Extrapolations – Episode 2, 2046

Writer and director Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion”, “The Bourne Ultimatum”) takes the reins once again as we join the messed up future-though-close-to-now of Extrapolations.

We pick up from the events of 2037 with Rebecca Shearer, Sienna Miller (“High-Rise”, “Foxcatcher”), who has now gone to work for Menagerie2100, a company that is attempting to gather all the information they can about species before they go extinct, in order to be able to bring them back one-day.

Shearer now lives in Colombia with her son Samir (“1 Out Of 30 (Short)”, “No Longer Suitable For Use (Short)”). Samir has a heart condition known as ‘Summer Heart’, which sees him wearing a colour changing pin which he must keep blue. Heat and stress make it lean towards the red.

For her day job, Shearer takes her personal helicopter to the middle of the ocean where she sits in a futuristic control room talking to, what is very possibly, the last humpback whale on the planet. The software translates the conversations both ways.

Shearer has given the whale the voice of her mother, Meryl Streep (“Don’t Look Up”, “The Laundromat”), who we see on recordings that her son plays a lot.

In the background to this is the richest man on the planet Nick Bilton, Kit Harington (“Eternals”, “Brimstone”), who has taken an interest in Menagerie2100 and decides to buy them out, given his previous dealings, you suspect something untoward.

I hadn’t expected 2047 to pick-up where 2037 had left things, I thought each episode was different, but that appears not to be the case.

2047 still leaves us in no doubt that we are in trouble. The world is still on fire, a rich man is still doing whatever the hell he wants to wherever he wants, whenever he wants and everyone else is paying for it all, often with their health.