Continuum crew set up an Occupy Vancouver-style Tent City on the CBC Vancouver plaza in March to do two days of filming for episode six, Time’s Up. On the first day of shooting, a peaceful protest rally against fake oil company Exotrol escalates to violence with prop Vancouver Mounted Police on the scene to control the fake rioters throwing prop bricks. [Update: Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron and Victor Webster’s Carlos Fonnegra arrive before the violence and cop-from-the-future Kiera sees her first horse.]
I blame the terrorists-from-the-future Liber8 for inflaming these present-day dissenters, who carry handmade signs saying things like — I’ll Believe Corporations Are People When Texas Executes One (my favourite); Stop the Pipe Line; Fish Can’t Breathe Oil; Oil & Water Do Not Mix;, My Mom Taught Me to Share; Save Mother Earth; It’s Time to Think Outside the Barrel; Your Fault My Problem; and No Fracking Way!
The ones throwing fake bricks above resemble the anarchist group, Black Bloc. [It turns out Alec’s stepbrother Julian, played by Richard Harmon of The Haunting Hour, is one of the Black Bloc hired by Liber8 to escalate the protest into violence while they kidnap the Exotrol CEO]
On the second day of shooting, Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster’s police detectives arrive to a big media show with reporters on the scene and an Exotrol armoured vehicle on the plaza. [Liber8 flashes a viral message instructing Exotrol to give the $20 million ransom to the people, who break through barricades to get at the cash from the Exotrol van.]
I liked seeing real Vancouver Police cruisers on Hamilton Street barricading the block plus the prop Vancouver Police cruisers in the scene, as well as real Vancouver Police officers next to background performers in uniform.
Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster had an earlier scene inside the Vancouver Public Library atrium high up on a walkway [made to look like they were walking to Exotrol security offices after the kidnapping of the Exotrol CEO. I missed the scene of the CEO on this same walkway with her security guards.]
[And the night shoot inside the CBC Vancouver breezeway turned out to be the opening scene of Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron in future Vancouver battling people stealing food provisions that were withheld by a corporation.]
Continuum airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday nights on Showcase in Canada.