Continuum

It’s a nice little scifi show; but the future it paints is entirely out of the realm of possibility. A corporation takes over the Congress, and hi-tech toys, weapons, etc are used to maintain control over the citizens. There are freedom fighters of course, and they come back in time to “change” things. Blah blah. Unending conversations ensue about if science is bad or good, which plays into US cultural fault line between “prohibition (containing, controlling something)” vs “freedom (as in letting go)”, but the fault line is pretty “odd” to begin with, which makes any discussion viewed through its lense even more so.

New generation hi-tech will rip centralized forces apart. Noone will be able to stop this. 1984 does not apply here, not anymore. Maybe Continuum is also trying to give the message the central institutions still can flex some muscle if they wanted to, but in truth, they really can’t.

Continuum necessarily paints its imaginery future as bad, and its freedom fighters with their methods of terror even worse. Main character of the show, a Jodie Foster look-alike who is a cop from the future and defender of the status quo will probably evolve into seeing that future as “bad” as well, not sure how many episodes will that take.

The tech scenes are pretty cool, acting is fine, fighting sequences are also watchable. Continuum does not take many chances with its casting though, besides Carlos and the future cop (a Jodie Foster look-alike as I said before), you keep seeing that guy from Eureka, that girl from Regenesis, that dude from Stargate SG-1 – all established characters from other scifi shows. Lost was a sucky show, but it at least it was courageous in its casting. It brought some very new faces to the forefront.

Is science bad or good? This is such a pointless discussion. If your culture has not entirely gone FUBAR, any sane person can look at the data and see that science is good. Research into particle physics might have made the atomic bomb possible, but in countless other ways, it provided economic advances and improved people’s lives. And .. how many times was The Bomb used? Twice? Which made everyone even more aware how horrible its uses were and then we get the Cold War, which was basically a bitch fight in all but a name.

Continuum’s approach in creating its universe seems to have been to take all major events of late and throw them into a big bowl. Take corporations gone mad, terrorism, freedom fighters, the Congress, technology, throw them into some mix and stir. What seems to have come out of this bowl does not entirely makes sense, things do not fit, hence it does not capture the viewer (well okay, me).

Anyway - I give the show an A on execution, a C- on overall structure.