Summer DVR Dump: Continuum 1.08: "Playtime"

“Two birds with one stone. He gets to test out his program and get rid of the woman standing in the way of his advancement. Clever.”
- Kiera

In the future, Sadtech (through Lucas Ingram) is demonstrating a new way to control criminals with electrical impulses. The demonstration starts out all right but then the test subject freaks out and Lucas has to zap him to get him back under control. The whole point of the demonstration was to show (or attempt to show) that you can even implant thoughts and suggestions in someone’s mind. Cut to a paintball range in the present where a guy walks up to the CEO of a company and shoots him and then shoots himself in the head. Yeah, that’s not normal.

Out on Kellogg’s boat, Kiera shows up after Kellogg requested her presence. He’s really turning up the romantic mojo. He’s made her breakfast and he wants to spend time with her. She demands to have the time travel device fragment back but he denies having it. She suggests that maybe he took it so Kiera wouldn’t leave. He agrees that might be something he’d do. I gotta say I like the relationship developing here. The interplay is interrupted by a call from Carlos at the paintball crime scene. The CEO who died was the head of a visual effects company. As Kiera and Carlos are chatting with a witness, a woman shows up at a train station and pulls a guy in front of a train with her. It turns out both assailants were beta testers for a gaming company. Betty is kind of a huge gamer geek and Kiera thinks it would be a good idea to bring her along.

Alec is trying to get Kiera’s suit up and running a little ahead of schedule but it’s not going so well. Over at the gaming company, our police team is chatting with the CEO and the head of the development team, Fred. Fred denies that the new game the two assailants were testing had anything to do with their deaths. Both Kiera and Carlos pick up on the fact that Fred is hiding something but they can’t pinpoint what. Betty and Kiera go see a test of the new game. It would seem Fred has a pretty low opinion of beta testers (calling them losers and bottom feeders) and praising programmers. Dude is kind of a douchebag to be honest with you. He gets one of his code monkeys to start up a simulation (even though said monkey reminds him there’s a glitch in it) and Kiera ends up getting shot in the head in the game and all of her tech is out of whack.

Kiera tries to get in touch with Alec on her CMR but it’s not working and his screens went blank. He ends up calling her the old fashioned way and she explains what happened. He’s going to look into things and he eventually figures out there’s a system restore on the CMR but he needs to be there in person to do it. He also makes a little progress hacking into her suit. Sadly, the investigation of the beta testers isn’t going very well. There’s no link really that they can find. Though Betty did spot cans of a legal drink which can cause delusions and psychosis. Well okay so apparently she discovers it’s not that legal since the FDA recalled it. Betty got in touch with some hacker friends who live on the drink and learned that someone, the CEO of the gaming company, bought it all up. She says that she bought it to keep her employees working.

Kellogg is having a much better evening. He tracks Lucas to a fight club and gets him drunk enough for Lucas to start spilling the latest plans that Kagame has. And when Lucas has to leave, Kellogg follows him. He really is my favorite of the baddies. And really, he’s not that bad. He’s more an opportunist than a killer. We find Lucas meeting with Fred. Lucas gets a hard drive in exchange for the tech he was demonstrating in the future. Yeah, that’s not a good combination at all. And based on the look on Kellogg’s face as he listens to Lucas gloat about how Kiera won’t be around much longer, you know it has to be bad.

Kiera heads home to let Alec reboot her while Carlos heads back to the game company after Betty finds a connection between the CEO and both victims. They were basically competitors. Kiera explains the tech we saw in the future to Alec and questions whether someone in the present could have it. If she was thinking about it, Lucas helped create it so of course they have it. Kiera heads off to meet Carlos and Alec is about to tell her he hacked into the encrypted files in her suit but stops short. Carlos runs into Kellogg outside the precinct and Kellogg fleeces poor Carlos into thinking he’s part of Section Six. But he gets the location of where Kiera should be going.

Carlos finds out that the CEO was in negotiations to take over the first victim’s company and that with him dead, there is no deal. Alec is trying to check out the program code and because it is virtual reality needs to use an old school VR set up. But before he knows it, nearly half an hour has gone by. And Kiera is not doing so hot. He head is killing her again. Thanks to Lucas trying to hack her brain, things get wonky pretty fast. Kellogg shows up at the company and talks to Fred and pretty much saves his life when Lucas and Kagame program Kiera to kill Fred. We get a pretty intense knock down drag out between Kiera and Carlos and it becomes the race of the dueling hackers as both Lucas and Alec try to control Kiera. And Lucas is also trying to follow the trail back to Alec. Before it’s all over, Kagame and Lucas realize that a teenage Alec Sadler is the one beating their every move. It turns out it’s a combination of Alec just shutting Kiera off and Kellogg talking her down that saves her before she can shoot Carlos.

She is understandably confused and exhausted after the whole ordeal but promises Carlos she’ll see a specialist (aka Alec). He says he’ll reboot her again and beef up her firewalls. He also tells her he found a hidden file in her diagnostics. Kiera says he should tell her about tomorrow. And as we end, we see he’s managed to at least organize all the files and there is one titled Alec Sadler 2012. This is going to be interesting.