhiladelphia Inquirer. She was book critic for the Baltimore Sun for 17 years and reviewed for PW for 20. Her book, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for cultural&historical fiction. Her novels, Ordinary Mayhem and Cutting will both be published in late fall 2014. @VABVOX