Extant is a summer TV series running – or more “meandering” – on CBS Wednesday nights. It’s cram-full of totally out there sci-fi concepts from the 1980’s, too much plot and not enough sense. Oh, and robot children. Seriously: robot children.
We won’t go on about the “mysterious” core plot, where key points are withheld from the audience for no reason other than stretching this mother for thirteenepisodes, or the dull-eyed, lethargic “acting” that makes you think they put horse tranquilizers in the craft service food. There are actually two things that really burn: the utter lack of faith in the core plot…and robot boys. Really? Robot boys?
One plot isn’t enough? This seems to be a constant problem with TV series and movies alike: the producers or creators or network or studios or somebody doesn’t really have any faith in the initial concept, no matter how rich or intriguing it might be, so they insist on adding a “B” story, and sometimes a “C” and “D” story, to keep things chugging along. In the case of Extant, it’s not enough to have the truly bizarre mystery of an astronaut on a 15-month solo mission in deep space coming home and finding herself pregnant. What is it? Alien contact? Insane androids? Military/corporate cloning conspiracy? No: as intriguing as that all might be, we need a second story: an obsessed husband, a brilliant cyberneticist, who has created an andoid son that he treats as his own – and who wants to populate the world with these creations before he’s at all sure they’re safe for human consumption. What, one story isn’t enough? You couldn’t come up with enough good plot? You didn’t care to? Nah, let’s just throw more junk-tech (holograms! Yeah, those are cool! They’re just like, you know, 3-D PowerPoint, right?) and lots of glow-y tech that looked old in 2001, and it’ll be good. Trust us. Which, in turn, leads to the second problem:
Robot children. Come on. We’re well aware this is set a few years in the future, and it is in exceedingly clean and tranquil future, from what we can see. But are we to assume that there is no poverty at all? No unwanted children, no starving or sick kids? That every single child who wants a parent or two already has ’em? And that surrogacy is outlawed, artificial insemination no longer possible, and cloning against the law? Because that would be the only reason to spend millions of dollars, and lobby (resentfully) for billions more, to create an army of robot children.
Take two minutes, and you’ll realize how dumb it is. Eternal children? Eternal dependents? How do you make them grow? Or mature? If they do learn more, you’ll soon have an army of immortal cyber-adults trapped in the bodies of nine-year-old cuties. God, it makes Kirsten Dunst in Interview with a Vampire seem like a good thing. If they can’t, you have a population of ageless children that continue to be six while you grow old, die, and leave them behind (wait, we saw that movie. A decade ago.) What could possibly be a good reason, socially or economically, to mass-produce android pre-adolescents, even if you were positive they were benevolent?
The whole show – doubling up on sci-fi lite plot lines, throwing bogus high-tech crap into the desultory mix, pushing half-baked concepts onto the screen with the humorless bombast reserved only for half-baked concepts –just shows what happens when you give a crapload of money for a science fiction series to people that clearly don’t ‘get’ science fiction, and on’t know or care what’s been done before. And then they wonder why the ratings are so awful.
We sat around the AmityvilleNow.com Int’l HQ Lunch Room table and came up with ten really good near-future space or cyber novels that would make great TV series, and probably cost no more than the beautiful crap that is Extant. It’s not hard. It’s just not happened. (20% loss in viewers between episodes 1 and 2.)
We sat around the AmityvilleNow.com Int’l HQ Lunch Room table and came up with ten really good near-future space and/or cyber novels that would make great TV series, and probably cost no more than the beautiful crap that is Extant. It’s not hard. It’s just not happening. At least not on CBS.
