Unfortunately, EXTANT, a very very promising TV show about two distinc subjects AI and Aliens fails to trully exploit the potential of its unique double headed story line.
That's too bad because there is GENUIS with a captial G in this TV show, Hale Berry is amazing and the AI storyline is fantastic, Goran Visjnic is just as great as always, with a cast this solid, a tag line like the one I posted above and a kid like Pierce Gagnon (who's frankly the best actor in this whole TV show) this should have been a 5 seasons slam dunk.
But Murphy's law dictates that : It could go wrong and it did, Extant uses the Alien storyline as the main story line after about 4 episodes, relegating Ethan, the AI child to second place and support role, the need to give Hale Berry a larger role than any other lowly TV actor makes the show unbalanced and the too strong focus on what is frankly the lesser of the two story lines makes it uninteresting. Give me AI over Space baby any day, didn't you learn anything from Mass Effect's space boy controversial people ? This is the same crowd you know....
So there you have it, while Ethan continues to grow and delight us with his progress he's being misused as some interesting plot device, some background noise of the techno future in which this Space baby story takes place, that's sad, failure by the author to recognize the gold he created in the background while totally failing at creating a compeling and interesting story.
Generally speaking people want stories that have bearing on how they feel, if you can't identify with the people in the show at all, it will fail, AI's are coming, we all wonder what it will be like (and if you dont' you suck). Space babies ? Not so much.
