Continuum: Second Thoughts, And Thirds, And Maybe Fourths!

Welcome back Continuum time travelers!

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR NON CANADIAN VIEWERS!

Quite often, past experiences will colour how we perceive and react to current challenges.

Equally as often, our choices depend on whether we see a similar past event as a failure.

Did we make a mistake or did something happen that we are now trying to change? Are we making up for that failure by trying to alter the event in the present, or the future?

Second Thoughts:

This episode opens with Kiera (Rachel Nichols) taking a cool looking chopper taxi to an area of the city, which, in 2077, is likely Vancouver’s East Hastings Street, or skid row.

There, she discovers a woman who has just bought some form of street drug. Kiera argues briefly with the woman, demanding the drug.

She manages to get it from the other woman, drops it on the ground, steps on it, making it useless. The other woman, now upset, demands, “you’re supposed to be my big sister. Not my keeper.”

As the conversation continues, we discover that Kiera’s sister, Hanna (Max Chadburn), is much like Liber8 in her thinking, “these people have emancipated themselves from the slavery of the system – your system! I don’t want your help. I don’t need it. Leave me alone”. Naturally, Kiera does not take this well.

Meanwhile, in present day Vancouver, Sonya (Lexa Doig) is in the midst of a negotiation with a group of bikers. Travis (Roger Cross) has gotten wind of the friendly chat and watches from a secluded location nearby.

As the deal moves forward to cash being offered, Travis steps out of his vehicle, aims a weapon at Sonya and fires.

Unfortunately for Travis, a biker gets in the way and goes down. Sonya’s vehicle speeds off, not giving Travis another shot. The bikers return fire and Travis’ vehicle speeds off. Just another lazy night on the streets of Vancouver.

Crazy time traveler Jason (Ian Tracy), who entered the story line last season, is very focused on working out some numbers in his head as he paces back and forth.

He also looks around suspiciously as if he feels he is being watched or followed. Obviously, there is much more going on with this guy then we currently know.

Later, Jason has dropped by police headquarters. Carlos (Victor Webster) gets to have a chat with him. He wants to tell Kiera something important. Since she is not there, Carlos offers to relay the information, “you tell her that I think we have freelancers”.

Carlos, as usual, does not have a clue what Jason is talking about. Not a problem, Jason says, he will write it down.

Alec (Erik Knudsen) is with a bunch of friends who are trying to introduce him to a new experience, a drug called “Flash”. The friend advocating it says that it is eye drops that, “triggers a vivid flashback like you’re there again. You know, concerts, first kiss, first shag, hell, even if it has not happened, you can just imagine it like it did. World class head trip.”

The evening goes sideways really quickly in typical drug addled fashion. One of Alec’s friends, who has enjoyed the wonders of this new drug decides to drive with logical consequences quickly following.

After the car accident, Kiera drives Alec home, I assume, from the hospital. He has a red mark on his forehead. After Alec states that he did not try the drug, Kiera worriedly explains that the drug should not be around right now. It is made with knowledge from the future.

Kiera informs Alec the problem with Flash is that, “people looking to escape their lives got locked in their own past”. With deadly seriousness, Kiera tells Alec, “I need you to find out everything you can about Flash”.

Julian (Richard Harmon) is visited by his step-mother (Janet Kidder) in prison. He has asked for more books. Two of the tomes are his father’s journals. His mom has even more information for him.

She shows him a newspaper clipping and tells him that five dead executives were meeting in secret in a building for several pharmaceutical companies, five executives who were normally in competition with each other. The five companies denied that the executives were even meeting until the insurance policies were paid out. They were suppressing cures to sell medicine.

At police headquarters, Carlos, Kiera and Inspector Dillon (Brian Markinson) discuss the new drug that is making the rounds. Kiera blames Liber8, stating that Sonya has the medical knowledge to do it. She thinks the drugs may be payment to the Coalition Kings gang for some service.

Back in prison, a member of the Coalition Kings sits down beside Julian and tells him that he does not need to worry about anything. Julian is clearly being protected for some purpose by somebody on the putside.

A fellow prisoner named Gus (Shaun Omaid) tells Julian that Sonya Valentine is the one making sure he is “safest guy inside these walls”.

