CONTINUUM

Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller | TV Series (2012–2015)

A detective from the year 2077 finds herself trapped in present day Vancouver B.C. searching for ruthless criminals from the future in this Canadian crime drama. The show premiered on Showcase in 2012 and concluded after 4 seasons and 42 episodes in 2015.

In its 4 seasons, I watched Continuum swing from imaginative to confusing to excellent to overly complex. It’s a drawback of any saga, especially when renewal of the program is not assured. Each season, the writers must come up with a storyline that is both finite and ongoing, which can leave the show in knots. There were a lot of twists, turns, sideswipes, conundrums, and paradoxes that sometimes left me wondering, but Continuum held my attention throughout.

Bewildered Protector Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) is accidently brought back to 2012 during a time travel prison break and spends the next 4 years trying quell battles and get home to her little boy. With the help of her partner, Detective Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster) and computer genius Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen) as well as some tek she brought with her from the future, she manages to avoid a hundred grisly deaths. The terrorists play brilliantly at being badass. There are a lot of characters and not all of them make it to the end of the series. On the other hand, a few times there are duplicates as a result of alternative timelines. Somehow they interact with themselves without imploding the universe. I suppose since time travel a fictitious phenomenon, the writers could speculate in any direction they chose.

Set in Vancouver, the sets were well selected and often beautiful. In contrast, the futuristic scenes were reminiscent of Blade Runner, giving the impression that the future might not be the best place to go. The action escalates well. The haunting score and use of the hand-held camera gives an immediacy that we feel throughout. I found there to be an unfortunate overuse of assault weapons resulting in a ridiculous amount of fatalities – like Star Trek’s Red Shirts, if you were a cop in a fight scene, chances are you wouldn’t make it out alive. But I admit I am oversensitive about people being gunned down by machine guns since that action has become a reality in our culture. I don’t hold it against the show. It’s sci-fi. It’s epic war. Bigger, better, more weapons are just part of the genre.