Extant - Change Scenario - Advance Preview

“Extant” couldn’t have chosen a more fitting title for its second season premiere than “Change Scenario,” as the summer sci-fi series tackles a creative shift.

Set six months after the first season finale, the episode starts with Molly Woods (series star Halle Berry) – astronaut, wife, and mother to both an alien and a robot – unhappily undergoing treatment at a futuristic mental hospital. Flashbacks are then used to resolve the cliffhanger involving Molly’s extraterrestrial child and reveal how things unraveled for her and her family. Molly struggles with who to trust and how much to tell when she’s questioned about the Seraphim and the alien spores. Her husband John (Goran Visnjic) and his assistant Julie (Grace Gummer) find the benevolent ideals of the Humanichs Project usurped by governmental interference. On the home front, a secret John has been keeping threatens to derail his and Molly’s marriage. And the custody of their android son Ethan (Pierce Gagnon) is called into question.

Back in the present, Molly crosses paths with JD Richter (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Supernatural” fame), a rough-and-tumble bounty hunter. JD has been contracted to solve a mysterious murder, to which Molly also feels a connection. It quickly becomes clear that they’re the only one who can help the other and a reluctant partnership is born.

For good or ill, “Extant” spent its first season trying to straddle several genres. This soft reboot simplifies things, seemingly setting up a focus on Molly as the sort of Mulder to JD’s Scully as they dive into investigating conspiracies and otherworldly goings on. Some of the plot pivots to get to that point are more blatant than others (the changes to Julie’s character felt particularly abrupt), but I think the show will benefit from being more streamlined. It already has for our heroine Molly, who Berry now gets to play as appealingly proactive rather than reactive to the insanity going on around her.

The season premiere of “Extant” airs two weeks from today – Wednesday July 1st – on CBS. So will you stick with “Extant” this summer? Let me know in the comments section.