Last season saw Molly jumping from emotion to emotion like a bipolar cat chasing a laser and, so far anyway, the writers have smartly decided to keep her on one level in season 2: pissed off. She uses her son’s toys to hunt for the truth about her husband, springs a prison break, and uses a shovel to attack a car and (apparently, sight unseen in the premiere) a certain betraying woman. The subtext, which shouldn’t be needed for anyone to pick up on: Berry makes the show palatable. Even when she was reduced to a mousy worry-wart in season 1’s worst streak of scripts, her just showing up helped elevate Extant out of the gutter and at least onto the pavement. Same applies for season 2 – you just wish they’d have made it a little higher by now.
Some of the flashbacks re-introduce (yep, again) the idea of humanity’s apprehension of the Humanichs program, with the government seizing Ethan out of the fear of his high level of intrusion into various private sectors of classified programs he used to save the world last season. Problem is, Ethan’s character is as dull as ever — despite a humorous bending-over-backward script attempt to explain young Gagnon’s aging — and since he has to be the backbone of this side of the show, any sense of danger or retaliation from him falls as flat as the eye-rolling attempt at danger in the Offspring’s glowing yellow eyes. With leaden dialogue saddled onto somewhat questionable performances surrounding Berry, Extant just can’t do dangerous. It doesn’t have the stomach for it.
After the premiere finally settles on a timeline, it’s easy to get the sense that all the time-hopping is supposed to tie up loose threads from last year while laying the groundwork for the next thirteen hours, but you may begin to loose hair from scratching your head so much. Once finished, it’s hard to shake the sense that the show is the televised equivalent of reading one of those choose-your-own adventure books in chronological order: you can see how snippets of story work within their own logic, but any attempts at constructing an overall thread are pointless.
Maybe it’ll make sense once the writers decide to give us the correct order in which to read it all, but that’s a hard sell when we’re already one full season into a show’s run. Vague attempts at changing Berry’s hairstyle amongst the periods are clearly meant to anchor the audience, but it all just steamrolls into an indecipherable mess. It ends on a high note, fortunately, with Berry and Morgan’s paths crossing and promising a sort of road-trip-to-save-the-world for the next 12 episodes.
The problem? I’ve seen 14 hours of Extant, and I still don’t know what they need to save the world from. Or who exactly needs the saving. Or what – in essence – the show is even about. An attempt at topical relevance rears its ugly head in the form of the military wanting to skip past the Humanich’s integral “childhood development” years and go straight to the gun training. Perhaps honest, certainly believable, but the last thing anyone behind a writer’s desk over at the creative department of CBS needs to be worrying about is new ways in which the world can end. How about finish explaining the original apocalypse first?
