Continuum (US) Season 1 Discussion Thread (Spoilers)

[Guy Gardener]

No matter what they told their sponsors about selling new cars and cellphones, Continuum's chief audience, 14 year old boys, hadn't been born yet when Time Cop and Time Trax were relevant.

Time Cop is awful. Time Cop II is worse, but I actually enjoyed the Time Cop TV show.

Time Trax would have been a thousand times better if Mia Sara had survived the pilot (or her identical ancestor hadn't just wandered off) and taken over the show... There was an episode of Time Trax where Darian Lambert had to find and capture from the wild an endangered rare Koala that was the missing ingredient to foil a plague ravaging the future.

You know that a shit plot like that makes the worst filth from Voyager seem like War and Peace or Snow Crash.

Mia Sara was the wife from Time Cop?

Small world.

 

[Admiral2]

No matter what they told their sponsors about selling new cars and cellphones, Continuum's chief audience, 14 year old boys, hadn't been born yet when Time Cop and Time Trax were relevant.

Doesn't change the fact that It's Been Done.

Time Cop is awful. Time Cop II is worse, but I actually enjoyed the Time Cop TV show.

The show's saving grace: No JCVD.

Time Trax would have been a thousand times better if Mia Sara had survived the pilot (or her identical ancestor hadn't just wandered off) and taken over the show... There was an episode of Time Trax where Darian Lambert had to find and capture from the wild an endangered rare Koala that was the missing ingredient to foil a plague ravaging the future.

You know that a shit plot like that makes the worst filth from Voyager seem like War and Peace or Snow Crash.

Time Trax was just fine as a series, and every show has one or two shit eps...VOY just seemed to have an overabundance of them.

 

[TheSeeker]

Hard to believe this is just premiering in the States. It feels like forever since I watched the season finale.

 

[Vendikarr]

No matter what they told their sponsors about selling new cars and cellphones, Continuum's chief audience, 14 year old boys, hadn't been born yet when Time Cop and Time Trax were relevant.

Doesn't change the fact that It's Been Done.

Then you should stop reading books, watching television and going to the movies, because yes, the plots have all been done.

This show is the same as the others mentioned only in the basic description of the show concept "Future cop travels through time to capture escaped criminals."

After that, the story is all in what they do with it. And from looking at the details, the three shows mentioned are each very different.

 

[Christopher]

^Right. Every story's been done. Story is a framework, a foundation on which you build. It's how you build on that framework that matters. And I find Continuum to be a far more interesting, nuanced, and creative take on the "cop pursuing criminals into the past" framework than Time Trax or especially Timecop ever managed to be.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Looper blew chunks.

Same framework.

Criminals chasing criminals in the past.

 

[Christopher]

Looper was more like The Terminator crossed with Akira, along with some very original takes on things.

 

[jayceee]

Every story's been done. Story is a framework, a foundation on which you build. It's how you build on that framework that matters.

The bare bones are easy to state and outline.

These days one can spend hours and hours reading all about them, such as on web sites like tvtropes.org

And I find Continuum to be a far more interesting, nuanced, and creative take on the "cop pursuing criminals into the past" framework than Time Trax or especially Timecop ever managed to be.

Putting together all the bare bone tropes in a manner which holds the audiences' attention, seems to be the hard part (whether it is a tv show, movie, book, play, etc ...).

They seem to have done a good job of it in season 1 of Continuum. (There was an episode or two which I thought were clunkers).

 

[Guy Gardener]

Looper was more like The Terminator crossed with Akira, along with some very original takes on things.

They don't say it very clearly but after the Machines took over the world, and although they were losing the new war for control, until they lost that new war completely, they were the masters of the planet after a fashion and the Terminators were Skynet's Police officers who administered the law of the land which was the systematic extermination of humanity...

"Terminator" was a Time Cop chasing criminals in the past.

The T-80 in T2 was a dirty cop on the take.

Ditto with T3.

The force was rife with corruption.

 

[stj]

Tony Amendola's plan apparently was to get captured?
If the real attack was to take place in the past, the blowing up of the Corporate Congress wasn't necessary. Nor was it necessary to do the temporal circle jerk in the execution chamber, where guards like Kiera interfered.

