Continuum 2.06 "Second Truths" REVIEW

Continuum 2.06 "Second Truths" TV REVIEW

Episode 2.06
Writer: Jonathan Lloyd Walker
Director: Pat Williams

THE ONE WHERE There's a serial killer on the loose who Kiera remembers from the future – but more importantly, this is the episode in which Carlos discovers her secret!

VERDICT At last! After Carlos spends half the episode with a right cob on – complaining to Kiera that he doesn't understand her methods and she's driving him nuts – Kiera reluctantly tells him that she's from the future. Of course, the big reveal doesn't go quite as smoothly as it could have done: naturally, he laughs and then gets angry. I'm sure I wasn't the only one thinking that things might have gone a little better if Kiera had said, “I'm from the future!” and then used her suit to go invisible. That would've rammed it home pretty sharpish, wouldn't it?

In the end, however, it's more satisfying that Carlos comes to believe her simply by trusting his gut feelings (“satisfying” because that's what he's been teaching Kiera to do). He trusts her detective skills and follows the clues she's given him until he finds her in the cellar; the fact he sees her gun in action is just the icing on the cake, as he's already started to believe her. Nice. Now we can look forward to Carlos regularly dropping his jaw at the amazing things his partner can do. The rest of this season will be fun!

As for the remainder of the episode, the serial killer case isn't really anything we haven't seen before – it's merely the MacGuffin that brings about the big revelation. More interesting is Alec's dalliance with the lovely Emily, who is revealed at the end to be using him. Not that this is really a surprise, mind you. Most women that computer geeks meet in bars don't use sentences like, “Why don't we go back to your place and talk about causality loops and see where it takes us?” If something's too good to be true, Alec, chances are it is too good to be true. It'll be interesting to see who Emily works for, though: is she a member of Liber8, or part of Mr Escher's brigade? And speaking of him, did anybody else feel short-changed that Kiera met him and we didn't learn anything about him at all? What a swizz.

The best thing about this episode, however, other than Carlos finally being brought into the loop, is the fact that he rushes to Kiera's rescue when she's in the hands of a killer... and yet, once more, she saves herself. The fact that Kiera is so rarely the damsel in distress is what makes Continuum so bloody refreshing.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? Usually serial killers are given functional, descriptive names (you know the ones: “Ripper”, “Strangler”, etc). The serial killer here is called the Ouroboros killer because he kills people and leaves them on a circular bus route – the Ouroboros image is of a snake eating itself. That's rather highbrow, isn't it? The cop who named him must have been feeling fancy.

MORAL DILEMMA If Kiera is determined to get back to her own future, should she really have interfered with the serial killer's plans? Shouldn't she have stepped back and let him carry on, because his victims might survive and mess up the future she knows? This is a dilemma Kiera's facing over and over (not least with the bombing at the end of season one), and frankly we don't even know how she's staying sane through all this head-feckery.

SPOILER ALERT! Alec and Emily discuss the twist ending of a film they've just seen at the cinema. The film they're talking about is... this one (we'll link to it rather than name it, just in case).

PURE CHEDDAR Just check out the cheesy grin Kellog uses on the guy he's trying to recruit for his business! Also, it seems Mr Escher has similar ideas – this could be interesting...

COOL TECH Kiera uses her tech a ton this week, from reading the vital signs of people she's interviewing, to firing her gun on a car and disabling it. There's also her “night vision” mode, her gun (which backfires and takes out her assailant) and a groovy room at the start of the episode in which she tries to solve the murder case. Most notably, she pauses and rewinds a scene she's just watched and then retroactively applies her thermal vision to see that someone's in a box the killer loaded onto a van. Wow!

OOH, PRETTY The serial killer looks into Kiera's eyes and see weird gold lights. They're cameras!

BEST LINES
Carlos: “Tell me everything.”
Kiera: “My name is Kiera Cameron, and I came here from the year 2077.”

Jayne Nelson

Continuum season two is currently airing in the UK on Syfy, Thursdays at 10pm

• Read our Continuum season two reviews
• Check out the new SFX TV Reviews Index