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...

Comments

[jducoeur]

(Although, minus points for the part where they introduced a kickass ninja girlfriend mostly for the purpose of refrigerating her/saving her.)

That one I'll grant -- the handling of Emily blew hot and cold throughout, and she's one of the few characters I never quite believed. And the "I must change time because my girlfriend has been fridged!" plot felt pretty cheap compared to the rest of the story.

I felt like there were some scenes that showed individual members of Liber8 learning more about What's Going On In The World than they had seemed to know in season 1.

It's possible -- I'm honestly not sure. But it's pretty clear that the story performs a very deliberate misdirection at the beginning. 2077 *seems* pretty utopian at the beginning of the series, because we're seeing it through Kira's *very* privileged eyes. (And as we later learn, messed-with memory.) They then slowly and carefully deconstruct that over the next three seasons, until we see a world that is squirm-inducingly creepy under the surface -- more or less a Black Mirror variation.

So I'd generally look to that for inconsistencies. There might be some actual mistakes -- that wouldn't be astonishing -- but every time I *thought* I had caught an error, I later concluded that I just hadn't understood the timeline. The fact that the flash-forwards are shown in fairly random order makes it tricky to piece together correctly. I actually had a, "Wait, what?" reaction to the Sonja origin story, but later decided that it worked if I rearranged the order of events.

Kiera also gets pretty "serious" about Brad in the sense of emotionally loyal

Fair -- the "do you trust him?" plot got stretched significantly too far.

But, I should also say, mostly I minded the Brad love plot because I'd spent 3 seasons rejoicing in the super-rare phenomenon of a female protagonist with no major romantic plot/partner.

Also fair -- but honestly, I found it in-character. Her loneliness was a fairly fundamental character point from the beginning, and I empathized with that a lot. Mind, I'm someone who does *not* do well alone -- I've been happily married nearly my entire adult life -- so I really felt for her on this. I find the male-stoic "I don't need relationships" character type just plain weird, personally.

So yeah -- I do see where you're coming from here. But it felt in-character for her to grab at some companionship when she could. (And assuming that was always intended to go as poorly as it did, I'm curious where they had originally planned to go after that.)

[desireearmfeldt]

Also fair -- but honestly, I found it in-character. Her loneliness was a fairly fundamental character point from the beginning, and I empathized with that a lot. Mind, I'm someone who does *not* do well alone -- I've been happily married nearly my entire adult life -- so I really felt for her on this. I find the male-stoic "I don't need relationships" character type just plain weird, personally.

Sure -- and I'm also in the "has basically always been in a long-term relationship since I started dating" bucket. But I think there's a difference between "I don't need relationships" and "I don't need romantic relationships" (and also a difference between "I don't need romantic relationships ever" and "I don't need a romantic relationship right now, thanks" and "This story is about other things than my romantic relationships").

The canonical cop-buddy TV show with two male protagonists features a very strong *relationship* between the two cops (or cop-analogues); just not a romantic one. (And thus was slash fiction born...but seriously, I think having a genre that emphasizes intimate, non-romantic relationships is actually a good thing, culturally speaking.) I always rejoice when I come across a mixed-gender example of that setup -- and am always a little (or a lot) disappointed when it eventually gets turned into a romance after all. I did not actually watch enough X-files to reach that point, but just hearing about it made me mad. Another example is Fringe, which I did watch. Or, for that matter, BSG with Apollo & Starbuck. Not that the romance plots are necessarily objectionable in and of themselves. But is it too much to ask to have an on-screen male/female friendship that just stays a friendship?

Anyway, I agree that Kiera is isolated and exiled and lonely, and that that's a major theme of the story. But one of the things that happens over the course of the show is she makes friends and forms loyalties. On the other hand, one of the other things that happens is maybe that's never quite (or never yet) enough. On the other other hand, as a viewer I was pretty invested in the continuing evolution of her relationships with Alec and Carlos and various of the other characters she was starting to become friends with. The show did not convince me to be invested in Brad, because he came out of nowhere and didn't get the slow relationship development everyone else got.