I thought it was a pretty good pilot, to be perfectly honest. The series can do a lot with the material they've presented so far, it's just up to the writers to make sure it doesn't turn to crap. They've already got a pretty good cast, and an interesting premise, now they need to follow up with good writing.
The pregnancy premise has been done to death but overall i loved it. The cast is good, i liked the writing, and it just felt smart. Halle of course was stunningly beautiful.
I was waiting for it to end so I could binge watch this Halle Berry sci-fi drama but io9 published this story after the finale aired and it's making me reconsider.
Why Extant Was Such An Insult To Our Intelligence
Well, it's over. The first (and hopefully only) season of Extant has come to an end. And yes, the idea that Halle Berry's character became pregnant on a solo mission in space wasn't the most promising premise, but did the show have to turn out to be such a turkey? It Was a Checklist of Scifi Tropes
The non-consensual supernatural/alien pregnancy is already a well-worn (and rather irritating) trope, but it's not the only one that Extant employs. I mean, our major plotlines included a misunderstood boy robot learning to be human and an eccentric billionaire made of Japanese stereotypes. The tropes themselves aren't the problem; it's that Extant hits them so hard. In the finale, we realize how much of the season has been devoted to clumsily finagling Ethan into a heroic sacrifice, one that's paired with a ticking time bomb and a space shuttle flying away from an explosion.
It's especially frustrating, because Extant would occasionally show flashes of something more interesting, of actually trying to build its own world instead of ticking off boxes on some scifi storytelling list. The alien phantoms who repeat back what is sent to them? Wonderfully creepy. The way Ethan would sometimes try to understand his place in the world by interacting with less advanced machines? Full of promise. Last week's episode actually had characters (Fake Katie and Sean) interacting in a human wayeven if one of those characters wasn't truly human. At one point, John actually behaved like a person admitted that he was bothered by Molly seeing Marcus again, even as a phantom. But those moments were unfortunately the exception rather than the rule.
I setup a series recording and watched the first episode but didn't watch on beyond that point. Nor did I cancel the series recording. So I have the entire aired season on my server.
With the premiere episode:
when she returns home from her mission she actually took out the garbage herself while her husband was actually there,....
I've got to call BS on that.
Im ok with the whole ET knocked me up and a robot boy is my son premise but I just can't see Halle taking out her own garbage when her husband or someone else (robot boy I'm looking at you) could do it.
Has this show been cancelled? It had promise then became rather erratic and lacking in logic. Also did they miss a couple of eps as suddenly there was the season/show ender?
I wrapped this up last night, was it the best, not a chance, but it was enough to keep me watching.
What erks me about people, is that they clamour for SciFi on TV , and when they get it, they complain it's not Scifi enough, or it falls into old cliches.
So given a choice between Extant and another cop show with a twist, I'll take Extant.
For a young kid, "Ethan" was a pretty good little actor, not so much the "i'm an 8yr old boy" but when he played the "humanic", managed to pull of some very "roboty" looks.
I've been reading Halle Berry is getting some Medical drama (again, "ok"Scifi or some medical drama)so there may be no 2nd season.
Sci-fi as a genre is not worth saving if it can't produce worthy offsprings. I know scifi is under represented on TV, maybe because it's hard to get right, but even when they do you'll find studio execs making the stupidest possible decisions.
I am not willing to lower my standards for "good intelligent TV" just because the majority of scifi shows in the last 10 years have been disappointing.