CONTINUUM Season 2 Episode Guide and reviews on the SCI FI FREAK SITE

CONTINUUM

SyFy

Second Chances
Split Second
Second Thoughts
Second Skin
Second Opinion
Second Truths
Second Degree
Second Listen
Seconds
Second Wave

Keira Cameron - Rachel Nichols

Carlos Fonnegra - Victor Webster

Alec Sadler - Erik Knudsen

Sonya Valentine - Lexa Doig

Travis Verta - Roger R Cross

Matthew Kellog - Stephen Lobo

OTHER CONTINUUM SEASONS
Season 1

OTHER TIME TRAVEL SHOWS
Doctor Who
Journeyman
Goodnight Sweetheart
Life on Mars
Ashes to Ashes
Daybreak
Timecop

Second Chances

Everyone is coming to terms with the tumultuous events of the Season 1 finale. Alec wants nothing to do with Keira, who needs his help desperately and also needs to work with Victor on the new case of a dead mayor despite having a federal agent chasing her.

CONTINUUM's first season threw a few nice curveballs in its last episode, but didn't really ever reach its potential. Given a second chance, it dives in with a murder to be solved and some serious infighting within the Liber8 movement, now without its leader.

Everyone seems to have grown a pair of balls since the last season and that gives the show a harder edge that offers up the possibility that the second season might acheive the heights that the first never did.

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Split Second

The only Liber8 member in prison is to be transferred and everyone expects that the terrorist organisation will try to free him. Everyone except the terrorist leader who tried to kill him.

There is something about having an unkillable character to undermine the believability of a show and Travis' ability to take several gunshots to the chest and carry on, ignore tazer charges as a minor annoyance etc make him an uninteresting, dull character. More interesting, however, is the split that has occurred in the Liber8 movement and what that might mean as the story progresses.

There is plenty of action to be going on with, though it's all rather generic in nature. The supporting story about Eric being seduced by Kellogg's offers of money and freedom is both predictable and tedious.

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Second Thoughts

Travis is trying to unite the street gangs to his cause and there is a new drug from the future on the streets. Keira's workload has gone up as the two factions of Liber8 go their separate ways.

Apart from a quick trip to the future to learn that Keira's sister was a drug addict (way to ram that theme down the audience's throat, guys) this is a straightforward police procedural that manages to to get nobody anywhere very much.

There are a couple of obligatory shoot outs with nobody getting hurt, but it's hard to really give a damn.

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Second Skin

Keira learns her old partner came back in time after her and arrived years before she did. Now there is another enforcer's supersuit in the city and both factions of Liber8 want it.

The melodrama of Keira's old friend appearing only on her death bed and the emotions that this arouses is a little too much for the story to bear and the outcome at the end is so obvious and expected as to be beyond the pale.

Add that to the rather dull story of the science fiction cosplayer who discovers the suit's powers by accident and decides to become a superhero and things get way to hackneyed for their own good.

The show doesn't even play by its own rules in order to tell its story. The fighter who beats the hell out of the suit-wearing innocent is well-known for just breaking people's necks in single twist, so why doesn't he do it now? And why don't the Liber8 girls shoot each other when they have the chance?

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Second Opinion

A new leader takes over the police unit and starts to investigate the mole. This is complicated by the fact that Keira's suit has detected her stress levels and shut down all its powers whilst a holographic shrink analyses her.

What could have been a possibly tense episode with the powers-that-be sniffing about Keira's deep, dark secret is completely derailed by the beyond bonkers idea of having installed in the suit a program that shuts down all its useful facilities in times of stress. Have the designers (Alec that's you) never been in a firefight situation? It is just plain ludicrous and the number of times that Keira is almost caught talking to herself becomes just as ludicrous.

Rachel Nichols gives a performance that is so strung out that she would have been medically sectioned long before the cybershrink showed up.

As for the twist right at the very end? That was so obvious as to be painful.

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Second Truths

A series of brutal killings is taking place and Keira has information from the future that might help solve the case before more people die. How, though, can she tells what she knows without giving away her secret?

A fairly straightforward police procedural plot is the backdrop to Keira finally having to tell the truth about her situation to Carlos. It's not before time and it's just a shame that we had to wade through the horribly unoriginal serial killer stuff to get to it.

Even more horrible, however, is Alec being taken in by a girl who is so obviously up to no good that a blind man living in a different country could spot it. Really, is this the best that the show has to offer?

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Second Degree

Keira and Carlos find that one of the jurors for the trial of Alec's brother is being blackmailed with his missing family. Can they save them in time to save the trial?

What seems like a horribly straightforward cop story takes on a twist when it becomes clear that there is much more going on than a single trial. Alec's moral dilemma is mildly interesting, though the direction he will take is never in real doubt.

The new girlfriend/spy turns out to be a real kick-ass hard case and the seduction of the future mayor continues in the background. All of this adds up to not very much above the average.

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Second Listen

Keira has to abandon the investigation in to who is stealing dead time travellers' bodies and why to save Alec, who has been taken hostage by one of the Liber8 activists with a twisted agenda.

An annoying subplot character (n the shape of the suspicious agent trying to find Keira's secret) gets half the episode to follow an investigation that goes nowhere and then to an abrupt removal, all of which makes his presence there at all a total waste of time.

More interesting, and dramatic, in terms of both future and present plots, is the strand with Garza and Alec. Future Alec sends her back to deal with present Alec to prevent him from becoming himself. Interesting, if muddled, time travel storytelling.

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Seconds

In the future, Alec's brother Julian will kill thousands. He will become a monster. When his mother is killed and he goes on the run, Keira decides to end that threat once and for all.

What is the true nature of good and of evil? Is doing evil things to prevent even greater evil not good? These are the questions at the heart of one of the best episodes with which the show has presented us. Keira is driven to the point of doing evil to prevent a greater one and Julian shown killing thousands, but in a way that blurs whether that act was truly evil or just necessary.

By moving away from the annoyingly undefeatable Liber8 and presenting a proper ethical dilemma in a dramatic and intense manner (the climax comes in a remote woods in the middle of the rain), this episode shows what the series is capable of. More like this, please.

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Second Wave

Liber8's Garza is captured and gives Keira a way of tracking Travis, but she gets waylaid by free agents from the far future and Julian's followers.

This episode screams 'filler' and coming so soon after the excellent Seconds is all the poorer for it. Keira is only metres away from taking on Travis, but decides to take a look at an anti-corporate rally instead? Unlikely. Her supersuit gets powered down again and is proving to be far less useful than might have been imagined.

More annoyingly, the cops get hold of Garza and decide to leave her on her own so that she can pick the locks on her handcuffs. Really? Especially when they know how dangerous she is.

Then, just to top it all off, Alec's spying girlfriend's boss pulls off a move of spectacular stupidity, alerting Alec to his girlfriend's duplicity, unless he is as stupid as everyone else in this show seems to be.

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