Continuum: Final Hour
October 10, 2015 12:08 PM - Season 4, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Series Finale. Kiera and Alec risk everything to stop the future soldiers and their devastating plan. Kellog, despite a loose alliance with Kiera, has plans of his own. All factions clash violently in order to determine which path the future will take.


The final episode aired on Showcase in Canada on October 9.
It will air on SyFy in the US on October 16.
US viewers, this thread contains spoilers for the season finale.
posted by zarq (10 comments total)
 
Needed more Garza

Kellog's comeuppance; so predictable (except the daughter thing, that was unexpected) and yet still satisfying.

William B. Davis as happy Alec was just weird, he was better as sad/evil Alec.

Overall it was a good wrap-up to the show. But I wish we'd had a few more episodes to tie up the loose ends.

Was there any point to the Traveller?
posted by zinon at 12:35 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


That was kind of a downer for me. I know Alec kept saying Kira was responsible for the future, but it really seemed like everyone but Kira was responsible, and she ended up alone and out of time.
posted by humans are superior! at 1:36 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was glad that it wasn't a reset, which I feared was what they were leading to. And I was pleased that Kiera was proved delusional in her belief that she'd go back to her own time and family.

But, yeah, the Traveler proved to be pretty pointless. And, yeah, I agree that it doesn't make sense to say that Kiera was responsible for the better future, since as far as I could tell she mostly just chased her own tail the whole time. All the people she left behind were much more responsible.

Also, I'm not sure how sending Kellog back into history was a good idea. Since Kiera went forward and the real destination was obscured to him, they should have just sent him like a week into the future, where they would have been waiting for him. I don't know how far back that was -- but, really, I wouldn't have taken the risk that he couldn't have managed to survive and then alter all of history. Seriously ... not a great idea. One week forward. Much better plan.

It occurred to me while watching this episode that this whole season we've seen very little of the suit. She couldn't have used it in that building, what with their tech to disrupt it, but I also wondered if their fx budget has been limited. I mean, that combat suit looked pretty bad. Like early 80s bad. And the whole scene was weirdly static, considering all the people firing guns. I also found myself thinking about sound design can make it seem like a lot is happening even though we're not seeing it. And that saves money. But I shouldn't have thought about these things. But, hey, they got to finish out the show. Good for them. And it didn't suck. It was okay.

I don't really understand exactly what the show wanted us to think about Kiera and Carlos's relationship. That goodbye scene seemed to me to have romantic overtones -- at least from Carlos's direction -- but that's not really what their relationship has been and certainly not in the last two seasons. I think that if it had been truly platonic -- and I'm totally okay with someone feeling very strongly about their friend leaving forever in search of a unreachable future -- then the interaction would have been different and the scene would have been written differently. Maybe the idea was that Carlos has unrequited feelings for Kiera -- and he's been signaling that for a while -- and I'm okay with that in theory but I don't know if I'm sold on it from what we saw on the screen.

They really just kind of got rid of Emily, huh?

And if I'd been the former police captain who just learned that these really are future people, then as we were running toward a battle with these guys, I'd have been asking Carlos about, um, the future weaponry that we might be facing in a minute? That would have been one concern among many. Wondering when Carlos knew about Kiera would have been on the list, but I would have put that one off for now in favor of learning more about stuff that might kill me.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:32 PM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was content with the finale given two things I've been keeping in mind all season: first, they didn't hit the reset button, and that would've been the easiest way to go. Second, the season has been compressed, forcing them to try and cram a story they wanted a year for into six episodes - I blame a number of odd characterization things on the abbreviated timeframe, (Kiera's weird behavior not being one of them).

Some thoughts:
* Kellog murdering Vasquez, only to find out she's his daughter, only to have him wash his hands and move on made me pause the show and laugh out loud. That's so Kellog.

Over the course of the show, Kellog was probably my favorite one to watch because he was the only one to truly embrace what they were experiencing. Everyone else had doubts, agendas, worries about the timestream. He just did what any fan of Back to the Future would do, and started using his foreknowledge to rule everything. Given the way this final season went, I'd argue he was as much the star as Kiera.

