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2077. My time, my city, my family. When terrorists killed thousands of innocents, they were condemned to die. They had other plans.

A time travel device sent us all back 65 years. I want to get home, but I can't be sure what I will return to if history is changed. Their plan: to corrupt and control the present in order to win the future. What they didn't plan on was me.
Opening Narration (Seasons 1 and 2)

Continuum is a Canadian science fiction series that ran for four seasons from 2012 to 2015. It was created by Simon Barry, who also acts as one of the show's executive producers. It aired on Showcase Television in Canada and Syfy in the UK and the USA.

Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) is an ordinary police officer — ordinary, that is, for the corporate-run, vaguely dystopian future of 2077 in the Vancouver District of the North American Union or NAU. She's assigned the routine job of guarding captured terrorists belonging to Liber8 during their very public execution. However, the group has an escape plan that involves Time Travel and Kiera is pulled along with them back to 2012.

Underground, motivated and very dangerous, the surviving Liber8 terrorists are determined to wage their war against the forces they believe will destroy the future in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia and it's up to Kiera to stop them. Luckily, she's not alone: she's quickly pulled into the orbit of Detective Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster) and the Vancouver Police Department, who think she's an expert on this "new street gang up from Portland," and Alec Sadler (Eric Knudsen), a young tech prodigy who will shape the future Kiera and the terrorists come from.

Now has a Character Sheet and recap page.

Has nothing to do with Stargate: Continuum besides also being centered on time travel. Not to be confused with the webcomic or the RPG of the same name.


This series provides examples of the following:

