How does time travel work in Continuum?

Continuum hasn't defined its rules for time travel. On the one hand, no set rules means that the show can put things into place as needed and as the story progresses. But on the other hand, the audience doesn't know what is at stake for the characters if we aren't sure how their actions affect the future (or the past).

What we can do is look at possible time travel theories based on what happened in the show so far. My go-to process with new time travel stories is to figure them out by using older stories where we know how time travel works.

Spoilers below through episode 2.08 "Second Listen."

(source)

Theory 1

The future already happened

In season one of Heroes, Peter Petrelli has visions of the future, and he knows those events are going to happen. He isn't able to change them. The only thing he can do is figure out how he is going to react.

If the same is true for Continuum, then all the scenes in the future will happen (have already happened). Everything we see Alec do in the future is already in place, such as making sure Kiera is the CPS officer sent back with the Liber8 group and sending back Garza as his judge and jury. (We see the scenes from the future as they are relevant to what is happening in the present.) The characters in the present cannot affect the future we've already seen in 2077 and Future Alec's intervention with the past is pointless. Maybe he hasn't realized that yet.

Theory 2

Nothing is set in stone

In The Terminator movies, John Connor's ultimate goal is to prevent the machines from taking over humanity. Future John sends Kyle Reese (in the first movie) and a terminator (in the second movie) back in time to help his mother and his younger self. John alters events in the past and keeps delaying the machines' rise to power in the future. The changes oscillate back and forth. Future John sends someone back in time. The characters in the present time make changes, which affect things in the future. Then Future John sends someone (or something) else back to make more changes.

If the same flexibility works in Continuum, then Kiera and Alec make changes in the present that will change the future, and Future Alec is responding to those changes and sending back messages or people to keep altering things to the way he wants them to be. This means that the scenes we see in the future are actually happening in alternate futures. Future Alec sends Liber8 back in time. They make changes. He responds by making sure that Kiera is sent back with them. She makes changes. He makes sure that his younger self doesn't make bad decisions by sending Garza. The characters can make changes and respond to effects all the time, back and forth, in both the present and the future. 

Theory 3

The timeline split

In Back to the Future II, Biff creates an alternate timeline when he visits his younger self in 1955 and gives him a sports almanac to bet on winning teams and raise a fortune in Hill Valley. By 1985 (the movie's present time), Hill Valley is completely altered from the original timeline that we saw in Back to the Future I. The only way to return to the original timeline is for Marty to travel to 1955 and stop Biff from meeting his younger self.

An alternate timeline in Continuum means that Kiera, Alec, and Liber8 have made enough changes that the future changes. Kiera cannot go back to the 2077 she knew unless she can travel back to the day she arrived in 2012 and stop her past self and Liber8 from making any changes. (She would probably have to kill them, including her past self.) As for the show's scenes in the future, there are two possibilities: 1) The future we see is from the original 2077 or 2) The future we see is from the alternate timeline and Alec is still trying to make changes to the past.

Any of these theories could help explain how time travel works in Continuum, but I have a feeling the show is going to leave the rules undefined. If the characters don't know what they can change, then maybe the audience shouldn't know either.

Weekend Roundup - July 21

The best of what I read this week. Sources in parentheses.

Sharknado: What the hell happened to television? (The Second Screen) - Excellent post about television shows' decline in quality, especially on the SyFy channel.

Employee Rights: Starting Your New Job (Simply Hired)

The Chokehold of Calendars (Medium)

Unpronounceable (Medium)

How To Be Happy (Medium)

3 Novel Things You Must Do During Interview Prep (U.S. News)

Weekend Roundup - July 14

Things I read this week. Sources in parenthesis.

90% Of Customers Will Recommend Brands After Social Media Interactions (Business Insider)

Turn It Up: How the Right Amount of Ambient Noise Increases Creativity (99u)

8 Simple Fixes for Lonely Blog Syndrome (LKR Social Media)

On Dialogue Tags: Why Anything Besides 'Said' And 'Asked' Is Lazy Writing (Lit Reactor)

5 Marketing Gigs You Can Do From Home (The Daily Muse)

Film Crit Hulk Smash: Never hate a movie (Badass Digest)

And one thing I watched:
How to escape education's death valley (TED Talks)

Man of Steel got some things right

Spoilers for Man of Steel.

I heard mixed reviews about Man of Steel and these two things kept coming up:

1. Way too much destruction. Buildings fall apart. Explosions. Lots of civilians in danger. But Superman wouldn’t put that many people in danger. He would take the fight away, out in the middle of nowhere (or even into space).

2. The first half of the movie feels different from the second half. Stylistically, visually. It’s like you’re watching two films mashed together, and they don't mash well.

As I watched the movie, I thought these were valid points. Man of Steel has its flaws, but it also got a lot of things right. I'll go through the bad stuff first, and then get to the good stuff.

The bad stuff

1. Too much destruction, and I know why it happens. This version of Clark doesn't don the suit until he faces Zod. Clark hasn't faced major threats before, human or otherwise, so when he fights Zod, it's messy and desperate. Clark doesn't have enough experience to control the situation, and that's why there's so much destruction. I still think it's excessive, but I understand why it happens.

2. Stylistic changes. One issue is with the flashback scenes. I like seeing Clark at different ages, but a few of the flashbacks feel forced and interrupt the flow of the present action. I don’t know if there was a better way to include them. Another issue is all the fighting in the second half of the movie. Lots of explosions, broken glass and stone, and loud noises in contrast to (relatively quiet) scenes around the world in the first half.

