Continuum: Rush Hour

September 19, 2015 3:15 PM - Season 4, Episode 2

Kellog leverages Alec by exploiting his weakness: Emily. Kiera attempts to negotiate with Kellog, unaware that Liber8 have other, darker plans. Meanwhile Alec, tired of feeling helpless, impulsively sets off to save Emily on his own.
posted by zarq (16 comments total)

You know how Warehouse 13 went completely off the rails for its last (truncated) series?

This episode (and episode 3) convinced me that Continuum is not going to do that.

I felt series three lost itself somewhere with all the future soldier stuff and the timey-wimey too-clever stuff, but I loved this episode.

"You could have just introduced yourself"
"I just did".
posted by Mezentian at 3:40 PM on September 19, 2015

Thoughts:
~ The bit with Kellogg and the phosgene gas was pretty good. Especially the cure.
~ I will never forgive the producers if Emily is gone for good. I'm holding out hope for her to re-appear in the last episode to kick serious ass.
~ Kiera didn't get shot or beat up. That's practically unheard of.
~ That family dinner at the end was kind of...odd.
~ An episode with some good story advancement and a fairly minimum (for this show, anyway) amount of violence. I liked it very much!
posted by Thorzdad at 3:48 PM on September 19, 2015

~ That family dinner at the end was kind of...odd.

Yes, yes it was.
Alec, why are you making pasta?

But I liked the way they wove the dialogue through it, so it didn't slow the plot down.

~ I will never forgive the producers if Emily is gone for good. I'm holding out hope for her to re-appear in the last episode to kick serious ass.

This will totally happen.
posted by Mezentian at 3:53 PM on September 19, 2015

Did anyone else notice that Tony Zhou used a quick shot from Continuum in his recent "Every Frame a Painting" about Vancouver never playing itself? As a rare example of Vancouver playing itself? I thought that was interesting because it's a marginal example -- Continuum is doing something like Orphan Black does with Toronto (and Canada) in that they don't say that it's another city, but they also never, ever say the city's name (or say they're in Canada). Unless I've missed that they have.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:25 PM on September 19, 2015

I am pretty sure Vancouver is loudly and proudly Vancouver in Continuum.
Can't mention an episode, but I have never been in any doubt.

My brain is suggesting the episodes where the police first raid Alec/Theseus' farm and the Liber8 bombing episodes.
posted by Mezentian at 10:36 PM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I feel like there's been zero actual use of the words "Vancouver", "BC", and "Canada". I don't really know about local place names, because I'm only going to recognize a few really obvious things, but that said I don't think they've ever mentioned anything that I would recognize, either. (My ex-wife lived there when we met and I spent a couple of weeks there in 1990.)

They don't make any effort to disguise that it's Vancouver like they'd do if they were trying to pretend it was Seattle or something, but I just don't think they ever explicitly localize it, either.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:47 PM on September 19, 2015

You might be correct.

Either way, I love the fact they are all basically "VANCOUVER" at every point, including that thingy from the other night (er... could be episode 3) which was Vancouver's version of the Space Needle.
posted by Mezentian at 10:51 PM on September 19, 2015

I feel like there's been zero actual use of the words "Vancouver", "BC", and "Canada".

On the Continuum Wiki they have a screenshot with the text "Vancouver District Prison", and I seem to recall more usages of Vancouver.
posted by Pendragon at 9:00 AM on September 20, 2015

On the Continuum Wiki they have a screenshot with the text "Vancouver District Prison", and I seem to recall more usages of Vancouver.

Yeah, it's always explicitly been Vancouver. Mentions are scarcer since S1/S2, but they called it out in the pilot.

I felt series three lost itself somewhere with all the future soldier stuff and the timey-wimey too-clever stuff, but I loved this episode.

I was concerned about the Halo guys, but the fight in the premiere between them and Kiera was great, and I love the continuing issues each side has about underestimating the other side's tech.

Still not loving Chen and TimeJesus though. I sincerely hope their game starts to make sense soon, given how little time is left.
posted by mordax at 10:18 PM on September 20, 2015

Kiera works with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).The show has mentioned Vancouver pretty often.
posted by zarq at 4:31 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

More often than I thought. How often that is in relative terms, I'm unsure.

But pulling all the English subtitle files that I could find at one main subtitle site (I could probably find the others, but this is kind of a pain in the ass at the moment, so I'm putting in minimal effort), which includes all of seasons one and two slightly less than half of three and only one of the three from the current season, making a total of 30 episodes, and keeping in mind that this is sensitive to someone making a typo, then:

4 uses of :"Vancouver"; one in episode 9 of the first season, the other three in separate season two episodes. None elsewhere (of what I have).

0 uses of: "Canada", "BC" or "British Columbia" or even "Province". Nor "Burnaby", West Van", "Richmond", "Gastown", "West End", "UBC", "SFU".

However,

1 use of "Hastings", 2 uses of "East Side", and 1 use of "Simon Fraser" in the second episode. I don't know how I forgot that, as my ex-wife was at SFU and that would have caught my attention.

I guess that four "Vancouvers" out of thirty episodes is not insignificant. No other broadly recognizable places names, though, and just a few that are local but only meaningful for those with some familiarity with the city.

Later I might pull the subs for something like iZombie, which is explicitly set in Seattle as a comparison.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:21 AM on September 21, 2015

Check for "VPD." It's in virtually every episode.
posted by zarq at 6:33 AM on September 21, 2015

17
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:59 AM on September 21, 2015

Interesting. Lower than I expected. Thanks for checking!

Vancouver playing itself on screen slowly becoming the norm.

Simon Barry has been shooting his Vancouver-set series Continuum in the city since 2012. The show, which has aired on Showcase and in broadcast markets around the world, is about a police officer from 2077-era Vancouver, who travels back in time to the present day chasing criminals from her era who have made the same trip.

He said one of the reasons he chose Vancouver is for its specificity – he wanted a setting that allowed him to develop a future history of a particular city. He assumed his funding partners would compel him to set it in a generic city or elsewhere. “That never happened,” he said.

Mr. Barry is now developing further series. “I’ve really got no reason not to set any of them in Vancouver save for the ones that are actually set in other places for story purposes,” he said. “I like the idea that I could do a series of shows that are all set in Vancouver but very different.”

posted by zarq at 8:46 AM on September 21, 2015

For what it's worth, Alex straight out says "This is Vancouver" and makes a joke about the amount of construction in the city at 13:22 in Episode 3.
posted by mmoncur at 2:05 AM on September 26, 2015

I had literally just watched that when I wrote that first comment about this! Just shows how trustworthy my memory is on this.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:18 AM on September 26, 2015