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#1 Jan 17 2013 at 10:15 PM Rating: Good
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I was watching the Haven season finale and noticed that a new show appeared on SciFi. Continuum. They re-ran the Pilot after the Haven finale, and I figured I'd watch it. I cannot tell who the bad guys are supposed to be yet.

Takes place in 2077. The US Government (possibly World Government) has collapsed due to crushing debt after the Corporations bail them out. In its place, there is now a Corporate Dictatorship. It starts out with a bang. A group of revolutionists/terrorists bomb two very large corporate buildings in an attempt to kill the CEOs controlling the Government. They fail, but still kill tens of thousands in the process when they bring down the buildings. A group of eight people are sentenced to be executed, and during the public execution they each sneak in a piece of Tech that assembles a time traveling device. Apparently supposed to only send them back 6 or so years, it instead sends them back a little over 60, to the year 2012. In the process a do good future cop is also sent back.

One prisoner dies in the very violent time travel episode. And it just happens that the inventor of the Tech that the future cops use to communicate and do surveillance is a college student testing out his new Tech, and the future-cop stumbles upon the super secret encoded frequencies and starts communicating with him. The cop now is trying to hunt down the 'terrorists' and stop them from starting up the revolution in the year 2012. And apparently the kid who invented the future Tech is also related somehow to one of the largest Corporations in the future Corporate Dictatorship. He sees one of the Corporate Logos in the Cops recordings of the future and notices that it is almost exactly the same as a logo he had doodled inside one of his notebooks. Future Cop teams up with Present Cops. The Revolutionists/Terrorists are painted in a pretty bad light so far. Which is why I can't tell which way they are going yet. Evil Corporations and Revolutionists, or Evil Terrorists and the Corporations.

Somehow the Future Cop's husband, and one of his buddies, are related to the revolutionists I believe he was shown as a sympathizer in the beginning, and when he saw his wife enter the execution chamber he got up and ran over to the guards, yelling (behind glass, couldn't hear) and pointing.


I think it will fill a time slot for the season for me. Hopefully it ends up interesting.

Edited, Jan 18th 2013 7:10pm by TirithRR
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#2 Jan 18 2013 at 8:39 PM Rating: Decent
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I thought it was interesting as well. Hopefully, they don't dork it up too badly.

I think the young genius is the head of the big super corp (played by "smoking man" actor William Davis) in the future. At least it seemed that way to me (and the flash back where he meets the woman for the first time in the future was telling). He made an interesting comment that may provide a clue as to the direction of the story. His younger self, upon realizing that the woman is from the future mentions that there are two possible ways to deal with time travel into the past. Either choices change the future (quantum reality type stuff), and so everything "up ahead" really ceases to exist except as a cloud of probabilities, or the time line is set and the fact that you traveled back into the past means that you always did. Your actions are somewhat predetermined (even though you don't know what they are).

This suggests to me that his older self remembers everything that happened, and that it's somehow key to the formation of the future as seen, and that he was actually involved in the background with the setup of the escape through time in the first place (how else did the tech end out in their hands?). He's fulfilling what he knows is going to happen. It also explains why the prisoners thought they were going to go back 6 years (long enough to make some changes to their terrorist plot, but close enough for their knowledge and contacts to be directly useful), but actually ended out going back 65 (where any specific info would be less useful to them). He maybe needed to deceive them to get them to go back in time. The thing they're fighting against doesn't exist yet, but perhaps they are key to bringing it about in the first place (so a bit of irony?).

The husband being alarmed when he sees her in the room also supports this. I don't think it's that he was a sympathizer, but that he knew about the plan to send these people back in time. Perhaps he knew that a cop would be sent back with them, knew that it was an integral part of the whole thing, but had no clue that the cop was his own wife. That's a fact that the boss guy obviously would have kept secret from him. The husband clearly knew not only that the criminals were going to time jump but that his wife being one of the cops in the room was dangerous to her. He would not have had any reason to be concerned if he didn't also know that a cop would end out traveling with them, right? Unless he was told they were going to blow themselves up or something. Obviously, there are other possible explanations, but this one seems the more interesting of them IMO.



Hard to tell too much from the first episode, of course.

Edited, Jan 18th 2013 6:41pm by gbaji
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#3 Jan 18 2013 at 9:03 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I don't think it's that he was a sympathizer, but that he knew about the plan to send these people back in time.


I couldn't remember which of their group in the beginning was talking about looking past the terrorists methods and looking at their message.
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#4 Jan 21 2013 at 4:32 PM Rating: Decent
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TirithRR wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I don't think it's that he was a sympathizer, but that he knew about the plan to send these people back in time.