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    A-D 
  • Abnormal Ammo: Kiera's future has a wide range of specialized ammunition. Ones shown include a blood-based tracking device, a more conventional but self-camouflaging tracking device, taser rounds, and self-guided flash bang rounds.
  • Action Girl: With the possible exception of Betty and Alec's Mom, practically every named female character is more than capable of beating anyone in their way to a pulp, leave them full of bullet holes, or both.
  • Actor Allusion:
    • "Matter of Time" has one to Rachel Nichols' role in Star Trek (2009) (see also Shout-Out, below):
      Carlos: Did anybody ever tell you you watched too much Star Trek as a kid?
      Kiera (Smiles, then stops short and looks confused for a second.)
    • The leader of the anti-corporate protesters in "Matter of Time" named "Mr. Vincent" is Vincent, from Eureka.
  • Affably Evil:
    • Kellog, in spite of being a selfish megalomaniac, always has a smile and is keen to engage in friendly smalltalk before getting down to business.
    • Kagame. A wise, thoughtful old man with an affable personality who just happens to be a leader of a Well-Intentioned Extremist faction responsible for plenty of death and destruction.
  • Agony of the Feet: While attempting to grill Brad for information on the future, Garza grabs a nail gun and puts a nail through Kiera's foot to force his cooperation. It got him talking.
  • Aliens in Cardiff: Vancouver is the 35th most populous metro area in North America, but it's apparently the epicenter of the region's future. Essentially Lampshaded that this was largely due to it being the home town of Alec Sadler, whose next-generation tech advances almost single-handedly turned it into the next Silicon Valley.
  • Alliterative Name: Kiera Cameron.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Liber8 storms a VPD police precinct to free one of their comrades. A few officers were killed trying to stop them.
  • Always Save the Girl: Both played straight and averted. Alec in the Season 2 finale uses the Time Travel Device to go back to rescue Emily, but denies Kiera her chance to return home to 2077.
  • Analogy Backfire: The use of the name "Theseus" by the revolutionaries who take everyone hostage in "Family Time";
    Hoyt: He was a warrior who united the people of Athens.
    Alec: He was also pushed off a cliff when the people turned against him.
  • An Offer You Can't Refuse: In "Waning Minute", Sonya is shown to have initially gone off-the-grid when she was given the opportunity to run the Super-Soldier project. The offer was such that refusing was basically impossible without ruining her life, but at the same time the work was so morally repugnant that she couldn't accept. Kagame convinces her to go along with it as a mole for Liber8.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The Freelancers are a secret order founded in the 12th century by a time traveler from the 22nd century with the purpose of preventing time travelers from changing history.
  • Anti-Villain:
    • The Well-Intentioned Extremist organization Liber8 is actually quite right about how bad the totalitarian NAU government is. Flashback sequences also give several members sympathetic backstories.
    • On the opposite end, there's Kiera herself. She starts out as a willing enforcer of the corrupt corporate dystopia in 2077, and her original motivation is the selfish desire to go back to the future as it was when she left it, contrasting with Liber8's more radical designs. Despite this, she's not someone who's cruel for the sake of being cruel and develops more heroic ambitions as the series goes on.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Invoked by Carlos in "Time's Up" when he and Kiera are interrogating a captured anarchist.
    Carlos: We've got you on inciting a riot, destruction of property, aiding and abetting a kidnapping, obstruction of justice ... oh, and, uh, I'm pretty sure I saw you jaywalking.
  • As You Know: The conversation between Kellog and Kiera in the season 2 premier serves little purpose other than to bring new viewers up to speed as they bat information they both know back and forth.
  • The Atoner: Future Alec makes a few allusions to being this and to the time travel plot being a Benevolent Conspiracy to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • Author Tract: The series is already pretty Anvilicious with its Ripped from the Headlines plots, but the Zero-growth economy utopia in the form of the Crystal Spires and Togas Vancouver at the end takes the series' Author Tract elements up to eleven, recalling Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Season two shows the Super-Soldier project was considered this. Despite all the combat advantages Travis possesses, his creation was deemed too costly and the project was shelved.
  • Bad Future: The main timeline future is this for Liber8. Brad Tonkin's future is this for everyone.
  • The Bad Guy Wins:
    • Season 2 ends with all the time travelers save Lucas locked up by the Freelancers, while Alec has gone back in time to save Emily. Meanwhile, Dillon going over Escher's guidebook to create CPS, and Carlos and Betty join Julian's group.
    • Season 3 has Kellog usurp control of Piron from Alec. This evidently leads to a Bad Future, as Brad Tonkin's temporal beacon summons a bunch of goons in Powered Armor.
  • Batman Gambit: In "So Do Our Minutes Hasten", Alec shows off his new health-monitoring wrist bracelet, the Halo, to the Piron board, convincing a naysayer by identifying markers for colon cancer. In private, however, he admits that the "data" it collected was all guesswork and information from the man's company insurance files. Now he only has two months to make a working prototype, though fortunately Jason is familiar with the technology, even if it is antiquated by future standards.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For:
    • Throughout Season 1, Kiera wishes that that the police in 2012 were more like the CPS in 2077, who use harsh and draconian measures in the pursuit of justice and to hunt down terrorist suspects, innocent or not. Come Season 2, the police start adopting more of these measures, only to turn them against Kiera, believing her to be the Liber8 mole in their department.
    • Liber8 wants nothing more than for the public to wake up and see the corporations for what they really are. Come "3 Minutes to Midnight", they get to learn the result. Instead of the Crapsaccharine World of 2077, you get the pure Crapsack World of 2039, where civilization has collapsed from all-out war between the corporations and the people, and humanity is going down the drain.
    • Kiera wants nothing more than to go home. However, when she is finally able to, she learns that there is another version of her raising Sam in a much better future.
  • Becoming the Mask: Emily was assigned to shadow Alec by Mr. Escher, but as of "Second Wave" she's fallen for him for real.
  • Belligerent Sexual Tension:
    • Between Kellog and Kiera, though it's largely one-way as Kiera is (mostly) keeping faithful to her husband from 2077. Kellog defects from Liber8 fairly quickly and becomes Kiera's ally, albeit one with his own agenda. She actually does sleep with him once, but things went right back to the status quo afterward.
    • Garza invokes this to troll Kiera during her interrogation.
  • Benevolent Conspiracy: Future Alec sees what he is doing as this.
  • Big Bad:
    • For Kiera and the VPD during Seasons 1 and 2, Liber8. For most of Season 3, Inspector Dillon is even more convinced of this. Even Kiera stops being so sure about it after some pointed discussions with Carlos.
    • Until proven otherwise, it looks like Escher is this. Maybe.
    • Also, for most of the third season, the Freelancers are this for the main cast, as Liber8 tries to avoid them, and Kiera has to join them in order to gain some measure of protection.
    • As of the end of the third season, it's Kellog.
    • Kellog's ultimate plan in the series finale is to go back in time to when Liber8 and Kiera first appeared, kill them all and basically take over the world with his future knowledge and technology, with no one to oppose him. Luckily it fails spectacularly due to sabotage from Alec and Kiera, because they figured he'd betray them.
  • Big Bad Friend: In an interesting twist on this trope: The goal of the first three seasons is to prevent the Alec in 2077 from being evil. When young Alec goes back in time a week, his earlier self starts down that path, creating a good and evil Alec for Kiera to contend with.
  • Birth-Death Juxtaposition: In the season 1 finale, Kagame dies, and then is born.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The final minutes of the series finale has this in spades. The future army and the time-line they're from is destroyed, Kellog's own plan is thwarted by being sent into the distant past, and Kiera finally is sent back to her own time. She has successfully influenced time to put it on the path of a utopia, but in doing so, her younger self never went back in time and is still in this timeline, so there are two Kieras. The time-traveling Kiera can thus never reunite with her son and must be content that he is happy.
  • Black and Nerdy: Lucas Ingram.
  • Blood Knight: Plenty among Liber8.
    • Garza sure seems to enjoy ambushing and gunning down the police when they storm the power station in the second episode.
    • Kagame rips Travis for acting like this during "A Test Of Time", when Travis gunned down a hostage that Kagame had agreed to release in good faith.
  • Body Horror: Of the Cybernetics Eat Your Soul variety. "Playtime" really rams home for Kiera that she is a cyborg, not fully human anymore, and that her possession of free will is highly conditional. At the end, when she tearfully tells Alec that she needs a reboot, it is both poignant and horrifying.
  • Body in a Breadbox: In one early episode, Liber8 are casually preparing for their next operation in the kitchen of a normal suburban house. Shortly thereafter, the viewer sees that they have murdered the resident and left his body in a freezer in the garage.
  • Book Ends:
    • Both the season one premiere and finale episodes begin with the Liber8's bombing of the Sadler skyscraper in 2077. Although the premiere showed the tower falling from Kagame and Kiera's point of view, the finale shows the same from the point of view of Travis and Chen just as they're leaving the tower.
    • Also, the second season starts with Keira dreaming that she's imprisioned in an industrial style facility, and ends with her and Liber8 all actually imprisoned in exactly such a facility.
  • Boom, Headshot!: Regularly.
    • Agent Gardiner is put down by several in succession.
    • Attempted on Alec Sadler in mid-time-jump by a Freelancer in the second season finale; it misses, but he spends the next episode with a wound on his left temple.
    • All over the place in the third season premiere, "Minute by Minute". Garza finishes off several Freelancer mooks by this method, then gets killed the same way as the timeline is collapsing, and then in Alec's new timeline Emily disposes of Escher and Brad does the same to Kiera's counterpart.
  • Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In "Waning Minute", Jaworski is able to use a biometrically-locked rifle by amputating the user's finger and holding it to the scanner.
  • Bottle Episode: "Second Opinion" takes place almost entirely in the police station and has no action scenes and very few special effects.
  • Bowdlerize: On the U.S. airing, the word "shit" is silenced, though it still appears in the closed captioning.
  • Brick Joke:
    • In "Playtime", Betty describes a banned energy drink as being popular with hackers and coders. Later, Alec is shown drinking it at his computer.
    • Starting in the second season, Carlos keeps comparing Kiera with Batman and himself with Commissioner Gordon. Fast-forward to the series finale and the final scene of the show takes place in 2077 in the "Commissioner Carlos Fonnegra Memorial Park".
  • Call-Back: When Garza has Alec tied up, she creepily asks if he thinks she's pretty. In a later episode, it's revealed that in 2077, Alec told her that she looked pretty before sending her back in time.
  • Can't Stay Normal: Alec tries his hand at a normal life after reading the message from his future self. He quickly finds this intolerable since his job at a computer store has him dealing with morons all day long, and ends up taking an offer from Kellog to continue his work.
  • Captain Ersatz: Sonmanto is a big corporation that deals primarily in food production and is shady as hell. The name is a spoonerized version of Monsanto.
  • Car Cushion: In "Lost Hours", Kiera is thrown off a building. A combination of her suit's shield technology and a well-placed car save her from being roadkill.
  • Cardboard Prison: Most periods of captivity are very short. Most notably, Lucas almost casually escapes from the facility he's held in during the third season episode "Minute to Win It".
  • Cassandra Truth: When Agent Gardner catches Kiera using her Protector suit and demands answers, Kiera flat-out tells him exactly who she is. Naturally, he doesn't buy it.
  • Casting Gag: Perhaps an accidental one — Tahmoh Penikett appears as a somewhat-crooked union politician who eventually wins a by-election to become the new mayor of Vancouver. His father, Tony Penikett, was the Premier of Canada's Yukon Territory from 1985 to 1992.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • Early in season one, Chen damages Kiera's Protector uniform by jabbing her with a power cable. In the season 2 finale, Kiera uses this to beat Travis, who has managed to get his hands on another Protector uniform.
    • Garza is shown to have barbell nipple piercings in a flash-forward to 2077. In the present, she uses them to pick some handcuffs a few episodes later.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Chekhov's Cigarette Smoking Gunman. William B. Davis (known for playing the villain on The X-Files) appears for a few minutes as a corporate executive before Kiera is sent back in time. At the end of the pilot, in a flashback, he returns and is revealed to be Alec Sadler.
  • Chekhov M.I.A.: The Liber8 leader, Kagame, is present for the time jump in the series premiere but doesn't arrive in the past with everyone else. It turns out he was a little further away from the device than the others, leading him to arrive several days later during the fourth episode, "Matter of Time".
  • The Chessmaster:
    • Kagame, who literally plays chess in "Time's Up". His showing up causes Liber8's plans to become much more elaborate and subtle, making it that much harder for Kiera to pull even a Pyrrhic victory over him. But even Kagame is dwarfed by the man who plotted and instigated his trip back in time, 2077-era Alec Sadler. Escher proves himself a good one in the second season, but his plans fell through at the last minute and he ended up getting unceremoniously murdered in the next season.
    • Kellog. He played almost everyone for the entirety of the third season, which ends with him on top in both the present and future.
  • Chessmaster Sidekick:
  • Child Soldiers: Downplayed, but present; a band of teens inspired by Liber8 (including Julian Randol) turn up in the ninth episode of the first season, preparing to set off a van full of ammonium nitrate as part of "Operation Theseus".
  • Clothes Make the Superman: Kiera's Protector uniform. It grants her enhanced strength, speed, and reflexes. It acts as a Bulletproof Vest capable of stopping rounds from an assault rifle. It has an Invisibility Cloak, a built-in computer to augment her own bio-implants, can change color, and its sleeves can be used as a stun gun. A second suit also shows the ability to stop bullets aimed at the head, though this seems to be a military-restricted function. Notably, a cosplaying civilian who wears the second suit uses it to stop a robbery.
  • Clarke's Third Law: In "The Dying Minutes" we are introduced to a cloaked figure that looks like a sorcerer straight out of a fantasy story when he uses his advanced technology to resurrect Curtis.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Briefly in 3x01 "Minute by Minute", where Kiera-A and Alec-A, the ones who travelled back in time, both wear almost entirely black (Kiera with a flash of burgundy), while Kiera-B and Alec-B (the ones from the new timeline) wear a variety of colours.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: There are plenty of them in 2012 and things will only get worse in the future. Apparently in 2077 the people in charge do not see it as much of a problem that a corporation is withholding food shipments, causing food riots, and not even trying to hide it. And by 2035, SadTech owns an entire factory (if not the entire gulag-style system of complexes) devoted just to using zombified debt slaves to turn out more chips to control even more people. In 2012, Kellog goes for this trope.
  • Crapsack World: An alternate future is created in which, rather than an oppressive corporate-run dictatorship/plutocracy, North America is in a constant state of violent armed conflict between several warlord factions.
  • Create Your Own Villain:
    • Kagame once advocated passive resistance and peaceful tactics to bring about the return of democracy, only for the NAU to raid his peaceful demonstration, arrest him and take his family away. Needless to say, he got pissed!
    • Kiera worries about having done this, after she nearly shoots Julian in cold blood, after discovering he will become the infamous Theseus. It's heavily implied that this was one of the events that set this in motion.
    • An oddly literal example with Travis. Part of the Super-Soldier program involved implanting him with a control chip that lowered his empathy and compassion, whilst ramping up his aggression, making him the unstable psychopath that he is today.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Emily. Up until "Second Degree" she seems to have been a rather ordinary girl whose main talent is being The Mole. Then, when a stranger accosts her in Alec's home, she proceeds to completely lay waste to him in a pretty realistic Action Girl way.
  • Crapsaccharine World: The North American Union in 2077.
    • On the one hand, the corporations of the day are said to have "bailed out" failed governments in the 2050s, and gained a stranglehold on power as a result. For example, food rations are withheld arbitrarily simply to drive the price up for people who need that food. And God help you if you go into debt after about 2030, as corporations are legally empowered to throw you in a slave labor camp!
    • On the other hand, people high up in the corporations or directly under their employ (Kiera and her husband, for example) lead relatively good lives. Though a corporate-run, privatized police state, the 2070s NAU in the series (or at least the province of it that we see) actually has some degree of freedom, from what we see of the era, which keeps it from being a total Crapsack World. Academics, including those with anti-corporate and anti-government views, are allowed to freely express their thoughts. Many individuals in both the present and future would obviously be happy that gay marriage is perfectly legal and respected in the NAU Vancouver of the 2070s, just as it is in Real Life present-day British Columbia.
  • Crystal Spires and Togas: The David Harvey-esque utopia at the end.
  • Cue Card Pause: Alec has this problem in front of Piron's board of directors. As he's been distracted by Emily's betrayal, he hasn't had time to prepare his speech. It goes off about as well as you would expect. Kellog even accurately predicts almost exactly what went down when he buttonholes Alec later.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • Travis against a group of prison white supremacists. And a few other examples with Travis.
    • Emily against the Freelancer who accosts her in Alec's home.
  • The Cutie: Emily instantly gets Alec's eye.
  • Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
    • "Waning Minute" reveals that the CMR technology is designed to influence how the users think.
    • "Playtime" rams home for Kiera just how much of a machine she has become, that she can be made into a robotic puppet by a sufficiently skilled computer hacker. When she tearfully tells Alec at the end that she needs a reboot, it is clear that she knows that her free will is entirely conditional.
  • Cyberpunk: The show has some bits of Cyberpunk, notably the dystopic future, cybernetic implants, detective work, and the focus on the Internet.
  • Damsel out of Distress: Emily is kidnapped and Alec launches a rescue. By the time he gets there she's already beaten one of her captors to death and quickly breaks the others neck then compliments Alec on how badass he was for rescuing her.
  • Dark Action Girl: Valentine and Garza.
  • Dark Messiah: Theseus.
  • Dating Catwoman: Kiera sleeps with Kellogg between the penultimate episode of season one and its finale. Kiera goes back to spurning his advances after that.
  • Deal with the Devil:
    • Alec lets Kellog sponsor him. Subverted in that he repeatedly stands up to Kellog and lets him know he won't just be a puppet.
    • Dillon makes a deal with Escher to better equip the police force to deal with Liber8. As a part of that deal, the police force is gradually being converted into CPS.
    • Alec and Kiera both have to make decisions they aren't completely comfortable with between the end of the second season and the beginning of the third. Alec robs Kiera of a chance to get home to save Emily, and as a consequence Kiera has to ally with the Freelancers to keep him from totally wiping out her future. She even describes it as such.
    • Twice for Emily. First, she signs on with Escher to watch Alec, apparently to escape her Dark and Troubled Past. In the season 3 timeline, Kellog recruits her to assassinate Escher, then hits her with the revelation that he was Alec's father to keep her under his control.
  • Death Equals Redemption: When the morally conflicted Dillon rejoins the good guys in the final episode, he gets fatally gunned down in the ensuing crossfire.
  • Decapitation Presentation: Travis gets the gangs to work together by bringing in the heads of their leaders.
  • Defector from Decadence: At the end of season 2, Carlos and Betty end up being this. It's reset in the season 3 premiere, though it's not necessarily out of the question in the new timeline.
  • Deflector Shield: Kiera can extend the range of her Bulletproof Vest effect to surround her and one other person, but can only sustain it for a few seconds.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Kiera has difficulty acknowledging that in the present, protest in the form of civil disobedience is not actually a criminal offense - a point on which she is reminded by Carlos when she wants to crack down on peaceful protesters who just happen to have some Liber8 sympathies.
  • Designated Girl Fight:
    • Played with in "A Test Of Time", when Kiera engages Garza in a shootout while shielding two more girls from the gunfire (one of whom is Kiera's own grandmother), though there were no men around to fight with at the time.
    • Played straight in "Second Skin", when Garza and Valentine get into a knock-down drag-out fistfight while Travis beats up the (male) civilian who they're all looking to capture. Garza eventually comes out victorious, but she has to work for it.
  • Despair Event Horizon: Most of Liber8 seems to cross this in "3 Minutes to Midnight".
  • Didn't See That Coming: In season 3, Kellog thinks he has all the angles worked out when Kiera gets on his case. Then she tells him that Escher, who he just had murdered, is Alec's father. Kellog is visibly stunned by the twist, but to his credit is able to make sure Kiera can't use it against him.
  • Disney Villain Death: Travis appears to suffer this fate in the season 2 finale, complete with flat-line on a computer monitoring his vitals, but he shows up in a tank later hooked up to life support, which suggests he'll pull through (again). It's rendered moot when the Reset Button undoes the circumstances of his death.
  • Does This Remind You Of Anything?:
    • The NAU was created after corporations "bailed out" the governments in the North American countries.
    • The explosion and collapse of the Corporate Congress building in the very first scene of the pilot is reminiscent of the Twin Towers on September 11th.
    • Even more blatant is the suicide bombing of Building 2 in the first season finale.
    • A terrorist attack on a major urban center sparks tougher, gloves-are-off measures by the authorities in catching the perpetrators - measures that can easily be abused against people who had nothing to do with the attack or the group that carried it out.
    • Betty is a professional hacker working for those in authority who leaks sensitive information before leaving to seek asylum elsewhere after deciding that her employers are abusing their power. This sounds similar to contemporary whisteblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
    • In "Minute to Win It", we're introduced to "Sonmanto", a corporation targeted by Liber8. They're shown in the episode to be willing to sic a battery of lawyers on anyone who impedes corporate profits, and are obviously hiding some sort of big secret which turns out to be chemical weapons sales to Middle Eastern terrorists.
    • In "Second Degree," Alec inserts a cylindrical plug into Kiera (to hook up her CMR to the Arc supercomputer), causing her to gasp and moan. When Alec asks if she's okay, she responds that she's fine, and that it "feels amazing."
  • Dragon-in-Chief: Travis is more of a threat day-to-day than Kagame. He also lasts much longer, because Kagame kills himself in a suicide bombing.
  • Dragon with an Agenda: Travis takes the lead in the absence of Kagame, but Kagame never seems to completely trust his leadership. Before killing himself, Kagame tells Sonya to kill Travis and assume his place as the new leader.
  • Driven to Suicide:
    • Jim Martin is implied to have killed himself after his association with Liber8 comes to light and torpedoes his career.
    • Kiera nearly commits suicide in a flashback to escape the pain of a deadly plague. She doesn't go through with it, of course, since the cure is brought in moments later.
    • Kiera's sister killed herself due to an addiction.
  • Dueling Hackers: Alec, Lucas and Betty are all competing for information at various times. Alec and Lucas even duel over hacking into Kiera's mind!

