Continuum Is Smart Science Fiction With No Time For Cuddles and Kisses

Knee deep in summer movie releases this gem of an exchange came out between Scarlett Johansson and an interviewer who asked her, and only her, if there was any romance on the horizon for Black Widow in The Avengers.

“She doesn’t have time for that,” Johansson crowed, “She’s got shit to avenge.”

That’s exactly what I was thinking watching Continuum. Rachel Nichol’s steely faced future cop doesn’t have time for romance or friends in the past, she’s got terrorists to destroy.

She’s kind of angry and definitely no nonsense and headstrong, but with enough of a sense of humor that you could never accuse her of being frigid. Basically she’s Judge Hershey instead of Dredd.

Women can never escape the dreaded love plot. Ever. Even a show like Rizzoli & Isles, which is supposed to be all about women solving crimes and being friends, is really now more Sex in the City with more murders. A female led show sans a romantic subplot is rare, like some precious flower on some mountain somewhere that only blooms once a year and only if in the exact right amount of shade.

The shade must have been cast just right to create Continuum. Keira Cameron is a no-nonsense cop in a hypercorporate dystopian future who accidentally gets sucked back into the past with a group of terrorists out to create anarchy and bring the corporate culture to its knees.

And the only person she’s even remotely romantic with is her husband, stuck in the future, who she can never see again.

But that’s okay because he and her kid would probably distract her from the important tasks of getting home and also stopping terrorists who seem bad primarily because they kill, because let’s be real, Keira is clearly an enforcer of a totalitarian regime and these terrorists, while awful in their methods, don’t seem so bad in their ideology.

This show is playing a long game of big ideas wrapped up in weekly procedural and I really, really love that. It’s perfectly content to leave the big stuff at the edges so that the audience can pick and poke at it all at their own leisure.

Though it throws us bones like Keira’s Girl Friday, a genius teenager living on a farm and potentially the Cigarette Smoking Man (I mean architect of the dystopia) in the future. Is he really going to bring about a less that ideal future? Can Keira’s meer presence alter his fate?

There are so many questions asked in Continuum’s pilot, and for once they’re all smart questions.

About the only thing even remotely hard to like about it all is Keira’s super suit, because while it’s awesome and her being a cyborg is a grand thrill that color scheme is just…yikes.

Did you check out Continuum this past Monday? Is it now a DVR it sort of show? Or are you looking for something a little different than it’s blend of cerebral science fiction, action and police procedural?

And am I the only one constantly thinking of Time Trax?