Kiera drops by Kellogg’s (Stephen Lobo) boat to ask him about Flash. Her real motive is to call him out. She accuses him of being the one who has introduced a drug from the future into the present day.

Kellogg points out that, although it might make sense to her, he has no interest in producing the drug. He has enough money. “I was really hoping we could get a fresh start, since we will be seeing a lot more of each other”.

Kellogg also adds that this is because they both have a close bond with Alec.

Kiera does not look very impressed. It is a bit odd at this point that Kiera does not seem to believe Kellogg. After all, she can tell when people are lying by using that fancy tech in her head. It should be a simple matter to tell when Kellogg’s sea slug morals are leading him astray.

As she is berating Kellogg for having the audacity to contact Alec, Kiera gets a message from him. There is a multiple shooting at the airport that she should check out. Kiera heads over to investigate, but not before giving Kellogg a final tongue lashing for existing.

At the airport, Kiera, Carlos and Dillon are surveying the scene. There are dead Coalition Kings all over the place. Dillon points out the obvious, “so, on top of civil unrest and a drug epidemic, you’re telling me I’ve got a gang war on my hands”.

Kiera, with the use of her tech, tells Carlos and Dillon that the bad guys were all shot by one person. She also identifies where the killer was waiting for them.

They determine that the shooter would have to be “a bad-ass super-soldier, like Travis”. With Sonya’s group at war with Travis’s people, it is beginning to look more and more possible.

Speak of the devil, Sonya has a chat with Lucas (Omari Newton). He is concerned that Sonya is not taking the situation with Travis seriously, “you need an army.” says Lucas.

And the Coalition Kings are supposed to provide that in return for the drugs”.  So, it was Sonya who was responsible for the drugs. She states that she would like a nonviolent path to achieve their goals.

Kiera meets with Crazy Jason. Jason seems in awe of Alec, although they do not meet. Instead, Kiera begins, “Carlos said you wanted to see me?”

The message lost a little something in the translation, “You said something about freelancers?”

Jason continues to talk to Kiera while he plays chess with several people at once, “I didn’t want to alarm you, but I wanted to let you know that they are here. They’re after me. And, oh, if you find a body all turned inside out with the intestines hanging up from the trees, don’t worry. It’ll be mine”.

Naturally, Kiera wants to know who they are. Jason is happy to provide details, “Itinerant time travelers, prospectors, adventurers, fugitives, they come in all colours. Some say they come here to protect the time line from abuse. Some say they are the abusers!”

“Atomic bomb, cold fusion, Jerry Garcia ice cream, whenever there is a quantum leap in technology, you are going to find freelancers. They might not be doing the inventing, but they are at least pulling the strings”.

Why then, are they after Jason? “Because they can only do what they do if no one sees them for who they are”. They know that Jason knows, so he warns Kiera, “…and now they know that you know”.

Now comes the important point. Kiera asks if they can travel back and forth. “You want to catch a ride home,” finishes Jason, “You know, you won’t be the same person you were when you left”. Kiera then states, “the longer I stay here, the more the future stats slipping away”.

Inspector Dillon is a tad upset. He reads off a list of deaths caused by the drug.He is in the middle of a meeting with Carlos and Kiera when Betty (Jennifer Spence) walks in.

She has an iPad with a photo of a bad guy who is next in line for the top job with the Coalition Kings. She has been tracking him through the GPS on an old cell phone.

Alec visits one of the other car accident victims in hospital. He wants to know more about her experience on the drug.

Alec mentions some things his father told him before he died that did not make sense then, but that Alec would like to try to understand now.

The young woman tells him, maybe all you see is what you hope is true, and not how it actually was.

As he exits the hospital, Kellogg turns up yet again. It really is a little creepy how Kellogg skulks around finding people and just pops up out of the blue. Kellogg pushes Alec a little for a decision; is he on board or not?

When Alec does not give him an answer, Kellogg dangles a carrot – the schematics for the lab, and, “yes, those are dedicated servers”.

Carlos has a face to face with Gabriel (Rick Dobran), the guy in line for the big gang chair. He wants to know what Gabriel knows, but Gabby Gabriel is not talking.

