Extant 1.06 “Nightmares”

Now this is what I’m talking about! How weird was this episode? Everything in it was totally obvious, and yet fit into the logic of this particular freaky, obsessive future universe only. Molly is solving mysteries, and working to protect her friends and family. She’s just not totally sure (and neither are we) who’s still a friend and who’s become an enemy.

I forgot to mention Julie’s freaky aplomb about having artificial legs last week; really great ones that look completely real (she probably made them herself), but leave her showering on a hover chair, and somehow tie in to her cavalier and attachment-free sex life.

She meets a new guy at the gym (of course servo-legs doesn’t obviate the need for aerobic health), who is a soldier with a somewhat creaky artificial arm. She invites him by the clinic for an upgrade, a chance he jumps at. So make that one more sinister stalker to worry about. That’s about the 5^th one I think.

John comes up with an amazing way to listen in on Sam’s dealings with their nefarious leader, a piece of Ethan’s inner ear that can hear and seamlessly meld with living tissue all by itself. Truly no one is unsurveiled in this world. Harder SF would have already begun to explore a culture without secrets or privacy, but Extant is sort of slowly getting there on its own through the rubric of having Molly and Sam bond in subversive code while Sparks and Kern watch.

And if all that isn’t weird enough, a couple of other odd wrinkles unfold. Fearless Leader’s Number One Thug Kern is a drug addict, an apparently legal need he gets met in an expensive salon, which Kryger tries to use against him. Do we need to know about this guy’s addictions? We do, because the story is moving to complicate everyone’s motivations and make the morality of this tale as gray as their minimal fashion and home décor choices.

And we finally see what Sparks is getting out of protecting (nurturing, creating, stealing, studying) this alien baby: it can look like his dead daughter, whom it may have killed in an earlier mission on a different space station than the Seraphim. Her final moments as an adult are recorded on a secret file that Kryger steals to give to Molly, and they are pretty harrowing.

Also, the dead lover Molly saw in her own space station event, that didn’t appear on camera, does appear on a magnetic resonance wavelength, as a field of intelligent energy. So that’s what was extant in outer space, though why it hasn’t driven Molly insane like it did the lab technician guarding the incubator (and apparently the fellow scientists on Sparks’ daughter’s mission) we don’t have a clue.

That last part is pretty cliché (and reminiscent of Threshold, a lamented 13 episode sci-fi series from a few years back where Carla Gugino investigated a spreading alien virus), but it’s the weakest part of an episode that has a boy robot having traumatic dreams that freak out everyone but his mother. Molly knows he’s just a kid that needs her love. Though how is he also seeing the fractal pattern that has started to haunt them all?