Tech Trillionaire, Nicholas Bilton is put on trial for ecocide.

Call me cynical (you won’t be the first) but you know you’re in trouble when no less than four writers (Dorothy Fortenberry, Diane Ademu-John, Scott Z. Burns & Ron Currie) are credited for a single fifty-minute TV episode. Alpha boss Nick Bilton (Kit Harington) is on trial for ecocide – the deliberate and murderous destruction of the environment – and this ought to be a stunning season finale, but there’s no two ways about it, this script is a confused mess pulling in several directions at once and going absolutely nowhere.

The setting doesn’t help. Extrapolations is at its worst when it attempts to be ‘futuristic’ and the brutalist ‘sci-fi’ courtroom looks just plain naff. It’s also a shame that the four writers didn’t come up with a consistent procedure for the hearing, which makes the International Criminal Court seem embarrassingly amateurish.

But it’s the content that had me wrinkling my nose. Bilton is on trial for profiteering from the collapse of the environment, but in his defence he says he only provided what we all wanted anyway (which is a fair point), and then (minor spoiler) we discover that he had a geo-tech solution years ago, but withheld it in order to keep on making money.

Oi! Extrapolations! No!

Where to start? The show seems to be unable to make up its mind whether to blame it all on capitalism or not, and the binary reductive nature of this debate becomes gratingly schematic and facile. Putting that aside, there is a more significant confusion around the whole idea of geo-engineering and whether finding a tech solution to carbon capture is desirable in the first place. Edward Norton’s Jonathan returns to harangue us all about how terrible it would be, but the episode’s conclusion suggests completely the opposite, as if the writing team have completely forgotten what they were lecturing us about just five episodes previously. Plus, we’re supposed to believe that humanity is collectively so stupid we are totally reliant on Kit Harington of all people to sort stuff out for us. Are they seriously suggesting that there’s no one else on the whole planet capable of developing decent carbon capture tech?

Back when I was producing, I used to get sent ‘capitalism-on-trial’ dramas on a regular basis and they were all uniformly awful, for the simple reason that they all endeavour to reduce the evils of society to a single person, and then feed them the right lines in order to get the desired outcome. They are little more than ideological show trials; rigged polemical debate; stodgy, wordy exercises in simplistic manipulation which achieve absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile there’s a subplot about Bilton’s adopted daughter which doesn’t make much sense either, and something about a folk singer who went on a demo once, which feels like a leftover from a missing episode.

Verdict: Extrapolations has been an extraordinarily frustrating watch. Despite being blighted by A-lister lecturing, and poorly thought through hypotheticals, there have been two excellent episodes – The Fifth Question and Nightbirds – which told cracking stories and involved us in the lives of nuanced characters who we cared about, giving us a glimpse of how great the series could have been. Having said all this, I would like to see a second season, one where the failings of this anthology were addressed and the team really engaged with the way drama works best to deliver an important message.

Episode 8: 3/10
Series rating: 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com