Extant
, on CBSApparently the word "extant" has two acceptable pronunciations, but I'm pretty sure I never heard the one CBS uses for this show until I started seeing promos for the show, so it kinda bugs me. But that's not important.
The show is set at an unspecified time (about 20 or 30 years in the future). Halle Berry plays an astronaut named Molly Woods, who is married to a scientist named John Woods (Goran Visnjic). At the start of the series, Molly has recently returned to Earth after spending 13 months on a solo mission on a space station called Seraphim. Her doctor, Samantha Barton (Camryn Manheim), informs her that she's pregnant, which is kind of impossible, both because she hasn't had sex in 13 months and because she was infertile. We do see some flashbacks to an incident on Seraphim, which she's keeping secret. But at first it's unclear exactly what the incident was... it seems like it was probably a hallucination Molly had, but then again, hallucinations don't usually impregnate you. Meanwhile, Molly and John already have a young son named Ethan... who is actually a robot that John built. Specifically, an android called a "humanich" (the latter 'h' is silent). But I guess Molly isn't quite as absolute as her husband in thinking of Ethan as their son. And since she's returned, she thinks Ethan has started acting differently.
In the first episode, John applies to the Yasumoto Corporation for funding for his project, to build more humanichs. The idea is for these robots to learn through experience, the same way humans do. But the board of directors turns him down, apparently because he's vehemently opposed to having a failsafe to "kill" the humanichs, in case they turn violent (as so often happens, in sci-fi). He thinks of them as people, and it's also important to note that he doesn't believe people have souls. (In fact, he thinks anyone who believes in souls is an idiot, including at least one member of the board.) However, the director of the International Space Exploration Agency, Alan Sparks, believes Molly is hiding something about her time on Seraphim, and he has ties to Hideki Yasumoto, whom he convinces to help John, in order to get closer to Molly. So Yasumoto agrees to provide private funding to the Humanichs Project, rather than funding it through his corporation.
And... there's obviously lots of mysterious stuff going on, conspiracies or whatever. But the farther the series progressed, the less I cared about any of it. In fact, a lot of stuff that happened in the show just seemed incredibly stupid and annoying. So I don't really want to even bother trying to explain any of it. And there were lots of other characters I'm not mentioning at all, though I will say there were a couple of other scientists who worked with John, a man and a woman. The guy was of no importance to the plot at all, but the woman, Julie Gelineau (Grace Gummer), was probably my favorite character on the show. And it bugged me that most of the time, John acted like a major jerk toward her. Anyway... I liked the season finale reasonably well. It was fairly obvious how the major plotlines would be tied together, but even if it was predictable, it was still a decent resolution. It's just a shame that most of what happened in the episodes between the premiere and the finale was so lame. Especially considering how much potential the show had to be really good and interesting, on so many levels.
Also, this is one of those shows that are initially announced as a limited series, but then there's always the possibility that if it does well in the ratings, it will be renewed. And that happened with this show. So while the major story arc is resolved, there's also a major cliffhanger. But after the first season finale, I decided not to bother with the second season. Then when season two started, I watched the first episode... and considered continuing to watch the new season, but then I went back to my original intention of not watching it.