    E-H 
  • Enemy Civil War: Sonya's botched attempt to kill Travis results in him and Garza teaming up to take out her and Ingram.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • A bit looser than most examples, but Kiera teams up with Gardner to find out who's been stealing the bodies of time travelers, reasoning that he'll be helping her and be too busy to keep hounding her for the truth in the meantime. Getting murdered by the thieves at least makes the latter a non-issue.
    • In the season 2 finale when Carlos teams up with Julian after leaving an increasingly brutal and corrupt police force.
    • In the season 3 premiere when Kiera and Garza team up to escape the Freelancer stronghold.
    • And in the same episode, Kiera joins the Freelancers once it's revealed that the timeline she's in is collapsing thanks to Alec trying to change the past, and as a consequence her family may never exist unless she fixes it. Within that, Chen makes a secondary offer to be Kiera's partner, reasoning that they share a unique background which neither Alec or Carlos can truly appreciate. Having previously killed him and aware of his obvious distaste for the arrangement in general, she doesn't go for it. Then she discovers that he killed her younger temporal duplicate.
    • Kiera reluctantly accepts help from Garza in "So Do Our Minutes Hasten" when dealing with a case where Liber8 is being framed for the murder of a company's entire board of directors.
    • In "Last Minute" Kiera allies with Liber8 in order to prevent Alec from setting in motion the events that lead to Brad's Bad Future. She even admits that while she may not agree with their methods, they share the same goals.
  • Engineered Public Confession:
    • When Liber8 kidnaps a CEO, they force her to read statements denouncing herself as a criminal, though this isn't really taken seriously. Later, they strap a bomb to her, which will only be disarmed when she admits to the fraud she and her company's board engaged in. That ruins her company.
    • Later, Liber8 forces Jim Martin to "confess" to a variety of crimes and malfeasance, some true, some not true. His political career is dead in the water after that, as is the man himself.
  • Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas:
    • Flashbacks to Liber8 members' lives often reveal that they cared for people.
    • As soon as he gets settled in 2012, Kellog looks up the woman who will be his grandmother and tries to help her and her family. He takes it quite badly when Travis kills her.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In "Minute of Silence", Lucas gives Carlos some intel on Betty's killer with no strings attached. They may be on different sides, but both want to see her killer go down.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Liber8 are ruthless Well Intentioned Extremists doing everything for their belief in the greater good. As such, they focus their attacks on their perceived enemies and won't go out of their way to hurt regular people.
  • Evil Costume Switch:
    • In the flashback scenes to the future, Sonia Valentine is shown wearing more brightly colored winter clothes. In the present, she is typically wearing a dark leather jacket.
    • When Alec turns evil, he starts wearing suits and parts his hair.
  • Evil Mentor: Kagame to Julian. Escher to Alec and possibly Dillon. Averted with Kellog, who only tries to make it sound like he is going to be this when he decides to sponsor Alec, but later praises Alec's independent spirit (albeit somewhat snidely) in spite of the sponsor-client relationship.
  • Exact Words: In the Pilot, Kiera gets Lucas Ingram to talk by threatening to find his grandmother in the present day and make sure his mother is never born (thus preventing him from ever existing.) When asked by a present-day cop what she said to him to make him talk, she simply responds "We talked about his future."
  • Face, Nod, Action: In the pilot episode, two members of Liber8 do this before creating a time vortex to the past.
  • Faking the Dead: In "Waning Minute", Chen seems to have hung himself in the Freelancer prison. When they open the cell to get him down, he breaks the guard's neck and walks out.
  • False Flag Operation:
    • A multi-layered one in the season two premiere. The mayor is assassinated, which on the surface seems to be Liber8's MO. However, the mayor's stance against organized crime makes the VPD consider that it might have been a hit by the gangs themselves to frame Liber8. Then it's revealed that Liber8 actually is responsible, having anticipated that deduction and framed the gang, all to hide the real reason: moving their own favored candidate into position for election.
    • In "So Do Our Minutes Hasten", Liber8 is framed for an attack on a corporation's board of directors. It turns out their rival, Sonmanto, arranged the hit and framed Liber8 for it so they could drive down the stock price then buy them out.
  • Fanservice:
    • One of the first things Kiera does when she gets to 2012 is strip down to her underwear and stare at herself in the mirror. Seeing her through her own eyes, Alec mutters that she's pretty.
    • "Second Listen" has a full-body shot of Garza naked from behind.
  • Fantastic Drug: Retrevinol (or "Flash" in street slang), a drug from the future originally used as an Alzheimer's treatment. It allows the user to vividly recall memories, but results in a dangerous sleepwalking effect as they get lost in their memory, not to mention addiction as they continue to pine for their brighter past. It's implied the drug also glamorizes the memory to some extent, making it feel better than it was in reality. It appears in episode "Second Thoughts". The drug's effect is identical to that of the drug "Refrain" in the anime series Code Geass.
  • Fictional Counterpart: The real BC electric company is called B.C. Hydro, not B.C. Power. Some of the universities, etc, are also fictional.
  • Fish out of Temporal Water: A lot.
  • Foot Focus: On Emily, while she sneaks down a flight of stairs in "Second Degree". And again while she proceeds to curbstomp the intruding Mook who necessitated the sneaking.
  • Forgotten Phlebotinum: Most of the special tools Kiera uses show up once and are never used again. While many of these simply don't come up again (the fingerprinting powder is just a more advanced version of modern fingerprinting powder; the police stuff works fine most of the time), the truth serum would be very useful in a number of situations, but is only used once in the very first episode. Then again, it's possible Kiera has a limited supply and no way to replenish it.
  • Frameup: The murder of Gardner is pinned on Kiera by the Freelancers to make trouble for her.
  • Friend-or-Idol Decision: In the season 2 finale, despite vowing to help Kiera, a grief-stricken Alec uses the device to go back in time to save Emily's life, preventing Kiera from going home. This mirrors Kiera's decision earlier to dive after the device rather than stay and cover Emily in the first place.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: Inverted in "Politics of Time", when after a journalist is murdered, the same assailant enters Carlos' home and attacks him while he is in the shower before he fights them off. It's a rare (and completely non-sexual) cross-gender example, as by this point, Kiera has deduced that the killer is a woman, later shown to be Garza.
  • Future Badass:
    • Alec Sadler is revealed to be a powerful merchant-prince in 2077.
    • Alternate future Kellog is a rebel leader who sends Brad and alternate Chen back to fix their extremely messed up future.
  • Future Me Scares Me
    • A big thrust of the show is preventing Alec from becoming the brutal industrial tyrant he has become by 2077. Future Alec, for his part, wants the same thing.
    • Meanwhile, Kellog comes to the horrifying realisation that his future self has sent a team of commandos back in time to steal his kidneys, which means future Kellog will have no more use for present Kellog after the planned invasion from the horrible-future 2039.
  • Gambit Pileup: The second season has this in spades. Kellog, Liber8 (both splinter factions), Escher, the Freelancers, Jim Martin and Julian Randol are all running their own agendas. it's actually called attention to in the third season, which dropped a few more gambits in for good measure.
  • Gender Is No Object: Say one thing about the future dystopias: there's no gender discrimination for police and military jobs. There are just about as many Action Girls as there are Guys.
  • Glassy Prison: Where the Freelancers keep temporal violators that they capture. Not much is revealed about why they imprison some of their targets while killing others, like Gardner, outright.
  • Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Kiera scheduled one, but decided against it, and urges her grandmother to do the same (of course, that was to save her own future existence as well).
  • Government Conspiracy: What is suggested on how the first season is being played out. Some in Liber8 suggest this possibility, which is how they were able to escape CPS custody for instance.
  • Grandfather Paradox:
    • Kiera uses this as a threat against Ingram in the pilot. They later decide to test the theory on Kiera's grandmother. Kellog's grandmother is ultimately shot and killed with no repercussions, though Alec notes that nothing happening doesn't really prove anything, and among the possible explanations is that Kellog may have been mistaken about his parentage.
    • This almost happens to Alec via Garza on his future self's orders, though Alec deduces that he must have arranged this intentionally, knowing that Garza wouldn't do it and that Kiera would save him.
  • Grey-and-Gray Morality: On one side, we have a bunch of psychopaths trying to avert the total control of the NAU by the corrupt Congress of megacorporations. On the other side, there is Kiera, a good cop protecting law and order-which are, at least in 2077, dictated by the corrupt megacorporations. Overlapping the entire conflict is a possible Big Bad seeking to exploit the timeline for his own mysterious ends, as well as yet another Well-Intentioned Extremist faction who capture and imprison those who tamper with the timeline (whether on purpose or by accident) and have no hesitation killing anyone who gets in their way.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: When Travis is in a prison fight, he breaks the arm of one of his assailants, then stabs him in the neck with the exposed bone. The camera cuts away after a split second.
  • Groin Attack: Kiera uses one on Travis in the season 2 finale, with her gun. Even with a Protector uniform of his own shielding him from castration, this still clearly hurt like hell.
  • Guilt by Association:
    • Roland Randol is mistaken as the leader of the hostage-takers in "Family Time", due to being an anti-corporation demonstrator, when he's actually one of the hostages himself. He ends up being killed by an ERT team as a result.
    • The same happened to Kellog, who was not originally a member of Liber8. His sister was, before she was killed.
  • Heel–Face Turn:
    • Lucas, Travis and Garza all become helpful to Kiera, though only Lucas really becomes a "good guy."
    • In the final episode it's revealed that Kagame becomes Alec's fictive nephew rather than his nemesis in the new utopian timeline.
  • Help Yourself in the Future: Often. Kellog uses his knowledge of the future to manipulate the stock market and get filthy rich, which he then uses to both set himself up with fine living and help his less-than-fortunate grandmother. Kiera gives advice to her own grandmother. In the first season finale, Kagame arranges for a large sum of money to be delivered to his mother. However, Alec points out that Kellog's method is in no way sustainable, as the more the future changes, the less his knowledge matters. This forces Kellog to try to set Alec up as a [[Future Famous Person|Future Famous People]] to help fund his lifestyle.
  • Hidden Agenda Villain: Some villains' motives are kept secret for a while.
    • Escher, whose motives remain totally unknown, though it's hinted he's from the future. The finale reveals that he's Alec's father, and desires control over time, calling it "the family business".
    • The Freelancers, who are apparently from the future even further ahead than Kiera. The finale reveals that they try to protect the integrity of the timeline.
  • Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Discussed in regards to Julian. Kiera attempts it but ultimately can't go through with, then realizes that her near-miss may in fact have inspired him to become what she remembers (which it didn't).
  • Hookers and Blow: Gord Solomon is introduced this way in "Minute Man".
  • Humans Are Bastards: When a corporate CEO is captured and apparently held for ransom by Liber8, the rebels set up an online poll for the public to decide whether she lives or dies. By the time the poll closes, almost two-thirds of the votes are for her death, out of several hundred thousand in total. This dips into Fridge Horror when one realizes that the reason why Liber8 were forcing her to admit her corporate indiscretions was because very few people knew about them — so basically, the people are voting for her death simply based on her position and status in society.
  • Hypocrite:
    • Kellog tells Kiera that he does not approve of his comrades' terrorist tactics. She points out that he is holding a live grenade in a restaurant full of innocent people and is threatening to use it if she tries to arrest him. To his credit, he only uses this tactic to establish a working relationship with her, after which point they get along well enough.
    • Julian gets this retroactively in "Seconds". Despite acting like he's trying to reform, then calling Alec out for selling him out when Alec is innocent of that, he swipes Alec's phone, and several episodes later he gives it to Lucas so he can use it to further Julian's agenda.
    • Kiera points out that if the Freelancers were honest about their talk of sacrifice then Curtis Chen should've let Liber8's execution proceed as scheduled.
    • Kiera herself gets this in the third season, constantly reminding Alec of his betrayal of her by going back to save Emily, even though Emily's death is solely Kiera's fault because she placed more importance on getting back home than she did on protecting others. She ends up handing him over to the Freelancers and siding with his current-timeline self, reasoning that the latter has a better chance of ensuring her future.

