In a moving and emotional episode, Scott Z. Burns’ Apple+ series “Extrapolations” portrays the dystopic world where man’s greed has turned earth into a nightmarish land of floods, earthquakes, and extreme heat. It presents the internal struggles of a man dealing with dementia. In the year 2066, when the temperature increase stands at 2.32 degrees, and the earth has to spend $176 trillion to deal with climate change, Ezra Haddad is trying to hold on to the memories of his wife, Lola. The last we saw of Ezra, he was a child dealing with a disease called Summer Heart – a congenital condition found in women and children because the mothers inhaled excessive smoke during wildfires, His mother, Becca, had taken him on tour to see the last humpback whale on the planet as it leaped out of the water. Now, the adult Ezra is forcing himself to remember the memories of his deceased pregnant wife as his condition eats away at his memories. Is he able to somehow salvage the memories of his love, or does he have to let go? Here’s what happens in “Extrapolations” Episode 6.
Spoilers Ahead
Pretensions
Ezra Haddad plays out a memory of his wife announcing that they’re going to have a baby, and the memory plays in a virtual screen, in what feels like something straight out of a “Black Mirror” episode. After the video ends, he adds a mole to his face and calls himself David. Yes, it does sound confusing, but as the years go by, science gets more and more advanced till ordinary people in 2023 can’t even make sense of it. He’s taking on the character of a man called David because he’s part of an organization called Pack where clients hire Pack employees to pretend to be their loved ones so that they can feel their presence, even when the actual people are gone.
David is seen playing with a kid named Harlyn as a woman watches from her doorstep, and David tells the kid that he had seen the last whale in the world, harking back to “Extrapolations” Episode 2, where little Ezra watched the humpback whale with his mother. Initially, we’re made to believe that this is Ezra, all grown up, but when he comes out, it’s revealed that Harlyn’s mother hired his services to act like her father, David. Ezra learns about David’s personality to be a good father to Harlyn, but the mother asks Ezra to drop the characteristics of David and just be a father to the kid.
Buying Memories
Ezra arrives at the Cache Cloud office upon learning that the fees for using Mind’s Eye—the system that allows people to store virtual memory in a drive—will be increasing and realizes that he’ll either have to accept the rising prices or get rid of some memories from the storage. Of course, he can’t remember everything like a normal human brain because of his condition, Summer Heart, which causes something like ‘life gaps.’ Not even “Cyberpunk 2077” had made things this complicated, had it? He proceeds to delete several memories from the storage, including that of his grandmother, and while returning home, he hears an announcement in the subway where a company offers services to keep people’s temperatures cool to avoid them going berserk.
At his apartment, a shady neighbor suggests getting an off-brand memory cloud from Siberia, but Ezra ignores him and enters his flat, where he learns about the different appointments he has for the next day, where he has to pretend to be other people. He then proceeds to sync his memory to the cache that records everything he did for the day and uploads that to the servers, much like how WhatsApp backs up the chats and images we’ve exchanged throughout the day.
Forgetting Your Life
The following day, Ezra heads to London, where the city is permanently overcast, and many futuristic buildings have covered the landscape, although Big Ben is still standing. In a bar, Ezra pretends to be the French lover of a client and then heads to an elder care facility, where he pretends to be an elderly woman named Dariya’s son. While talking about lavender flowers, Ezra’s memories experience a glitch, and he is reminded of a memory where a pregnant woman named Lola asks her to enjoy the day outside. Instead, Ezra decided to stay in and laid his head on her belly as she talked about her love for lavender. While returning home in the subway, he makes the cache play the same memory. Later, Ezra speaks to a doctor about these recurring visions, and the doctor says Ezra’s brain is showing signs of neuron death and learns that his summer heart condition has triggered vascular dementia, and soon he’ll be forgetting everything. The doctor suggests nostalgia therapy, through which he can activate the neural pathways by repeating words to himself.
At the parent-teacher meeting for Harlyn, the teacher says the kid has shown marked improvement in her mental state because she feels safe in her family unit. The mother, Natasha, thanks Ezra and is leaving when he says she still has an hour left, and he learns how the actual David left Natasha and Harlyn and settled in the USA. Upon realizing she misses the person, Ezra brings up David’s personality and apologizes for abandoning his family, and Natasha goes red in the cheeks. In his appointment with Dariya, he finds out the woman has passed, and the nurse tells him she doesn’t have any next of kin on her list. While backing up data at home, he’s informed that he has run out of storage space and needs to either upgrade the storage plan or delete his memories. He refuses to delete his memories but wakes up gasping after watching his memories of Lola fade away in his mind. When his doctor is unavailable, Ezra tries the nostalgia therapy himself and devises the four words to be “brown eyes, guess, lavender, Lola” and keeps repeating this phrase while he gets increasingly frustrated because his mind is wiping away his memories.
