How many episodes are there in Steven Soderbergh’s Command Z? Details explored

While the world is caught up in the Barbie and Oppenheimer madness, Steven Soderbergh dropped his upcoming sci-fi series, Command Z, on his website, extension765.com, on July 17, 2023. The acclaimed director, known to deliver films like Traffic, Erin Brockovich, the Magic Mike series, and the Ocean's franchise, has the talented Michael Cera playing the lead in his series.

The series that has been released exclusively on Soderbergh's website features eight episodes spanning from eight to twenty minutes each, a format comparable to modern-day sci-fi series like Netflix's Love, Death and Robots. Apart from Cera, who plays a scientist on screen, the cast also features Roy Wood Jr., Chloe Radcliffe, JJ Maley, Stavros Halkias, and Liev Schreiber.

The synopsis, as per IMDb, reads,

"A scientist who tasks his employees with a 'historic' mission to travel back in time to revise history and save the world."

The premise of the series is based Kurt Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History.

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Soderbergh's Command Z - Episodes explored

With a career spanning over three decades, Steven Soderbergh has become synonymous with his distinctive approach to filmmaking. From his breakout hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) to his crowd favorite, the groundbreaking heist Ocean's trilogy (2001–2007), Soderbergh has consistently challenged traditional cinematic experiences of the time.

Command Z, which was initially known as The Pendulum Project, depicts the story of the digitized version of a trillionaire scientist and CEO who employs three people to travel time and space safely into the future and recreate the events in the present to make it more habitable. The three make a journey through a wormhole inside a washer and dryer machine after ingesting a psychedelic synthetic substance that keeps them calm through the journey.

The eight episodes of Command Z have been released on Soderbergh's website Extension765 and have been streaming for $7.99, which goes to charity. The list of episodes currently streaming and their synopses include:

1. The Room
2. The Climate
3. The Pryce Is Wrong
4. The Pryce Is Wrong II
5. Antisocial Media
6. The Climate II
7. Preach
8. Back for the Future

The script for the screen has been created by Sam Lowry and Larry Doyle, along with the writer of the novel, Kurt Andersen. The trailer, released on July 14, 2023, shows Michael Cera as Kerning Fealty directing the three new employees in his run-down workspace, which is known as The Room.

As Fealty can be spotted saying in the Command Z trailer,

"We are only able to interact with 2023 because a wormhole is traversable only to its moment of Genesis and then continuing in real-time. For us, that means July 17, 2023."

He adds,

“This is historic, literally. We’ll be dipping into the past to make some critical fixes there that will, in turn, make the future, our present right now, more livable, fair and decent for everyone. We’re going back to the moment that I’ve determined was America’s last inflexion point — to 2023.”

The cast includes Mike Houston, who plays a fishy oil company official who is personally responsible for an increase of 0.3 degrees in global temperature and is about to flee to his $57 million bunker during the apocalypse.

Liev Schreiber plays Kohlberg Pryce, the terrible boss who burns out his employees in the corporate world, while Alexandra Socha plays the pastorpreneur who has been churning the church's tax waivers and networks for political gain.

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With the recent limited noir series, Full Circle, already airing on HBO, the eight episodes of Command Z will be restricted to Soderbergh's website.