Review: Continuum

[jducoeur]

The television series Continuum ran a few years ago -- I managed to catch about half of it, in the middle, was pretty confused, and dropped off by the end. I've just finished watching it properly, from the beginning, and -- well, the tl;dr is that damn that's a good show.

The premise in a nutshell -- in the year 2077, Kira Cameron is a cop, an officer in CPS (Corporate Protective Services). She's been risking her life to take down the core of a terrorist organization called Liber8, and is invited to attend their execution. But in the middle of that, the terrorists manage to activate some sort of "time bomb", sending themselves and, accidentally, Kira, back to the year 2012. She embeds herself with the modern police department, and has to stop Liber8 from changing the future. (And find a way to get back to the family she left behind.)

As such, it sounds like a sci-fi police procedural, and initially it looks like one. It's not. Rather like Person of Interest, this is an increasingly intense, well-rounded, ferociously tight story wrapped in procedural garb.

On the one hand, it's one of the best time-travel stories I've ever seen. It wrestles deeply with the question of what time travel is and what its implications are. And just as importantly, does not spend much time worrying about how it works. There is just the tiniest bit of hand-waving to establish that (a) it's Very Very Hard and (b) it takes a Lot of Energy.

What they're really concerned with is the implications. Very early in the series, they explicitly raise the question of whether it's possible to change the past -- and delightfully, they admit that they have no clue. But the series does have a well-reasoned time-travel model underneath, and by the middle of the story we do pretty much know the answer. And as far as I can tell, that answer is followed pretty rigorously and sensibly throughout, a rarity in television SF. There is one detail shown in mid-series that is a bit stupid, and one very explicit time-travel paradox late in the story, but they're minor issues in otherwise fine science fiction.

I should note that this is not some Legends of Tomorrow BS, where people are zipping back and forth through time every episode -- time-travel incidents are rare and major. The story stays grounded in Vancouver, in the year 2012, with frequent flashbacks from our characters' past. (Future. Whatever.)

More importantly, this isn't just a science-fiction story -- Continuum is actually much more interested in the social side of human progress, and has a lot to say about Corporatism, Anarchy and everything in between. What starts out looking like a black and white story of Good Cop, Bad Terrorists gets steadily grayer as it goes along, as we learn more about the world of 2077 that they all come from.

We get to know all of our characters, including the members of Liber8, very well in the course of the story, and are reminded that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. There are no simplistic good guys in this, and almost no simplistic bad guys, just people with very different agendas, all of them trying to make a Better Future -- as they happen to define that.

In terms of theme, this series is about Choice. The underlying tension of the whole thing is whether there is any such thing as destiny, and whether we make can make the future we want. I can't say much more without serious spoilers, but several of our characters spend a lot of time wrestling with this.

For better or worse, the series is fairly short: 3 1/2 twelve-episode seasons, and the first three end with excellent, scenario-changing cliffhangers. The ending is rather rushed, and gets a little hand-wavey -- my suspicion is that this was plotted to be five seasons, they got the axe after season 3, but were given six more episodes to wrap things up. The result is a bit like Babylon 5 Season 4: a loud, frenetic roller-coaster, but decently true to the story. The story does get a good, correct conclusion.

It's currently available on Netflix, and at 42 episodes it's a good extended binge, that gets steadily better as it goes along. It must be watched from the beginning to really understand what's going on, and don't miss any episodes -- most of them turn out to be critical, especially later in the story. Highly recommended -- check it out...