That said, sending him back in time was, indeed, the dumbest possible move. What I *thought* they had done when I saw him stand up in the forest was that they'd sent him back to, like, the Cretaceous to be eaten by dinosaurs. (That also would've been stupid, but awesome. Sending him to any point in human history was stupid minus the awesome.)

* Yeah, the Traveler was completely pointless. I assume he was supposed to factor into later seasons - they were on record as having a storyline they needed several more years to wrap up. I assume he was introduced in S3 on the assumption that he'd get integrated into events slowly and make sense by the end. That said, all he ever did on the show was irritate me. Curtis also managed to make the 'just irritates me' list after becoming his disciple. (Curtis was at least a little interesting before that, as a rogue Freelancer witha grudge.)

* Travis, RIP, was right about Kiera: she wasn't the hero of the story. She spent all but a small part of it blinded by privilege, hoping to preserve a fascist state until shown the error of her ways. Then she reverted to that perspective inexplicably in the final season. I can see why a number of the characters on the show would talk about her in glowing terms, (particularly Alec, whom she really did positively influence), but as a viewer, I could see that it was mostly unearned.

I was disappointed by it, too - the thing that grabbed me about this show in S1 was the tension of having a jackbooted fascist that you could really feel for on one side, versus a bunch of freedom fighters who were personally pretty awful on the other. The tension of being uncertain who to root for, culminating in everybody working together to defeat Evil Alec was exactly what I wanted out of Continuum.

Dropping it S4 made exactly no sense. I was with Travis on that one: "What? She wants to go back to sleep? But she just woke up!" (As I mentioned in the other thread, she knew exactly what happened to branching timelines that were invalidated: she erased *her* Sam from existence herself, just by making contact with Alec in the pilot.)

She should've stuck around. Seeing her selfishness rewarded with such a bittersweet ending was all right though.

Overall, I'd say Kiera was the weakest link on the show. Rachel Nichols did a fine job with the material - she's great with body language, very expressive, did the sci fi fish out of water thing wonderfully, and I'm hoping to see her star in more things - but the character herself was written very inconsistently. In earlier seasons, she was an uncompromising tool of the state, blinded by privilege. Later, unearned flashbacks softened that up, but it didn't make much sense in contrast with her earlier behavior.

I'm sad about that, because again, the initial setup was great and the casting was great. (I was especially grateful that they didn't push her and Carlos together, and the hint of unrequited feelings was disappointing in the finale.)

* Friendly Liber8 was woefully underutilized. As was said before, this all needed more Garza. I'd been hoping for more Kiera/Garza teamwork ever since the Freelancer base, so the thing where they ended up getting into a fistfight in the antimatter warehouse instead of just working together was profoundly disappointing. (Garza was probably my favorite member of Liber8, followed closely by Travis.)

I was also disappointed by Lucas' death - it really felt like they just didn't have any more screen time for him, so they iced him to make room. (Lucas was an interesting figure too.)

* Seeing William B. Davis genuinely nice and enthusiastic was, indeed, jarring. I was a little surprised anybody thought it was a good idea to leave Kagame to welcome Kiera, too.

... I will probably be back later to clutter up this thread some more. For all its flaws, I really was fond of this show, and really will miss it. (It's sort of hard to stomach, like, Supernatural continuing to make the same mistakes for over a decade, while Continuum was always interested in making new and exciting mistakes.)
posted by mordax at 4:44 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


>They really just kind of got rid of Emily, huh?

Alec drops a one liner at the end about Emily lobbying City Hall for the "Police Commissioner Carlos Fonnegra 2015 VPD 2045 Memorial Park" before she passed. So, presumably, Alec got her back at some point. Poor Jason, I wonder what his note said...

In other news Carlos was Police Commissioner for 30 years. That may be the least believable part of the show.
posted by zinon at 7:32 PM on October 10, 2015


"That's so Kellog!" is the spin-off show we need to happen.

I was wondering if The Traveller was Kellog (or a Kellog) at one stage, having seen the error of his ways, but that makes no sense.

I wish they hadn't had to rush the ending. I had a hope the show might tackle the question of why the people from the darkest timeline thought they could invade the present. That's some Terra Nova stupid.
posted by Mezentian at 3:59 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


"That's so Kellog!" is the spin-off show we need to happen.