    I-L 
  • I Have Your Wife: Liber8 holds Kellog's grandmother hostage to force his cooperation in finding Kiera's grandmother. He turns this back on them by finding Kagame's mother instead.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: Future Julian, as Theseus, insists that it is better that the "chipped" prisoners in the factories are shut off and killed before the factories are destroyed. It appears that there really is no way to disable the chips without killing the workers.
  • I Don't Pay You to Think: Escher says this to Emily. She counters that she isn't being paid to be a zombie, either.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All of the episode names are phrases incorporating a specific word, which changes every season:
    • In the first season, it's "time".
    • In the second season, it's "second".
    • In the third season, it's "minute".
    • In the fourth season, it's "hour".
  • Idiot Ball:
    • Even if Kellog is self-serving, he nevertheless is a valuable source of information for Kiera and seems genuinely uninterested in Liber8's revolutionary agenda (and thus somewhat interested in her continued existence to help keep the rest of Liber8's shock troops from finding him and blowing him away). In spite of this, it's surprising how often she blows him off when he's trying to reach her with critical, time-sensitive info. This is actually lampshaded in season two, when Kellog points out exactly this. Kiera still gives him the cold shoulder.
    • Carlos doesn't believe Kiera's initial claim to be a time traveler, and she lets him walk away instead of showing him any of the future-tech gadgets she has on her person at that very moment. She doesn't make the same mistake with Dillon. She shows him her future gun immediately before revealing her story.
  • I Hate Past Me: Happens twice:
    • After travelling back in time, Future Alec has this problem with Past Alec. Thanks to Future Alec's meddling, Escher is killed and the revelation of his relation to Alec and Emily's association with him hits pretty hard, rendering Past Alec a fair bit more cynical. It certainly doesn't help that Future Alec isn't forthcoming about the details of his little adventure beyond doing it to save Emily, which only further drives a wedge between them, causing Past Alec to take measures to ensure Future Alec doesn't have access to his resources.
    • Present-day Kellog later realizes his future self is dying of kidney failure, and wants to use present Kellog as an Unwilling Donor.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink:
    • Carlos hits the bar after a hard day in "Minute Man". Learning that there are two Kieras (the younger version dead), two Alecs (both alive), and about Jim Martin's association with Liber8 would be hard for pretty much anyone to swallow.
    • Kiera, Betty and Carlos all have this reaction at the end of "So Do Our Minutes Hasten", after a rousing day of Liber8 being framed and Dillon refusing to budge on Liber8 being guilty. Makes for major Mood Whiplash when Betty is assassinated for digging into it when she steps outside to meet a source.
  • In Love with the Mark: Emily legitimately falls for Alec Sadler, despite having been hired by Escher as a spy/bodyguard for him. When she admits this to Escher, he actually views it as a plus for her work, and uses it to manipulate her into doing as he says so he doesn't learn the truth.
  • Insistent Terminology: Two examples:
    • Alec is very insistent on the fact that Roland Randol is only his step-father and quickly corrects anyone who refers to Roland as Alec's father. He continues doing so even after Roland is killed.
    • Everyone insists on calling the sphere the "Time Travel Device" and never "Time Machine".
  • Inspector Javert: At various times in the series, Kiera, CSIS Agent Gardner, and Dillon.* Internal Retcon:
    • According to Sonya, the North American Union began restricting access to historical records relating to the early 21st century in 2058. Kagame reveals that the reason for this was so the public wouldn't have knowledge of corporate incompetence leading to the financial crisis of the 2010s and government bailouts. Instead, the revisionist history painted them as heroes and meant that no one questioned the corporations seizing power when the reverse happened in the 2050s crisis.
    • "Minute Man" reveals that pretty much anything dating back to before the corporate takeover is considered contraband. Kiera's mother had an old book collection that is considered subversive material, and the only reason she didn't end up jailed is because Kiera claimed she was bringing them in to be disposed of, and manages to strike a bargain with the officer who happened to discover them.note 
    • In 2077, the rebel leader Theseus has become a boogeyman that parents scare their children with, as in the poem Kiera recites below. The real reasons behind his uprising are suppressed and he is portrayed as a complete monster who killed millions of innocents in order to destroy humanity's future. Official records don't even seem to mention his real name and Kiera is surprised and terrified to discover that Julian Randol is Theseus.
      When darkness falls
      and fear sets in,
      he'll be the one
      the nightmares bring.
      With blackest soul
      and coldest core,
      he'll paint a "T"
      across your door.
    • A more cynical viewer might read elements of this trope into the older characters' description of the Utopia at the end of the series, which they founded, but the Utopia appears to be more or less played straight, in spite of raising a number of questions about how society has been reorganized, and whether competition and ambition have been suppressed in the name of an egalitarian utopia a la Rollerball or Logan's Run. However, as we only have one old man's say about what the world is now like, and see almost none of it besides a cityscape.
  • In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous: It seems that the events unfolding in 2012-era Vancouver will shape the future to come.
    • After she arrives in 2012, Kiera is able to communicate through her implants with Alec Sadler, the person responsible for inventing the technology that provides the basis for all future computers (including her implants).
    • In the course of one of her investigations, Kiera almost arrests a person who will be responsible for revolutionizing the energy industry.
    • Kiera and Kellog get to interact with their grandparents and Kagame sees his pregnant mother. In the season finale, Sonya gives Kagame's mother a large amount of cash to ensure that her son will be well cared-for.
    • The future mass murderer/terrorist Theseus is Julian Randol.
  • I See Dead People: Ingram, first implied with Kagame then confirmed with Chen. It's suggested to be a side-effect of time travel, similar to how Jason is kinda crazy. However, his seeing Chen is eventually explained as Chen coming back from a different timeline.
  • Juggling Loaded Guns: In "3 Minutes to Midnight", Lucas waves around a pistol from the future in the middle of a rant, complete with warnings for him not to. When he pulls the trigger, he finds out it packs a fair bit more of a punch than he expected, though mercifully his only "victim" was a wall.
  • Jurisdiction Friction:
    • Kiera obviously has no recognizable jurisdiction in 2012, so she pretends to be a detective from Oregon. The police inspector in the Vancouver Police Department is naturally livid that a US cop is trying to butt in on his investigation. However, once cops start dying he does not hesitate to ask for her help. By the end of the pilot he is demanding that she stay and help them catch the killers. Thanks to Alec's hacking skills, Kiera stays with the VPD to catch Liber8 disguised as a member of a top secret government group.
    • Kiera invokes this when the VPD inspector suggests that the US Department of Defense could help them track down the ex-military members of Liber8. Kiera replies that since they did not start their criminal activities until after leaving the military, they are a purely civilian matter. Of course, her real reason for invoking jurisdiction is that the military would have no record of these people ever serving in the armed forces (or existing at all).
  • Jury and Witness Tampering: Julian is found not guilty at his trial for Roland's death because of witness perjury and jury tampering and a corrupt judge.
  • Just a Flesh Wound: Averted with bullet wounds. When Carlos gets shot, it does not seem that bad but soon blood loss and shock make it vital that he get proper medical attention.
  • Karma Houdini:
    • Discussed in "A Matter of Time", when Kiera lets Melissa Dobeck get away with both the murder of Dr. Aames and stealing his research into anti-matter, because she's credited in the future as the woman who solved the world's energy crisis.
    • Julian in "Family Time" is a major example. He poses as his father during the hostage situation, leading to Roland's death at the hands of a police sniper. This continues with his subsequent trial, where he is found innocent due to witness perjury, jury tampering, and a crooked judge.
  • Kansas City Shuffle:
    • Liber8 pulls one in the series premiere. After stealing a variety of weaponry, they raid a series of banks and Kiera thinks she's deduced that Liber8 has used the early break-ins as a distraction and are going after the final bank that they hit. Kiera and her 2012-era partner thwart the terrorists there, but when Kiera returns to the police station, she finds that the gang used the whole operation as cover to raid the precinct and retrieve their imprisoned comrade.
    • In "Time's Up", Liber8 kidnaps the CEO of a 2012-era corporation. As Kiera is trying to rescue the victim, she tries to determine what their real goal is: are they in it for the ransom money, or are they trying to make a political statement and earn street cred with the local anarchist groups? In the end, it turns out that the plan was to expose the fraud the CEO was involved in, ruin the corporation, and in the process make a fortune short-selling the corporation on the stock market to fund their next operation.
  • Kill and Replace: Ends up happening with Future Alec replaces his earlier self as the head of Piron, though he certainly didn't intend to murder him going in. Becomes a moot point when Kellog takes over right then and there.
  • Kill the Cutie: Towards the end of Season 2. Alec goes back in time himself in an attempt to avert this. As of the season 3 premiere, this has resulted in the creation of a completely separate branch of alternate timelines and the old timeline has begun to fade away.
  • Killed Off for Real: Due to multiple timelines, it's possible that people we see or have seen die will come back in the timeline we're watching. To date, the people who have died and not returned (barring flashback):
    • Jaworski, late in the series premiere, though he reappears in a flashback in "Playtime" and has an entire focus episode in "Waning Minute".
    • Kagame in the first season's finale, as part of a Thanatos Gambit.
    • Gardiner is executed for getting too close to the Freelancers.
    • Escher is on the receiving end of Boom, Headshot! in the third season premiere, "Minute by Minute".
    • Betty at the end of "So Do Our Minutes Hasten".
    • "The Dying Minutes" left a lot of work for the morgue. Most of the Freelancers, including Catherine, followed by Sonya in a failed Taking You with Me towards Dillon.
  • Knight Templar: Most notably, the Freelancers. Kiera even outright calls them a "cult", given their apparent single-minded focus on preserving some sort of "orthodox" timeline.
  • Le Parkour: A thief in "Minute of Silence" steals military technology from various corporations through a combination of parkour and hacking.
  • Letters 2 Numbers: "Liber8". This is apparently a reference to the fact that there are eight members of the group in 2012, their earliest appearance.
  • Living Lie Detector: Kiera, thanks to her implants being able to conduct detailed medical scans simply by staring at a person. That said, it's not entirely accurate. When Julian is tortured for information about Liber8, Kiera states that he was lying when he claimed not to know where Travis was. Since Travis had paid him a visit earlier, but was then asked to leave, Julian technically knew where he had been, but was in no position to give up his current whereabouts, creating a false positive. Later, in "3 Minutes to Midnight", Alec is able to reprogram her CMR so he reads as telling the truth, even though he was lying.
  • Locked Out of the Loop: Carlos, of course. The worst part is that he knows Kiera is lying, he just has no idea what the truth is. She eventually tells him halfway through the second season. Even Liber8 feels bad for him.
    Travis: It must really suck to be you.
  • Love Makes You Dumb: Lampshaded in "3 Minutes to Midnight" when Liber8 gets the drop on Kiera in the middle of the day out in the open. Travis figures she must have strong feelings for Brad to be that distracted.
  • Love Martyr: Alec's mother. She went along with Roland's anti-corporate grassroots campaign to support her husband, willingly choose to commit perjury in order to protect Julian, who was on trial for shooting a cop and domestic terrorism and later turns out to have been married to the villainous Mr Escher (aka Marc Sadler).
  • Loyal Phlebotinum: Kiera's future pistol has a biometric lock. Anyone else that tries to use it gets a lethal shock. Two people have fallen for it, the first one from the future and thus really should have known better.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Using the memory recall drug Flash, Alec discovers that his father, Marc Sadler, is Jason, the homeless, somewhat crazy time traveler Kiera worked with in the season one finale. Turns out to be subverted, however; Alec only assumed Jason was his father due to the DNA match, and the season 2 finale reveals Jason is in fact his son, while Escher is his father, who faked his death in the fire years ago.
  • Luke, You Are My Father: Inverted. In Season 4, Jason reveals to Emily that she is not his mother.