Desperation
Finally, Ezra gives in and hires an employee from the same organization he works for, Pack, to hire someone to pretend to be Lola. The employee arrives and behaves in the ways Lola used to, making Ezra believe the illusion that this is indeed the woman he loved, and they make love, but he abruptly stops when he notices a tattoo on the employee’s shoulder. He slowly understands that she’s not his Lola, and he gets off the bed, and despite the employee’s repeated attempts to make him immerse himself in the experience, he asks her to leave. He then proceeds to delete everything from his memory that doesn’t have Lola in it and then plays every memory of her continuously.
While heading to Natasha’s appointment, he suddenly realizes he can’t access her files, and two women in the subway tell him that an earthquake knocked out all the cloud storage. He’s shocked to realize he can’t even play Lola’s memories because his data is lost and rushes to the Cache Cloud HQ, where the representative tells him that everyone’s data is lost and they’re trying to get it back. He heads to a shady neighbor who deals in providing memory services through pirated means, but he realizes acquiring 10,000 units won’t be cheap. Ezra begins searching for all kinds of jobs, including providing sensory experiences to make money fast so that he can keep his memories of Lola intact. He ends up accepting an eviction job and bringing down the hammer on an elderly Spanish couple, and for his next assignment, he terminates a woman from the job, all to make quick cash. However, his gig with the client here, where he pretends to be the French lover, goes awry, and he’s rejected from the position, and while returning to the subway, his memories of Lola are too glitched to make sense. When he receives an appointment from Natasha to go to her place and make a home-cooked dinner, he accepts it immediately to make money. Harlyn asks for the story about the last whale, and while recounting it, Ezra realizes he doesn’t remember most of the incident, and the worst part is that he can’t recall who the woman was who took him to see the whale. Tragically, it was his mother, Rebecca, who took him on the trip, but he’s forgotten his mother. Later, he speaks with Natasha and reveals that Lola, too, had Summer Heart, and although the doctors were able to make an experiment work on Ezra, it failed on Lola, who was pregnant, and now he’ll be losing her yet again. That night, Natasha and Ezra finally make love as Ezra lets go of his inhibitions to not provide sensory experiences.
Who Are You?
In the morning, the shady neighbor says finding Ezra’s memories was very hard, so he needs half of a 30,000-unit warehouse by that day. In the subway, Ezra adds sensory experiences to Natasha’s account to charge her extra and then finally accepts the job to pretend to be the paramour of a woman whose husband is going through rage caused by heat. The only reason he accepts the task is because of the 5,000 units she’s offering. The raging mad husband severely beats Ezra, and then he learns that Natasha has terminated his contract, so he rushes to her place. Natasha orders him to get out, but he pleads that he’s doing this for the money because he can’t lose Lola. She asks him to let go of Lola’s memories, but Ezra refuses because he feels happiness while he can think of Lola, and he’s been chasing that feeling ever since. She begs him to tell him his name, and he finally removes everything about David and reveals his name, Ezra.
While returning to his flat, the dealer demands payment lest he sells every detail of Lola to the highest bidder, and Ezra slams the door in his face. Three months later, Menagerie2100 announces that the humpback whale is coming back to a zoo, and Harlyn asks him if this is the whale he’d seen as a child, but he says he’s never seen one. The next thing he sees is Lola showing him the pregnancy test kit and saying they’re about to have a baby, and this is used as an ad to promote a surrogate womb-providing service. When Natasha asks him where his mind flew off to, Ezra smiles and says, He’s right here.
‘Extrapolations’ Episode 6: Ending Explained – How Did Ezra Forget About Lola?
The latest chapter shows what happens to the mind at the onset of dementia and how desperately people try to cling to memories that matter the most to them. Ezra Haddad, who struggled with trying to remember the love of his life—Lola, the woman whom we last saw as a little girl in “Extrapolations” Episode 2—was on his last legs as cognitive dementia began wiping his memories. He went to many lengths, erasing every detail that mattered to him, including memories of his grandmother, his mother, and even witnessing the humpback whale with her. Finally, he was told by a client, Natasha, that he needs to let go and that it’s useless to hold onto the memories of someone who’s gone.
Ezra indeed forgets Lola because, upon seeing her on the screen, he feels like he’s seen her somewhere but can’t recognize her. He said he used to be happy with Lola, but instead, he seems actually happy and content now as he goes to lunch with his new family. “Extrapolations” Episode 6 talks about the importance of letting go and not letting the past hold up the present. Ezra begins to live in the now and enjoy the love of a little child who loves him like a father, finds companionship in Natasha, and realizes happiness is what we make it.
