Continuum‘s Creator Talks Season Three and Time Travel

Beware of spoilers for Season Two of Continuum in this story.

Continuum creator Simon Barry has a plan. And that’s a good thing, considering the stunning finale of the show’s second season, in which young genius Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen) used the recently reassembled time travel device to try and save his murdered girlfriend.

Barry talked about the show’s start, and the writers’ plans for the future, in a new interview with Collider.

“There’s this horrible, two-sided blade with time travel,” he said about Alec’s actions in the finale. “By not exploiting it, you can be safe and solid in your foundation. If you do use it, it can get really messy, really quickly. It is a time travel show, after all, and we’ve always wanted to explore more time travel on the show. So, we really planned ahead, that this would be our second use of time travel, after the original incident in Season One. We felt very confident that the storytelling would support the way this would play out and how we would be able to portray what Alec has done.

“I think in the first episode of Season Three, there will be no more questions about how this works or how to tell stories using time travel. We have a fairly straightforward and fun approach to the reality of time travel that allows us to have our cake and eat it, too.”

Barry said that while Season One laid the groundwork for the characters and their relationships, it wasn’t until Continuum‘s second year that the show could — thanks to strong ratings and positive feedback from fans.

“Season Two was really our attempt to be the show that was not just trying out,” Barry said. “We could own it. And I think because we started thinking long-term in a much more pragmatic way, we certainly decided to lay in much more mythology, and split the balance of procedural episodic storytelling and serialized mythological storytelling a bit more in the favor of the serialized.”

Heading into Season Three, plans are already in the works to add further depth to the series’ mythology and its characters.

“Julian’s role is going to evolve in a way that’s surprising, and I think Carlos is certainly going to show a different side of himself that will challenge everyone,” he said. “They are both rich characters who should not be stagnant. I think we try to hold every character up to that standard and the objective not to change them for the sake of changing them, but to mine the little shades that we’ve revealed in the past, and see where those shades can go.”

Next season will also introduce what Barry described as “two very important characters,” and expand on just who the Freelancers are and what they are up to.

“Season Three definitely has a major component of Freelancer activity and the mythology of the Freelancers, as it relates to the larger mythology of the show, the future and Alec Sadler,” he said. “That’s going to be explored in a major way. We’ve always resisted the urge to throw too much, too soon at the audience. We will be using every hour of the 13 hours in Season Three to explore our Freelancer mythology and take advantage of it.”

Be sure to read Collider’s full interview with Simon Barry, and stay tuned for the third season of Continuum next spring!