It’s all come down to this on the season finale of Extant. Molly is going back up into space to intercept the Seraphim. She has two hours to get it back into orbit, keeping it from falling down to the Earth and spreading the alien spores attached to it. If she doesn’t, she’s armed with plenty of explosive power to disable the ship (and probably her) for good. Back on our planet, John has to keep a bomb from going off, aka his robotic son, Ethan. To say that the survival of the entire Wood’s family is at stake is an understatement.
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Aboard a Creepy Spore-Filled Seraphim
Molly makes it aboard, armed with a second skin suit to make sure the spores don’t touch her and a special helmet that helps her distinguish the real people from the spore people. She quickly finds Shaun locked inside the escape pod and when she rescues him, he tells her what happened to the real Katie. The alien spore child she was carrying ripped through her stomach and left her dead for a long time and now she’s roaming the ship making sure it crash lands into Earth. Molly can’t let that happen and she gets down to business — establishing communications with the ISEA so they can regain control of the ship.
As Molly goes through the ship looking for a spare part to restore the communication system, the spores are everywhere, like a really bad mold problem. She finally finds what she’s looking for as well as what she’s not — spore Katie. It tries to play the part but thanks to Molly’s helmet, she knows better and tells her so. It tells her that she can’t let Molly pass and complete her mission but she’s not hearing that. She rushes to her, throws her to the ground, runs out the room, and locks her in. Unfortunately, Molly lost a glove in the process and now she’s infected.
A Honey Bomb
Back at the lab, Julie shows John the video she found in Odin’s apartment. While Julie and Charlie are all about calling in the bomb squad, John doesn’t want to take the chance of them blowing up his child. He wants to go in, no matter the cost . At least he was smart about it, calling in Gordon to take a look at the bomb inside. Odin planted a honey bomb, the stickiest of explosives that can be set off by just the smallest movement. There’s no way of getting it out of Ethan without blowing him and everyone around him to pieces. Their only option is to get them to a safe place until they can figure out a way to back him up.
It took a lot of coaxing and convincing Ethan to even shut him down, his brain still washed by Odin’s lies. But John promised to be there when he woke him up and he did, sending everyone else away. He explained to him what was going on including a lesson on being disappointed by so-called friends.
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Mission Control, We Have a Problem
The folks at the ISEA thought they had a secure building but the security cams said otherwise. The offspring was in the building and making its way to them. The director quickly put the building on lock down, shutting down everything despite not hearing back from Molly. He couldn’t take the chance of being mind-tricked into making the situation on the Seraphim worse. Besides, she has a Plan B and C – neither of which is good news for her and Shawn.
John gets a call about the building lockdown and his day just went from bad to worse. He explains to Ethan what’s going on — how they can’t communicate with his Mom because the spore child is in the building. He tells him about its ability to manipulate people’s minds to do what it wants them to do. Ethan, being the robot child that he is points out that he doesn’t have a human brain to manipulate and he can get in to help his mom. It’s the best plan for everyone at this point — no sense in him waiting around for the bomb inside him to go off.
Time for Plan C
When Molly tries to phone home she gets a message that ISEA is on lockdown so she has to go straight to Plan C. It proves a little difficult because the infection is taking over and Shaun has gone AWOL (he most likely infected himself). She has to find him, sedate him, and get him to her ship while trying to keep her sanity. She worked through a false vision of being at home and seeing Marcus, who was really Shaun trying to attack her. She’s successful at sedating him and getting him back to her spaceship before leaving again to set the explosives.
With only 20 minutes to get their pod out of there, her computer buddy Benjamin decides to go off the grid too. Because they are both infected, he’s refusing to let her leave. Molly braces for the worst until she hears a familiar voice over her Com signal: Ethan.
Ethan Rides Into the Rescue
With the schematics of the ISEA uploaded and a scooter to help him get around, Ethan goes riding into the building. His mission is to get to the control room and establish communication with his Mom. The offspring, however, is determined not to let that happen. When it realizes that the mind games don’t work on Ethan, he resorts to using waves to break through the locked glass doors. Ethan isn’t scared at all and gets there just in time to help Molly get off the Seraphim before it explodes.
However it isn’t as easy as it sounds. In order to override the computers, there needs to be human authentication in the form of a hand. Ethan says he can use his warmers to simulate the warmth of a human hand. However, his systems aren’t built to handle that type of heat and with a bomb already inside him, things definitely won’t end well for him. With his Dad dialed in, his parents plead with him not to do it and the offspring is staring him down outside the door. Ethan tells him he believes this is his purpose and he understands that the alien boy is also Molly’s son, promising not to hurt him. As we watch his core heat up, Ethan tells the alien boy to run.
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The Ultimate Sacrifice
I’m so glad they didn’t show Ethan exploding on TV. It was hard enough to watch everyone in his life fall into devastation over the loss of him. Five days later, Molly is home and she, along with everyone else, is still in mourning. She, most of all, realized what a gift Ethan was and just how she enriched his life.
Then some heartwarming magic happens. Ethan appears but not in the physical form. Instead he appeared to his loved ones in a Johnny Depp Transcendence kind of way, his cute voice heard over every screen in the Wood’s house.
There’s Room for Season 2
It’s clear that the offspring not only survived the explosion, but is roaming the streets. At the very end, he’s picked up by a very unsuspecting couple and from the look in his creepy eyes, this spore invasion is far from over.
(Image courtesy of CBS)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
