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The TV series:
Liber8
- Why is Liber8 becoming more violent as of the finale and S2? Kagame already proved that Liber8 will only make gains in 2012 by explicitly refusing to kill people. Then he blew up an entire building! (Admittedly, it had been evacuated, but even so...) And now Sonya seems to be just as trigger-happy as Travis was, even if she's setting things up to deflect blame from Liber8 and onto other groups.
- That building blew up in the future, so Kagame had to destroy it in the past (for whatever reason). As for Sonya, what she's doing is political. Killing the mayor puts the guy on her payroll on track to win, in addition to undermining groups opposed to her own.
- Because for all the suggestions of a Grey-and-Gray Morality, Liber8 are basically cartoon supervillains.
- Agreed. The TV series doesn't seem to be getting into a serious exploration (yet, anyway) of what would drive Liber8 to be the left-wing counterpart to the corporate-backed "Union" of 2077; the audience seems to largely be expected to discount the Strawman Has a Point nature of Liber8.
- As of Season 2, Episode 9, the show is starting to motivate why Liber8 was formed. By 2035, factories (which are basically large corporate-run labor camps) were set up which "employ" zombie-ized lifetime workers, most of who have probably been run in for failure to pay excessive debts or other relatively minor offences. One can hardly imagine the matter to have improved much in 2077 - and it hasn't. Debts can still be piled on for almost any reason, and "subversive" material is an open-and-shut reason to lock someone up.
- Also, as of S 2 E 9, the first glimmerings of the corporate-dominated future of 2077 can be seen. Mr. Escher is personally contributing funds to the Vancouver Police Department. As of S 2 E 11, the branch of the VPD under Dillon's control is for all intents and purposes Piron's (that is, Escher's) private army. In Season 3, at least one character explicitly makes this connection during police questioning.
- In the third Season, the effects of the "Piron Mandate" are beginning to be felt: Dillon blames Liber8 for almost all the major crimes occurring within the GVRD, even if evidence points to inter-corporate rivalries instead. It does not pay to question too closely those who provide funding for one's police department.
- Now we have an answer. The building was being used by pharmaceutical execs for a secret meeting to suppress cures. Good a reason as any for Liber8 to want them dead.
- Liber8 seems to have evolved into an anti-corporation in the truest sense. Instead of politicians being beholden to corporations and being their puppets, Liber8 is now making puppets of their own politicians. The natural question is, what's the point of Liber8 trying to avert a corporate-backed tyranny in 2077 if they're just going to create a mirror image of same? It's like the Bolsheviks essentially continuing the Tsarist repressive state apparatus instead of honestly doing away with it.
- No one said the revolution was perfect. Liber8 just can't collapse the institution. They have to make sure the alternative is better. And there's no indication of any long-term plans to run things behind the scenes. The guy was evidently picked because of how he would lead, not being forced to lead on their terms.
- Such is the irony of so many revolutionary movements. Revolutions start because people are upset with how things are run, with the ultimate goal of changing things. But being a revolutionary doesn't necessarily involve the skills to do a better job. So even when the revolution succeeds, it often devolves to "doing whatever it takes", which is often not so different from what the previous guys were doing and sometimes worse. Hence why so many people in stable societies often distrust would-be revolutionaries.
- Given a nod in "Second Thoughts". Sonya realizes that she's starting to become no better than the people they're trying to fight, while Ingram points out that sometimes you have to be.
- Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Her? If your plan to get rid of the Protector from the future requires stabbing her in order to get a copy of her DNA so you can track down and murder her grandmother, it's too complicated of a plan. Stabbing someone is usually the end of a plan to kill someone, not just the middle.
- She had already messed with several of their plans, they wanted to undo that. Plus, they were not sure if it would work, or if changing the past was dangerous to their own existence. Killing her grandmother allowed for testing which version of time travel their universe uses.
- In the episode with the hostages (S1: Ep. 8?), Hoyt somehow manages to die from a clearly nonlethal shoulder shot.
- There's no such thing as a "nonlethal" place to be shot. The bullet, or fragments (if it hit a bone), could have could have hit a major blood vessel. Combine that with shock from heavy tissue damage and pain amd you've got one dead guy.
- Oh, dear. You've fallen victim to thinking the Only a Flesh Wound trope is realistic. Television Is Trying to Kill Us.
- But what about those fancy suits Kiera et al have? Then bullets really do only cause flesh wounds!
- So, as of "3 Minutes to Midnight", Liber8's members have been confronted with the realization that what they've been trying to do has been running into cross-purposes with "master plans" orchestrated by 2039!Kellog (who is the time traveller from 2077), plus the Freelancers in the person of Chen, and Alec Sadler in the persons of Kiera Cameron and Garza. As a result, the group has effectively imploded.
