Belated TV Review: Continuum

I’ll say it once—spoilers ahead.

I’m getting to this very late because for some reason I missed Continuum season 3 and just caught up with the entire season via streaming.  Continuum is an outlier, a television sci-fi show that sometimes has more ideas and better ideas than most literary science fiction.  In an era where much television science fiction is under-thought and over-wrought, Continuum is just about the sole beacon of light.

To recap quickly, the show is about a cop from 2077 named Keira Cameron (Rachel Nichols) who, while attending the execution of a band of terrorists, is caught up in the wake of their time travel device and is thrown, with them, back to . . . 2012 (they were supposed to travel back in time 5 years but missed). The group, calling themselves by the catchy name of Liber8, start plans to win the future by subverting authority in 2012; Cameron manages to insinuate herself with the local (Vancouver) police department, teaming with a hunky detective who has the very Canadian name of Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster).

I like Webster’s performance a lot; it is great that he establishes an immediate rapport with Keira, but there is zero sexual tension as her character tells him she is married (to her future husband).  He is a rare actor who can bring the beefcake but acts like he doesn't expect a woman to drop her panties at the sight of him. I also liked the dynamic between Carlos and the police cyber expert Betty (Jennifer Spence); it is immediately clear that she adores him (and is jealous of Keira), but he ignores her not because she isn't gorgeous, but because he is too just too self-effacing and clueless to notice her signals.

The series has always reveled in unclarity about motives; flash-forwards to the year 2077 reveal that Liber8 are pretty much psychotic murderers who are never the less fighting for freedom, while Keira is a descent, moral human being who defends a fascist corporate state. She spends much of the first season mooning over her son, wanting desperately to get back to him. But, realizing that Liber8 can prevent her world from ever existing, stays to fight Liber8 even as she slowly realizes that despite the high body count, they have a point.

She is helped by a teenager named Alec Sadler (Erik Knudson), who (in the future) invented all the technical gizmos that came back with her from 2077.  The younger version of Alec is able to communicate with Keira’s cerebral implant, view through her eyes, and monitor her uniform which, among other things, can make her invisible.

If it sounds a little confusing, it’s because Continnum has never shied away from some of the more troubling literary aspects of time travel. Early on, the mother of a character is killed before he is born, and he fails to fade away like Marty McFly.  At the end of season 2, Alec travels back in time a week to rescue his girlfriend, followed by Keira; the fact that there are now two of both of them propels much of the action in season 3.

The series grew more assured and daring in season 3.  One episode was set almost entirely in 2077; new characters were introduced as sort of “time cops” whose morality and aims were hard to suss out; a regular character was suddenly killed; and while Cameron’s police superior (Brian Markinson) embraced greater corporate control of the police department, her partner Carlos became increasingly uncomfortable with corporations treating the police as their personal security team.

One of the more frightening aspects of Continuum is how easy it is to project the current state of corporations into a dystopian future where there are no civil liberties and all decisions are made by a “corporate congress.” With US Supreme Court decisions giving corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in the political process and impose the corporation’s “religious beliefs” on their employees, such a corporate controlled future seems a lot closer than 2077.

Towards the end of season 3, all of the characters begin to realize that there is no way to win “the” future because there is no “one” future, but a plethora of futures. Keira accepts that she can never return to her son, who no longer exists in the time line created by her time travel, just as Liber8 members realize that they may free one time line, but that means leaving their time line enslaved. This causes some major shifting of loyalties that none the less feels organic.

Season 3 ended with a doozy of a cliffhanger; here’s hoping that the producers of Continuum get a season 4 to prove that they weren’t just making it up as they went along.