Greg Walker comes to CBS’s summer sci-fi show “Extant” with a strong pedigree. As a writer, he worked on “Harsh Realm” and “The X Files,” graduating to co-producer on “Smallville.” After producing some crime, legal and medical shows, Walker heads up “Extant,” from the pilot by first time TV writer Mickey Fisher.
Steven Spielberg also executive produces “Extant,” the story of an astronaut, Molly (Halle Berry), who returns from space pregnant, and her husband John (Goran Visnjic) who builds robot children. Earlier this summer, Walker spoke with reporters about the new show and we got to ask him some questions.
CraveOnline: Just to clarify, is her name Molly Woods or Molly Watts?
Greg Walker: It was originally Watts and now it’s Woods.
How do you balance delivering information every week and maintaining the ongoing mystery?
Yeah, I learned working on “X-Files” from masters of that, from Chris [Carter] and Frank [Spotnitz] and John [Shiban] and Vince [Gilligan] how to, with mythology storytelling, always leaving the viewer wanting more. But, still we have a mandate that each episode you have to learn something new about a character or about the story you didn’t know before. What’s interesting is we have a really interesting now multi-layered mystery, I hope. People are intrigued by it, that has developed over the course of time so that we can give little pieces about characters or larger pieces about the plot and not feel like we’ve exhausted it all.
How many seasons do you have loosely mapped out?
We’re already looking into season two and some bigger ideas, but that’s a long way from reality. We’ve got to make season one work.
Sure, but some people go in with a five year plan.
We never did. Mickey wrote a pilot script and we started working. We started hanging out in coffee shops and talking about what we could do with the story and where it could go. There are some colliding trains that he’s built into his storytelling naturally. There’s the alien baby and then there’s the Humanics child. Those feel like, from a storytelling perspective, trains that need to collide someplace, sometimes soon.
Does the series get into what people want out of parenthood? With so many options, a robotic child would be at odds with the “normal” parenting experience?
Yeah, I think that’s a terrific question. A lot of it is there’s a certain kind of blindness that an inventor has about his own creation and where his personal needs are being met or not being met by that creation. So a lot of the story right now is there’s a hubris that an inventor who creates something in his own likeness, and that godlike story plays out for John in many different ways.
Mostly, with an A.I., it’s unpredictable. Even though John wants to limit the A.I.’s input as human only input, he’s not patched with certain accelerated languages, he’s not able to learn a Tchaikovsky concerto on violin in one second. You can teach the computer that. He doesn’t want Ethan to learn that way. He wants Ethan to learn through human experience that ultimately, if we want robots, technology to exist in our world without squashing us or tearing us apart, they need to function the way we do. So it’s his idea of maybe, potentially creating a soul for a robot and a soul for technology.
Would Halle Berry be back for a second and further seasons?
Heck yeah. Yes, for sure. She’s phenomenal. She’s embodied this role immediately with ease, with a lot of I think intelligence and warmth. Everything you see on stage is what you get on screen. She’s the center of the series and she’d continue to be the center of the series as we went on.
How much was Steven Spielberg’s involvement?
Well, certainly the sense of awe and wonderment in the storytelling. He has expertise in crafting very relatable human, emotional stories but that have such extraordinary and sensational elements to them. So it’s science fiction, for sure. He is the guy that when you’re sitting across from him on the other side of the table, you realize he’s the most successful writer in the history of the business at telling these type of stories, if not any kind of story. So it’s like playing tennis with the very best tennis player in the world.
How were you able to bring the script to Halle?
I have to credit Halle Berry’s representatives because they came after us very quickly when the script was just out in the ether, when it was passed around. Mickey’s script got such buzz. I don’t know if you followed that story last summer but Mickey’s script was his first project, a guy nobody’d heard of. He wrote this script that everybody read including myself and got super excited about it.
When we did, Halle’s people started calling us immediately. As soon as I got attached, I was coaching a Little League game when my phone rang when I was coaching first base. It was her agent saying, “We want Halle in this.” Luckily we got the person we wanted most who wanted it as well.
When Molly comes back to earth, will we flash back to her time in space throughout the series, or was that only in the pilot?
Yes. We flash back a few times to space and other people’s experience in space, because it’s not the only spaceship up there. The Seraphim has also had other occupants, so there’ll be many opportunities to go back to the Seraphim.
What is John’s motivation to create Ethan?
Well, he’s been working on it. He’s an exceptionally gifted A.I. engineer who’s worked in A.I. for a while. So he’s worked in other applications of A.I. I think the central thesis he has is that technology, to its own end, and we’re talking about where we’re all going in the future with robotics and A.I. driven robotics, could divide us as people. Essentially, because they can’t replicate the human experience, that we are connecting with your iPhone right now or your iPad, with something that doesn’t give back.
Ultimately, the more that we walk down the street now and we see all these people individually connected to their devices, the more we see that we’re not connecting with each other. That is a concern to John, so John wants to create a Humanic. That’s what he calls his android son, that could connect back, that could actually give back. Given that we’re not going to get away from technology, it’s not gonna go away from our lives tomorrow. We’re not going to become this luddite clan where we’re roasting pigs over open flame now. We’re going to still have technology in our lives. That’s inevitable. How do we give that technology, how do we imbue it with the best of us?
Is John afraid that if it fails, he could destroy civilization?
I think John, like many great visionaries, worries less about the negative than the positive. There are people though around him who firmly believe that to be the case. That’s the threat that Ethan potentially represents to them.
Does Molly ever contemplate abortion? Many women confronted with something inside them when they return from space having not encountered anyone else would want it out.
What’s interesting, if you look at the first eight or nine episodes of our show, the total timespan is less than two weeks. That’s a little indication of how quickly the story moves and how quickly the decisions are made. So no, she doesn’t because she wants to figure out what it is first. Before she can consider that, actions are taken that make that question no longer pertinent.
What are your influences whether film, TV or books?
Well, there are a ton. On a headier side, the Tarkovsky movies. Close Encounters is a movie, when we went in and pitched the story, we centered this on Close Encounters because in a similar way, Richard Dreyfus plays an ordinary man who sees something extraordinary. How does he react to that? A full chapter of the three chapters of our storytelling is basically what we call the Close Encounters chapter.
That’s the kind of ending of our three chapters for our season. It’s a movie that connects to me emotionally about a family story, about a man trying to preserve his family but still driven to try to see what’s out there. And, a story about what’s out there and what does it mean and is it benevolent? What does it want from us? So we use that certainly, and “X Files,” because there’s a scary element to our show. So how it’s filmed and how those stories are told and how you mete out that information and doses, those are all huge influences. Everybody in the writer’s room comes up with something different.
Is this very definitively a serialized show, or is there any standalone episode component?
No, and CBS has been great about giving us the opportunity to really tell this in a serialized way and really drive these stories. I’ve never worked that way before and it’s a hoot in that you get to really explore what is the weave of these characters and these stories and how far can you go with them? The hardest component is actually containing it in 12 in a way that feels compressed, dramatic in a way that you feel fulfilling.
What’s the bigger threat, a potential alien baby or a potential robot child?
Well, you nailed it. Those are the two parallel tracks, right? At what point are they going to cross? On one side, people are concerned. Not the people of the space administration about the Ethan character, but the people in the world who are either, we have the character Yasumoto who is funding this Humanics project, whose funding John courts in the opening episode. He’s somebody who’s interested in seeing how far this can go. Can we be immortal through technology? If Fred’s memory and his soul were put into a hard drive, could we just have ultimately many Freds down the line?
There are.
Yes, that’s awesome.