- With two more episodes left to go, the Liber8 members must now find some new raison d'etre; given that the timeline of 2077 is a warning of the abuses of corporate power, while the timeline of 2039 is a warning of the abuses of temporal manipulation, then given their admittedly worthy goal of trying to sharpen people's realizations of the dangers of corporate power in Canadian and American society, at least one of the time travellers has to be able to hit on the correct actions to take to generate a timeline which generates the exact opposite of a Crapsack World. The question is, will the Freelancers go along with it?
- With the core nexus of the Freelancers dead or dying, all bets are off and it's just a question now of what the surviving time travellers will do or not do. It appears most of Liber8 + the future!Alec have decided to step out of the picture and lay low "Up North". Kiera and Brad are still in play, but whether they believe Liber8 and Carlos's prescient warnings enough to avert what Piron!Alec is doing is another matter.
- They almost managed it. Until Kellog had to go and ruin it all.
Alec Sadler
- What's strange about Garza's interactions with him is that as far as can be determined, she's actually giving him a genuine smile when she's initially talking to his younger self after having just offed or knocked out his friends. It's like she has developed some kind of strange comradeship with Old Alec. And Kagame went to his death for Old Alec! Meanwhile, Garza is safeguarding - in her own strange way - Alec from going down a path to darkness. What kind of man is he in 2077 that he can inspire those feelings in people?
- One with the knowledge of what has happened, what is to come, and the roles of those who have yet to play those parts. One would imagine it would be easy to manipulate others when you have a fair idea of how they'll react beforehand.
- It's worth noting that Garza didn't seem inclined to spare Young!Alec until he mentioned that he'd fallen in love, which Old!Alec said he'd never done and wanted to change. Of course, whether that's true or just another of Old!Alec's manipulations is anyone's guess. It seemed enough for Garza to want to give Young!Alec the benefit of the doubt, though.
- In Season 3, "A Minute Changes Everything", which one was which?
- Past!Alec is running Piron.
- Presumably they'll now be dressing differently and have different hair to make it easier to tell them apart, since Near Future(?)!Alec's wounds are healing.
Geographical Changes
- First off, it's subtle, but the sea level as a whole seems to rise a bit when going forward from 2012/2013 to 2077. Second, New Pemberton looks like a real industrial wasteland compared to what you can see of Pemberton via Google Earth. It would be interesting to see the results of earthquakes and global warming on the 2077 map of British Columbia.
Present Day
- In "Family Time", SWAT shoots a hostage. It's based on bad intel, interpreted in the worst way; Roland Randol is a political activist, so the police's first assumption upon learning of the situation is that Roland is one of the perps - not his son Julian, who actually purchased the vanload of ANFO. What were the repercussions? Or did the police simply lie and say Roland was a domestic terrorist?
- They probably blamed it all on Liber8.
- They weren't actually guilty of incompetence, they only acted on the information they had, so any repercussions were probably light.
- And that probably set some nasty precedents both for police and activists: cops now know it's okay to consider all activists potential terrorists, and activists now know that cops consider them all potential terrorists. Continue that Vicious Cycle for another half a century and the state of constant war between the establishment and the revolutionaries in 2077 is almost certain. Perhaps a story arc in Season 2 will involve the Roland widow trying to call attention to her husband's execution, which in the original timeline ended in a suspicious death before her trial... and Kiera will have to protect and/or become her assassin or risk her future being destroyed.
- Supplemental canon material suggests that this Vicious Cycle in fact, happened as a country named Cascadia forms out of the remnants of West-Coast North America after years of ecological crises. Farmers in particular become targets of agribusiness and the Corporate Congress by the 2060s, which neatly dies back to Roland being a farmer critical of the 2012 banking and business sectors.
- Kiera's "enthusiastic questioning" of Garza makes me wonder just what they teach in 2077 in the "Interrogation Methods" course. And the irony is, it probably all started because Liber8 hit 2012 in the first place, forcing Dillon to seek extra funding to do things "his way". Enter Mr. Escher, willing to hand out cash no questions asked, and all the rest seems to follow to the NAU of 2077.
- Dillon shows no signs of stopping, either. He talks about the "Piron mandate", which suggests that for all intents and purposes, AU-2013 has a private, corporate-funded police force which operates above the law. If Dillon's proposed tactics are anything to go by, no wonder an entire corporate gulag-complex sprouted up by 2035!
Season 4 Kiera
- Why does she keep banging on about "returning home" when she has to know it's almost impossible due to multiple timelines and the changes wrought by Liber8 and Kellog?
- Why does anyone keep trying to accomplish a goal long after it has become hopeless?
