One of the best science fiction shows in recent memory just finished it first season and almost no one saw it. The reason for so few people seeing it is that it was only available in Canada. The Showcase channel in Canada is the only place you could have seen Continuum. Despite the name, it’s not related to Stargate: Continuum, but is (was?) a time traveling police procedural with an interesting timeline and mythology. So, let’s see what Continuum is all about;
Rachel Nichols (best known for Alias Season 5 and Uhura’s roommate in the Abrams Star Trek movie) is Kiera Camero, a police officer in 2077 Vancouver. She has a young son and a husband who works for a large company Sadtech. By 2077, the governments of the world have failed and corporations now run everything. But not everyone is happy about it and when a group of terrorists (known as Liber8) start blowing things up, they are arrested and sentenced to death. But a weird accident (or planned jailbreak) throws the terrorists and Kiera back in time to 2012. Kiera is still able to use her super suit (which has a ton of fun functions such as stopping bullets and invisiblity) and her implants (eye implants that let her see additional things and interface with the suit to give her more information). Her communication system should no longer work, because it wasn’t set up until decades later, but she does find someone who can hear and talk to her over her embedded communication system. That person is teenager Alec Sadler (Eric Knudsen) who will grow up to create and run Sadtech.
Kiera manages to bluff her way into a special posting in the police department to try and hunt down the Liber8 terrorists who are also in 2012. She is partnered with Carlos Fonnegra(Victor Webster who was Brennan on the Mutant X TVshow.) in her mission, but she also uses her communication device (which she cleverly hides by pretending to be on a bluetooth headset) to talk to Alec, who can hack into almost anywhere.
Alec doesn’t get along with his step-father, who leads a group preaching against corporate interests, or his step-brother, who wants to go further than the step-father. Later in the season, the two groups start interacting more. We see a lot of plans from the terrorists and Kiera trying to stop them. There are views from the future (actually flashbacks in the future to times prior to the season starting) that give a lot of back story. We also find out a lot more about the time travel adventure and how everyone is connected.
Overall, the show focuses on the main trio (Kiera, Carlos and Alec) with bits and pieces from Alec’s family and the terrorists (especially the one terrorist who leaves the group since he just wants to live in peace in 2012). We get glimpses of the future and how it relates to what’s happening in the past. We get good characterization of Kiera and Alec (and a little bit of Carlos). The show is setup as a police procedural, but because it’s only 10 episodes, every case has to do with the terrorists. Near the end of the season, we get a couple twists that expand the mystery of what happened a bit and a realization that maybe things are designed to work this way and they’re supposed to be in the past. I really enjoyed this show and hope that not only does it come to a wider audience, but that there are future seasons as well. The show is well produced, the special effects are done quite well for a small TV show budget and the characters are interesting. Highly recommended.
This post is part of the thread: Continuum – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.