Second Look: Continuum Season 1, Episode 1 – “A Stitch in Time”

Continuum A Stitch in Time

Continuum Season 1, Episode 1 “A Stitch in Time”
Written by Simon Barry
Directed by Jon Cassar
Aired May 27, 2012 on Showcase

Time travel shows are a bitch. Not only is the creative team on a show responsible for setting up two universes (if not more), but also some kind of logical set of rules for affecting the continuity of said universes. Continuum, a Canadian science fiction series from Simon Barry that aired on Showcase and SyFy from 2012 – 2015, is a series very much occupied with these conceptual ideas – but takes a slightly different approach, deriving a natural endpoint of our current world and working backwards to observe its genesis, examining concepts of human rights, the intersection of technology and humanity, and the power of revolutions (both successful and failed) within its archetypal stories of antiheroes, prodigies, and revolutionaries. Though a series that would often get bogged down in its own narrative devices and time-travel mechanics, Continuum‘s four-season run remains an engaging, interesting examination of sociopolitical themes within the structure of dystopian science fiction – the kind that, unfortunately, only grows more prescient with time.

“A Stitch In Time”, Continuum‘s incredibly busy, intriguing pilot episode, opens on an elderly man making a speech, neatly laying out the path from our time to this fictional 2077, where corporations bailed out the failed governments of the world, trading in the personal freedoms of their populations for the compromise of conglomerate-led salvation. “Today, all that changes”, the man named Edouard Kagame says – and then all of the massive buildings behind him explode and crumble, killing 30,000 people (and 20 corporate board members) in the name of violent separatist group Liber8, in pursuit of what Kagame calls the “survival and success of liberty”.

It’s there we meet Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols), a Vancouver police officer involved in the arrest of Kagame – and someone who immediately makes for an interesting protagonist choice. The following scenes in 2077 firmly establish her as a literal device for the Corporate Congress, a corporate cop who enforces the law by beating up suspects and placing tags inside their necks when they’re simply suspected in the act of a crime. She carries a futuristic gun (think a less creepy version of the gun from the video game Control), wears a suit full of advanced technology, and gleefully capes for the corporations, including denouncing the Liber8 attack, dismissing them as mindless terrorists who deserve to be publicly executed.

Continuum A Stitch in Time

She makes for a great entryway into Continuum‘s dystopian future, where governments went broke and sought financial salvation from corporations – who in turn, predictably pushed the boot down on almost all of society under the guise of humanity’s well-being. Kiera, whose husband works for one of the corporations attacked by Liber8, are both staunch defenders of the system they’ve clearly benefited from, hosting dinner parties while debating the forgotten philosophies of democracy over wine while they watch news of Liber8’s impending execution on fancy holographic hand terminals.

Our time there is brief, however; after meeting her husband and son (who gives her mother a army man toy as a keepsake), Kiera heads off to the televised Liber8 execution – and subsequently gets pulled into the past when the prisoners somehow create a time vortex at their execution site using a vague sci-fi device, dropping them all into 2012 Vancouver, where Continuum is truly set.

From there, “A Stitch in Time” begins to open its lens, as Kiera chases down one of the Liber8 members (who points out they accidentally travelled 60 years into the past, not six) and tries to connect to the corporate police technology embedded in her suit and brain. The answer she receives, is perhaps the most interesting part of Continuum‘s presence; it is answered by a 17-year old computer whiz named Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen), who begins talking to Kiera after she connects to an experimental radio frequency he’s been testing in his nerdy computer hacker-esque lab.

Continuum A Stitch in Time

Though Kiera is the protagonist of the series, “A Stitch in Time” slowly reveals Alec as perhaps the most important part of the show’s premise, as his arc to the man we see in the 2077 scenes is integral to all the show’s plotlines. As we slowly learn, Alec is the orchestrator of this world’s future; he creates the liquid chip technology future technology is built on, he bails out the Canadian government, and as we see, he clearly has something to do with the event that takes place at Liber8’s execution scene in the episode’s opening scenes. Alec is really the key to the series; his arc is just as central to Continuum‘s character stories, though much of that is only hinted to in the pilot episode (like when we see Alec leave his nerd den and sees his family in the house with a group of people, where his father notes he’s “not quite ready” for something).

The other big pieces of “A Stitch in Time” introduces us to the 2012 Vancouver Police Department, where Continuum would form the basis of its more procedural elements, especially over the show’s 10-episode first season. Kiera manages to fake her way into pretending she’s hunting Liber8 (who, obviously, is a completely unknown entity to anyone at this point) after running into Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster), a detective investigating the crash site where Cameron and Liber8 landed. Though this clearly adds some unnecessary additional tensions to the story (mostly Cameron hiding her real identity from the extremely gullible VPD), Fonnegra’s straight man provides a solid archetype to exist alongside Cameron, someone whose point of view (and morality) is firmly grounded in a different world than Kiera’s.