    M-P 
  • Mad Bomber: Liber8 not only blows up an office building as part of their terrorist campaign, but also like to leave explosive "surprises" for the police.
  • Magical Defibrillator: Subverted in the season two premiere, where it fails to revive a flatlined patient with multiple gunshot wounds. Double Subverted when the victim, Travis, turns out to have one built-in, which successfully revives him.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Alec in 2077 knows both his own past and future, as well as that of others, the man is very good at getting anyone to do what he wants. And then of course, there's Kellog.
  • Master of Unlocking: Kiera has a device which can apparently open any modern lock, be it a simple pin-and-tumbler lock or a complex combination lock safe.
  • Matrix Raining Code: Lucas Ingram's and Alec Sadler's screens.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Liber8. While on the surface, an obvious pun of "Liberate", it can also be seen as representing Liber, the Roman god of Freedom and 8, the number of members within the group.
    • Not too much has been revealed about Escher, though it's hinted he's a time traveler. His namesake was an artist who created endless looping staircases and drawings of hands wielding pens to draw themselves into being.
    • Alec Sadler's company, which is said to have brought about a dystopic police state, is called SadTech. Sad... Tech.
  • The Men in Black: The Freelancers' uniform is a black suit with a dark shirt and black tie. Averted with the few CSIS agents we see, who, despite working for a government intelligence agency, are considerably less dark or intimidating and are usually shown wearing a friendly shade of grey to emphasize their By-the-Book Cop nature.
  • A Million Is a Statistic: Liber8's actions are said to have caused the deaths of 30,000 or so people in an effort to bring down the comparatively small number of Corporate Congress board members. Though these numbers might be inflated by propaganda, the urban cataclysm in the first scene of the pilot cannot have had a small number of casualties (and who knows what else occurred off-screen).
  • Mind-Control Device: A chip exists in the future which allows remote control of a human or animal's brain. Travis had one when he was a Super-Soldier, debtors get them when they're enslaved to repay what they owe, Curtis makes bugs and a police dog into his servants using them, while Liber8 uses them to turn various white collar criminals into bank robbers using them.
  • The Mole:
    • Someone in the VPD. Kiera believes Gardiner might be it, using his position to undermine her and hopefully expose her as a fraud. For his part, Gardiner suggests to Inspector Dillon that the obvious suspect is Kiera. It's actually Betty.
    • Alec's girlfriend, Emily is one for Escher, though she also serves a protective role.
    • Chen is one for the Freelancers, planted in Liber8.
    • Dillon plants his own daughter into Liber8.
  • Morality Chain: Garza to Alec, in a very twisted variation. At the request of his future self, she is his "fail-safe" in that if he starts to go down the same road that will lead to the corrupt future they came from, she will kill him. Even though she didn't do it the first time (it ended up being more of a Scare 'Em Straight tactic), it is clear that it's not over yet.
  • Movie Superheroes Wear Black: While repairing her suit, Alec switches the color from brown to black, reasoning that the latter looks cooler. Despite switching to gold for a bit, she ultimately sticks with black.
  • Mr. Fanservice: Carlos Fonnegra, played by Victor Webster. Bonus points for being a beefy police officer that somehow manages to be both a pretty boy and ruggedly handsome at the same time. A blatant use of this is when an attacker catches him by surprise in the shower, followed by a fight scene which he remains nude for the entirety of, complete with (since this is still on a family-friendly television station) precise editing and camera angles. Very precise.
  • Ms. Fanservice:
    • Kiera spends a lot of time in her tight catsuit. She also strips down to her underwear in the series premier. Mostly, though, she stays pretty well-clothed.
    • Emily, particularly in "Second Degree".
    • Also played straight with a full-body nude shot (from behind) of Garza in "Second Listen".
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Kiera's crashing realization that her torture and near-murder of Julian is what could have driven him to become Theseus.
  • Mysterious Backer: Escher. Although it's clear he has his own ulterior motives, he is honestly pretty helpful to Kiera and, to an extent, the police department. Later less helpful than detrimental, as he becomes Dillon's Evil Mentor and leads him (and the entire police department) on a gradual Start of Darkness towards a Day of the Jackboot style dystopian path.
  • Never My Fault: Julian blames the government for his father's death, either ignorant of or unwilling to accept the fact he was the one who impersonated him on the phone with the police, thus making him the primary target.
  • New Era Speech: In 3x13 "Last Minute", it looks like Green Alec's keynote is going to be one of these, and the episode opens with him rehearsing it, stumbling over a particularly difficult part, implying he will get to, and power through, that part. When it actually happens, he gets less than twenty seconds in before Lucas sabotages the big screen behind him, broadcasting Travis. After about another fifteen seconds, the backstage team restore the screen to normal, Alec offers a sardonic remark, and it looks like everything will get back on track, but then Garza fires two warning shots from above and everything goes to hell.
  • Newspaper Dating: After Kiera and Liber8 arrive in 2012, there's a shot of a newspaper box where the front page mentions austerity measures in the Canadian federal government's 2012 budget.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • The NAU's brutal crackdowns lead to Kagame's transition from a peaceful demonstrator to a militant terrorist.
    • After learning that Travis has a military CMR, the precursor to her law enforcement model, Kiera convinces Alec to use that to track him. This ends up activating his CMR, so now Travis is a Super-Soldier with analytical abilities similar to Kiera's, not to mention whatever military enhancements his CMR version has.
    • After showing mercy and not killing Julian, Kiera wonders if her treatment of him might actually have been what fully radicalized him in her future.
    • Liber8's activities in the past have led to the police department teaming up with Piron and throwing out the book, seemingly laying the foundations for the future privately-owned police state.
    • Kiera accuses Curtis Chen of this because of his failure to give up his own life to prevent Liber8 from time traveling in the first place.
    • Alec's decision to go back in time to save Emily causes the destruction of an entire timeline (just not the one he's in), and the Kiera from his old timeline is the only one to survive. Now she is (implicitly) working against him to make sure the timeline stays on course, which may or may not pose problems for Emily later.
    • And Liber8 gets another with the arrival of Brad Tonkin. While they may have averted their future, his is even more terrible in the opposite direction. No control instead of too much has left humanity on the brink.
    • Chen appears to know much more about the effects of all the time-travel than anyone and what is really going on, but his unwillingness to actually tell anyone has caused many problems, namely because he's The Mole for the Freelancers. His statement that Kellog will get what's coming to him and that both he and The Traveler expected to see the lights going out and even more future-travelers showing up may mean that some things have to happen before they can take action, potentially averting this in the long-run.
    • Kiera letting the idea of going "back to 2077" distract her from stopping Kellog is at least partially responsible for the chain of events leading up to the destruction of the VPD, since her distraction ensnared Alec and Carlos in a web of half-truths and misdirections that kept both from ably assisting her had they been focussed on stopping Kellog.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
    • Jim Martin thinking he could con both Travis and Sonya into eliminating each other for him. When they realise they've being played, they decide to end their feud with each other and join forces to get revenge.
    • Liber8's activities lead to the creation of CPS. Because they are so beyond the ability of the police force to handle and have such a specific agenda against the corporations, Piron ends up funding the VPD to transform them into the CPS.
  • Nipple and Dimed: It received several forms of censorship for the American Syfy broadcast, including this; see Sexy Shirt Switch, below. Surprisingly, despite that example being censored, Sonya got away with being braless while dressed as a sexy scientist.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Carlos goes to town on a Dirty Cop in "Minute to Win It". Kiera points out how out-of-character this is for him, so he was probably venting given all the craziness of the past two episodes.
  • No MacGuffin, No Winner: Suggested in regards to the time travel device in "Second Last". Kiera is understandably set against it, and they don't get the opportunity to act on it anyway.
  • Non-Indicative Name: The "freelancers" are anything but. In fact, they’re the most disciplined and cohesive organization in the show, with a rigid hierarchy.
  • No Such Agency: Kiera legitimizes her association with the Vancouver Police Department by bluffing about such a program. Gardner, who has reason to actually be familiar with real top-secret government programs, quickly catches on.
  • Nostalgia Filter: The in-universe Fantastic Drug Retrevinol (or "Flash"), first appearing in episode "Second Thoughts", causes hallucinogenic flashbacks to pleasant past experiences that are far more satisfying than the actual event being remembered, meaning the drug "cannot be trusted".
  • Not Quite Dead: Towards the end of the series premiere, Kiera takes down Jaworski via an electrical shock. A minute later, he gets back up and lunges at her with a knife before Carlos puts a fatal bullet in his chest.
  • Obstructive Bureaucrat: Carlos is a good guy example near the end of the fourth season.
  • Offing the Offspring: In the series finale Kellogg stabs Vasquez, and she reveals she's his daughter from the future right before dying.
  • Off the Rails: The Gambit Pilup of Season 3 goes completely to hell in Season 4 due to a new faction finally figuring out how to break the rules of time travel.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Lucas, when the VPD (acting on intelligence provided to Kiera by Alec) break through his electronic security measures and pinpoint the location where Liber8 are holding a corporate CEO.
    • Kiera's reaction when after thinking she's escaped the "Bodysnatchers" by becoming invisible, one of them casually pulls out a device, points it in her direction and then switches her invisibility off.
    • Kellog has a massive one in "So Do Our Minutes Hasten" when he's confronted by Chen, both because of a past betrayal and because the man is supposed to be dead.
    • Kiera and Brad have an epic one in the final scene of season 3 when a group of time travelers in Powered Armor materialize around the beacon.
  • Ominous Multiple Screens: Escher has a wall full of little screens. He uses it to keep an eye on everything via the city's many surveillance cameras.
  • One-Man Industrial Revolution: Alec Sadler has/will apparently design all the major technologies being used in 2077.
  • One Nation Under Copyright: The North American Union.
  • Only a Flesh Wound: Travis and some of the other members of Liber8 can shrug off wounds with ease, though this makes some sense since several of them are super-soldiers from the future.
  • The Order: The Freelancers, who double as Time Police.
  • Organic Technology: Kiera's Protector uniform, which is made clear after it's damaged and Kiera explains that they aren't so much repaired as healed.
  • Our Time Travel Is Different: The show goes out of it's way to adhere to certain rules of time travel, but only explains them over the course of the first three seasons, and very slowly. In order, it works as such:
    • Time Travel only works in one direction (backwards), and anyone who time travels will be forced to take The Slow Path back to their period, assuming they live long enough.
    • Time travelers are cut off from the causal effects of their journey directly, even if on their own timeline, and have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. This means that even if a past version of them, or ancestor, is killed by the changes to the timeline, they remain alive and unaffected.
    • The moment a time traveler makes the journey, the time period they originate from begins to erase, meaning anyone they left behind is effectively killed by their journey. Much of Kiera's angst during the series is caused by her coming to terms with this, especially because it means her son Sam is effectively dead.
    • Season 4 goes completely Off the Rails after a future version of Kellog manages to break the first and third rule, causing both a Stable Time Loop and Set Right What Once Went Wrong situations to each successfully occur SIMULTANEOUSLY.
  • Papa Wolf: Dillon deeply regrets letting his daughter become The Mole inside Liber8, and in an emotional moment asks Kiera to do everything she can to retrieve Christine, his daughter.
  • People Puppets:
    • Liber8 figures out how to hack into Kiera's cybernetic implants, controlling her in order to kill a video game company executive (who can identify the members of Liber8), followed by Carlos and then herself. This results in a struggle between Alec and Lucas to wrest control of Kiera's mind from each other. Alec wins, but in the process, Kagame and Ingram deduce that he's the one they are up against.
    • In "Minute to Win It", Lucas and Sonya wire up a bunch of people with implants that allow them to be controlled remotely. In the future, it's shown that the military can control their troops remotely if necessary, as demonstrated when Kiera is forced to execute an informant who no longer had worthwhile information.
  • Phoney Call: Kiera constantly pretends to be calling her nonexistent colleagues in Section 6 when she's actually talking to Alec. In a twist, she doesn't even talk to him on her phone — they talk using her implants, and she holds the phone up to her ear so it doesn't look like she's talking to herself.
  • Police Brutality: As the VPD becomes more militarized and targeting anyone who even expresses the loosest ideological sympathies with Liber8, it's implied that this becomes increasingly common. Kiera's use of the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on Julian really doesn't help matters.
  • Police Are Useless:
    • Kiera thinks so, with good reason. The VPD in 2012 thinks they are dealing with a standard street gang muscling in on new territory. Instead, Liber8 are ruthless revolutionaries, including former military specialists and super-soldiers, who have no qualms about killing cops and leaving a high body count. The police are completely unprepared for this and are easily outmaneuvered.
    • In "Family Time", when the ERT units are utterly convinced that Roland Randol (Alec's step-father) is the one masterminding the hostage situation on his own farm — thanks to his history of hardline activism. They assume that Julian and Hoyt's voices are Roland, and the two boys never correct them. This ultimately leads to the police shooting the innocent Roland.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Roland Randol is gunned down by the police due to a series of fumbled attempts at communication that left them under the impression that he was masterminding a hostage situation, rather than his son Julian.
  • Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: The future apparently has a serious problem with even the most iconic fiction franchises. Kiera fails to pick up an obvious Batman reference in the season two premiere. Alec is actually surprised when Kiera makes a modern-day pop culture reference. Games such as Rock–Paper–Scissors and paintball have also faded into obscurity. Justified in "Minute Man", where it's revealed that the NAU had basically all pre-NAU material labeled as subversive contraband.
  • Present Day: Subverted. The show takes place in 2012-2014, but many of the major characters are from 2077.
  • Privately Owned Society: The 2077 setting.
  • Protagonist-Centered Morality: Okay, the existence of Kiera's family may be in question if she doesn't succeed in preserving the original timeline as unaltered as possible. But while her stakes are admittedly high, the very fact that her future is an extremely crappy place for A LOT more people makes it hard to root for her. Even moreso since she already witnessed first-hand the measures the system is willing to take (like engineering food shortages to raise the company's profits, mind-controlling her to make her kill informants that aren't of any further use, trying to coerce her into letting perish children in a fire in favor of executives who enjoy a higher saving priority etc.) - and that's just the stuff she saw herself. Given that she should see that her future is going to be a lot worse than the present and that she is about to bring that future, one wonders whether she's just really desperate, has only temporary memory bouts, or actually considers the system of the future in spite of all its shortcomings an ultimately beneficial system.
  • Psycho for Hire:
    • Most of Liber8, though it's zigzagged somewhat as they actually (to varying degrees) believe in the message that Kagame is preaching. That being said, it's strongly hinted that without Kagame, their group would tear itself apart. Which it almost immediately does once he dies.
    • While her record was only hinted at previously, Emily is shown to have a rather impressive rap sheet. The same file also has video of her brutally shanking a fellow inmate. Apparently she's mellowed out since then, though she's not above assassinating Escher.
  • Psycho Serum: The HALO bracelet has a roughly 6% chance of causing violent psychosis, on account of it being designed using Kiera's CMR as the key component without concern for the compatibility issues. Alec insists he can fix that part, though it's unclear if he will succeed.
  • Purple Prose: Sonya’s preferred writing style, to the point that in "So Do Our Minutes Hasten" Kiera is able to determine that a Liber8 press release wasn't written by Sonya because it wasn't pompous enough.
  • Put on a Bus: Emily skips town midway through the last season, having become convinced that she and Alec were never meant to be. The series finale reveals that they eventually got back together and remained a couple until her death.
  • Putting on the Reich:
    • The CPS have shades of this in how they operate, which in keeping with the heavy undercurrent of authoritarianism in 2077. It seems that this began as early as 2035, where "criminals" were implanted with mind-control chips and set to work in factories. And they also love going after "subversive" material, confiscating anything that might contradict the official story of the pre-2050 world.
    • The Anti-Liber8 Taskforce become increasingly this over the course of Season 2, taking drastic measures to hunt down those suspected of being criminals to the point where "guilty until proven innocent" seems to be their new mantra. The Season 2 finale has Dillon reviewing Escher's plans to turn them into the CPS.
    • In Season 3, active censorship on university campuses and security and police crackdowns over even relatively minor events (pro-Liber8 dances and peaceful protests) are apparently regarded as normal. Granted, a building did get bombed by Kagame, but even so, this kind of heavy-handed response is more characteristic of an emerging police state rather than a reasoned law-enforcement response to seeking out the principal backers of Liber8. Kiera's behavior toward Rebecca, one of Julian's lieutenants, does not help.

