Continuum (US) Season 1 Discussion Thread (Spoilers)

[Guy Gardener]

All your concerns are going to be addressed if you pay attention.

But we already figured out in the pilot that Old Alec needed Kiera to go back and meet himself in the past while staying ignorant that she was being manipulated and that together they would hunt Liber8... So yes Liber8 needed to be caught after the bombing, otherwise they couldn't drag Kiera downstream who wouldn't be there in 2012 to supply L'll Alec with tech, adventure and the lessons as to how he should grow up to be the man the world needs to save it.

What should be clear from episode two is that the members of Liber8 who backstepped have no idea that they are patsies or their role in the greater game.

[Borgminister]

stj wrote:

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Persuading yourself that a single decaptiation strike on the corporate heads is worth the collateral damage just isn't the same as wanting to personally kill a victim with your own hands. In the first case you can easily ignore the reality of other human beings dying. It's like having no problem with drone strikes. In the second case it a matter of reveling in it. It's like taking fun photos at Abu Grhaib. The mentalities are emotional opposites.

Uh, yeah, what you just said...

[Christopher]

I don't understand this line of debate. People are questioning why the characters who were introduced as violent bad guys are still being portrayed as violent bad guys? The whole point is that they're ruthless. The cause they fight for is one most of us would support, all else being equal; what makes them worse than Kiera is the extreme and brutal methods they use.

And come on, anyone who's willing to kill 30,000 people to strike down a mere 20 corporate heads is already "reveling in it." There are plenty of more surgical, targeted ways to take out a select few targets. Causing that much mass death isn't about strategic precision, it's about destruction for its own sake. It's about making yourself feel powerful by causing major destruction and spreading terror far and wide. Drone strikes are a terrible analogy because those are much more surgical, specifically designed to minimize collateral damage. Liber8's actions were designed to maximize it. We're talking about acts that killed one thousand five hundred innocents for every one "guilty" target. That's excessive by any standard.

[stj]

Real drone strikes are not as surgical as propaganda would have you believe. It is rather offensive to pass off the many murders by drone as mere surgical strikes.

Just as you have managed to convince yourself that this is acceptable, Liber8's members could have convinced themselves it was acceptable. Especially since, unlike drone strikes that constantly take out alleged key leaders whose removal never turns out to make a damn bit of difference, Liber8 really did take out a substantial portion of the ownership in hopes of making a difference.

Also, the implicit notion that Liber8 should have used its own drones is preposterous. Really, the reason for targeting the whole building is because the real target is so heavily shielded that only an indirect attack can succeed. The declaration there are more targeted methods available to Liber8 has absolutely no support. Outrage at questioning the surgical precision of drone strikes has clouded your judgment.

None of this means Liber8 is correct in its judgments, any more than condemning drone strikes as murderous means the targets are correct in whatever they are alleged to do. But it does mean that if you convince yourself the casualties are inevitable collateral damage, then it feels different from killing someone with your own hands.

[Guy Gardener]

The Goal was for old Alec to amass power and not seem culpable.

To hit those twenty targets when they weren't together would have required the destruction of 20 buildings, that would have had to have been struck simultaneously or increasingly heightened security in the wake of successive attacks would make each target then more unhittable than the last.

[cylkoth]

The difficulty in watching Liber8's actions, is not in their ruthlessness, it's the sheer insanity of causing so many deaths in a time period they weren't expecting to back step to. The collateral damage they choose not to address to the future timeline-one that spawned them, makes their disregard of innocent lives in the present difficult to swallow. At least, you could assume they'd rationalize the deaths they caused back in the future as sacrificing people who participated or benefited from the oppressive corporate regimes. But here, it does come off as mindless, pointless violence in order to make Kiera's quest to capture them all the more heroic. If they showed them adjusting their tactics-as Kellogg tried to convince them, the group and their desire to thwart the coming corp-pocalyse would come off a little better.

