Quick Take: Extinct

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 27, 2017

My family has thoroughly enjoyed Extinct, a streaming TV show available from BYUTV.org (the makers of Studio C, Granite Flats, etc.) or at Extinct.tv. It’s a post-apocalyptic science fiction show with a really unusual premise. The human race has been wiped out by an alien invasion. But a portion of the population, at the last months, had copies of their DNA and brain-states made by unknown outsiders. And now, hundreds of years later, after the invaders have gone, the human race is being restored… re-created from this copied data.

Sort of like restoring from a save point.

But… and there’s always a “but”…  it’s more complicated than that. Hopefully I’m not spoiling anything because it’s all stuff revealed in the first few minutes of episode 1… but they aren’t the first. In fact, our original three heroes are fairly late the party, and there are other re-constructed humans out there who have been infected by “skin-riders” – parasites with a hive-mind that enslave their human hosts.

That’s just the basics from the first few minutes. The world is fantastically more complex and interesting. Our initial heroes are people out of time, people from the 21st century thrust into an alien world that was once their own, with relationships with others that aren’t exactly where they left off. In fact, questions of identity are a core element of the first season (so far). Is a human just the sum of their physical body plus their memories? What about what happened to the person after the last “brain state” was captured? What about the relationship of two people who have had “brain states” taken from different points in their past relationship? What about a human who is controlled by a parasitic entity?

Even the alien entities aren’t entirely who they seem. The ones intent on restoring the human race are not infallible, and the hive-mind is not as unified as they claim. There are quite a few twists and bends throughout the season, and I hope they can sustain that through many seasons to come. This is quality science fiction.

The show features several veterans of the Utah film and TV industry, starring Jake Stormoen (from Arrowstorm’s Mythica series) and Jaclyn Hales (of Unicorn City). Melanie Stone (also of Mythica) makes an appearance in one of the available episodes. Dan Wells is one of the writers for the series.

It’s free to watch. You don’t have to subscribe at all to view the episodes, but they do tack on an ad at the beginning of the show. There are currently 8 episodes (each just under an hour long) of the first season available to watch. The final episodes will drop in a couple of weeks.

 

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