Channel Surfers – Continuum Episode 1 “A Stitch In Time”

Welcome to the first edition of Channel Surfers, a place for Justin and I to talk about another one of our passions, good TV programing. Surfers for me is going to be a place to talk about shows that I love, whether it’s episode by episode or the season as a whole. New shows, old shows, shows based on books, any show I want to talk about, I plan on talking about. So for this first edition of Channel Surfers I’m going to talk about a brand new show that just hit the airwaves on the 27th of this month: Continuum.

Continuum is a sci-fi crime drama about a detective from 2077 who gets blasted into 2012 and has to chase down seven of the worlds more wanted terrorists. The series premier starts in 2076, a man is sitting in his office when suddenly cops burst through the door to arrest the man. While they are talking a building blows up in the skyline, the man is then escorted out of the building. It the jumps forward six months to 2077 and a group of people are at a dinner party, we learn during this party that the government fell an untold amount of years ago and that the worlds biggest corporations bailed the government out, this turned Canada’s government into a Corporate Dictatorship.

One of the people from the dinner party show up to an execution of a group that call themselves Liber8 and she is assigned to be inside the chamber to make sure the execution goes according to plan. And of course, it doesn’t. Right as the machine that is going to be used to execute them is activated the members of Liber8 throw various pieces of a metal orb into the center of the machine’s, what I’m assuming to be, power source. Kiera, the detective, jumps forward to try to prevent this but before she can there is a massive blast that destroys everything in the chamber.

Kiera then wakes up in Vancouver in 2012 in a pit that smoldering from the explosion that just transported her back in time. She discovers this jump occurred when she tries to contact her base of operations and a young man, Alec Sadler, in fact created the technology that her police service uses to contact one another. She gets mixed up in an investigation that involves members of Liber8 that the Vancouver Police Department is looking at and claims to be a detective from Philadelphia in order to help them catch the various members of Liber8 that have been set free in 2012. By the end of the episode she has been accepted by the VPD and she has discovered Alec’s identity as the individual who will one day create all the technology that her world is built upon and that he will create one of the biggest corporations in her time, making him a target of Liber8.

I really enjoyed what this show is doing, it has a really great idea behind it and very strong performances from all of the characters involved. Everything they say is plausible to me, the government being bailed out by corporations and them then forming the government, all the tech is very cool, especially the suit worn by Kiera. One thing I noticed that was wrong with the show is that in the first half hour they gave a bit of misinformation, they changed between Kiera having to chase down 7 or 6 members of Liber8. They say there are seven of them at the top of the show, then in 2012 when she finds out one of them is arrested she says 7 to go, and then for the rest of the show she says there are 6 to catch, it was mildly confusing to say the least.

All in all I enjoyed the premier of Continuum quite a lot, I can see it quickly building into a can’t miss show. I’ve been missing the Canadian sci-fi shows since Stargate Universe was cancelled and this is now here to fill that void in my heart. I can’t wait to see where this show is going.