[Guy Gardener]

Kellog is awesome.

Kieras heroism becomes more grey as the fabric of the future becomes clearer.

She's as thoughtless as liber8 in some ways.

[jayceee]

Season 2 will start airing in April.

http://www.showcase.ca/blogs/528/con...for-season-two

[Tom]

So has anyone else been watching this on Syfy? Season finale in next week. Of course, many of you have seen the Canadian broadcast in advance.

I like the show, it has kind grown on me (or is it Rachael Nichols hmmm). I do find the corporate revolution thing a bit to much though. Especially in Vancouver, a non-US city, if it took place in Washington D.C. or New York it would have carried more weight with that plot line.

[stj]

I like to think that Vancouver as the world metropolis of future capitalism proves that wild-eyed scifi speculation isn't dead.

Yes, I've been watching. It appears they're opting for a causal loop instead of a temporal paradoxes, but it's still too soon to be certain. Liber8 at least is acting much more like a genuine revolutionary movement, albeit one of a highly Blanquist nature.

Also, yes, Rachel Nichols.

[Zod]

I have been watching and really liking it. The most recent episode was very strong imo.

I am glad its getting a 2nd season as it deserves one. Will Sci Fi channel pick it up? Hope so. Their track record with shows like this is dismal compared to their love of reality TV like blackout (where they scare people in the dark-dumbest show I have ever heard of)

[Christopher]

Zod wrote:

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I am glad its getting a 2nd season as it deserves one. Will Sci Fi channel pick it up? Hope so.

Yes, they have already picked it up, but the airdate isn't yet known. However, Syfy is currently showing new Lost Girl episodes just a day after their Canadian premiere, so hopefully the same will be true here.

Their track record with shows like this is dismal compared to their love of reality TV like blackout (where they scare people in the dark-dumbest show I have ever heard of)

It's not love, it's money. TV is a business, and the shows that cost less to make and bring in higher ratings are the ones that any network is best able to afford. People keep blaming the networks, but the simple fact is, reality shows dominate because that's what the audience wants to see -- they're a way that networks can get high ratings with low overhead, so from a business sense, they're a necessary evil no matter how much the executives would prefer to be doing smart, critically acclaimed scripted programming. At least the profits from the popular, lowest-common-denominator stuff help fund the better stuff.

And no, Syfy's track record with scripted SF shows is not dismal. This came up just the other day in the Lost Girl thread (starting with post 76). If you compare the track record of genre shows on SciFi/Syfy with those on the major networks, you find that Syfy has a distinctly higher ratio of longer-running shows. We've seen a passel of mediocre genre shows premiere and die quickly on the broadcast networks in the past couple of seasons, but the only cancellations Syfy has had in that interval were Eureka (after its fifth season, making it roughly tied with Battlestar Galactica as the second longest-running show in the network's history), Sanctuary (after four seasons), and Alphas (after two full seasons). Go back a little farther and you can add Stargate Universe (2 seasons) and Caprica (one season), but they still got more than network shows like Journeyman, FlashForward, Terra Nova, Alcatraz, Awake, Last Resort, 666 Park Avenue, or Do No Harm got.

And of course Continuum is a Canadian import, so it's not as costly for Syfy because they don't pay for its production. Thus they can more easily afford to air it and have less incentive to cancel it. That's why so much of the current Syfy scripted-drama lineup consists of imports.

[Zod]

Perhaps the perception of Syfy as a show-killer comes, paradoxically, from the fact that they do keep their genre shows on longer than most networks, long enough to win more of a loyal audience that's upset when they do come to an end, whereas the legion of fast-dying SF/F shows on the broadcast networks don't hang around long enough, or aren't good enough, for the audience to care as much about their ending. I know I'm a lot more upset about losing Alphas after two seasons than I was about losing Terra Nova, Awake, Alcatraz, or FlashForward after one

You posted this is the other thread and I guess that is why I said what I said.