Continuum Actor Victor Webster Talks Time Travel And Riding The Edge Of The Real
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Carlos knows about these multiple timelines — he knows the Kiera he worked with is dead, and the one he’s working with now is from the other timeline. How much is he struggling with that?
It’s causing a lot of conflict. It’s mind-boggling. Life isn’t cherished because you can go back in time and change everything. I think there are so many question marks for him. And the person who was his best friend, who he loved deeply, is laying there, dead. And then there’s someone else claiming to be that same person. Put yourself in that position…that’s got to throw you for a loop. Not to mention all the stress he’s gone through in the last two seasons, finding out that someone’s from the future, Liber8, the freelancers…there are so many things being thrown at him at once that he’s having a hard time processing it.
Carlos seems to be coming apart a little. Does he have a source of stability — someone or something to keep himself solid?
He doesn’t. One of them was Inspector Dillon, and that’s been taken away from him. His father, whose sense of morality was passed down to him, was killed when he was younger. Kiera was another person he was able to go to, but is this new Kiera really who she claims to be? So he doesn’t have anybody, he’s swinging in the wind by himself, which is one of the reasons he’s starting to unravel.
Isn’t there another Carlos — or many — hanging around out there in another timeline?
There must be. There must be two, three, four, depending on how many alternate timelines there are. Every time we go back and change something, we create another timeline. So there’s got to be another Carlos. How many times have we changed the future in Continuum? I’d imagine there have to be multiples of everybody.
I think so too. But this also means that it’d be nearly impossible to go back to the same timeline as someone else. So I found it interesting that Kiera could jump back to the same timeline Alec did, rather than creating yet another timeline.
Yeah… (laughs). I don’t know. I think it’s so well done and you have to watch the show and really pay attention to all the bits and pieces they give you. There are lots of Easter eggs in the show where something is said in passing and then, five episodes later, what we talked about is a really big part of the storyline, and if you weren’t paying really close attention, you’ll miss it.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing how the rules work in this time travel scenario as the season goes on. It’s not like Back to the Future, where you can’t have any contact with your other self or you’ll get erased. It’s more complicated than that. I can’t say I’m 100% clear on it, but that’s okay.
I think they base our world in science and the things we’ve discovered that are in scientific journals and magazines, where great minds have pondered the possibilities. They root our world in that. What we see on our show is a pretty good reflection of what the greatest minds think could possibly happen.
Do you see that as a difference between Continuum and other shows? Take Fringe, for example, which is pretty similar in some ways to Continuum, but feels less hard science to me and a little more like fantasy. Do you think Continuum caters more to hard sci-fi fans by incorporating real technology?
I think we realize how smart our fan base is. The people that watch, especially the hardcore fans, are very intelligent — you can’t slide anything by them and they call us on everything. So we don’t go into the fantasy world nearly as much as we live in the world of science and what’s conceptually possible.
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