Continuum [Showcase - CA] *Spoilers!*

Thought it was a bit meh overall. I found 3 big flaws with it. The first was that it needs a bigger music budget. They obviously have no rights to anything original and their composer is terrible. Music plays an important role in mood setting but the mood set by this screamed cheap and lazy. It was like it was put together by a film student in 1992 on his $200 Casio keyboard. I could have overlooked it if the plot was good enough but t wasn't.

A lot of this episode relied on extreme contrivance. Like handsome contemporary cop would leave some stranger claiming to be a cop alone in a room with a suspect without seeing her badge. And even if he was stupid enough to do that he would have been straight back in that room the instant the CCTV went out. Then we have the very convenient phonecall that interrupts his boss from asking for her supervisor's details, followed by him being so upset after the attack on the precinct that he just tells her to transfer herself. It was extremely lazy writing, which I could have glossed over if the main plot had been good enough but it just wasn't.

We didn't see enough of 2077 at all. I know that the device of her recalling events she never paid proper attention to at the time will keep sending us back there but we needed a bit more set up. The little bit we saw of the future made it seem like little more than a future version of now. We got a tiny smidge of debate with Keira's lone friend lamenting the loss of democracy but even he didn't seem that bothered and none of the rest of the group gave a damn. Why are Liber8 so pissed off? A corporate society relies on a reasonably libertarian society of consumers who are always becoming slightly more affluent so they can keep consuming and allow the corporations to keep expanding. If people are poor and can't consume they are of little use to corporations, unless of course they are producers working in sweatshops. Presumably then the world of 2077 is two tier and those two tiers are no longer kept so far apart by geography as they are now. We needed to see more of that so we could understand why Liber8 are trying to so hard to change things that they think little of killing 10s of 1000s as collateral damage.

Worst of all is that most of the Liber8 people who are back in 2012 a bunch of psychopaths instead of terrorists/guerilla fighters who believe in a genuine political cause. They just seem like nutters trying to destroy a nice enough society because they are bad. It would be a lot more interesting if they were ordinary people hardened by living in a tough producer society, with certain members of the group, like the tech guy, former members of the consumer society who couldn't live with the loss of personal freedoms and the inequalities he'd stopped turning a blind eye to.

I'll give it a few more episodes because what I read about the show made it seem like it was a lot smarter than it was and I'm holding out a hope that the next few episodes will start into that direction. That and it's nice to see the Cigarette Smoking Man again.