Continuum

Continuum, the Canadian sci-fi show imported to the US by Syfy, continues to be an excellent television show about time travel. Season 3, already airing in Canada, drops on April 4th for Americans who don't download their shows from semi-legal sources.

A quick recap... in the future of 2077, the world is pretty much run by corporations and a group called Liber8 fights against the corporations. The core members are captured and set to be executed when they suddenly open a portal and time and get sucked back to 2012. City Protective Services law enforcement officer Kiera Cameron gets pulled along for the ride. Liber8's goal in the past is to augment the original opposition to corporations and prevent the grim corporate controlled future. Kiera wants to get back home to the future, and her son. Another wrinkle: Kiera wears an advanced suit and bio enhancements that are like a wearable, implanted computer, and it would be largely useless in the past where none of the technology that supports it exists... except that Alec Sadler, the teenage boy who will one day found SadTech and control quite a bit of the corporate structure, has already invented the base computer that will become the center of that empire, and Kiera's suit and bio enhancements immediately tap into it.

Season two ended with a paradox. Kiera was captured by the Freelancers, time travelers who appear to hunt other time travelers, one of whom is a person she killed in season one. The first episode of season three gives us the answer: the Freelancers are a group of people plucked out of time to monitor the timeline and keep it from changing drastically. Paraphrasing their tale: you can kill a million people and not affect the future, but one person can change their mind and rip everything apart. They spend their time trying to identify the "important people" and making sure they don't change to keep the future intact. Alec and, as it turns out, Kiera are both important people, and Alec has just slipped a few weeks into the past to attempt to save the life of his girlfriend. The Freelancers decide they have to trust Kiera, who they believe can get through to Alec and keep him from destroying the timeline, and send her back to stop him. Now there are two Alecs running around, and two Kieras, but Kiera is warned that the universe will correct that sort of mistake, and by the end of the episode we are shown how those mistakes get corrected.

Now the setup is complete and we are ready to dive headlong into the rest of season three as Kiera fights to save the future so that she can go home. Or will she allow the future to be changed, wiping out her family forever, to achieve some other goal. Only time will tell.

One of the best elements of Continuum is the strange dichotomy the writers have constructed. You want to support Liber8. They fight the corporation and champion the common good. But they are extremely violent about it, so you are forced to view them like a good dog who got rabies and needs to be put down. On the other side, Kiera is the hero cop... but she fights for the corporations, who seem to be pretty terrible. So you end up wanting Liber8 to win, but you want Kiera to stop them from winning in ways that kill people. And now they've amped up that conflict by forcing Kiera's hand. She'll have to choose between the corporate "evil" world that contains her son, or give up her son to make the world a better place.

Continuum season three looks to be a really exciting ride.