Going back to the future…
Continuum is a science fiction time traveling detective show that originally aired in Canada on the Showcase channel on May 27 2012. Now you can catch it on the Syfy channel as well because they have began airing the show from the beginning as one of their own series.
The story is about the Protectors- the future’s law enforcement group, hunting down a group of terrorists that call themselves liber8. In the year 2077 the world is run by mega corporations that control everything. Liber8 has started a rebellious group of freedom fighters that are attempting to restore a proper government. The main character is a protector named Kiera Cameron (played by Rachel Nichols) assigned to bring down Liber8. There are a total of eight members of Liber8, who were all captured and put on trial to be executed for their crimes. However, they smuggled in a time traveling device and activated it only seconds before being killed. Kiera gets caught in the time traveling blast radius and all eight members of Liber8 and Kiera are sucked back in time to 2012.
Liber8’s goal is to change the past to change the future. Kiera wants to get back home, but she is afraid that if she lets Liber8 run loose that her future will no longer be the one that she remembers, and decides to hunt them down to ensure that their future timeline remains undisturbed. When Liber8 hears that a Protector came back to the past with them, they begin using their knowledge of the future by killing key people from their past to erase their enemies before they come into existence.
Why I like the show
The good parts about the show is that they use their knowledge of the future for things that makes sense, such investing in the stock market to become millionaires overnight, or killing one of their enemy’s parents so that they are killed before they are even born. There are a lot of science fiction shows that suffer from lazy acting and cheap special effects, but actually I like some of the special effects in the show and how the future environment looks, a few parts actually looked a lot better than I was expecting from a weekly television show (especially one on Syfy).
I like the cast of characters and the acting, it isn’t perfect but it is enough to carry the show and keep viewers entertained to see more. I really like the idea of how the show is dealing with time travel and how they portray time as a loop and not always a straight line. They haven’t come out and officially said that time repeats itself, but that is what it is hinting at and building up to. One of the reasons why I keep tuning in is to see if Kiera will ever get back to her present time, or if she gets stuck living in the past for the rest of her life.
The parts I didn’t like
I have now seen about five episodes and I have found a few flaws with the show that takes away from it a bit. One of the biggest problems is when they make characters seem all knowing, yet at times they are extremely dumb. Sadly Continuum suffers from the same thing. Kiera didn’t know what Rock-Paper-Scissors was, nor did she know how to drive a car, and another thing I thought was strange was that she didn’t know what a Hazmat suit was. I’m not very good at history and I don’t know a lot about Government and military terms, but I do know what a Hazardous material suit is because we hear so much about pollution now days and going green to save the environment. When Japan had the severe Earthquake, a lot of people were afraid of the radiation leaking out like what happened at Chernobyl and they even showed news clips of Hazmat suit men walking around testing for radiation. I know about Chernobyl because people still talk about it, I know about World War II because I studied history. Kiera has all this knowledge about complex technology that hasn’t come into existence in the current timeline, yet she didn’t know how to drive a car from 60 years ago or what a Hazmat suit was?
That seemed a bit odd to me. Even in our real life timeline I still see cars being driven from the 1970s and people know how to drive the classics.
If you watch the show you’ll know what I mean when she starts giving advice to the police about how things work, yet there are little things that she comes across and she becomes completely clueless. Which brings me to the shows next flaw, the police seemed a bit too accepting when Kiera walked into the station and joined the force with little to no information. They later acknowledged that problem and tried to clean it up, but it made things a bit unbelievable to me. I could go on with pointing out the flaws but I think you get the idea, so let’s just move on.
Overall
I honestly don’t know if I officially like this show yet. It reminds me of NBC’s Bionic Woman meets Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Time cop. You can take that however you like…
I’m hoping that Continuum doesn’t turn into “Just another police drama” because we have a lot of those already on TV at the moment. The Detective part seems to be a subplot and not the full focus of the show, which I actually like so far. There are a few shows on television right now that start off with really strong pilot episodes but then change halfway through the season into something disappointing, I want to see if this show will keep standing strong all the way through. At the moment I like the concept of the show enough to keep watching until the season finale.
If I had to rate Continuum on a scale from 1 out of 10- with 10 being amazing, I would give it a solid 7.
Overall though, I recommend that you give it a try and watch a few episodes to see if it is something you like. The Showcase episodes are about to start season 2 in April (of 2013), so hopefully Syfy will get season 2 as well to continue the story.
If you want to watch Continuum tune in to Syfy on Mondays at 8:00PM EST, make sure to check your local listings for any changes with the time and date.
For more information you can also check out the Syfy official website for Continuum by clicking on the link on the right side of this article.