I'd totally watch it. Over the course of the series, he really was the guy who most intrigued me. His talk with Travis this season, "Aren't I exactly what Liber8 is fighting for? Freedom and choice?" was clearly self-serving, but it's still a philosophical thread that was worth exploring because Travis' answer wasn't really good enough. (And it exposed a flaw in Liber8's overall philosophy: they didn't necessarily have a great plan to deal with the aftermath of knocking over the existing order.)

I wish they hadn't had to rush the ending. I had a hope the show might tackle the question of why the people from the darkest timeline thought they could invade the present. That's some Terra Nova stupid.

The worst part was that in a normal instance of time travel, something like this is entirely workable in Continuum's universe: Liber8 and Kiera were able to come back, continue to exist after their timeline was wiped out and make ongoing changes to the future with tech and foreknowledge that should not rightly exist. Someone using a time orange to send an army back could totally get away with Future Kellog's gambit of 'conquer an earlier time.'

Whatever the Dark Future guys were doing though, they instead created a tether to their timeline that completely neutralized that: 'Everything that happens now, ripples into our future.' Why the hell would they want that, when they could've come back with impunity otherwise?

*sighs*

Abbreviated season was not enough season, no.

I was wondering if The Traveller was Kellog (or a Kellog) at one stage, having seen the error of his ways, but that makes no sense.

Nah. He was born centuries later, assuming Curtis could be trusted. (In this case, that seemed plausible to me.)

I wish they'd had time to explain him better, period. I was okay with the Traveler as a reason why time wars hadn't gotten out of hand 'sooner,' so to speak. The way time travel works in Continuum, the whole place should feel like a game of Chrononauts, with time snarled to the point that DC or Marvel comics would look at it and go, 'Whoa, that's convoluted!' For that to not be the case, someone needed to be playing Time Cop, so... okay. The Traveler set up the Freelancers, gave them some gonzo future tech to keep out incursions.

That worked better with the Freelancers running around trying to contain stuff though. Having just two guys trying to do that was dumb, and the guy himself was a total cipher.
posted by mordax at 10:02 AM on October 11, 2015


So...the finale just aired south of the border, and...meh. It pretty much played out exactly like a complex storyline that suddenly has to be wrapped-up in an hour.

I kind of feel like they could have skipped the final 15 minutes of warfare and used the time to stitch together a slightly more satisfying ending. So much bloodshed always seems like filler due to a lack of ideas.

I agree with much of what mordax said, especially about the uneven writing of Kiera. Her sudden need to go home in these final episodes was almost like she was a different character.

In the end, this show will stand as an example of good potential being thwarted. I feel like, had they been given a full last season, things could have been wrapped up much more satisfyingly.

I really liked this show. I just wish more people had tuned in.

I liked the thank-you to the fans in the end credits.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:38 PM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


One of these days a show runner, say a cross between Straczynski and Whedon, will get to plot out an entire several season time travel story with amazing interconnected arcs that link together threads and ties it all together in the last few minutes, probably with a cycle to the very first scene that makes no sense until that moment.

I'm sure that's what Continuum thought they might get to but not even close. The end where Kira gets to see her son but never touch is very Greek tragedy, certainly more satisfying than other possibilities. I expect this was a real struggle to wrap up seeing that they did Jason's note to his father but it must not have worked and got cut in editing. It's gotta be really hard to write one of these that has a plot that keeps moving but that is at all understandable by anyone but the continuity editor.

Although the scenes where the character barely survive future super solders and the very basis of reality is yanked from under their feet, then the next cut they are arguing about police procedure. Just not quite the right balance.
posted by sammyo at 9:24 PM on November 24, 2015


I enjoyed the series. As far as the finale goes, there was one thing that felt unrewarding. Alec greets Keira with a beaming, "You did it! You succeeded!" then next reveals the price she's paid: never to be reunited with her son, who was her raison d'etre through the entire series.

I suppose a charitable reading would be that Keira, ever the good soldier, readily accepts the price of her victory. That makes sense. Still, though, Alec is the one who effed everything up, and while he did take steps to rectify that, he used an unwitting Keira to do it. She never chose to make the sacrifice. Yet he ends up just the same as he started, while Keira is denied the one thing she wanted all along.

Maybe she'll meet a version of Brad Tonkin on a lonely, meandering stroll through Stanley Park.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:43 AM on February 4, 2017


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