Continuum Review: “Second Opinion”

Kiera Cameron experiences a nervous breakdown and some voices invade her head.

We also learn the identity of the mole in the police department.

Title: “Second Opinion”

Cast and Crew

Directed by Pat Williams

Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron
Victor Webster as Carlos Fonnegra
Erik Kundson as Alec Sadler
Nicholas Lea as Gardiner
Roger Cross as Travis Verta
Jesse Moss as Shane Mathers
Jennifer Spence as Betty Robertson
Stephen Lobo as Matthew Kellog
Brian Markinson as Inspector Dillon
Omari Newton as Lucas Ingram
Cantfinder Name as Nora Masters

Full cast and crew information may be found here.

Premise

A new chief inspector takes over operations, and she suspects Kiera is a mole working for Liber8. Kiera, meanwhile, loses contact with Alec when she has a breakdown and a program embedded in her head activates.

The episode concludes with a disturbing but uncertain revelation.

High Point

I’m uncertain what the conclusion means, but I’m hoping it’s not a deceptive cheat. It makes perfect, disturbing sense, and has far-reaching implications for the series.

Low Point

The episode features two far-fetched premises necessary to the story.

The embedded program could be possible, I suppose, but its ability to erase large portions of Kiera’s memory while leaving a functioning human being, if real, seems really unlikely.

More significantly, the episode calls attention to the unbelievable notion at the center of the series, the creation of a faux secret agency, accepted as real by a major metropolitan police department. I really don’t see how Kiera would be permitted to work for them, or how suspicions about her could be cleared so easily.

The Scores:

Originality: 4/6

Effects: 5/6 Simple but effective techniques create the futuristic kid’s toy, probably the most plausible tech we see this week.

Story: 5/6

Acting: 5/6

Emotional Response: 4/6 The story begins well; the rushed and unlikely conclusion does not work so well. The final scene makes some amends.

Production: 6/6.

Overall: 4/6

In total, “Second Opinion” receives 34/42

3 replies on “Continuum Review: “Second Opinion””

  1. You know, given the time travel situation, there could be a lot more backstopping on Kiera than Alec has done so far. We know the old man intended Kiera to arrive when and where she did. He could easily have arranged for others to arrive in other times to provide just enough of a backstop to get stuff past the various levels of doubt encountered. For all we know, the chief received a message from the future and was acting on (or against) that.

    • Could be, though we haven’t seen evidence of that yet, and we have seen some indications that time-travel can’t be controlled especially well.

      This week, we hear expressly that no one else has heard of Section Six prior to her arrival.

  2. I’m not that troubled by the fact Kiera has been able to maintain the Section Six thing. The whole idea of a secret government agency thing is that it’s secret, it’s not absurd to think secret agencies exist that other agencies don’t know about (and there’s no real way to verify them). A fake agency could even be created so no one finds out about the real one.

    All they really have is that Kiera and Section Six are apparently backed up by a convincing digital paper trail that Alex’s uber hacking skills created. The grudging mixture of suspicion and acceptance seems appropriate.

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