“Re-Entry” is episode one of season one of Extant.
It opens with what looks like a shuttle flying, but that turns out to be a toy being flown by a child. In the bathroom, a woman doesn’t look that great. The boy calls her mom and asks if she’s too sick to come to the party. She says she’s fine; it’s just her body readjusting.
The party looks to be welcoming the woman, Molly, back. A friend wants Molly to have a drink, as she hasn’t had one in 13 months. Another friend, Sam, who is also Molly’s doctor, says not until the tests come back. Then she’ll personally prescribe it. The boy, Ethan, is heard shouting and Molly and John (Timeless‘s Goran Visnjic), her husband, go and find out why. John gets Ethan to apologise for something.
Later, Molly is clearing up and John says she should leet him do it; she must be exhausted. She disposes of the garbage first – with a technological touch, one of several, to show the advancements – and briefly sees a figure at the end of the drive. She glances away, then back, and the figure is gone.
Ethan is in bed and John is talking to him about what happened earlier. Ethan thinks it’s different with his mother. His father says she’s just been away a long time. Ethan thinks he needs a flip. John checks. Ethan is at least some type of robot.
Later, Molly checks on Ethan, then gets down a photo album and looks at her with another man. John comes in and asks what brought this on. She had a dream. Does she dream about Marcus much? Less as she gets older. John thinks about him sometimes. If he was still alive, would they be together? Molly thinks you end up where you are supposed to.
Ethan and John head to a company where John is going to do a presentation on Ethan at the Yasumoto Corporation. Molly is seeing Sam at the International Space Exploration Agency. Sam checks that Molly was alone on the Seraphim station for 13 months, and that there were no emergencies or other people visiting during that time. There weren’t. Why? Molly is pregnant.
Molly recalls approaching the station then working on it when the AI, Ben, tells her there’s an incoming transmission from John and Ethan. The transmission breaks up, due to interference from solar flares. Then most of the power goes down, including the AI. Molly heads out of the area with spin gravity to fix the problem. An, whilst she’s doing that, sees Marcus on the other side of an airlock. He writes ‘HELP ME’ in the condensation.
In the present, Sam is quizzing Molly. Molly says she is sure there was no-one else, and anyway, she can’t get pregnant. She tried for years. No, she isn’t taking the fertility drugs; she stopped before Ethan. Sam is just asking everything that would have to be in the report. Molly wants her to hold off. Not lie; just get her some time. She doesn’t want to be in quarantine so soon after getting back. She needs time to figure it out.
John is giving a presentation about AIs, and how the Uncanny Valley isn’t visual; it’s a lack of genuine connection. So, they decided to bridge the gap. Create an AI designed to seek connection. And introduces Ethan.
Molly is looking at the memorial photo of a dead astronaut, Harmon Kryger, when a man speaks to her. He introduces himself; Gordon Kern, the new deputy director. He’s being going through her logs; they’re very thorough. Just one thing. Molly assumes it’s the gap. It is. She says that’s easily explained, but Kern wants to wait until they’re with Director Sparks.
John is being asked about something. He assumes that they’re wondering what there is to stop the robot uprising; overthrowing and slaying their human overlords. Absolutely nothing. But they’re creating AIs that learn like children, not a master-slave relationship. A woman, Femi Dodd (Annie Wersching), asks what precautions are in place to, well, kill Ethan. John asks if she has a child – she has a daughter – and if she has a plan to kill her own child. She thinks that’s totally different. John does not.
Something happened on the Seraphim. Something odd. But there are odd things happening on Earth as well. Something is definitely going on.