The Point Radio: CONTINUUM Making Time Travel Work
Transcript
The Point Radios Hey it's Mike Raub, new time travel twists and turns already going on on the third season of Continuum. We talked to series star Rachel Nichols and creator Simon Berry about what's ahead for the new season. And Morgan Freeman talks about the real-life dangers going on right now in Madagascar and they're not a cartoon. Plus Guardians of the Galaxy bringing in some big bucks already. Let's get to The Point.
This is The Point, The Point Radio, get The Point Radio. The time travel drama Continuum is back for a third season on Sci-Fi. So I want to know what we can expect as an overall theme for this run of episodes. For the answer to that I went to series star Rachel Nichols. For me the theme for Kira this season is really for the greater good.
And season one it was very much about getting home, getting home, getting home, and have to get home. Season two it was about getting home but it was about taking responsibility and knowing that my actions or liberate the actions or Alex's actions in the present day was going to affect the future that I come from. And season two was about taking responsibility for that and acknowledging the changes that we put in effect from little actions and from big actions. And then season three is very much about the idea that Kira is coming to realize that the future that she came from, although yes her husband and her son are in it, is not a very good future. It's not a very happy future. The world is not a great place where she comes from.
Season three is, like I said, for the greater good for Kira. It's about understanding that if she were to try to maintain the future that she came from just to get back to her husband and son, rather than try to effect change to make the future she came from a better place should she ever get back to help, thankfully, all of humanity. If she chose just to save two people, it's quite a selfish move on her part. So I think season three for Kira for me has been very much about the idea that although I love my husband and I miss my son and I would like to get back to them,
the better thing to do is to stay in this time and to try to change things to make the future that I come from not exist at the risk of sacrificing my husband and son for the greater good. Adding to that showrunner and creator Simon Barry. The idea of sacrifice, which I think is exactly what Rachel is talking about, is to make a hard decision. We're sort of trying to take sacrifice and strip it down to its more personal state. And I think this season, what we're trying to do with all our characters is look at sacrifice as a theme and play out various permutations of sacrifice in a way that is essentially works on a personal level on a very, sort of a character into a level.
And that also plays out on the scale of the stakes of the show, which as Rachel just eloquently put, is really about, you know, looking forward and making decisions that have more to do, that are altruistic as opposed to selfish. And I think, you know, the way that plays, it's easy to say that, but the complexities of those decisions, because there are personal stakes and larger sort of global stakes, makes them less than simple when you exercise them. They can be quite complicated. And of course, they involve the relationships that you already have.
So, things like betrayal and sacrifice are definitely big themes that we're working with this season. So as an actor who plays sometimes different versions of the same character, is it hard to keep all this time travel stuff straight? Very funny conversation. Alec asks me in a question in the third episode, and I'm with what we call, you know, there's Alec, there's regular Alec, and then there's scar Alec, the one who traveled back in time to save Emily. And I'm with regular Alec, and he asks me a question.
Did you know X, Y, and Z? And in the moment, as Rachel playing Kira, I'm thinking in my head, okay. Okay, this Alec doesn't know that I know that the answer to that question is yes. But the other Alec knows that I know that that question is yes. And the other mean, I mean, I had to go through this process of which Alec knows and how to cover best this lie that I'm about to tell in the split second.
And I just started laughing in the middle of the take. And I went, okay, let me start again. Let me get this straight in my head, because it's one of the more fun parts of my job. And sometimes it's one of the more boggling parts of my job to remember what I know in which timeline and what everybody else knows. And then I can always call Simon if I have a question, because he has to know everything.
The problem is taken a little bit more seriously by the writers. We realized that we didn't want to get into a jam with multiple timelines in a way that would, A, just complicate the show and B, be confusing to the audience. So for those who have watched the first episode, we went to great lengths, I think, to establish for this season kind of a general structure that would not allow the science of time travel and the consequences of time travel sort of mathematically, if you will, to interfere with a lot of the storytelling. And we didn't shy away from it. We just tried to resolve it in short order so that we could say, hey, we are adhering to rules of time travel that are based in what we've set up, and we're trying to be true to those rules that we've set up from day one.
At the same time, you never want that to bog down the storytelling of the show or the entertainment value. We love it internally. The writers and I are probably more excited sometimes about these complications than we should be. We have to temper our nerd-gasms and sort of bring it back down to earth a lot of times. I think we were successful in sort of saying, hey, this is a big subject time travel. There are so many spiraling scenarios that come out of it. But what we wanted to do is really kind of bear down on one storyline that kept everything in context in a way that I think opens the door to the time travel universe but keeps it contained that we can tell a focused story.
I say that, and a lot of people will come back and say, oh, but it's so much more complicated than that. And the truth is we try to make sure that the things that are important are front and center and that the audience knows that. But we always try to acknowledge that there are – the big world of time travel when you break it down. It's a mythology that has been practiced many times. So we try to honor all of those things and at the same time be true to ourselves and be as concise as we can be. To a lot of fans today, time travel stories are what vampire stories were to the science fiction genre a few years ago.
I asked Rachel to comment on that. This is something that I haven't really thought of before. I find that time travel is an extremely interesting genre to choose the basis story on. It's also a very difficult one because you have to – when you're establishing a show, whether it's our show or a different show that involves time travel, you have to establish rules for time travel. And then you have to adhere to them because the fans are the first ones to say, well, no, that doesn't make sense. You were allowed to time travel this way in this time and then you went to this timeline and that doesn't make sense because it should be – so it's very, very complex.
