The show ends nearly as expected, by playing three sci-fi apocalypses off each other in occasionally interesting ways. Was the alien invasion the problem all along? No, it just made Molly a super-hero and forced us to realize that we’re all just going to have to get along someday. Sorry about all the corpse moms!
Was the Robot Uprising what we really should have been worried about? When they started turning them out in the 1000s to instigate marshal law, it seemed like it, but they were hardly invulnerable and mostly seemed to be reacting pretty mindlessly in panic mode rather than carrying out a clever agenda. Not a credible threat once exposed.
So it must have been TAALR, the nefarious cyber-presence that was the real threat, yes? It killed John and Toby, and was willing to wipe out the entire human race as a flawed blight on the surface of what could be a really nice planet, you know, sans biological life. Rather extreme thinking for a deductive algorithm, but one with so many failsafes it wasn’t even all that hard to turn him off or to use the MacGuffin that’s been in play since Molly’s dream sequence in episode 9.
I mean, yes, of course they all have to negotiate the maze of his server facility, and kill the robo-guards, and figure out that most of the walls are holograms, and convince Lucy to help them, and find a way to save Ethan from the nano-bots that apparently are not only airborne, but also can teleport into sealed airplanes (since all the virus-carrying Humanichs were mid-flight on their nefarious mission when they started coughing up ooze).
Double Vision had a little fun with the penultimate of our inevitable clichés, creating a Humanichs model of Molly, who was all bossy and “I’ve got the upgrade” and good at fooling the good guys at the wrong moments. Berry had fun playing the bitchy version of herself, as actors always do, in what was pretty much Shatner-level shenanigans. Sadly Hilary stand-in Fiona Stanton doesn’t survive the episode, as her fate is sealed once she starts collaborating with Molly over virtual reality glasses. Again, Extant gets small details right along the way of offering up the hoariest of clichés.
The Greater Good all too easily solves the problems set up this season, mostly by a very under-budget second attempt on the holding facility, which pits the aliens against the robots again (but now with helpful telekinesis!), which is just what happens when Molly meets Molly 2.0. The most fun is that Ethan’s little spider-bots are gleefully efficient bomb delivery machines, and that having Ethan and Julie and Charlie and JD on Molly’s side is almost believable in giving them the edge against a foe who can call up drone bombers as needed, but is too busy trying to talk Molly half-heartedly out of turning him off. HAL this guy is not.
In fact, it turns out it’s not about any of those threats, they were all red herrings to keep Molly from giving an accurate press conference, where Molly admits she brought an alien invasion to Earth and everybody applauds her for it. Because the season is over and they’ve really run out of money this time?
Still, I think viewership stayed pretty steady, even from Season 1, and Amazon Prime Video has its funding already figured out. So my vote for the inevitable Season 3? Probably cyborgs. The Terminator franchise has been letting us down on that front for years, and that way maybe we could have Goran Visnjic and David Morrissey back, but with rusty guns and armor!
The cleverest part of everything above? When Ethan reminds everyone they can track Julie (who’s been kidnapped and buried alive, sending her would be lover on a ridiculous suicide attempt) by her cybernetic legs. Thank you, Ethan (the best idea of both seasons, and a winning performance from Pierce Gagnon), for innocently making this nonsense work in a way that even Halle Berry struggled to achieve.