Alex Strachan
Postmedia News
Continuum is poised to begin its third season March 16 on Showcase, so if you’ve somehow missed this trippy, futuristic, set-in-Vancouver sci-fi parable about time-travelling terrorists, a slow Saturday night in February may be a good time to check it out.
With Hockey Night in Canada on sabbatical for the Olympics, and with the gold medal game on hold till Sunday, Global TV — Showcase’s broadcast partner — has been showing early episodes of Continuum on Saturdays, on a night viewers can find it.
This weekend’s episode, The Politics of Time, first aired in July 2012, the seventh of a 10-episode first season. By this time Continuum had found its voice and rhythm, and while there was little sign yet that it would last several seasons to come, fans knew what to expect: A police procedural set in the not-to-distant future, with Vancouver subbing for Vancouver for a change.
There were just enough sci-fi elements — time distortion, eugenics, social engineering, terrorism as a form of political protest — to give Continuum a twist, but not so much of a twist that fans of procedural cop shows would find it impossible to follow.
Politics of Time, co-written by show creator Simon Barry, a grad of the University of British Columbia’s film school, finds future-cop Kiera (Rachel Nichols) helping her present-day partner Carlos (Victor Webster) clear his name after he’s implicated in a friend’s murder.
It doesn’t help his cause that he lies about his whereabouts the night of the murder, then tries to cover his tracks while investigating the same crime he’s implicated in.
Meanwhile Kiera’s enabler from the future, Alec (Erik Knudsen), is fixing her spiffy high-tech flak jacket so that it’s more-or-less invisible to the naked eye and yet will protect her from danger, all the while providing her with high-tech point-of-view information displays — shades of Google Glass.
One of the complications in Continuum’s early episodes is that Carlos does not know yet who Kiera is or what she’s doing in the present time frame — he learns the truth in the second season — so Politics of Time truly is a throwback to the beginning.
In its two seasons so far, Continuum has evolved into a modest success story for homegrown TV production, a locally conceived, produced and distributed TV drama that’s been sold to the U.S. Syfy channel. Time will tell how that story ends.
9 p.m., Global