Also, he is doing is what guys who think they are tough always do…a lot of posturing. As they depart in their car, Kiera uses her weapon to plant a tracking chip on Gabriel’s vehicle.

As they tail Gabriel, Kiera suggests that Sonya has paid off the Coalition Kings to take out Travis and used the drugs as collateral.

They track him to a commercial building where he is meeting with Sonya. Sonya tells Gabriel that his boss is dead, so he is in charge, then she walks away. Kiera goes after her, “if we lose Sonya, we lose everything”.

Kiera and Carlos are spotted, and a gunfight ensues. Sonya uses it as a diversion so that she can escape. When she arrives back at her hideout with Lucas, she tells him that she is done getting her hands dirty, “from now on, we no longer associate with criminals or from those who would willingly steal from or exploit the very people that we are trying to liberate. We will use the weakness of the system against it. We will expose hypocrisy and corruption where it lives and we will sacrifice but only when there is no peaceful alternative”.

Nice speech, but what Sonya describes is something a politician should be doing.

Travis is meeting with a gang. He has brought a heavy case with him. He says that he is there on behalf of all the gangs in the city, that the tent is big enough for all of them. He opens the case and several heads role out. Travis has killed the leaders of the gangs. He offers the gangs a new plan; the opportunity to follow him. One by one, the gang members fall into line.

At Alec’s home, he has a vial of Flash. After moments of careful thought, he deposits a drop of the drug into his eye. He sees an image of his mother with a man.

All he can see is the back of the man’s head, but as he turns around, and looks at Alec, Alec realizes that he knows the man. It is Crazy Jason.

Alec meets Kiera at a coffee house. She berates him for finding out that he and Kellogg are talking through Kellogg. Then, once Alec agrees that there will always be full disclosure between the two of them, Kiera asks him to track down all the information he can on a man named Usher.

It is beginning to look like Usher is also a time traveler and may be manipulating events from behind the scenes. As they talk, a young woman enters the coffee shop. Alec flirts with her.

At the prison, Julian is witness to a change of management of sorts. His current protector becomes his past protector as Travis’ people stab Sonya’s guy, “nobody’s going to hurt you, I guarantee you that. I promised Travis that the Syndicate has your back now”.

We learn the fate of Kiera’s sister, Hanna, at the end of the episode. She has taken the drug Flash, and is experiencing hallucinations about a perfect moment in her life.

She seems to come back to the present for a few moments, where she tells Kiera how their father had wanted her to be perfect, but the perfect one was Kiera. Then she falls backward off the building and to her death.

It is obvious that Kiera has a lot going on in her life that affects how she sees things that are happening in the present. She wants to get home to her family, yet, she also feels a need to stop Liber8 from causing damage in the present.

Further to all of this, as Crazy Jason states, there are freelancers arriving who are also messing with the timeline. At this point, Kiera should not be wondering about if she gets home, but if there would be a home to return to with all these people mucking about and altering things.

The longer the series continues, it seems, the more convoluted and involved all of the strings that connect to Kiera and her future become. If she wants to be with her family again, the best solution I can see, would be to bring them back to the present, rather than Kiera attempting to get Back to the Future.

Another device that the writers have not yet used is the concept of sending messages to the future. Kiera knows the habits of her family. She could send messages in the form of whatever passes for e-mails in the future to her family. For example, in another time travel film a person who had gone back in time was able to take out a classified ad in a newspaper that contained a message to that person’s friend.

We all know how Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) sent Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) a message using Western Union in Back To The Future. It would seem like a good idea to make Kiera feel better in 2013, to send a message to her husband and son using one of these methods.

She could even send a message to herself before the accident that sent her back in time to stop her from going in the first place. All of these ideas can prove problematic for writers. Perhaps this is why the writers of Continuum have not yet used these ideas.

Thanks to Kenn for the audio video embed “Good as Gold” music video by Canada’s great folk group Dala (Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther) and additional Continuum images for my analysis, and many thanks to you for stopping by WormholeRiders News Agency!!

We look forward to seeing more of you here at our review site dedicated to our wonderful science fiction series Continuum!

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Regards,

Thank you.

ArcticGoddess1 (Patricia)