Second Look: Continuum Season 1, Episode 9 – “Family Time”

Continuum Season 1, Episode 9 “Family Time”
Written by Floyd Kane
Directed by William Waring
Aired July 29, 2012 on Showcase

“Maybe it’s best to stop living for a future that might not even happen.” – Kellogg

For the most part, Continuum‘s first season has done a solid job finding balance between its many competing narrative priorities, as it lays out the broad strokes of its overarching story through the show’s first ten episodes. Thanks to that consistency, an episode like “Family Time”, when it kicks into action only a few minutes into the episode, is an exciting proposition as a penultimate episode – which, to varying degrees, “Family Time” delivers on. But it is an hour that’s also a bit of a victim to its own hubris, an episode whose vagaries, obfuscated details, and thin one-off characters subvert integral parts of “Family Time” – which, as Kagame notes, is the beginning of it all, marked by the death of Roland Randol and the subsequent radicalization of Julian on what would become known as “Theseus Day”.

“Family Time” takes a rather dark interpretation of its title, with deaths in 2077 and 2012 bookending the shootout at the Randol family farm. Importantly, both of these deaths, both of which come from at the hands of the state – Kellogg’s sister by Kiera, and Randol by Vancouver PD – and both of which spark the journeys of two critical players in Continuum‘s world in their subsequent timelines. What begins as a gesture towards revolution – Laura stealing detonators, while Julian and his friends ordered massive amounts of fertilizer 60 years in the past – ends up in the deaths of the family members that inspired Kellogg and Julian; unfortunately, “Family Time” tries to build parallels between these stories without a real coherent thesis beyond the influence of trauma on a young man’s decision-making.

For Julian, it all begins when Kiera and Carlos show up at the Randol family farm, where she inevitably runs into Alec – and soon after, Carlos takes a bullet to the gut, when they discover a barn containing vans full of rigged explosives. And it’s here where “Family Time” begins to falter on its own premise a bit; Julian, whose radicalization has clearly accelerated since the events of “Time’s Up”, employs his hillbilly friends (including an outspoken redhead named Hoyt) to take police officers hostage, before shooting Carlos in the stomach and setting off a showdown between Julian’s juvenile little splinter group and Kiera (with an on-site assists from Alec along the way, of course).

The problem lies not in Julian’s arc itself, but in how haphazardly it comes to its natural fruition in this episode. The signposts of a dynamic character arc are there throughout the season, but the scenes of Julian’s radicalization – first by his father and family’s circumstances, then the results of Liber8’s recent actions – are most suggestive of depth than representative of it. It makes him an interesting cypher for ideas about revolution and radicalization, but how it represents the genesis of an identity – which he chooses the moment he shoots Carlos, and tries to take control of the situation at the farm with his idiot cavalry – comes across a bit sudden and drastic, which flattens his character’s arc into something two-dimensional. It certainly doesn’t help the episode telegraphs the death of Randal pretty hard throughout the hour, especially when the tactical teams show up and immediately assess the situation incorrectly, assuming that Randal was the one radicalized to violence, and had taken his own family hostage against the police.

Marrying his acceptance of violence into his life to Kellogg’s also feels flimsy; it really seems like the focus of this story should be on the fact Kiera kills someone from a helicopter, and that she feels no guilt about the actions that take the life of Kellogg’s sister – or at the very least, focus a little more in the body of the episode on how her death shaped Kellogg’s decision to take up her place in the revolution, joining Liber8 and getting tied up in the events that led him to 2012 (where Kiera notes she continues to be present for people he loves dying). One can see the skeleton of a really compelling episode tying his plight to Julian’s – but strangely, “Family Time” embraces neither, opting instead for a more superficial story that focuses on the dramatic fallout of Randal’s death as a shocking moment, rather than exploring the catalyst it is obviously meant to be.

That focus, on Randal’s death and the threat of Carlos’s death (more on him in a minute), robs a lot of potential depth from the story; characters like Hoyt and missions to get Carlos out of a closet take up valuable space, where the Alec/Julian conflict could’ve been developed a bit further, or another flashback to give some pathos to both Kellogg and Kiera – who strangely ends her day of shooting anti-corporate rednecks by having a rather suggestive (and unresolved) visit to Kellogg’s yacht, but one of many strangely undercooked choices packed into this momentous, yet strangely uneventful hour.

Speaking of Carlos, “Family Time” also kind of ironically points out how little Carlos matters to the larger mechanics of this first season; sidelining him for the entirety of the episode – where he is seemingly near death, though his mortality is never a real moment of tension – and giving Kiera her suit back (powered up and repainted by Alec, just in the nick of time) really points out how little he’s provided to investigations except some beefy fists and a lot of head-scratching investigative choices. It’s not something that derails the episode, but it certainly doesn’t help that nobody exactly misses him while he’s sidelined, unable to offer his whimsically goofy investigative mind – even the moment where Kiera emotionally tells him she lies to her friend (him) every day and hates it, the unexpected emotional high point of the hour, feels a bit flat because it’s all incidental, information to be forgotten when Carlos regains consciousness and his normal level of mental ineptitude.

It all amounts to an hour that bookends some really intriguing developments with a handful of undercooked elements, making for a bumpy, inelegant episode, one that is given an import (as Kagame says, this is the beginning of everything he is) it struggles at time to convey through the episode’s actual movements. “Family Time” is not a bad hour of TV, by any means; but it is certainly less propulsive an hour than it probably needs to be, a penultimate episode that feels like it only skims the surface of its own potential.

Grade: C

Other thoughts/observations:

• Kagame talks about monocropping and the destruction of agriculture, something that’s been a debate for decades in agriculture around the world in the past decade.
  
• “We Fonnegras are pretty hard stock.” I like to think Carlos has a mom who is more stocky and muscular than him somehow.
  
• Alec… is strangely lost amidst everything happening in this episode. It’s an odd choice, though we’ll obviously see how this event affects him in future episodes and seasons.
  
• Another odd byproduct of this episode’s creative choices: Liber8 watches the whole situation at the farm unfold while watching on TV. After a season of them inserting themselves within history, this seems an odd decision to sit this one out (especially if Kagame really means what he says, and this event is particularly important to his own becoming).
  
• Kiera, to Kellogg: “Does this conversation come in interesting?”
  
• Also… does Kiera really bang Kellogg? If so, I wish this season had dug a little further into the tension explored in her flashback in “The Politics of Time”, and how that changed their relationship moving forward.
  
• The episode ends with Julian getting a phone call… from Kagame!
  
• “The two of us are in on a joke eight billion people aren’t going to get.” Kellogg might be a scumbag, but he can certainly be convincing sometimes.