TV REVIEW: Extant Pulls it Together in its Penultimate Episode “Before the Blood”

By Chelsea Hensley

Extant has had a difficult first season, and there’s still no guarantee that it’ll get a shot at a second.

Even the penultimate episode “Before the Blood” isn’t perfect. The beginning is slow, just waiting to ratchet up to its more compelling back half as the season’s plotlines finally begin to converge. There’s Odin’s terrorism plot, Sean Glass aboard the Seraphim with Katie, and finally Molly’s fight to reunite with her son.  As much as is happening in this episode, not all of it good, it’s a much more focused hour than we’ve gotten recently. The opening moments are haphazard, between Odin’s continuing manipulation of Ethan to Molly’s fruitless interrogation of Sparks (and Anya’s suddenly dead so there’s that), to Katie and Sean catching up in space. But somewhere along the way “Before the Blood” figures itself, and even the show, out.

First there’s Molly realizing what happened at the cabin: she redirected the Seraphim so it would cross paths with another ship, the one carrying Katie. Molly discovers what she did at the cabin: redirecting the Seraphim to cross paths with another ship, the same ship carrying Katie. Dropping Katie’s name and offering proof of her survival is the only thing that makes Sparks talk. The Seraphim is dropping out of its orbit and will disintegrate when it enters Earth’s atmosphere, a revelation that doesn’t feel as urgent as it should, not with Molly’s muted reaction to this fairly tragic piece of information.

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It’s suggested that Molly return to space to get the Seraphim back on track, a suggestion she refuses despite John wanting her to go. After episodes stressing Molly’s lingering hopes for a family with Marcus and their baby, it’s about time her current husband has an opinion on it. Until now John’s been resisting Molly’s urgent search for her son, with his protests remaining focused on the offspring’s hazy motivations.

It’s one of the show’s better moments, when Ethan enters the bedroom and we realize John’s not talking to Molly at all but to an offspring-induced hallucination, playing on his desires for the Molly he married to return to him. It’s disappointing that it’s taken this long for us to get to the real meat of John and Molly’s relationship. There’s been hardly any conflict to it, even with the two of them occasionally coming down on the opposite side of things, but here’s a huge obstacle in their relationship centered on Molly’s lingering preference for a different family with a different man.

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These two families collide when Molly finally meets her son face-to-face, when he shows up at her house, distracting John with a hallucination but being scared off by Ethan. Exant‘s been moving so slowly in this regard, particularly with Ethan’s involvement in Molly’s baby drama, that it was surprising to see Ethan taking on such an active role, first horrified at John professing his love to empty air then at Molly gazing longingly at a glowy-eyed stranger.

Molly meeting her son finally is a huge moment for the show which has kept the offspring shrouded in mystery even when Molly was pregnant. Once he was out in the world, he became even more elusive, but now he’s right in front of us, and he doesn’t disappoint. He isn’t all predator, though he’s doing the bidding of more powerful, bloodless others to ensure their survival. But he isn’t all Molly’s son either though he wants to whisk her away and protect her before the arrival. Molly being faced with two hallucinations, one of her father and another of Marcus, is a powerful moment as she shoves them both aside. After longing to call her hallucinations of Marcus and their baby real, Molly denies the false realities her son can create for her, choosing instead to have this reality and to know her son as he is.

It’s hard to predict if Extant will return, but the offspring’s appearance makes me wonder about the possibility of him being an actual character. The unorthodox family dynamics in the Woods household have been at the center of the show from the start so would the inclusion of another half-alien, half-human child really be all that different for them? And I’d be interested in seeing how said child fits in with Ethan and John, but I’m getting ahead of myself because aliens are on the way.

With more aliens imminent, the offspring can’t help Molly defeat them, telling her that she’s the only one who can. Harmon made a similar plea to Molly episodes ago, though he told her that she should be targeting her son. The offspring on the other hand puts him and Molly on the same side (somewhat), giving her the responsibility of saving herself and her world, and Molly’s ready to accept and return to space. Besides the obvious desire not to have the planet overrun with hallucination-happy fungus aliens, Molly’s also looking for a way to make both her and her son’s situation permanent as they can’t be a family when he’s doing the bidding of bloodless superiors.

Image © CBS

“Before the Blood” marks the most time we’ve spent with Sean Glass since his introduction. Enver Gjokaj does his best with the material, as charming as the storyline allows even if his and Katie’s flirtation pre-“death” doesn’t come off very well. It serves its function at least, showing Sean to have someone (like so many others) that he wishes he could see again. This someone is Katie, and despite the difficulty of connecting to their relationship, all we really need to know is that Sean’s judgment is compromised by her return. He’s caught up in Katie enough to sleep with her even as the “fungus problem” extends along the Seraphim’s exterior until he discovers Katie’s dead body in the Aruna and is trapped there by the other Katie, telling him “it’s okay.”

At the same time, Ethan’s wading into dangerous territory himself. Gifted with a “phone” from Odin (which is actually a trigger for the bomb), he’s under the impression that his parents are going to shut him down because he’s not like other children. It’s interesting that Odin’s trying to destroy Ethan because he’s technology, but he preys on Ethan using very human means, touching on a sensitive subject regarding Ethan’s place in his family and in the world. That Odin’s entire plan (tricking Ethan into making a video promising to take violent action against his creators and following up with his propaganda about the dangers of robots) gets laid out for us isn’t all that great, though Grace Gummer’s terror-filled race to the Woods’ home, only to find John disturbingly unresponsive following his hallucination, is almost thrilling.

“Before the Blood” is exactly what its title promises, the promise of a more explosive finale next week. It does set things up very neatly, perfectly laying the groundwork for a resolution next week, but after so many stumbles, Extant being this close to putting a neat bow on its season is something to look forward to.

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