So I think it takes a very smart story writing, very smart setting and a very smart set of rules to make it work. So it may go very well if time travel is the new vampire because it's a sort of highly intelligent genre to be able to keep track of it and to keep honest with it and for everybody that wants it to stay extremely involved because it is complex. So I think it's quite a cool idea that something so complex has become the new vampire because then it just speaks well to the societal genre in general, just the intelligence of the viewers and the fans and how involved they are and like to be and will continue to be, even if you're making a show that's extremely, extremely complicated. New episodes of Continuum every Friday on Sci-Fi and see a lot more too at scifi.com. The flight radio.
Let's get right into it. Here's the latest in pop culture. The world of Marvel movies has once again reached out and affected collecting with certain Marvel comics, raising in value due to upcoming movie appearances. And of course, the latest is Marvel Super Heroes number 18 first appearance from back in 1969 of the Guardians of the Galaxy and a nine point eight graded CGC copy has just gone for a little under twenty thousand dollars. In case you need to be convinced about the influence just a little less than a month ago, a copy of Marvel Super Heroes 18 that was graded nine point four went for just about twenty three hundred dollars in auction. Marvel has added a second layer to their summer crossover event, Original Sin by announcing a second series called Original Sins.
It'll be all part of the event that begins in June and contains characters like Deathlock, The Young Avengers, Black Bolt, Doctor Doom, Howard the Duck and more. The new mini series will be five issues and tie into the original sin crossover event, which begins with a lot of big publicity and comic stores in June. The Epic's cable network has announced a Heroes Unlimited weekend, which will pretty much be two full days of comic book and superhero related property movies. Those include GI Joe, Star Trek, The Expendables and of course, The Avengers, as well as some things kind of on the edge like Red Dawn, World War Z and Jack Reacher. Again, it begins on Saturday, April the 12th and continues into Sunday, April the 13th.
And for more information, check your local listings and your cable network to make sure you do get Epics or get more information at Epics.com. Remember the Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie? Well, Nicole is coming back to television in a show that really is being spun out of her series on AOL. Cannanly Nicole was picked up on AOL from material that she had on Twitter and now it's going to debut as a regular series on VH1 in July. Even though a lot of people have already grabbed it on torrents and already love it, it looks like BBC America is way at the top of the list of people who believe in the series, The Musketeers.
The first take on the classic Alexander Dumas characters has already been a hit in Britain. It premieres in June here on the BBC America and already there's a second season been ordered, which will premiere here in 2015. The pipeline between IDW Comics and getting those properties on to television has been widened a little bit with a new agreement that IDW has set with E1 Entertainment. E1 will now have a first look deal with IDW, which means that the properties that IDW does handle could have an easier ride to get on television. Entertainment 1 has had a few successes in the past. Right now they're involved with the AMC series Turn.
They've been involved with getting Walking Dead to television and a number of other projects that are in development for cable networks. Island of Lemurs Madagascar is a new documentary headed into IMAX theaters. It follows the work of Dr. Patricia C. Wright who's been trying to help these highly evolved creatures who arrived on Earth millions of years ago and are now endangered. I first asked Dr. Wright what makes these creatures so special. They're beautiful animals, but each one is so different. There's 103 different species.
Some eat bamboo, some eat seeds, some eat leaves, some eat insects, but each one of the species does their own thing. And every one of them is cute in its own way. So, you know, there's many reasons. But the reason I stayed in Madagascar as long as I have working with lemurs is partially because they're so endangered. Ninety-one percent of them are either threatened or critically endangered or endangered.
And I feel that I can maybe do something and I think this film can do something so that they will survive into the future. So what are the biggest problems that put lemurs on the endangered list? I think probably the deforestation in the slash and burn farming is a major problem. It has been for a while. And it used to be that the village elders who had all the wisdom would say,
do not eat the lemurs because they are so much like us. Their hands, their faces, they are special and sacred. But recently, you know, people aren't listening as much as they should to the village elders. And so hunting has become much more of a problem. And that's a problem for lemurs because very often, like the injury, that extraordinary injury that Morgan did so well on camera,
the injury gives birth once every three years. How lucky Drew and David were to have one born just at the right time for that extraordinary film. But if you have an animal that gives birth once every three years and there's just not very many of them and they're big and they're good for hunting, you know, that's a problem. So hunting has become recently more of a problem than it has been in the past. The documentary is narrated by a familiar voice, Morgan Freeman.
And I ask him how he got involved. I don't know lemurs. This is the first time I've had this close connection with them. However, I have a friend who lives, who has a place in the Caribbean and he raises them. So on a visit to his place, I guess a year ago, maybe more, I was introduced to them up close and personal because they're obviously in a little bit of trouble. And he's doing what he can to help rejuvenate their population.
So I got a little bit of history about them, not nearly what I got doing during this marriage. The overall problem here is pretty clear to Morgan. There was a book called Ishmael. It's a trilogy in which the author explains that we are turning everything on this planet into food for humans. We'll eat it. And if we can't eat it, we'll kill it and take its place.
It's moving out of the way. The amazing thing about Madagascar is there were no humans there when the lemurs got there. So they flourished and life does without us. Island of lemurs, Madagascar is in IMAX theaters right now. Check your local listings. That does it for the podcast right now, but we'll give you pop culture anywhere you want it with Give The Point Radio.
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Have a good weekend. See you back here in a few days. Get the point radio dot com.