3. Clark doesn’t work at the Daily Planet until the end of the movie. I have mixed feelings about this. I like seeing on-the-farm Clark, but the mild-mannered reporter is a big part of the character and usually a more prominent role for the actor. One of the best things about Superman I is seeing Christopher Reeve shift from Clark Kent to Superman, but Henry Cavill doesn’t have the opportunity to do that.

4. Zod was born to be a soldier and protector of Krypton, but we find out too late. Jor-El says that for centuries, everyone on Krypton was born for a specific purpose, but Clark was born naturally and with the freedom to become whoever he wanted. Zod was born to protect Krypton, and that helps us understand why he is willing to do whatever it takes to build a new Krypton on Earth. Clark takes away the purpose of Zod's life, and that's a Big Thing, but the revelation comes too late in the movie for us to care.

5. Jonathan’s death was sort of...ridiculous. In other versions of Superman, Jonathan dies from a heart attack. It’s fine if the writers want to do something new, but Jonathan's death in Man of Steel could have been prevented so easily. Jonathan should have picked up the little girl and gone to the overpass with Martha. Clark could have rescued the dog and used the excuse that he “got really lucky” that he didn’t get hurt. I understand that Jonathan was willing to die in order to protect Clark’s secret, but this was a poor way to show it.

6. Lines that failed miserably. I'm sure there are more, but these two stuck out to me:
---Zod: “Where did you train? On a FARM??” This sounded cartoony, like a cheesy villain. What Zod meant was, he dedicated his life to protecting Krypton while Clark had relatively insignificant experiences on Earth.
---The female military officer at the end who said Superman is “kinda hot.” Completely inappropriate. Her character wasn’t even well developed and still that line was out of character.

The good stuff

1. Clark as a drifter. We haven’t seen this stage in Clark’s life on screen before, even though it’s been hinted at a few times. Man of Steel has thirty-three year-old Clark moving from place to place, job to job. He has this great power and he isn’t sure how he should use it, so he helps where he can. It’s nice to see Clark in ordinary situations. Bus boy at a bar. Part of a ship’s crew. He wears t-shirts and jeans and even though he looks ordinary, there’s an Otherness about him. He wasn’t pretending to be a bumbling reporter and he wasn't a demigod with a cape yet. Just Clark trying to figure out what he is supposed to do.

2. Lois is an ace reporter and she respects people’s boundaries. Lois finds out where Clark lives and says she wants to tell his story. When he explains to her that the world isn’t ready to find out there’s life on other planets, she backs off. She keeps his secret and doesn’t push him. Other versions of Lois Lane (but not all of them) have her arguing for the sake of arguing. If someone says she can’t do something, that’s all the more reason she wants to do it. It becomes predictable. “Lois, don’t get into trouble.” And then oh, there’s trouble and there's Lois. This Lois thinks about more than the news story. She realizes there are some things she shouldn’t do, even if she has the ability to do it.

3. No Kryptonite. No meteor pieces that came to Earth with Clark’s spaceship. No crutch for the bad guys to use. I like what the writers did instead. Clark adapted to Earth's conditions and so he has a bad reaction to the Kryptonian air on the spaceship and the Kryptonian atmosphere spewing out of the World Engine.

4. Jor-El is AI you can see and trust. Russell Crowe’s Jor-El is visible (and not a translucent hologram) and integrated with the alien ships. He explains things to Clark in a straightforward way, no mind games, and Clark trusts him. What bugged me about Jor-El in Smallville was that he was always ambiguous—Clark never knew if Jor-El was manipulating him. It is so refreshing to see Jor-El as a guiding figure that Clark can work with.

5. Normal danger doesn’t faze Clark. In one of the flashbacks, Clark is on a school bus that goes off a bridge and into water. All the other kids are screaming as the bus fills up with water, but Clark is looking around, observing, because he knows he can force his way out of the bus if he has to. The other kids are scared because they’re trapped but Clark is calm because he has a way out. It’s part of his Otherness, that he can't be hurt as easily as humans. In contrast, Clark is cautious when he fights Zod and Faora-Ul because they are actual threats to him.

6. Heat vision is uncomfortable for Clark. The skin around Clark’s eyes turns dry and veiny, which is something that might happen if searing heat suddenly burst from you eyes. In fights, Clark uses heat vision in desperate moves and it takes him a moment to shut his eyes and turn it off.

7. Superman teams up with humans. The military needs Superman’s help and Superman needs to coordinate with them in order to defeat Zod. It isn’t Superman as mankind’s savior but rather Superman as a leader. Which is how it’s supposed to be. Superman leads mankind into the light, not Superman solves all of your problems for you.

8. Lois knows Clark Kent is Superman. She tracks him down to Smallville, and then she keeps his secret. The writers completely bypassed the notion that Clark’s disguise fools Lois, and it suits the characters perfectly.

9. Coming to Earth was about repopulating Krypton. This was the central conflict: would Superman help Zod build a new Krypton or would he defend his adopted home? It's an internal conflict for Clark and it has external effects and consequences. In theory it would work well, but the movie doesn't quite get there.

Man of Steel focuses heavily on Kal-El’s side of the story. It’s a film about the last son of Krypton with some flaws and some highlights. I’m still waiting for a story about Clark Kent. Scenes hinted at what that would be like...young Clark suffers from sensory overload; middle school Clark risks revealing his secret in order to save his classmates; young adult Clark is frustrated about what his purpose is. I want to see a story about what an extraordinary man does in an ordinary world, but the Superman movie we usually get is an extraordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.