The pilot of Showcase's new TV show Continuum, featuring the stunning Rachel Nichols, seems at first like a cookie-cutter Terminator-type plot where goodies and baddies time travel to hunt each other in the past. However, it may have more depth than it first leads us to believe.
It's unclear what agenda Continuum is pushing. As the documentary Operation Hollywood shows, the state uses movies and TV programming ...well... for programming people to their particular perspectives.
Continuum seems at first to push the status-quo line of the evil terrorist 'freedom fighters' committing a 9/11-type event killing 30.000 people to kill 20 members of the corporate congress. They escape into the past and decide to cause a revolution, but are chased by the valiant supercop Nichols - who seems unphased by being propelled 700 years in the past and keeps on performing her professional duties regardless. Of course, the contemporary cops embrace her immediately in her fight against the evil terrorists.
Other clichés that reinforce our current statist status-quo is that the terrorists are cold blooded killers that kill a bunch of cops to get their weapons and free their comrade. We can see they are baddies because they throw knives at each other, have scars, dodgy hairstyles and decide to wear anarchist-militia-type outfits to 'blend in'.
Contrastingly, the future they present -although high-tech- does seem somewhat despotic as well as very familiar. The 'corporations' bailed out their failed and bankrupt government and the population lost their freedoms as a result, making them 'slaves to corporate congress'. Their future democracy was replaced by a corporate dictatorship. This seems like an exact description of what we have today - except maybe that the bailout was the other way round where corporations were bailed out by the governments.
So this would point that the future world seems to be a metaphor for our current situation, with government bailouts and the rising police state. They describe the future USA as the 'North American Union' which is a term associated with the globalist agenda. It is run by the corporate congress, which again is appropriate for our current congress.
The writers of the show probably don't want to be too blatantly critical of the status quo so they target their criticism at the 'future' society which is a caricature of our current society. The cop chase in 2012 seems pretty standard where the cops are the goodies and the baddies are our familiar terrorists. I'm hoping these covert criticisms of our current society were used by the writers so that the show would be approved by the censors and networks. We'll see in future episodes which side they are really on.
A few things that trouble me are that the Liberate freedom fighters seem to blame the corporations for the corporate dictatorships. This appears to be the standard socialist viewpoint which blames corporations for subverting democracies, resulting in fascism. To some extent they are correct in that corporations -like any other special interest group - uses state force to impose rules that benefit them. The real problem is the presence of the state's monopoly on force which becomes a magnet for special interest to take control of it for their own ends. Without the state, corporations are nothing more than voluntary associations of people. Actually, without the state, there are no corporations as it is a statist construct that shields its members from personal liability - something which would not exist in a free society.
Also, the parents of the geek Erik Knudsen can be heard saying that the government bailed out the banks and that Erik is not 'ready' yet. Are they freedom fighters too? Why is Erik blindly helping this supercop Nichols? Why does it seem like they've taken current fears of the rising police state, Muslim terrorism and conspiracy theories, blended them together and spewed out a very confusing resulting story that seems both pro- and anti- establishment? It's not clear to me which way the writers are leaning at this point. Maybe this could be an interesting vehicle to criticize the current status-quo, or maybe it's just using the plot as a device to show that fascism is the way forward.
It's unclear what agenda Continuum is pushing. As the documentary Operation Hollywood shows, the state uses movies and TV programming ...well... for programming people to their particular perspectives.
Continuum seems at first to push the status-quo line of the evil terrorist 'freedom fighters' committing a 9/11-type event killing 30.000 people to kill 20 members of the corporate congress. They escape into the past and decide to cause a revolution, but are chased by the valiant supercop Nichols - who seems unphased by being propelled 700 years in the past and keeps on performing her professional duties regardless. Of course, the contemporary cops embrace her immediately in her fight against the evil terrorists.
Other clichés that reinforce our current statist status-quo is that the terrorists are cold blooded killers that kill a bunch of cops to get their weapons and free their comrade. We can see they are baddies because they throw knives at each other, have scars, dodgy hairstyles and decide to wear anarchist-militia-type outfits to 'blend in'.
Contrastingly, the future they present -although high-tech- does seem somewhat despotic as well as very familiar. The 'corporations' bailed out their failed and bankrupt government and the population lost their freedoms as a result, making them 'slaves to corporate congress'. Their future democracy was replaced by a corporate dictatorship. This seems like an exact description of what we have today - except maybe that the bailout was the other way round where corporations were bailed out by the governments.
So this would point that the future world seems to be a metaphor for our current situation, with government bailouts and the rising police state. They describe the future USA as the 'North American Union' which is a term associated with the globalist agenda. It is run by the corporate congress, which again is appropriate for our current congress.
The writers of the show probably don't want to be too blatantly critical of the status quo so they target their criticism at the 'future' society which is a caricature of our current society. The cop chase in 2012 seems pretty standard where the cops are the goodies and the baddies are our familiar terrorists. I'm hoping these covert criticisms of our current society were used by the writers so that the show would be approved by the censors and networks. We'll see in future episodes which side they are really on.
A few things that trouble me are that the Liberate freedom fighters seem to blame the corporations for the corporate dictatorships. This appears to be the standard socialist viewpoint which blames corporations for subverting democracies, resulting in fascism. To some extent they are correct in that corporations -like any other special interest group - uses state force to impose rules that benefit them. The real problem is the presence of the state's monopoly on force which becomes a magnet for special interest to take control of it for their own ends. Without the state, corporations are nothing more than voluntary associations of people. Actually, without the state, there are no corporations as it is a statist construct that shields its members from personal liability - something which would not exist in a free society.
Also, the parents of the geek Erik Knudsen can be heard saying that the government bailed out the banks and that Erik is not 'ready' yet. Are they freedom fighters too? Why is Erik blindly helping this supercop Nichols? Why does it seem like they've taken current fears of the rising police state, Muslim terrorism and conspiracy theories, blended them together and spewed out a very confusing resulting story that seems both pro- and anti- establishment? It's not clear to me which way the writers are leaning at this point. Maybe this could be an interesting vehicle to criticize the current status-quo, or maybe it's just using the plot as a device to show that fascism is the way forward.