Genre Character of the Week: Kiera Cameron

Early every morning over a cup of coffee and (when I’m being good) breakfast, my family sits together and watches about an hour of television.  Usually it’s shows on DVD, but upon occasion it is the new stuff as well.  Over the years we’ve seen everything from sitcoms to dramas and at the rate of five hours a week, we tend to make it through most series in every couple weeks (or a month for longer ones).

Right now we’re watching the Canadian science fiction series Continuum.  The show follows a cop from 2077 who has been transported back to 2012 along with 8 terrorists and her attempts to stop them from altering the future.  The police officer in question (called a protector in her own era) is our genre character of the week, Kiera Cameron (pictured left).

In the series, 2077 is a corporate-controlled world where governments have fallen (BTW, I should really do a review of Jennifer Government soon – a great SF novel suggested to me a few years back by my BFF Mike) and the status quo is threatened by a terrorist cell called Liber8, who have recently bombed a number of significant buildings in Vancouver Canada with a death toll number in the thousands.

After their arrest and trial, the eight ringleaders of the group are sentenced to die, and during the execution they use a device to escape through time – and because she saw the device and attempted to wrestle it away, Kiera is pulled back with them.

The majority of the show takes part in modern-day Vancouver, Canada.  Kiera (played by Rachel Nichols – who was a green-skinned Orion cadet in the 2009 Star Trek film, which is probably why Mike is watching the show) is a mother who, in addition to trying to stop these terrorists, is also hoping to get back to her nine-year-old son Sam.  In a lot of ways this show parallels the 2008 BBC series Ashes to Ashes which also features a cop trapped in the past attempting to return to her child in her present.

So far we’re only a couple episodes in, but the family is enjoying it, and a big part of that comes down to the main character.