Extant S1 Ep 1 – Reentry

She has nice eyes and all, but we could stand some other expressions.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I’ll start right off by saying Halle Berry was by far not the main draw for me for this show, and it turns out that’s likely to be good thing – though she’s not terrible, she’s not very convincing, either. Most of her emoting consists of wide-eyed staring, which gets old fast. Still, I buy her interactions with the other characters enough that I’m not giving up on Molly yet. After all, she’ll have to be done being shocked/terrified by everything soon, right?

The sci-fi stuff, which was one of the main reasons I watched, is not mind-blowing or ground-breaking – yet. It’s impossible not to think of AI (especially since that was another Spielberg creation), and the shadowy, sketchy research and development corporation could be from any number of movies or TV shows we’ve already seen. Still, if it’s old news, it’s at least put together well, and the effects are good. I like that nothing is so ridiculously futuristic that it takes me out of the scene. The actor playing Ethan does a good job with the traditional cute/creepy kid role. I hope as a character there are some surprises there, though. I know we can expect he’ll get creepier.

Ew. Also, not something I expected before watching,

I’m not going to go into much in the way of the plot of this episode, because if you’ve seen the previews, you know it already: she comes back from her solo space mission pregnant, and her android son is acting creepy. At least I haven’t already completely guessed all the plots and twists that Weyland-Yutani (I know that’s not the actual name but it might as well be) is going to be up to, apparently in tandem with the International Space Exploration Agency (aka privatized NASA). I wasn’t necessarily expecting there to be a fairly clear tie this early on between Molly’s ‘hallucination’ while in space and both of those organizations. So that’s good. I’d really like this show to be fresh and new, not just cool-looking and interesting enough to keep going. The title itself, which is the opposite of the word “extinct” (as the title sequence demonstrates), hints at some possibilities. My other main wish at this point is for more Annie Wersching, because I adore her. But I don’t know how likely that is.

All in all, an intriguing pilot. I appreciate CBS for giving it a shot, since it’s so different from their usual primetime fare. It drew me in much better than, say, Believe, which I successfully watched the entire pilot for but then couldn’t be bothered to watch any more. This, I’m pretty sure I would keep watching even if I weren’t sign up to recap.