Guess who’s coming to dinner this week on Extrapolations, the sci-fi omnibus from Apple TV+? Veteran TV director Nicole Holofcener goes for the gusto as the worst dinner party in America goes off the rails.
An all-star cast, and a lot of pent-up energy, help this week’s episode — entitled “2068: The Going-Away Party” — stand apart from previous episodes.
Extrapolations recap: ‘2068: The Going-Away Party’
Season 1, episode 7: Anna (played by Hari Nef) is on her last legs. She’s out of money. Her family has been killed by a heatwave. She can’t afford to replace the bike that was just broken by vandals. And she’s doing menial labor in a heavily polluted major city where you can’t leave the house without an oxygen tank. Tonight, she’s serving at a private dinner party hosted by the Bolos, Sylvie (Marion Cotillard) and August (Forest Whitaker). They’ve fallen on hard times, too, but they’re doing better than Anna. (August is something of an idiot. He keeps investing in bad ideas and throwing the Bolos’ money away to do it.)
The guests tonight are Nic (Tobey Maguire) and Elodie (Eiza González), and they get off on the wrong foot immediately. Elodie tries to hug Sylvie, but she refuses — germs and all that. (“Elodie’s trying to bring back hugging,” Nic says.)
Nic used to work with August for the U.S. government, but he’s become a kind of grotesque since that time. Now he wants August to get into the private sector. Nic says he heard about a trillionaire who plans to put his consciousness in the cloud until global climate change is done. They joke about it, but then August drops a bomb: He also signed up for this service. It’s called LifePause, and it already worked on a dog. Unfortunately, August only got one ticket. He’s not bringing Sylvie.
Sylvie is blindsided by this, but the 10 minutes we’ve spent with them are indication enough that the marriage wasn’t working in these bodies. What are the odds they’ll work in the future?
Think that was awkward? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The dinner party, needless to say, gets a whole lot more awkward after this. Sylvie goes to the bathroom to regroup, and Nic follows her. Then they masturbate together rather than having sex to spite August. Elodie asks August if she can take his spot in the LifePause program, but she blows the psychological evaluation when a holographic bear shows up to test her resolve in the face of danger. When August finds out about Nic and Sylvie, he’s crestfallen all over again. decides to go ahead with LifePause, despite Elodie’s protests.
August is crestfallen when he discovers Sylvie and Nic had their version of sex. And he’s in even worse shape after Nic takes the opportunity to say he’s actually always been in love with Sylvie. The two get into a physical altercation, and Sylvie asks them to leave.
August finally comes clean and says he doesn’t want to go. He was doing LifePause out of desperation because he wanted proof that Sylvie still loved him. The question now is, what happens next? Who’s going to get paused?
In the year 4545
Photo: Apple TV+
This week we get treated to more of Extrapolations creator Scott Z. Burns and company’s legendary sense of humor. This one was written by Bess Wohl, and most of the jokes land like a B-52 on a suburban street. The pastiche of the nouveau riche is about par for the course for Extrapolations — obvious and supercharged — but director Nicole Holofcener understands what’s being asked of her.
To wit: Cyber-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Sylvie is Martha, August is George, Nic is, creatively enough, Nick, and Elodie is Honey. There’s even talk of kids that may or may not exist. I don’t have a problem with the idea of redoing Edward Albee for prime time, but I do have to ask what it has to do with Extrapolations, thematically or grammatically. Which, of course, gets to the bigger question: What is Extrapolations?
If the idea is to do something distinct with each episode, you need bigger personalities than Burns himself. Hiring Gregory Jacobs to direct the third episode was a better idea, but not even the right one. Jacobs’ episode displayed his by now trademark use of space and odd symmetry, and even gave him a dance number to film, because clearly someone at this show had seen Jacobs’ best movie, Magic Mike XXL, and knew he could handle it.
This is as good as Extrapolations gets
Holofcener, master of domestic dramedy, was brought in for the “funny” episode of Extrapolations with the emotional climax. But these aren’t exactly genres — they’re vague ideas. The smarter idea would have been to just hand these directors an idea and give them carte blanche. But then it wouldn’t really be Burns’ project anymore, and he’s the guy with the “producer: An Inconvenient Truth” credit, so that wouldn’t have worked exactly.
However, it would have allowed each episode of Extrapolations to breathe a little more. This one is by far the best of them, because the writing gets to be unimportant. It centers on the usual marital strife, and ends on a sweet note (two of them, actually), and Holofcener films around a cramped apartment.
It’s a good mix. I wish there was more Extrapolations like it.
★★★☆☆
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.
