The Extant two-hour special event launches us back into time when Molly first learned about what happened on the Aruna. After successfully averting a major, simulated on board crisis, she leaves the mock spaceship just as Sparks walks into the large room to deliver the news. He’s clearly choked up as he tells them about the “oxygen explosion” that claimed the lives of the entire crew — including his daughter. Fast forward to the present, Molly is showing Sam the transmission Ethan decrypted in the last episode. She knows the baby is alive and she has a plan to get Alan to tell her exactly where it is.
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A Secret Mining Mission
To get her plan in motion, Molly asks Sam to look into the medical records of the Aruna crew. They both know Alan is watching their every move and that’s what Molly is counting on. She wants to make him sweat knowing that she was on to him and that he’ll come clean about everything. In theory, this sounds like an excellent plan but we all know that in television, there’s rarely a perfect plan. But for now, it’s going Molly’s way. Sam started digging and Alan was quick to make it to her office to ask her why. Sam plays the part very well, telling Sparks that Molly asked her to look up the records but doesn’t know why. Since she gave him info on Kryger’s location, she already has Alan’s trust. He tells her that if Molly asks her for anything else, he is to pass it by him first.
Meanwhile, Molly seeks out Derek Pierce at his swanky penthouse apartment to ask him about the Aruna mission. He quickly sends her away but Molly won’t get discouraged that easily. Back at home she looks up the purchase history of his apartment, wondering how he was able to afford such a place. She finds out that he bought it for $1 from Claypoole Industries, a mining company. She shoots him an email, asking him about the company along with a picture of the mysterious circles. He emails her right back and asks to meet at his apartment.
As she’s heading out, Sam stops by with information from the Aruna medical records. Every crew member had their brain scans swapped for a copy of the same exact one. That has to mean that they all must’ve had the same abnormalities that Molly and Kryger had in their scans. She also noticed that they were given a treatment before going up that was only reserved for mining missions. Aruna wasn’t supposed to be a mining mission — hence another cover up revealed.
Derek Pierce had to have the answers she needed. Too bad Molly won’t get them. By the time she reaches his apartment, Derek had taken a header off his balcony.
Kryger is Held Captive
When we saw him last, Gordon took down Kryger after his meeting with Molly. Now he’s tied up and gagged in Gordon’s basement when he supposed to be dead. In between inhales of some potent recreational drugs and an impromptu visit from his Mom, Gordon interrogates him about the whereabouts of the secret footage. Kryger doesn’t budge, but when he realizes that Gordon may have seen the same crazy things he has, he offers to help. He can point Gordon to what he’s been hiding from and he knows Sparks isn’t telling him the whole story. We don’t know exactly what Gordon’s deal is but judging his messy apartment and his mom’s concern, he’s battling some serious demons.
Ethan And the Danger of Progress
In humanich land, Ethan is ready to get back to school. As John helps him settle into his new locker, two Japanese girls walk in. Speaking in their native language, they make fun of him, calling him “robot boy.” Ethan answers back that he can hear them — in Japanese, a language he didn’t even know he could speak. John is astonished and not in a good way. His son was designed to learn at the same pace as humans. It was the only way he could be a real boy instead of a robot. If he could learn languages at this rate, that means he could surpass everyone, and that can lead to scary things.
Over dinner with Femi Todd and Yasumoto, there’s a clear difference of opinion as to how beneficial Ethan’s new development is. Yasumoto sees it as the next step to pulling a transcendence move and uploading human consciousness into an android. John sees it as the barrier that keeps his boy from being human. Molly is not sure what to make of it, though none of them should be playing God (kind of too late for that when her husband created a little boy).
What pushes John over the edge is his late night bike ride with Ethan. His son couldn’t sleep, walking in on his Dad and the surprise bike he had stashed next to him. He convinces his Dad to take him out for a quick spin and John agrees to teach him how to ride. But there isn’t much to teach him because he aces it on the first try. John realizes it that to protect everyone involved that he has to go into Ethan’s coding and slow his brain down. When he tries to get in he gets a big “Access Denied.” At first he thinks it’s Julie’s doing, switching up the access code on him but when he learns is not her but rather Ethan has gotten around all his programmed safeguards. Add to that he’s programmed to be a kid who tends to be rebellious and questions everything his parents say, it’s going to get a whole lot scarier.
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Time to Make Sparks Sweat
With Derek Pierce dead, the stakes are high and Molly has to speed things up. She does so by getting into Alan’s house and playing his daughter’s last transmission on his TV screens. Then she emerges from the shadows and tells him everything she knows before demanding where her baby is. He lies of course, telling her he doesn’t know where it is but would find out. Molly knows he’s lying and says she’ll find it herself since she got this far on her own. Before walking out, she lays on a serious guilt trip advising that he pray on his knees every night for Katie’s forgiveness.
