Second Look: Continuum Season 1, Episode 3 – “Wasting Time”

Continuum Season 1, Episode 3 “Wasting Time”
Written by Simon Barry
Directed by David Frazee
Aired June 10, 2012 on Showcase

“Wasting Time”, to some degree, is a fitting title for Continuum‘s third episode; it is an hour of manufactured, mostly contained drama, but its actions serve to introduce a few important concepts, and plot threads, for season one to follow. There are throwaway serial killer plots, sci-fi gibberish about super soldiers and HGH, and some awkward introduction of the season’s core themes – but at the same time, it is an intriguing episode that adds layers to Continuum‘s world… and features one of the show’s best fight scenes, to boot.

The biggest issue with “Wasting Time” is the story it frames itself around; when Travis suddenly falls deathly ill, Sonya (who we learn used to be a doctor) begins harvesting the pituitary glands of young men, in order to harvest enough human growth hormone to keep her super-soldier/de facto revolutionary leader from dying. It’s a silly enough premise on its face, one that ignores anything interesting Continuum might have to say about medicine and the military under corporate rule – and instead spends most of its time with Carlos and Kiera (leading the newly formed Liber8 task force) down a rabbit hole to nowhere.

Focusing so much on Carlos and Kiera’s investigation into Sonya’s behavior does provide an entryway into more interesting stories – Kiera’s willingness to lie to everyone to get home, and Kellogg’s defection from Liber8 – “Wasting Time” struggles to balance all of these elements, and even its own credulity, when Kiera is scanning genetic code from a sperm bank (or guiding a medical examiner through his own autopsy) and Carlos is just standing there like some drooling idiot. And with “Wasting Time” opening on a flashforward of Kiera arresting Sonya (who people randomly refer to as the ‘Queen of Hearts’, which I don’t think really continues throughout the series), one might expect those two threads to meet, or at least give some space to define Sonya as a character.

Unfortunately, it does not; the serial killer angle not only proves to be a dumb one, but it pulls away and takes space from so many other emerging threads of Continuum‘s first season, especially as the audience immediately knows Kiera and Carlos are trying to hunt down Sonya. What “Wasting Time” doesn’t answer in this episode is why she matters to Liber8, information that would help shape the infighting beginning in Kagame’s absence and Travis’s sudden fragility; she is positioned between Kellogg and Curtis (who spend the first half of the episode measuring their dicks while Travis sits on life support), but her presence is merely of one acting in support of Travis, mostly uninterested in the group immediately fracturing around her.

It’s an early missed opportunity for Continuum, which instead attempts to use misdirection and some formulaic cop investigation scenes as a gateway into a story about the flat power structure of Liber8. There is one interesting thread that emerges – Kellogg contacting and meeting with Kiera, where they’re later set up in a house rigged with explosives – but for the most part, “Wasting Time” mostly pushes Travis to the sidelines to push Curtis briefly to the forefront, giving him a nascent psychopathic bent that resolves pretty quickly when he dies trying to use Kiera’s Future Gun on her following his fight with Carlos. Problem is, “Wasting Time” doesn’t do much with Curtis either, a one-note character who riles up the faces of Liber8 (minus Lucas) for some short-term drama – his death should feel like a major escalation in the tension between Liber8 and the Protector they seethe over so much, but instead feels perfunctory, written off with an unexplained convolution (why wouldn’t Curtis know the gun had biometric readers built into it?) and Carlos’s hand-waving away an internal investigation into what happened as a thank you to Kiera.

It’s a really weird plot, one that has interesting concepts, but not nearly enough room to expound on them, with multiple scenes discussing anonymous dead sperm donors. The investigation just takes up too much space with an uninteresting trail of bread crumbs, leave little room for anything else to develop in the episode – and considering it unceremoniously offs a character while making another look like a useless (though impressively strong) dumbass, it leaves some of the more intriguing, Alec-focused moments of “Wasting Time” feel underdeveloped. It might help if the plot went somewhere; instead, Kiera just kind of shrugs at the end when she notes Liber8 has synthesized enough hormone to keep Travis going indefinitely, rendering most of the episode’s contents moot with just a few lines of dialogue.

In between those moments, we begin to see the Sadler family saga beginning to take shape; Alec’s stepfather and stepbrother Julian are clearly getting themselves into something (his father holds a meeting, handing out fliers while talking about food production technology and how its used to control a population), and pulling Alec’s mother along with them, as she pleads with Alec to at least consider her husband’s point of views on technology (a decade later, and the unintentional allusions to our current reality are quite prescient, actually) – though knowing what we already know about Alec, this is not going to stop being a point of conflict within the family anytime soon. In “Wasting Time”, it’s mostly just alluded to in a brief conversation between mother and son; unfortunately, with so much time spent on the HGH goose chase, this story is one of a few not given much room to develop.

However, there’s no denying the climactic scene of this episode, which begins as another generic Continuum shootout between Kellogg and Curtis, until they drop their guns and begin duking it out, with some incredibly satisfying fisticuffs. Shoutout to stunt coordinator Kimani Ray Smith, who stages each punch and throw with incredible weight, giving room for moments like Carlos’s shocked face when Curtis begins pounding on him, and Kiera’s reaction to being thrown through an office window; it’s easily the most kinetic action sequence of the first three episodes, a testament to good editing and Continuum realizing it is more powerful the more personal it gets, a philosophy that only grows stronger when its characters stop posturing and toss their guns aside, fighting it out with wars of words or fists, the latter of which are an absolute highlight of “Wasting Time”.

“Wasting Time” ends in a more physically explosive place (Liber8 tries to two birds, one stone their problems with Kiera and Kellogg by blowing them both up), but it’s really the fight scene preceding it that gives the episode some much-needed life. Otherwise, this is purely an hour of table-setting, establishing some of the internal conflicts between the emerging clans of the season (the Sadler separatists and Liber8) as it begins to tease out more characters and interpersonal dynamics. It’s a bumpy ride, undoubtably, but one that finishes much stronger than it starts, ending with a series of minor reveals that nonetheless effectively set the stage for the rest of the season to follow.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Kiera gets confused by rock, paper, scissors – and more amusingly, doesn’t understand all the packaging around her new Bluetooth device. “No wonder you have so much excess trash,” she remarks to Alec.
  
• Kellogg sitting down in a diner with a live bomb is quite a desperate move, and one Kiera hilariously treats as an afterthought.
  
• Lucas manipulating networks, payment processing systems, and delivery services with a grin is fun, but would someone even recognize the systems of 60 years ago? It’s not illogical considering Lucas is supposedly a savant of some sorts, but it’s certainly eyebrow raising how easy it all is for him, considering I see teenagers who can’t navigate Windows file systems in 2025.
  
• Carlos strangely decided to ‘take the hit’ of Curtis’s death for Kiera, even though she’s done basically nothing to be honest or helpful to him.
  
• Also hilarious that Roland and Julian don’t clean up after their meeting, leaving it to Alec’s mom. Men!
  
• “Sperm from a Nobel Prize winner goes for how much these days?” is just a hilarious line of dialogue.
  
• Kellogg’s fake lead for Kiera is an H.G. Wells reference.
  
• Kiera realizing there’s a bomb where Kellogg is tied up because it happened when she tried to capture Sonya is cute and convenient, but it feels cheap in the moment.
  
• The episode ends with Kiera stealing the last piece of the time travel device out of police evidence; “A girl’s gotta have secrets”, she tells Alec.
  
• “Wait until the phone company is the government.”