Fonnegra’s mostly by-the-book approach quickly makes a good counterpart for Kiera’s rash decisions, driven by her desperation to get back to her time; she makes dangerous tactical decisions (aided by her super suit – and her practiced confidence of having worked for the most powerful entity in the world in 2077), is clearly willing to lie and use violence to manipulate events to her liking. Continuum appears to present these actions as noble, but there’s a certain lack of righteousness in its tone when she beats up a teenager (and injects them with truth serum) in 2077, or when, without her powers or influence, she’s unable to convince former Sadtech engineer Lucas Graham to confess – until she threatens killing his family before his mother can be born, of course.

Continuum A Stitch in Time

She is a byproduct of her environment, a response to the vicious militarism displayed by Liber8 in their brief time in 2012. Liber8 and its members – except the loudmouthed Matthew Kellogg, who tries to convince everyone not to start the revolution 60 years ahead of schedule – are a group created in response to people like Kiera (who are called “Protectors”, a bullshit sci-fi term that also speaks volumes about how the corporations of 2077 define their own actions), and their swift, violent destruction of the Vancouver PD, both in the streets and in their home precinct, certainly makes them an intriguing entity.

Even more interesting is the twist that Continuum throws into the mix with Liber8, revealing that none of the group have seen their leader since coming to 2012. Assuming he didn’t make the trip, there’s a vacuum at the top of Liber8’s leadership, a tension briefly hinted at when the intellectual and militaristic voices clash over what their initial strategies to fit in should be. “A Stitch in Time” is way too busy to introduce all of Liber8’s personalities in their short scenes, but the brief glimpses of Travis, Kellogg, and Lucas already paint Liber8 as a focused group of disparate ideas and personalities, all somehow guided by Kagame to unite as a single front against all the shrouded faces sitting in high towers around them.

Continuum A Stitch in Time

It’s a lot, yes – and the events of the pilot play out in rapid, brutal fashion in its back half, with a drawn-out gunfight leading to an off-screen massacre where Liber8 rip through the Vancouver police office to free Lucas from their holding cells. It’s the one time where “A Stitch In Time” gets way too bullet friendly, with long, drawn-out shooting matches with no real important or meaningful interactions; it is when Continuum feels the most perfunctory, in the few scenes where it devolves into standard cop action show fare, faceless bad guys and main characters firing off dozens of rounds in random directions and hitting nothing (though we do get some good Kiera super suit moments throughout, including using electrical charges to

Strip away the noise and some of the more pilot-y and procedural elements, and it’s clear “A Stitch in Time” is setting up the first season of Continuum to focus on two stories: a somewhat grounded story about family (those we have and those we choose), and a larger, more ambitious story about humanity and technology, which Kiera only seems concerned with as far as her family is involved. And though Continuum doesn’t have much time to establish its characters and introduce the many facets of its narrative, some of the two-dimensional supporting character work in “A Stitch of Time” is largely forgivable. It may spend a bit too much time chasing and shooting, but Continuum‘s first episode does a great job establishing its world and characters, without spending too much time defining its rules or justifying its conveniences, which allows it to maintain its taut pacing and intriguing setup of the larger ideas and stories it is set to explore in the 41 episodes to come.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

  • Welcome to Continuum reviews! Though hardly a perfect series, Continuum remains a rather prescient little series, and one I’m looking forward to revisiting. Want to watch along? All 4 seasons and 42 episodes are streaming on Amazon Prime!
  • the “8” sculpture in the park we see in 2012 at the end of the episode is missing one of its curves in 2077, suggesting the future is ‘broken’, and 2012 was selected for a reason, not merely an accident of going 60 years instead of 6.
  • I appreciate that 17 year old supertech whizkid Alec may or may not have some privacy issues… he can’t help but peek at Kiera while she’s getting ready for bed, murmuring “you’re so pretty” under his breath, in a way that perfectly captures how unsettling and juvenile his gross invasion of privacy is. Given he turns his camera off, it’s an encouraging sign he’s not the Zuckerberg of his world.
  • A not so encouraging sign: every single thing Kiera does is recorded, thanks to a memory chip implanted in her brain as part of her position with the CPS force.
  • Alec discovers his own prototype Sadtech logo in one of Kiera’s video logs from 2077, one of many little Easter eggs this pilot drops to see how things change (or may not) as the events of 2012 begin to play out and ripple through the show’s timeline.
  • Kiera and others experiencing things like running water and oil-powered vehicles offers brief, quiet moments of reflection, and help separate the people from 2077 from the reality and logic of our world. How do you approach life when those amenities we take for granted simply no longer exist?
  • Most of the dialogue is fairly good for how exposition-heavy it is, but Carlos asking Kiera if she “likes playing hero, or are you just a little bit crazy” is hacky and goofy, in a way that gives the whole affair a bit of character. I honestly kind of like it.
  • Hey, what’s going on with Alec’s stepfather and all those people meeting in the kitchen? And who is that angsty looking teen played by The 100 and Final Destination: Bloodlines‘s Richard Harmon?
  • “The revolution is on our schedule, Kellogg.”

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