It totally works, sending Sparks to the building where the baby is being kept, with Molly following close behind. She realizes that Claypool is in that building and tells the security guard some silly story about having to evaluate the office for her boss after learning the company left over a month ago. He shows up to an empty floor and when she isn’t looking, locks the door behind her, calling in a security breach.
Sparks gets the call while in with the baby, asking to see Katie; his hallucination appears right on time. He gets his apologies out of the way and orders his team to eliminate the threat aka Molly Woods. The baby knows his mom is in danger, too. He makes the birds outside the window of the empty office she’s in fly into the grass so she’ll notice the armed guards rushing into the building. She looks for a way out, finally ducking into an office. A guy with a gun finds her in that office and we’re thinking she’s done for — until he takes it off and she sees it’s Gordon. He safely gets her out of the building and into a car with Kryger behind the wheel.
Unlikely Allies
With Gordon firmly on their side and the trio safe in Molly’s home, she gets the real deal about what happened on the island and the status of her baby boy. He tells her that Sparks isn’t the real one in charge but doesn’t know who is. In any event, Molly wants to see her baby, and is convinced that he’s trying to tell her something. Gordon agrees, though Kryger would rather see it dead before it can hurt anyone else. But because he doesn’t trust Gordon all the way, he agrees to go along with their plan to get to the baby. They get their chance to do so when Gordon learns that the baby will be relocated to a contingency location. His plan is to get the baby as soon as it leaves the lab.
As you may have guessed, things aren’t going to go according to plan. Inside the chamber where the baby is housed, a mysterious fog appears, and it puts a damper in the relocation plan. Sparks sends a scientist in to investigate and when he goes radio silent, everyone is nervous. Outside, Gordon tells Molly and Kryger that their plan is a no-go, but all isn’t lost. He can still get them inside by blowing up a transformer, crashing their security system, and getting them into the lab undetected. Everyone will be leaving out and no one would see them going in.
The bomb goes off, everyone scrambles, and Molly gets inside and marches straight to the elevator with Kryger by her side. Before Gordon can get take down the elevator’s security system, he gets called to the lab. He tells Sparks that Molly’s been handled and urges them all to evacuate. Alan doesn’t want to go anywhere. At the elevator, Molly doesn’t want to wait for Gordon to show up. Kryger still has Gordon’s prints and gets them to the elevator. When Alan and his crew see that the elevator is coming down when everyone should’ve left the building already, he realizes what’s going on. With his gun on Gordon and his goons aimed at the elevator door, the plan is turning into a big fail. Molly’s saving grace? The baby.
Using its mind bending tricks, it makes them all turn their guns on each other. Once the bullets stop flying, Mollly opens up the door to find all Sparks men dead and Alan and Gordon missing. Molly heads straight for the man-made womb to find a dead scientist inside, not a baby.
A Weird Cliffhanger
Sparks is running around dimly lit corridors chasing after Gordon. He runs into Molly instead, giving her a quick apology before shooting her dead. I know that she can’t die, but how the show switches things around was a little weird. When Alan kneels down to turn over the body, it’s Katie he sees with a bullet to the chest. He hugs her and cries before being distracted by a loud clanging in the pipes in front of him. He goes to investigate and Katie rises up behind him, telling him that “he” needs our help.
What the Baby and Yasumoto Have In Common
So what does this mining mission and Yasumoto have in common? Up until now, we’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure out what interest he had in this baby. Tonight that was definitely cleared up during a conversation with Alan. Sparks warns him that Molly is getting too close and needs to be eliminated, lest they’re all exposed. Yasumoto tells him that killing her would put the offspring at risk since she is his mother.
The billionaire is dying and the life-sustaining substance that’s been keeping him alive up until now is almost depleted (so that explains that weird chamber thing he’s been using!). The Aruna was sent to mine more of that stuff, encountering the entity along with it. This baby could be the next best thing to keeping him alive.
A Day of Reckoning
As if all of this isn’t enough, we have another monkey wrench in this conspiracy and it takes the form of Julie’s new boytoy, Odin. During their date you could tell something just wasn’t right with this guy, and this long episode didn’t take long to prove us right. He’s part of a movement to rid the world of machines. As a war vet, he knows the damage it can do if they start outsourcing wars to machines, all of humanity would lose their souls (kinda like the Terminator movies). He’s calling for a day of reckoning it will start with Ethan.
Extant will air a special two-hour event next Wednesday starting at 9 pm on CBS.
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(Image courtesy of CBS)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