I couldn't remember which of their group in the beginning was talking about looking past the terrorists methods and looking at their message.


I'm pretty sure that was the husband, but I could be wrong. I just don't see him as a sympathizer in terms of that group itself. Those were the guys who did the bombings, so if his position was that the message was right, but their methods were wrong, why would he work to have that particular group of people escape back in time? I never underestimate the potential for screenwriters to use flimsy motives for character actions, but given that he clearly knew something was going to happen, it makes more sense that he was in on the "make them think they're going back 6 years to do a better job at toppling the corporate power structure, but really send them back 65 years where/when we know they'll be stopped", but just didn't realize it was his wife who would be doing the stopping.

Pure speculation of course. Could go in an entirely different direction.
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#5 Jan 22 2013 at 10:26 PM Rating: Good
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They really haven't gone the route of Evil Corporations yet. And the terrorist group members are still portrayed very badly except maybe the Kellogg character, who seems to have given up and wants to start a life in 2012.. I thought for sure they'd start with the Evil Corporations bit by now, but so far nothing.

I do not enjoy how they are forcing the emotional character building so far. Seems completely random, young Alec just says, "Hey, we haven't talked about your kid/family recently." In the middle of hunting down a deadly terrorist plot and hacking government files to make a fake aliases, he decides that he hasn't has a personal talk with this woman he just met, and not even in person...

Edited, Jan 23rd 2013 7:02am by TirithRR
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#6 Jan 28 2013 at 10:03 PM Rating: Good
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I'm kind of happy where they are taking the story.

As I understand it:
Young Alec is the young version of the head of the big corporation in the future.
Young Alec's step father is a crazy hippy dude who Alec does not like.
Having to listen to his crazy step father likely pushes Alec to be the way he is in the future.
He sends the Protector Kiera and the other guys back into the past (likely because he knows it was supposed to happen because he already experienced it in his past.)

I'm still waiting for them to pull a Judge Dredd with Kiera. I cannot imagine them keeping everything status quo in the future. I wonder if Kellogg is going to be the Catalyst.


Also, according to IMDB this series is Canadian and was aired earlier in 2012 and has another season slated? I am avoiding looking up any other info about it because I don't feel like reading a spoiler.
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#7 Mar 05 2013 at 5:12 AM Rating: Good
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I'm really enjoying Continuum, even though it is probably more shallow than it feels. I really liked the story arc over the first season. It IS hard to explicitly find where the writers' ideologies lie so far, and I'd be happy if they kept that ambiguous. I suspect anti-big business viewers and anti-big government viewers would both think that Continuum is "on their side". I think that there IS somewhat of a condemnation of violence and extremism in the show. Yet at the same time Means and Ends are shown not to be simple things to wrestle with. There are plenty of ironic punishments to extreme actions taken by the "Bad Guys". The "Good Guys" are not really able to keep their hands clean, either, even when they have ideals of their own. There are lots of shades of grey and ambiguities as the present and the future clash together. I also get the feel that if the writers wrap the story up, by the time the producers call the end of the show, it will be an exceedingly ironic ending.

Future Cop did not make a great skill leap in tapping into a "secret network" in the present. Her suit from the future is the product of Future Alec's well developed technology, and has a wireless network connection to Future Alec's world-wide corporate software. When Future Cop is flung into the past, her suit automatically "looks" for its usual network software, and by luck is able to wirelessly plug into Young Alec's private software in development in the present. I would scoff at such backwards compatibility over 60 years, if it wasn't that Real Life 2013 PCs that people own right now are running the latest Windows version that is STILL running on completely dodgy base machine code software written in the 80s.
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#8 Mar 05 2013 at 5:27 AM Rating: Good
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I'm bothered by the main actress's eye mole. Or more that the editing/makeup team can't decide whether or not they want to remove/cover it up or not.

I do think it's weird that Kiera's revelations about the wrong doings of the corporations she worked for in the future are coming through flashbacks (or... flashfowards?) about things she's already experienced them doing. It also seems, as of the episode last night in the US, that Future Alec has left a message for Past Alec encoded into the remnant memory files of Kiera.

Am I the only one that is bothered when Sci-Fi picks up these shows and airs them and has no real announcement that it's not something original? They seem to do that quite a bit, at least more so than the major networks.

Edited, Mar 5th 2013 6:28am by TirithRR
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#9 Mar 08 2013 at 6:50 AM Rating: Good
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I'm liking Keira's memories about her past life in the future.

(Sorry, I just love that I got to write that and it's not an error.)

