Extrapolations, the too-ambitious-in-all-the-wrong-ways Apple TV+ science fiction show “about” global climate change, revisits an old friend this week for a look at the courier job from hell.
The show’s focus this time around is not on the environment but rather on the personal toll of living in a future you can’t control or understand. The episode, entitled “2066: Lola,” is a laborious and overfamiliar story that is, for no good reason, longer than almost every other episode of Extrapolations.
Extrapolations recap: ‘2066: Lola’
Season 1, episode 6: Remember Omar (played by Tahar Rahim) and Rebecca Haddad (Sienna Miller) from episode one of Extrapolations? In case you don’t, Omar died and Rebecca raised their son Ezra (Joaopaulo Malheiro) on her own. Well, now Ezra (who is now also played by Tahar Rahim) is all grown up and continuing his mom’s work in a grim fashion.
Rather than cataloging animals going extinct, now he does the same thing for people. His job is simple and devastating: He watches hours of footage of people’s dead or missing relatives, then comes over once or twice a week and pretends to be them.
He puts on absolutely absurd disguises, speaks different languages, and taps into important memories. The trouble is, Ezra was born with a defect in his brain: It doesn’t get oxygen as easily as other people’s. As he ages, he’s losing his memory more rapidly. Dementia looks inevitable.
The thing that bugs him most about this is that he’s losing the memory of his wife, Lola (Devika Bhise). He’s paying for a service that catalogs his memory — and he’s out of space. Buying more storage would cost more, and for some reason, he won’t pay the price.
Let’s pretend not to forget
One day, Ezra breaks protocol (his own protocol, which says he shouldn’t get too close to anyone). He spends time with one of his clients, Natasha (Gemma Chan). She’s a single mother raising a cute daughter, Harlyn (Scarlett Sher), by herself since her husband, David (Andrew Richardson), abandoned them. Ezra asks her about Natasha’s life and marriage. And he impresses her by doing a quick impression of David apologizing for his behavior. It’s not enough for either of them, though.
Knowing he’s losing his memories, Ezra then hires his own surrogate (Isabelle McCalla) to pretend to be Lola. They get a drink and have sex, but the differences between the surrogate and Lola are insurmountable. For some reason, this seems to bother Ezra much more than the surrogate, as Ezra can’t put up with the falseness. After he pays her (in “credits”…. god I hate science fiction sometimes) and she leaves, he gets drunk and deletes most of his memories from his bank.
The next day, the rising sea level (remember that?) hits an offshore server farm and Ezra can’t access any of his memories for work. The internet is down everywhere, including in his brain. He asks his neighbor, X (David Hywel Baynes), who’s some kind of black-market internet dealer guy (?), to help him. But Ezra knows he’s going to end up losing it all anyway.
Later, at Natasha’s house, he tries to tell the story of his mother and the whale (the one that spoke with his grandmother’s voice). He confesses about the decaying memory and breaks down. They have sex and it goes better than Ezra’s last carnal appointment. However, when they’re done, Ezra gets startling news: X has found his memories in a troll farm. Now that he’s got his memory of his wife back, is he going to still want to have a relationship with Natasha?
Let’s get inside the screenwriter’s head
This whole episode of Extrapolations is the most “screenwriter is directing” thing I’ve ever seen. Show creator Scott Z. Burns is back in the director’s chair, needless to say.
The episode opens with one of my pet peeves in science fiction: people’s memories looking like movies, complete with reverse angles. That may be how some people remember things (I’ve certainly inserted images of myself into some memories I have, but I also know they’re not real). But why would a computer program in your brain do that? But that’s a minor thing.
The major thing is that the story concept “what if a guy moonlighted as a widow’s dead husband?” is jusy so obviously a writer’s idea. And the fact that our hero talks to himself all the way through the story to let us know how miserable he is stands as proof that there’s no way the writer who came up with it figured out how to sell that idea visually.
This is an extremely well-worn trope, explored best in both movie versions of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris, and less well in something like After Yang or Reminiscence. The bits where Ezra is losing his memories of his wife is yanked right out of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (itself a riff on the works of Alain Resnais). Only Gondry and Kaufman did it better and with more visual creativity.
So many ideas, but none of them really work
Burns’ idea for this episode of Extrapolations boils down to the ultimate dead end for the gig economy: Hop into someone’s body like they’re a Lyft. This isn’t enough, though. Nothing is ever enough on this show. He also needs the memory bank technology, and the black-market neighbor, and the dead wife.
As ambitious as Burns is here, he also cuts corners in a way I don’t like. How does the memory bank technology work? I know that’s not a requirement in sci-fi (James Cameron bluntly and brilliantly wrote around time travel in The Terminator, for instance). But coming up with all this flashy future technology to tell a story whose outcome we can guess in the first five minutes of this hour-long episode? Why?
And other than the server farm trouble, what does Ezra’s story have to do with global warming, exactly? Yes, it’s going to make everything difficult, like life support in the ICU, for instance … stuff you don’t need to go to the future to imagine. And then the one potentially interesting idea, X selling Ezra’s memories as B-roll for a commercial, is brought up in the last three seconds and immediately dropped. That’s an awful lotta paint and brushes for a straight line.
★★☆☆☆
Watch Extrapolations on Apple TV+
New episodes of Extrapolations arrive each Friday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