I am really getting to despise the getting captured is the plan plot twist. It's just kinky, but not in a good way.

So-called terrorist organizations are not generally comprised of trained soldiers carrying out military attacks. If and when political groups using force have such soldiers and weapons, they tend to start a guerrilla war in a particular area where governmental authority is weak. Really, the more or less random nature of the assaults tend to stem from the inability to mount such attacks against authority.

Generally, as in Syria currently, military attacks on the government tend to be mounted from areas under the opposition's control. And these operations are rarely self-financed. Usually the money and a steady flow of recruits come from outsiders. Guerrilla operations with some control over the countryside may collect taxes on farmers/peasants.

The only scene in which the Liber8 "gang" seemed like something that could exist in the real world was the stepfather's political meeting.

On the plus side, the lead is fetching. Brian Markinson's character doesn't reallhy care about her skills, he just wants in her pants so badly he's hired a foreign cop without references!

 

[Guy Gardener]

(No spoilers from me I think. This is only stuff I knew after watching the first episode.)

You missed something.

There's a smirk you can't help but knowing that it's from a man in the know who really shouldn't be.

Forces are in conflict to produce fate in a crucible like a bathtub.

Besides if Liber8 had control of the prison, this is how they decided to use it, to travel back in time 5 years to upset the government before they were wanted, ironically using the states own execution device which was supposed to kill them as power source to jump back in time?

Pishaw!

And her husband!

Trying to get her to runaway prematurely before shit got real because he knows something bad is about to happen, did we actually see him hand over part of a temporal device? Never mind, his complicity was obvious, but his complicity in what and for who?

Surely not Liber8?

He's Alec's second, making him one of the most powerful Personal assistants on Earth... Vice President?

They cast the fricking smoking man as old Alec!

That guy just wheezes conspiracies.

(Yes Alec was the one in the future smirking before and after Kiera was taken who I mentioned earlier. It was totally a "Mission Accomplished" smirk.)

Liber8 is a pawn and it's blatantly obvious from the first episode.

Besides, who else but a billionaire industrialist could invent a time machine?

That's how the Ra's Al Ghul tracked down Batman's secret identity. He looked to see who was buying the tech that Batman was using and drew a bee line form those purchases to the Batcave.

Carry on.

 

[The Green Mushroom]

I liked it. I don't know if it will have legs, but I liked it.

The Cigarette Smoking Man does seem to know something in the future.

I can believe the technology that FutureCop has.

I don't think the show is a ripoff of either Time Trax or Time Cop. Time Cop was more about preventing the misuse of time travel than anything else, while Time Trax, as I remember, was simply (mostly) about rounding up the fugitives. Continuum is more nuanced. If nothing else, the criminals have a goal that they themselves can't really benefit from and, if they had avoided collateral damage, they could almost come across as being the good guys.

 

[Admiral2]

Then you should stop reading books, watching television and going to the movies, because yes, the plots have all been done.

I don't have to do anything of the kind. There are some plots I don't mind seeing more than once. The high-tech time-travelling cop isn't one of them.

This show is the same as the others mentioned only in the basic description of the show concept "Future cop travels through time to capture escaped criminals."

This is like saying "The A380 and the Boeing 787 are only the same in the sense that they're both passenger airplanes." Right. That would be the point.

After that, the story is all in what they do with it. And from looking at the details, the three shows mentioned are each very different.

The only significant difference is the cop is a hot chick. Time Cop had a computer nerd helper and the cop in Time Trax had advanced computerized assistance (SELMA). Continuum isn't even 6 degrees of separation, much less "very different."

^Right. Every story's been done. Story is a framework, a foundation on which you build. It's how you build on that framework that matters. And I find Continuum to be a far more interesting, nuanced, and creative take on the "cop pursuing criminals into the past" framework than Time Trax or especially Timecop ever managed to be.

She has a kid and corporations rule the world. That's not nuance or creativity. That's pandering, to soap-opera lovers and anti-capitalists.

Time Cop was a bad TV show. No kidding. Time Trax was interesting enough to make me a loyal viewer and a gender change and having the nerd grow up to be Cancer Man isn't enough to make me think Continuum is any huge leap forward in telling this particular story.

 

[stj]

(No spoilers from me I think. This is only stuff I knew after watching the first episode.)

