If you’re the sort of person who struggles to keep track of where you left your mobile phone, be grateful you’re not living in the world of Extant. In this US sci-fi drama, smartphones are featureless translucent blocks that only wink into life when someone FaceTimes you. What’s more, in this imminent future, BMWs are driverless, Fitbits talk back and Nasa has been privatised. Affluent, futuristic sleekness is the default setting in Extant, which stars Halle Berry and boasts Steven Spielberg as executive producer. All of these technical advances appear to have improved humanity, which makes it the polar opposite of Black Mirror, but things aren’t actually that simple.
Creator Mickey Fisher lifted the title from a vintage interview with Rod Serling, who created The Twilight Zone. The various strands of Extant feel very Twilight Zone. Berry plays astronaut Molly Woods, who returns to Earth after a 13-month solo mission and discovers she is pregnant. So what happened during that communications blackout in outer space, the one in which she hallucinated hugging an ex-boyfriend before passing out?
Meanwhile, back on Earth, her husband John (played by Goran Visnjic, AKA Dr Luka Kovač from ER) has developed some highly advanced artificial intelligence and housed it in a robot that looks exactly like a six-year-old boy. This becomes their “son”, Ethan, who can learn Japanese in minutes but struggles with less tangible concepts, like morality.
This primary school Terminator and the telepathic alien to which Woods gives birth begin to vie for their mother’s attention. If that sounds like a cue for a wild, pulpy ride, Extant goes to great lengths to establish a tone akin to any other middlebrow US drama. The interior design is tasteful, the soundtrack largely non-intrusive; there’s no sense of experimentation in the direction, and the initially slow pace lulls you into thinking the mystery of Berry’s space conception might take all 13 episodes to be unravelled.
But the airless, clinical feel of Extant soon feeds into a growing sense of paranoia, of manufactured reality. The Offspring, as the cosmic child is called, has a troubling survival mechanism: the ability to alter people’s perception, which triggers unexpected moments of horror. And beneath the surface of this world full of helpful touchscreens, shadowy forces are circling the Woods. For all her empathy, though, Molly is no victim, opting for a proactive approach to uncovering what’s going on. She is, after all, a lateral-thinking brainbox trained to handle life-or-death situations. In outer space.
Besides The Twilight Zone, the other obvious reference point is Solaris, Stanislaw Lem’s twice-filmed sci-fi novel about a far-flung planet messing with the minds of orbiting astronauts by creating lifelike copies of the people they love most. In Extant, a warning precedes the Offspring’s mind-meddling, in the form of a pulsing circular pattern. This appears, unnervingly, on Berry’s belly in the early stages of her pregnancy, then later surfaces on the bodies of targets. Eventually, the Offspring’s influence extends even to wildlife: in one highly unsettling image, a random flock of birds suddenly snaps into the shape of the symbol.
In the UK, Extant was initially available free for subscribers to Amazon Instant Video, before being quietly deactivated to encourage DVD sales. The show further diluted its one-off, star-powered, event-TV status by being recommissioned for a second season. This survival does seem appropriate, however, given that the drama’s underlying message is that life finds a way.
