“A Stitch in Time” is episode one of season one of Continuum.
This is the rather more imaginatively named than most first episode for a series. The episode starts on November 5th, 2076, in the Vancouver District of the North American Union. A man is making a speech about how, 20 years prior, the corporations had bailed out the bankrupt governments, but how in exchange they had lost their freedoms. When he finishes making his speech the door is blown in and armed police come in and arrest the man for being the leader of a terrorist group called Liber8 and plotting against the Corporate Congress. From the window behind him, there is an explosion and a massive skyscraper crumbles.
It then moves to six months later. 30,000 people were murdered to kill 20. It was the Corporate Congress that was bombed. The bombers had been sentenced to death, the first execution for 40 years, and it’s the eve of the execution itself.
At the actual execution, Edouard Kagame (played by Tony Amendola, who played Master Bra’tac in Stargate SG-1), the leader of Liber8, does something, causing an energy pulse to be emitted from the device that was supposed to execute them, enveloping the terrorists and Officer Kiera Cameron. They look to have been disintegrated, but Kiera wakes up in a scene of some destruction and somewhere completely different. Oddly, at the time of the pulse, an older man who was watching (William B. Davis, the Smoking Man himself from The X-Files), smiled as if it was something he expected.
Where they are is still Vancouver, only it’s 2012. Cameron doesn’t realise this (time travel is rarely your first choice as an explanation after all) and tries to contact her backup. She manages to speak to someone, but not her backup. Cameron thinks that someone has hacked her police frequency (he thinks she’s a hacker too). Until she catches one of the escaped terrorists, pumps him full of a truth drug who says that they have time jumped – sixty years not the planned six. Cameron manages to dupe the terrorist into being captured by the 2012 police.
The man Cameron was talking to is the person who developed the technology she is using, although it hasn’t been released as yet – it’s some sort of internal technology. The young man’s name is Alec. Alec Sadler.
Kiera plans to capture the remaining terrorists; they plan to stop the corporate takeover before it happens. She has the benefit of advanced technology, both internal and external (including some really advanced smart clothing), as well as support from the young genius who developed at least some of it. Cameron also ingratiates herself with the local police, by using her superior knowledge to appear as if she’s an out-of-town police expert on a gang – the time travelling terrorists – who are moving into the area.
As well as the Smoking Man, there’s another appearance from science fiction – one of the terrorists, Sonya Valentine, is played by Lexa Doig, primarily from Andromeda but also with parts in Stargate SG-1 (and she’s married to Stargate‘s Michael Shanks)and Eureka.