Continuum: An End

After pondering the Time-Turner and having watched a spate of movies related to time travel, I discovered the TV series “Continuum”. Last year we watched the first three seasons (12 episodes per season), and this past week I watched the fourth and final season (of only six episodes).

The main protagonist is a cop from 2077 who is transported 65 years into the past  (to present day 2012) with a group of “criminals” destined to be executed. There are layers of conspiracies with different factions and individuals trying to change their destinies. The series is action-packed with lots of hand-to-hand combat, shooting of ranged weapons, and of course future tech invading the present. In the early seasons there are frequent flash forwards to events in 2077 where the “government” is run by corporations, and rebels are trying to free themselves from its tyranny – there’s a very interesting social subtext weaving its way through the storyline.

I’m not going to give away any spoilers for those who might be interested in watching the series, but I’d like to ponder some questions about time-travel and fate that come up in the show. The first point is that once time-travel is invented, you can’t put the “genie back in the bottle”. Anyone with the power, who wants things to go a particular way in his/her life can (and possibly will) use it to achieve such ends – multiple times if necessary. This lure, and the individual choices people make when given the opportunity, is examined in the series. Others who are connected become pawns of a larger game. But it is unclear how free choices are for pawn or time-traveller.

This brings me to the second point. Are individuals or factions utilizing time-travel really able to bring about substantial change to the course of history? Are they pebbles in a river that may affect some local surroundings but not be able to change the ultimate flow? When is an event momentous enough that it truly diverts the course of the future? Students in my Statistical Thermodynamics class are right now knee-deep in the Boltzmann equation (and distribution) and calculating partition functions for different types of molecular motion. When the number of particles is large, the overwhelming “occurrence” of the most probable distribution (and ancillary closely related ones) dwarfs any other possibilities. Individual and even small groups of particles may change course at the microscopic level, but may still have no effect on the macroscopic level. We haven’t gotten to entropy and the arrow of time yet, but I’m looking forward to having that discussion with my students!

Third, how do we resolve potential time-travel paradoxes? There’s a shadowy faction in Continuum that is trying to “fix” the “error catastrophe” that is mounting in the time-universe. Is there an error catastrophe? It makes me think about chemical-biological evolution and the balance between fidelity of a self-replicator and the capacity to mutate and change. Too much deleterious mutation and the “organism” dies. Too high a fidelity and the same fate befalls the organism that cannot adapt to a changing environment. Extant living systems, from a biochemical view, seem to straddle this edge. But what if the organism could time-travel to ensure its own survival or that of its species by making different “choices”? The question is how constrained are one’s choices?

In the first Back to the Future movie, as the time-line starts to diverge from that which might have produced Marty McFly, he and his history starts to “fade”. In Continuum, a time-line can collapse as events that may have spawned its birth are reversed by events that quench its existence. In the first new Star Trek movie, Spock meets his younger self and Vulcan logic prevails that such a meeting is possible. Neither version goes “insane” in seeing the other. In the third Harry Potter book, we do not see what might happen if Harry and Hermione might have met their former selves. Would their earlier selves have gone mad? In Predestination, a cycle of time loops must be engineered to bring events into a coherent “closure” of the time continuum. Continuum straddles a middle ground: some of the paradoxes are not quite resolved, but one seems the converging and diverging of a manageable number of time-lines so as not to be completely mind-bending. 

Fourth, the question of free will is raised. There is no good answer to this question, but the series juxtaposes those who think that time-travel strengthens individual choice (for those who wield the technology) or weakens individual choice (for those who know in their earlier selves that such a technology is possible). Sometimes this dissonance is present in the same person and you see the wrestling that happens within an individual about how to make choices. What does it mean to make choices and “influence” events? Are those choices predestined? Can people truly “change” if they got a glimpse of their futures?

A final summation of Continuum in relation to the limited number of other TV series I have watched. The acting is overall good. The characters are interesting. And most importantly, the series does not drag itself out but comes to a conclusion without overstaying its welcome. I think this was also done well in Breaking Bad. The momentum builds up to an explosive climax that resolves (for the most part) appropriately given all that has come before. Battlestar Galactica, to take an opposite example, seems to attempt outlandish ideas in the final season that lose touch with authenticity, and in my opinion ended rather weakly. Once Upon A Time, which started well, in my opinion, might be getting more ridiculous with each season as stronger and more powerful antagonists need to be introduced. I’ll probably continue watching it since it makes me think about magic in certain ways. (Coincidentally Once Upon A Time and Continuum are both filmed in Vancouver, BC. In my last visit I was told that the TV/movie business is booming.) The series ends with An End, but not The End. (Who knows if there will be a sequel?)

Will time-travel be invented in a future timeline connected to the present one? If it has, shouldn’t we already know it? Or is there some entity that keeps us on the road towards it that we are unaware of? (Conspiracy theorists will be working on this for time immemorial!) Or is the fact that we are here suggest that there is a telos or direction guiding the process – one that knows the future and the past? If our universe is not closed, then certainly from the thermodynamic point of view, all these questions remain open.