Continuum – Occupy Wall Street in tiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmeeeeeeeee

I promise after this week I’ll lay off the time travel for a little while.  Or maybe BEFORE this week!  Whoooohhhhoooohhhoooo!  Anyway, over the weekend I caught the first two episodes of Continuum, a Canadian series SyFy has picked up for rebroadcast.  The first season is complete and has aired in Canada, and has already been renewed for a second season.  

Continuum is the best time travelling cop show I’ve seen that doesn’t involve Jean-Claude van Damme killing Bruno Gianelli.  It’s about time travel, technology, and terrorism all at the same time, and does it without being dumb.  The characters are smart and capable, and don’t make idiotic choices to fuel some kind of mystery based plot.  There are certainly mysteries underlying the entire premise, but the narrative and action of the characters aren’t hinged on big reveals that will either never happen, or be incredibly stupid when they do.  Lost and Battlestar Galactica, I’m looking at you.  Right at you.  Uncomfortably close.

Anyway, let’s look at the pieces of the show that make it work.

Time Travel

The show immediately presents us with it’s theory on time travel.  Either you can change the future, or everything you’re experiencing has already happened from the future’s perspective, and you were “destined” to travel back in time.  The knowing smile on a certain character’s face when the time travel happens strongly implies that the show will be sticking with the second theory.  Continuum handles this pretty well by having the characters be nervous about how they could affect things, but not having it cripple them.  They’re human beings, and they have to live the life in front of them.  I also love that it doesn’t dick around with the metaphysics, it just tells us how to think about time travel within the framework of the show.  That immediately reduces the discussion of plot holes and paradoxes, and lets you actually focus on what’s going on.

Technology

The future tech in the show is cool as hell, mostly because it’s strongly based in what’s going on right now.  The only flashy pieces that I couldn’t see being built in the next 50 years are the expanding gun and the magic radio frequency thingy.  Oh yeah, and, you know, time travel.  And even the magic radio frequency itself isn’t the problem – it’s the concept that the prototype of the tech that some kid is building in a barn would be able to communicate with the bioware the future cop has from 50 years from now.  Microsoft Word 2010 can barely communicate with Word 95, and that’s a word processor made by the same company from 15 years ago.  But the super suit with light bending camouflage, the augmented reality vision, increased adrenaline, bullet resistant fields . . . all of that is literally being built RIGHT NOW.  Mostly at MIT.  The believable science without a lot of mumbo jumbo really helps sell the show.

Terrorism

The heart of the show is really the ambiguity over which side is “right” and which side is “wrong”.  In Continuum’s future, corporations have replaced our governments.  A group of terrorists called Liber8 wants to restore power to the people, so they blow up a bunch of big buildings, killing most of the leaders of the Corporate Congress, but also thousands of innocents at the same time.  The show does an excellent job of making the CAUSE of the terrorists really resonate with its audience, but not their methods.  After watching the first two episodes, there is no doubt in mind that the terrorists are bad people, but I still feel for their cause.  On the other hand, the future cop chasing them is very sympathetic emotionally, and seems to be trying to do the right thing.  But she’s enforcing the laws of corporations, not of an elected body of representatives.  To throw things even further into a grey area, the future we are shown is NOT dystopian.  It seems like a pretty nice place to live.  The only hint of totalitarianism is when the future cop arrests a kid on a subway because the cameras in her eyes, on the subway, and in the eyes of the people around the kid detected him as a possible suspect.  It’s apparent that those people have even less privacy than we do today, which is scary, but hardly an immediate sign of a despotic regime.

If Continuum continues to walk a morally grey line, and keeps the characters smart, it’s going to be one to keep an eye on.  I definitely recommend checking it out.  The first two episodes can be found on Comcast On-Demand, and if you live in Canada you can probably dig up the whole show somewhere.