You missed something.

There's a smirk you can't help but knowing that it's from a man in the know who really shouldn't be.

Forces are in conflict to produce fate in a crucible like a bathtub.

Besides if Liber8 had control of the prison, this is how they decided to use it, to travel back in time 5 years to upset the government before they were wanted, ironically using the states own execution device which was supposed to kill them as power source to jump back in time?

Pishaw!

And her husband!

Trying to get her to runaway prematurely before shit got real because he knows something bad is about to happen, did we actually see him hand over part of a temporal device? Never mind, his complicity was obvious, but his complicity in what and for who?

Surely not Liber8?

He's Alec's second, making him one of the most powerful Personal assistants on Earth... Vice President?

They cast the fricking smoking man as old Alec!

That guy just wheezes conspiracies.

(Yes Alec was the one in the future smirking before and after Kiera was taken who I mentioned earlier. It was totally a "Mission Accomplished" smirk.)

Liber8 is a pawn and it's blatantly obvious from the first episode.

Besides, who else but a billionaire industrialist could invent a time machine?

That's how the Ra's Al Ghul tracked down Batman's secret identity. He looked to see who was buying the tech that Batman was using and drew a bee line form those purchases to the Batcave.

Carry on.

Quoted because I have to agree with a lot of the parts I understand.

Young Alek knows Liber8's "plan" from Kiera. Old Alek wants Liber8 to carry out the plan because it was part of his life. He didn't want to change his own past despite the collateral damage in the Liber8 attack. Plus, it probably vastly increased his power to be one of the few survivors.

But, why does Liber8 carry out this plan? There's no way this plan makes sense from their perspective. Either they are crazy for conceiving the plan on their own (and the Alecs got caught up in it,) or they are crazy for blindly following a corporate leader who, no surprise at all, sold them out. The only surprise would be that he sold them out by sending a Protector back to keep them from succeeding in the past, instead of just blowing them up.

Incidentally, quantum mechanics doesn't really have any place for a spacetime continuum, The very existence of time in our sense is a highly controversial question in QM. It's general relativity that currently has solutions allowing closed timelike curves (physics journal jargon for time travel.)

 

[cylkoth]

[Donna Noble] "Oy! SPOILERS!" [/Donna Noble]
This is of course, the US thread for first time viewers, and this is their first viewing of the first episode.
Try and keep that in mind.

 

[Christopher]

The Cigarette Smoking Man does seem to know something in the future.

I can believe the technology that FutureCop has.

Their names are Alec Sadler and Kiera Cameron, respectively. Kiera's job title is Protector.

 

[stj]

[Donna Noble] "Oy! SPOILERS!" [/Donna Noble]
This is of course, the US thread for first time viewers, and this is their first viewing of the first episode.
Try and keep that in mind.

Yes, I'm one of those first time US viewers who've only seen one episode. Anything I've posted is either commentary on the first episode or speculations, not spoilers.

 

[Greg Cox]

Yeah, for the sake of this one thread, let's try to avoid discussing anything that hasn't aired in the US yet.

 

[RAMA]

Not really plausible to me as a real future, its just a modern period that's different, slighltly more advanced(except time travel), however, as a run of the mill scifi trope future, this show looks visually appealing. I must say I liked the first episode a lot, but in discussing it with my wife I realized once again that most scifi tv shows wind up being police procedurals in one way or another, and it looks like this show will shift into the high tech detective work bit in no time at all. As with most thrillers these days there's some sort of conspiracy going on, again a bit mundane. There were also lots of homages to Terminator: the bubble like time distortion, the attack on the police station, and potentially it looks as if the terrorists are going to go after originator of the tech or status quo, much as they did in T2...or alternately he regrets creating any of that and wants to stop himself from doing it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

[Donna Noble] "Oy! SPOILERS!" [/Donna Noble]
This is of course, the US thread for first time viewers, and this is their first viewing of the first episode.
Try and keep that in mind.

Go back and look, these are the same thoughts I had in the Canadian thread in may 2012.

Old Alec was too smug, and he was prepared for the flash of the chronal event when every one else recoiled, and the husband who works for Old Alec is a traitor.

From that alone you can piece together a hell of a lot of what is going to happen.

There is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much that I am not saying.