SNAPSHOT
Extant is a mystery thriller about a female astronaut trying to reconnect with her family when she returns after a year in outer space. Her experiences lead to events that ultimately will change the course of human history.
(synopsis via Ace Showbiz)
Let’s be honest – no matter how much we discover about space, there is still an awful lot about it we don’t know.
And no matter how we romanticise or mythologise in series like Star Wars and Star Trek, or books by Peter F Hamilton and Kim Stanley, it is still seen as capable of harbouring many things we may have well have cause to fear.
And it’s this very real fear that something extra-terrestrial may be out to get us, that fuels shows like Falling Skies, and now Extant, the latest series from Steven Spielberg to explore the idea that something malevolent mat be lurking just outside the range of what we know about the far reaches of space.
The preview trailer leverages this fear to great effect, with astronaut Molly Woods (Halle Berry) returning to Earth after 13 months on a solo mission into space to discover she’s pregnant (guessing that’s all a tad unsettling for husband John, played by Goran Visnjic), that her son Ethan (Pierce Gagnon) thinks the human race is careening towards extinction and her work colleagues are acting unnervingly out of the ordinary.
The clear implication is that “Something wicked this way comes” (Macbeth, Shakespeare) although the series could equally examine, as some have suggested, the idea that Molly is the unwitting vanguard in the next step of human evolution, which would make sense since the building blocks for life on earth may have come from space in the first place.
Whatever is afoot, we will have 13 episodes to find out just what is going on when Extant launches on CBS on July 9.