Continuum

  

I’ve been watching the Canadian SF series Continuum, which is time travel/alternate history.  The Expanse it’s not.  I can’t quite explain my enthusiasm.  If you were to watch it, your immediate reaction might very well be, What in the name of God does he see in this?  It’s just too stupid. 

Here’s the premise.  A cop from 2077 is blown back in time fifty years, to the present day.  She’s trapped by a temporal vortex that’s also captured a gang of terrorists and sent them back.  The hook is that the time travelers know the future; the terrorists plan to change it, the cop is the only one who can stop them.  But the cop can’t explain any of this to the cops or the military in the present – they’d throw her in the booby hatch – so she’s on her own.  (Except for some convenient plot holes.) 

Now, first off, the cop from the future is adorably cute, so you forgive a lot.  And then, the dude cop she partners up with in the present is beyond hunk-a-licious, so equal time.  They even contrive a bit where he strips down and gets in the shower, and then the Ninja assassin sneaks into his apartment.  Naked fight scene, but a reversal of the convention where it’s the actress, usually, in her birthday suit.  It’s intentionally mischievous.

Now, it’s more than faintly ridiculous that nobody seriously questions the heroine’s bona fides, once she’s hacked their databases and given herself a fake ID; the police work is rudimentary and lazy; nor is there any real attempt to make the science particularly convincing.  The time paradoxes are handled without fuss, though.  You’re not brought up short by crippling doubts, everything is pretty brisk.  (The short version of a time paradox is this, that you can’t go back in time and murder your grandfather, because then you’d never be born, and you therefore wouldn’t exist to travel back in time and murder your grandfather, etc.)  The biggest dramatic irony is that the heroine wants to get back to her own time, but that time is brutally dystopian, the future ruled by corporate oligarchs, and the cop herself more thought police than criminal investigator – the crimes themselves political – and the “terrorists” an underground devoted to overthrowing that hegemony.  Why would you want such a future?  Your sympathy should be with the insurrection, if it weren’t for Liber8’s sociopathic violence, which toxifies them.

Generally speaking, the concept is better than the execution.  So we’re back to the first question, what’s holding my interest?  I think it’s notional.  I’m attracted to the framework.  I like the way they work out the difficulties.  The most obvious precursor is Terminator, but there are quite a few SF/alternate history models.  The Man in the High Castle, still startlingly original, China Miéville’s The City & the City, Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and, of course, Fatherland.  These last three, also, are police procedurals.  This makes for an interesting sub-genre.  Using the ordinary detail, not the alien, but the commonplace.  Gorky Park, and Martin Cruz Smith’s other Arkady Renko novels, use the same method, the accretion of specifics, the forensics, and the lab work, pounding the pavement, looking at surveillance video, the institutional rivalries and the office politics: this is what makes it credible, when the environment is itself foreign, and speaks a different language.  This is very much evident in The City & the City, which presents a deeply imagined but enormously slippery idea as settled reality, shape-shifting as a metaphor, but all too complete in its physicality, and our psychological  accommodation.

Science fiction, as my pal John Crowley points out, is usually at right angles to the present, shown on the oblique.  It’s no secret that Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry were using Twilight Zone and Star Trek to bring social commentary to a mass audience.  A novel like The City & the City, or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, are clearly speaking to violence, and authority, and the coping mechanisms we adapt, individually and as herd protection.

It’s interesting to me, too, that the books have more room to breathe than their movie or TV versions.  This isn’t about the literary vs. mass market, I don’t mean the movies or the TV series are dumbed down, that’s a contrived distinction, and it’s condescending.  My point here is that film or video, as a medium, is very literal: you see something in front of you, even if it’s hallucinatory.  But it’s hard to convey possibility, or adaptive psychological structures.  You can show the fact, for example, of Fascist authority; the inner effect, the self-policing, is out of visual reach.  The Lives of Others comes close.  I think also De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  In both cases, the claustrophobic framing squeezes perspective, and smothers you with a sense of airlessness. 

In the novels, The Man in the High Castle a good example, your POV expands and contracts.  But in the recent TV adaption, for all its strengths, you can only see what you’re shown, you don’t have a sense (or at least I didn’t) of a world outside the frame of the camera.  In this context, the specificity narrows your engagement.  The material surfaces are hard, and cold, and reflective.  They have no depth.  Metaphorically, we bounce off. 

I’m probably reading more into Continuum than it plausibly merits, but then again, it was the catalyst that sent me off along this line of inquiry.  I think it’s entertaining, although I don’t think it’s terribly deep, but I think that’s in the eye of the beholder.  I think the people who put the show together take it seriously, which is in itself a good thing.  Credit where credit is due.