    Q-T 
  • Red Shirt: The VPD, including the Emergency Response Team.
  • Reset Button: Hit hard in the season 3 premiere. Alec's time traveling in the season 2 finale causes that entire time line to collapse into itself, causing the show to reset to the events of "Second Guess", only with two Alecs and two Kieras running around... until Past Kiera gets bumped off, leaving only Present Kiera. All in all, the switch from the collapsed timeline to Alec's new timeline reversed the deaths of Emily, Garza, Travis, Sonya's right-hand gangster, and most of the known Freelancers.
  • Restraining Bolt: A flashback to 2035 shows the NAU fitting citizens who are in considerable debt with chips that render them mindless slaves, and then putting them to work in the manufacture of more chips.
  • Ret-Gone: Kiera has no idea how time travel works in her universe, and is therefore constantly terrified that she's going to wipe her son from existence. Doubly so in season 3, where Alec's trip through time carries the very real possibility that her future is outright gone. In "3 Minutes to Midnight", following the revelation that Brad is from a different time, she's pretty much accepted that she can never go home..
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Liber8 is willing to blow up buildings full of people just to kill a few members of a corporation. Kagame tries to shift to a more peaceful method following their trip back in time, but he still blows himself up and takes a building with him. After that, Sonya and Travis end up forming separate groups, Travis being the violent one while Sonya uses more subversive methods.
  • Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: After Julian Randol is cleared of attempting to murder Carlos, the judge responsible for the verdict gets a lethal visit from Travis.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: in a somewhat anvilicious way, this series does its best at addressing a number of contemporary real world issues and debates involving corporations, police brutality, government surveillance, and other themes.
  • Robbing the Dead: Alec does this to Kiera's corpse at the end of "Minute of Silence", presumably to jump-start Halo and his eventual future-tech. Carlos and the remaining Kiera treat this as his final descent into villainy.
  • Running Gag: Carlos comparing Keira to Batman, and her not getting it.
  • Sacrificial Lion: Chen dies several episodes into the show, after being established as the group's second-in-command. He comes back in the season 2 finale.
  • Sarcastic Confession:
    • Kellog tells his broker that he's from the future and knows what's going to happen, which they both laugh off as a joke.
    • In the season two premiere, when Gardiner questions Kiera about how she survived the bombing in the Season One finale and seemed to disappear before his eyes, she tells him the truth about her future technology sarcastically and he does not believe her.
  • Sanity Slippage:
    • Lucas shows signs of this. He starts hallucinating conversations with the dead Kagame. In the end of season 3, he breaks down the hardest when Liber8 become convinced that their efforts have been for nothing.
    • Ingram, apparently as a result of Temporal Sickness. He levels out in Season 3, escaping from the mental institution he was incarcerated at with the help of Sonya. She gives him some medication that keeps him sane.
    • Jason zigzags this; when first introduced, he's already more than a little out there due to the same temporal jet lag as Lucas. He gets a bit better after some time spent with the main cast (he still makes for a very confusing conversationalist, but he becomes very useful), only to get much worse in Season 3 when his HALO bracelet starts driving him nuts.
  • Scary Black Man:
    • Travis, the Super-Soldier who spends the most time commanding Liber8.
    • One of the major freelancers is a scary black man in a nice suit.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Taken to the literal extreme with the North American Union. Alec Salder, being a member of the Corporate Congress, is both rich and powerful enough that he is legally allowed to offer a stay of execution for any prisoner he sees fit.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
    • Liber8's intended goal, though they end up a lot further back than they had assumed they would go, and things are soon revealed to be more complicated. In the second season, it's revealed that Alec himself desires the same, and left a message for his younger self telling him that only he could avert that future. Doubly strange is the fact that he sent Kiera even though he should have known that she would be dead-set against changing it as she didn't want her family erased out of existence.
    • Done by Alec in the season 2 finale, jumping back a week to save Emily after she died in a firefight with the Freelancers. Then done by Kiera to keep him from making a mess of things, since his interference has pretty much destroyed her future unless she corrects it.
    • Then compounded when it's revealed that Alec's new future has sent its own agents to fix things.
  • Sexy Shirt Switch: Happens with Emily, and she's clearly not wearing a bra under it.
  • Show Some Leg: In order to get access to Piron's servers, Sonya walks in dressed as a sexy scientist and flirts with the maintenance guy, getting him to walk out so they can have coffee later.
  • Shown Their Work: Frank Bolo mentions that he has an Authorization to Carry (ATC) permit after being arrested, which is issued to a person to lawfully possess a restricted, or a specific class of, prohibited firearm that is loaded or possessed with readily accessible ammunition.
  • Shrouded in Myth: Theseus, the man who inspired Liber8, is a famous revolutionary by 2077. To those protecting the establishment, like Kiera, he is almost literally Hitler. To those fighting against it, he's basically Jesus. He's Julian Randol. Even Sonia, normally quite composed and in control, is nearly in tears from a chance to talk to him face to face.
    Julian: I'm not interested in being recruited.
    Sonia: This isn't about you joining anyone! This is about you leading everyone!
  • Sinister Surveillance: This combined with Police Brutality are a major part of the VPD's Start of Darkness once it falls under the control of Escher, who seems to be quite fond of exploiting surveillance tech himself.
  • Skyscraper City: Seems to be the standard in the future.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Carlos Fonnegra seems to be leaning to the "cynicism" end at times, especially when he witnesses more and more blatant examples of corporate interference with the ability of an impartial law enforcement agency's officers to do their jobs.
    Carlos: Why don't we just skip to the end where they call us all "protectors"?
  • Smug Snake: Kellog, in "Minute of Silence", having maneuvered Alec into essentially re-founding SadTech. He's not content with that level of smugness, though, and really outdoes himself in the season finale, where he reveals that he stole Piron right out from under Alec's nose.
  • Stable Time Loop: In a fourth-season conversation between young Alec and old Alec, young Alec encourages his future self to continue to work on time travel, and also name-drops Kiera, leading old Alec to make sure she's sent back with Liber8.
  • Start of Darkness:
    • Julian gets his when his ill-conceived activism goes horribly wrong in the first season, though his morality actually goes back up in the following seasons.
    • Somewhere along the line, Alec helped create the One Nation Under Copyright. In a twist, Alec comes to deeply regret how things have played out by 2077 and wants his past self to avert it.
    • When Dillon loses his job thanks to poor progress in stopping Liber8, he makes a deal with Escher to get it back, starting him on a dark path that never stops getting darker.
    • In the third season, the new timeline's Alec has his when he inherits Piron. He then comes across certain damaging information that his future self was better prepared to hear, becoming increasingly more evil as the season progresses.
  • Status Quo Is God: Kellog loses his grandmother when Travis guns her down, and breaks down (to the point of implied alcoholism) as a result. He even freely does Kiera a favor by using his new boat to take her future grandparents to safety. By the very next episode, he's right back to being manipulative and weaselly, even to the point of sneaking into Kiera's apartment to steal her fragment of the time-travel device.
  • Super-Soldier: Travis Verta. Originally seemingly based on a your typical Super Serum, but later revealed to also be packing a nanite-assisted Healing Factor and a few other cybernetic enhancements.
  • SWAT Team: The VPD's ERT.
  • Take That!: A possibly unintentional one to the RoboCop franchise, in that 2077 in the first timeline is identical to that Omni Consumer Products runs practically everything in Detroit at least, which is painted, quite accurately as a dystopia.
  • Taking You with Me:
    • The de-facto leader of Julian's teen terrorist group in "Family Time", once cornered by Kiera, decides that if he can't escape, he can at least be a martyr by detonating his homemade bomb. Kiera's much better with her gun, however, and he gets gunned down before he can make good on the threat.
    • Sonya does this to take out Dillon in "The Dying Minutes". She fails.
    • In a metaphysical version, Past!Alec, currently suffering from a stab wound to the jugular, uses his last breath to tell Kiera that her future dies with him, before deliberately removing the object so he bleeds out immediately.
  • Tattooed Crook: Garza has a fair number of tattoos.
  • Teen Genius: 2012-era Alec Sadler.
  • Television Geography: While the show makes some effort to refer to real parts of the Lower Mainland, there's no good reason for an oil truck being driven around Stanley Park. Considering how narrow the roads are there, it's about the most impractical thing to do (and there's no reason to anyway, unless the driver took a wrong turn en route to or from the Lion's Gate Bridge). Also, sharp-eyed people will notice parts of the GVRD stand in for other parts of the GVRD.
  • Temporal Mutability/Stable Time Loop/Rubber-Band History/You Already Changed the Past: According to series creator Simon Barry, Continuum has a consistent model for temporal mechanics that blends different conceptual models of time travel and will gradually be revealed as the plot develops. Thus far, it's clear time is mutable to some extent yet there are also numerous stable time loops in play. The course of events depends on the importance of the incident or the person that is affected by Time Travel. Thousands can die without having an effect on the timeline, as long as the truly important people turn out as they originally did.
  • Temporal Sickness: Time travelers occasionally suffer from this, though so far there doesn't seem to be any particular pattern to it. Jason spent some time in a mental institution after being stranded in 1992 (though it's hinted he wound up in Freelancer custody for a while, which wouldn't have aided his sanity). Late in season 2, Ingram is institutionalised after developing full blown psychosis and hallucinations, though he eventually gets back to a slightly more amoral normal.
  • Thanatos Gambit: Dying in 2012 (on his birthday, no less) seemed to have been part of Kagame's plan all along.
  • There Can Be Only One: The Freelancers indicate that Kiera will have to do something about her counterpart and one of the two Alecs in the new timeline. Someone beats her to the punch with her counterpart, while Alec from one week later seems to intent to stay out of the way now that Emily has avoided her past fate.
  • The Chosen Ones: Alec remarks to Jason, Carlos, Brad, Garza and Curtis that with the future army stopped and Kiera gone, it's up to them to build the better future they all want. Come 2077, it's revealed that they succeeded and that Julian and Kagame were also instrumental. Eight people who are part of a group, brought together by circumstances, that want to make the world a better place. Sound familiar?
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The police in 2077 seem to think it's appropriate to use a gunship to fire over a dozen missiles to detain two unarmed people.
  • This Means War!: Explicitly invoked by Dillon in the first episode after Liber8 have blown through the VPD station to retrieve Lucas.
  • Thoughtcrime:
    • Kiera implies that this will be the case in the future
    Suspect: The worst I did was wish him dead...that's not a crime is it?
    Kiera: Not yet.
    • In "3 Minutes to Midnight", Dillon claims that Alec's HALO bio-monitoring can be used to detect subversive behavior. Given this is technology from the future, there's a very real possibility it is actually used this way.
  • Time Crash: In the season 3 premiere, Alec's use of time travel causes the current timeline to collapse. The sky has gone gray, lightning is striking everywhere, and there are periodic earthquakes. It's not clear how things would have gone if they had ridden it to the end, but it doubtless would have been awful.
  • Time Police: The Freelancers are a vigilante cult who, in the absence of any real Time Police (that we've seen so far anyway), decide it's their duty to serve precisely this function. Per their beliefs in not changing history, however, the cult was set up in the 12th century and members are locally recruited.
  • Time Travel: Of the Set Right What Once Went Wrong variety for Liber8, as well as for the alternate 2039 which sent back Brad.
  • Timey-Wimey Ball: By the third season, so many competing timelines have piled on top of one-another that Kiera and Liber8 have basically decided it isn't worth fighting anymore. There are too many variables now to just pull certain strings for the outcome they want.
  • To Be Lawful or Good:
    • Kiera figures out that a murderer had an accomplice but then realizes that in a few years the accomplice will become a world-renowned scientist whose work will help millions of people. If she has the accomplice arrested for the murder, she would be changing the timeline and averting all the good that the person is about to do. Ultimately, Kiera decides to let the accomplice go.
    • Alec calls Kiera on this in "Split Second", pointing out that her desire to maintain the future is going to force her to choose between letting certain critical moments to the future happen or helping the people in the present. He also points out that her attempt to avert the bombing in the season 1 finale could have ruined the future she's trying to protect.
    • Kiera starts to have real problems with this in season 3, when the Corrupt Corporate Executive angle is really played up while Liber8 segues away from violent terrorism to more Robin Hood-esque social activism. Kiera ultimately decides that her future is no longer worth fighting for, joining up with Liber8 to stop Past!Alec from setting it in motion.
  • Token Good Teammate: Carlos is basically this to the rest of the police; Kiera starts out as a well-intentioned fascist, his boss Jack Dillon eventually sells out to the corporations, and hacker Betty Robertson briefly turns traitor to work with Liber 8, where Carlos basically always focuses on doing the right thing and helps to inspire Kiera's own character development.
  • Too Dumb to Live/Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: One of Alec's friends decides to drive while under the influence of a mind-altering drug that is explicitly designed to make the user have intense flashbacks.
    "It's okay man, laser focus!"
  • Too Kinky to Torture: Garza treats violent interrogation like foreplay, much to Kiera's annoyance.
  • Trapped in the Past: Kiera and Liber8. Within that, the Liber8 members thought they would be going back six years, not sixty five. Kagame, though, was well aware that they were going back to 2012.
  • Trash the Set: The penultimate episode features Kellogg's future army attacking Carlos's VPD precinct, which sustains heavy damage in the firefight before a grenade utterly destroys it.
  • True Companions: Subverted by Liber8. At first they seem to be extremely loyal to each other and willing to go to great lengths to rescue each other from the police. However, we are later shown that there are deadly divides within the group that are kept in check by the group's leaders. They are also willing to sacrifice one of their own in order to kill Kiera. Without Kagame, the group fractures in short order.
  • Turncoat: Kellog offers to betray Liber8 in exchange for Kiera letting him stay in 2012. The end of season 2 sees Carlos and Betty become arguably heroic examples of this.
  • Turn in Your Badge: Carlos is forced to do this as part of an indefinite suspension, when he reveals that he slept with the victim in a murder case hours before she died. He gets it back once he's cleared.
  • Tyrant Takes the Helm: Inspector Dillon is replaced as head of the department by a more By-the-Book Cop. The new boss is much less tolerant of Kiera's activities and more antagonistic toward her. Subverted when Dillon is reinstated and he begins to turn the department into a prototype of the corporate police force that Kiera belonged to in 2077.

