“Change Scenario” is episode one of the second and final season of Extant.
Molly is running VR scenarios until a robot tells her that her session has been terminated. It’s time for her medication. She’s a patient in some sort of facility.
Six months earlier and the Offspring is at the home of the people who picked him up in the season one finale, “Ascension”. They are on the phone and the Offspring is in a room with a crying baby. He shuts the door with his powers, then entertains the baby with a vision. He stops and starts to judder. The couple hear a crash and, once they can get in through the door, find a trail of blood leading to the collapsed Offspring.
Four weeks later and Molly is testifying in front of a Senate committee about the destruction of the Seraphim. Sean Glass died shortly after their return, but Molly wasn’t affected by the spores. The senator asks if it’s confirmed the spores were alien lifeforms. They are. And, to the best of Molly’s knowledge, no alien lifeforms have set foot on Earth? She lies. The senator congratulates her on her actions.
Out of the hearing, Molly tells the general, Toby, that she isn’t happy she lied under oath. If the truth was told, though, there would be anarchy.
has been heading up global security for 6 months and, as well as learning things about aliens and terrorism, also learned that people spook easily. When they do, they do irrational things. Dangerous things. Molly asks the general if he’s sure that the Offspring is dead. He is. They have the body, if she wants to look. She doesn’t; she just had to ask one last time.
John and Julie are in the lab working on a new body for Ethan. Molly arrives, early, and catches Julie holding John’s hand. John tells Molly that Ethan is ready. They activate him.
Back home, Ethan is asked if he can describe where he was. He was like a bird, free to go anywhere. Now he’s not. Did he die? No; he uploaded himself to the cloud before the explosion. He can’t die exactly. Ethan says that’s because he’s not human. They reassure him that, though he might not be technically human, he is still human.
Molly gets up in the middle of the night and heads to John’s workshop. She wants Gina to run security footage from the week before she returned from space. Gina tells her the cams were offline. There’s a robot, though, with a motion activated camera. Molly wants to see all the footage of John. And Julie. She sees them start to kiss, and then goes to the end scene, asking Gina if she can estimate the words spoken. John enters and says to stop playback. He swears it’s been over for a while. The conversation is going downhill rapidly when government people arrive. The Humanichs is now the property of the U.S. government for reasons of national security. Ethan is driven away in a van.
Molly and John head to General Shepherd’s. He tells them that HomeSec has decided that Ethan is a threat to national security. He hacked into the ISEA mainframe, then blew up a building. Humanichs is being mothballed and all service bots with a rating above 4.0 are being seized and decommissioned. Molly wants to fight it in court. She’s told that national security letters can’t be challenged in court. The general says that in the eyes of the law Ethan is not human.
Ethan tries escaping, but runs into Julie. Things start to get worse – a lot worse, Molly winds up in a psych hold, after all – and the Offspring may not be as dead as believed.