The flashbacks to the future, even if they aren't very long, are frequent, well done and long enough to maintain that sci-fi feel to the show. Instead of just having an initial set-up of a person from the future coming to the present, settling in and then the whole story being set here.
#10 Mar 08 2013 at 3:35 PM Rating: Good
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Ditching the spoilers now that the threads gone far enough down.

I'm curious what future Alec would think if he knew that this past and the original future are not existing on the same timeline. I'm also curious what Kagame thinks about the two being separate timelines. I guess it says something good about him, that his is continuing his crusade for a better future knowing now that he himself won't benefit from it even if he returns to his time. Similar with how Kellogg was really sad that his grandmother was shot, even though he didn't get affected, he really did want to help her out.

Edited, Mar 8th 2013 6:04pm by TirithRR
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#11 Mar 08 2013 at 7:06 PM Rating: Decent
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They have to exist on at least a somewhat similar timeline, or else future Alex could not have known to send himself messages from the future. They may be divergent, but clearly the future him experienced much of what he's experiencing now. There's a number of ways to manage time travel to deal with this. The whole "infinite quantum realities" is one common one (and means that everything is separate and distinct). That's the most flexible since you can do anything and not affect "your" timeline (but also somewhat removes the motivation to make changes in the first place, at least in the context of time travel). The "back to the future" method, in which if you change the past, you can change the future you return to. This has variations in which you can or can't erase your own self (in the former, you'd disappear. but in the latter, you could return to a future in which you never existed, but because you weren't there when it happened, you still exist). Another interesting approach (call it the Millennium, or "rubber-band") method time is constant and wants to maintain a stable course of events. When you change things, the universe reacts with another change that tends to put things back "on track". It'll always use the most simple and subtle changes, but in some cases they'll be dramatic (like a rubber band snapping back into place, or "time quakes" if you will). So when what's his name's grandmother is killed, time changes so that she wasn't actually his grandmother at all. He just thought she was. Some other woman will just happen to marry his grandfather, and their dna will combine in just the right fashion to produce his mother/father, just as was meant to be. Perhaps this woman will have the same name, or will change her name. In any case, things will change so that everything that was experienced in the future still happens as it was remembered to have happened, thus avoiding paradox.


I find the last approach fascinating to contemplate, but likely very hard to manage in a series. It's still too early to tell which method they're using for this show (or if they even really gave it that much thought). Still, I'm liking the show. For the most part, the future flashback fill in nice gaps, but it's not really about the time travel or their effects. It's so far settling into just being a "stop the bad guys and their evil plots". Now maybe they'll move into exploring the time stuff more as it goes along, but that's not necessary to carry the story at this point. Just enough to remind us that she's from the future and there's another element to this all is sufficient IMO.

Edited, Mar 8th 2013 5:08pm by gbaji
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#12 Mar 09 2013 at 8:42 AM Rating: Good
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I was thinking it was like Dragon Ball Z. Trunks travels back into the past, the events of that moment are same as the events of his timelines past, yet as soon as he changed something, that timeline is now separate, and happens different than the timeline of his reality. He returns to his reality and everything is still exactly the same (except of course, Trunks is more powerful having been able to train outside of his reality and return to that reality with knowledge/experience earned elsewhere).

In that case, Kellogg doesn't exist in Past-reality's future, because his grandmother died as a young girl.

Of course, that would mean that Future Alec didn't know to send things back 65 years to meet Past Alec because he had already experienced it. But he could very well have just decided to send everyone back there to meet himself to ensure the future happened the way it had. That he had discovered Kagame's plan and sabotaged it to try and ensure that Kagame didn't succeed. Both Alec and Kagame not realizing the timelines would diverge, and Kiera not being selected because Alec knew it was supposed to be her, but for some other reason.

I'm kind of surprised that Kagame isn't alive yet in the past. Kagame's an old man. Alec is in his very late teens. I didn't get the impression that Future Alec was almost 20 years older than Kagame. I keep getting the impression that Kagame and Alec are supposed to know each other on a personal level as adults. I kept thinking it was going to be an early childhood thing, but the age difference doesn't seem to allow that.
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#13 Apr 08 2013 at 6:03 PM Rating: Good
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Seems like it's more of an "unchangeable future" sort of thing. I think the imagery used was standing on a beach holding a bucket with an tidal wave approaching. But there are some who are hoping that if their bucket is big enough, they will be able to stop that tidal wave.
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#14 Jun 24 2013 at 5:25 PM Rating: Good
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Season 2 has started up in the US. Last week's episode dropped a bit of a surprise on me. I really didn't think of that crazy guy from the future potentially being Alec's father. Which kind of makes for a weird time loop. Of course it could all be a lie and the drug is just showing Alec what his brain was piecing together from just seeing Mr. Crazy earlier.
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