    U-W 
  • Unbelievable Source Plot: Kiera works as a consultant for the police force and provides information based on her knowledge of the future and her communications with the smart kid through her communication implants. Sometimes it seems silly that she doesn't just tell her partner what's up so she wouldn't have to convince him to follow a lead every time she has insider information, but she is certain that no one would believe her. Eventually, she trusts Carlos with the information, but they continue to keep it secret from others.
  • Undying Loyalty: Sonya's loyalty to Kagame is absolute. As Travis learns the hard way, it even trumps their relationship.
  • Unexpected Positive: Subverted. In "So Do Our Minutes Hasten", Alec shows off his new health-monitoring wrist bracelet, the Halo, to the Piron board. He convinces a naysayer of its value by having him try it out, and identifying markers for colon cancer. In private, however, he admits that the "data" it collected was all guesswork and information from the man's company insurance files, and he doesn't have a working prototype yet.
  • Unexplained Recovery: Chen is somehow alive and a Freelancer in the season 2 finale. "The Dying Minutes" reveals he was "merged" with an alternate timeline version of himself, which brought him back to life.
  • Unholy Matrimony: Travis and Sonya appear to have a thing going. According to the backstories in their character bios, Sonya was responsible for the super-soldier program that gave Travis his genetic enhancements, and began to see him as more than just a test subject. Doesn't stop her from trying to kill him on Kagame's orders, though.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The plan in the season 3 finale is never openly explained, but it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately the later stages did have a specific goal, so that of course had a few hiccups.
  • Unwanted Assistance: More than once, a hostage has professed to agree with Liber8 and gotten shot by Travis for doing so.
  • Unwitting Pawn:
    • In "So Do Our Minutes Hasten", Carlos and Julian both get roped into a whistleblowing scheme on Sonmanto which turns out to be an intentional plant to discredit the latter, as well as work up some sympathy points Sonmanto can use to avoid blame for another incident.
    • When Alec takes over Piron and cuts Kellog out, Kellog sues him based on an exclusivity clause in their old contract. Alec reads between the lines and installs Kellog as a board member. What he failed to anticipate was Kellog tricking him into signing away the company, but by then it was Future!Alec who got the bad news.
  • Utopia: The ending events of the series change the fictitious version of the late 21st century from a fairly stock Cyberpunk-ish Dystopia to an equally cookie-cutter socialist utopia that might have been dreamed up by Edward Bellamy or David Harvey.
  • Viking Funeral: Past Kiera gets an odd variation with the incomplete time travel device. By leaving it incomplete, she's atomized across time and space. Carlos notes that it's like a Viking funeral.
  • Villain Has a Point: Liber8 is correct about the future being a brutal police state that steps on the rights of its citizens. Even our heroes are alarmed as they see more authoritarian measures begin to take hold in 2012.
  • Villain with Good Publicity:
    • Sonmanto is this in the future, relative to the other members of the Corporate Congress. They created a cure for a nasty battlefield chemical weapon, which they themselves created. Even Travis admits that they had him fooled.
    • In season 3, Sonya's plan is essentially to subvert this for all the members of the future Corporate Congress by exposing their dirty laundry and erasing any public trust for them. If they have no support, they won't have the leverage to become the leaders of the future NAU.
    • Liber8 itself, depending on your point of view. Despite being a terrorist group, it's suggested that they have a certain amount of Robin Hood-esque popularity, particularly in the present day.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: Alec Sadler for Kiera in 2012. He invented the technology that Kiera depends on in the future, so his computers are able to interface with her suit and her cybernetic implants. However, it soon becomes clear that Alec has a lot more importance to the story and the world's future than as Kiera's pet hacker.
  • Waif-Fu: The diminutive Emily very capably takes down and kills an intruding Mook who is much taller, larger and better-armed than she is.
  • Walking Transplant: Kellog attempts this trope on himself. In one apocalyptic future, he is a warlord dying of kidney cancer. He sends his daughter back in time to find and guard his past self so that he can travel back himself and take his own past kidneys. In the series finale, past Kellog objects, kills his future-self's daughter, and steals the trigger for the time machine to try to send himself further back and avoid any of this happening. Too bad Alec reprogrammed the trigger.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist:
    • Liber8 is fighting to take down pro-corporate governments and restore true democracy. However, they are willing to kill 30,000 people in order to assassinate the twenty corporate leaders in charge of the system. In 2012, they have no problem murdering police officers simply to obtain weapons and create a distraction.
    • A scientist is murdered because he was about to sell his research to the Canadian military. His killers want the technology to be used to help people rather than to build weapons. Kiera, realizing what their work means for the future, reluctantly lets them slide.
    • In 2077, Alec Sadler masterminds the plot to send Liber8 back into the past, as part of a gambit to avert the current future.
    • Dillon, after speaking to Escher, begins taking much more extreme measures, leading to a Start of Darkness not only for himself but for the entire Vancouver Police Department, then leading to the genesis of CPS.
    • In 2077, Julian Randol is guilty of the murder of tens of thousands of people... who had been converted by the NAU into mindless slaves and were apparently incapable of being freed without dying.
    • Though not much has been revealed about The Freelancers, it seems they are dedicated to the fairly reasonable goal of preserving the correct timeline and preventing temporal tampering… regardless of who they have to kill or imprison in order to do so.
  • We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Another bit of Fish out of Temporal Water for Kiera, though the VPD gets her meaning.
  • Wild Card: Kellog. First he is a willing part of Liber8, then he decides to strike out on his own and seek a quiet and rich life, then he provides key intelligence to Kiera, and then he is seen searching Kiera's apartment and stealing her recovered fragment of the time-travel device.
  • Wham Episode:
    • In "Seconds" (Season 2, Episode 9), the very final shot reveals that Alec Sadler's company owned the entire prison-gulag complex that made the very control chips used to keep workers in a zombie state for the duration of their "sentence".
    • The season 2 finale in spades. All the time travelers have been captured by the Freelancers, Carlos and Betty have joined Julian, Alec has gone back in time to save Emily, and Dillon is hard at work creating CPS.
    • "3 Minutes to Midnight" is, both in-universe and out, simply mind-boggling. Kiera's future friend comes from a future where Liber8 won, and they are practically ecstatic at their victory. Then he clues them in on the reality of it. What the corporations didn't get through manipulation, they instead tried to take by force. The end result? 2039 Vancouver is a complete hellhole and Kellog is a revolutionary trying to fix things by sending him and Chen back. Combined with Kiera outing Garza as working for Alec (after a fashion) and the alt!Chen a Freelancer, Liber8 falls apart at the sheer pointlessness of it all.
    • "Last Minute": On the cusp of believing that they've finally changed the world for the better, Kiera and Brad realize that something has gone horribly wrong, while simultaneously Kellog reveals that he's been subtly manipulating Alec and Jacqueline to gain control of Piron, reopening the possibility of a 2039-like timeline.
    • "Final Hour: Kellog discovers that 'Vasquez' is his daughter in the gone-horribly-wrong 2030s timeline.
  • Wham Line: "Revolutions Per Minute" has one hell of a doozy for Kiera.
    "John Doe": Who the hell is Alec Sadler?
  • Wham Shot:
    • Quite literally in Season 3, Episode 1 "Minute by Minute"; Emily kills Mr. Escher.
    • At the end of the same episode, Alec discovering that Past!Kiera was murdered in his new timeline.
  • Whole Episode Flashback: "Waning Minute" is mostly set in the future, focusing on Kiera's time as a prisoner/guest of a farming community living off the grid.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: In the series finale it is not revealed what happened to Garza, Chen or Tonkin.
  • Withholding the Cure: The pharmaceutical industry executives Kagame targets in the first season finale were meeting to do this, along with price-fixing.
  • With Us or Against Us: Kagame looks down on the Gleaners because they’ve found a way to compromise with the Corporate Congress while still living apart. It’s implied this is one of the reasons why he arranges for their community to be annihilated.
  • Work Off the Debt: In the future, debtors can be sentenced to work off their debt under control of mind control implants.
  • Would Hit a Girl: The villains never hold back on hurting or killing someone because she's a woman. For that matter, the heroes never hold back on killing various female mooks they run across.
  • Written by the Winners: In "Time's Up", it's mentioned that the corporations prevent anyone from learning about their history. Kagame is old enough to have been taught prior, and Kellog seems to have at least a working knowledge of that history as part of his training on how to finance Liber8 in the past with heavily-leveraged stock picks. Invoked in "Seconds", where Carlos (accurately) notes this might be the case with the "official history" that Kiera knows.
    Carlos: But how do you know that for sure? It's usually the victors who write history.

    X-Z 
  • Xanatos Gambit:
    • Liber8's plan in "Time's Up" is engineered so a Corrupt Corporate Executive must admit her corruption, or otherwise die when her fate is decided by people voting online. She chooses to confess, but either way her company is in ruins and Liber8 makes a fortune by short-selling the corporation's stock in advance.
    • "Second Degree" has Julian's trial. Liber8 kidnaps the family of a juror to get him to vote innocent, which Kiera discovers. To keep the family safe, they can't reveal the fact until they've performed a rescue, by which time the trial is nearly over. The presiding judge, also in their pocket, then delivers a bench verdict that clears him anyway, making sure Liber8 wins either way.
  • You Are Too Late: Invoked by the Liber8 leader/spokesman, Edouard Kagame, when he is arrested in the first scene of the pilot after broadcasting a speech outlining the group's manifesto. Kiera arrives with a number of officers to apprehend him, but moments later, they can only watch as a large office tower explodes in the distance.
  • You Cannot Kill An Idea: Seems to be a recurring them with Kagame, who believes that spreading information is more effective than violent activism. Not that he doesn't engage in that, mind you. Showing where he got it from, Julian preaches the same message to his followers when he spares Kiera's life.
  • You Can't Go Home Again: Kiera is driven by her desire to get back to her family, but as time passes that goal slips further away, until finally she is forced to accept that she is likely never getting home after the timeline has been mucked with so much.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Implied to have happened to Travis in the first season finale. Lucky for him, being a Super Soldier helped immensely in surviving it.
  • You Just Told Me: Kellog gets Kiera to admit to her and Alec having traveled back in time through this method, having guessed as much from their behavior and just needing to confirm it.
  • Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters:
    • Liber8 is a group of murderous, violence-addicted terrorists... who are fighting against the world's oppressive corporate overlords in order to restore human rights like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right to peaceably assemble, and pretty much the rest of the Bill of Rights or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And remember... the hero of this story, Kiera Cameron, is trying to stop these rampaging democracy-advocating, liberal-minded monsters out of a combination of loyalty to the job and a fear that their meddling may negatively affect her personally.
    • Kellog practically says this to Kiera word for word in "Time's Up".
  • You Wouldn't Shoot Me: In the season two premiere, Travis tries this on Sonya. It doesn't work, but a timely interruption saves his life. Amazingly, he actually says this again after he had been shot once before, but in this case rationalizes his belief by indicating that she'd have already done so, rather than give him the chance to speak at all.

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