If Friday’s first episode of Continuum is any indication, this final season is going to blow fans away. The Future Soldiers have Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) in their sights and, intent on restoring order to the timeline, are willing to blow our heroine to smithereens. And they’ve got the tech to do it; Kiera’s suit just doesn’t seem to stand a chance.

The first of these last six episodes, “Lost Hours,”—returning Friday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase—is packed with the stress, action and armaments of a feature film, which is exactly how Continuum‘s creator tackled the farewell storyline.

“The six episodes really freed me up creatively because I didn’t have to service episodic storytelling,” Simon Barry says during a Vancouver set visit. “I said, ‘Let’s just do a six-hour movie and break it up into six chapters.'” Some fans vented their frustration on social media when Showcase announced the sci-fi project would conclude with Season 4, but Barry says he’d rather have a half-dozen hours to tie up loose ends than have three more seasons and be cancelled suddenly.

The result? A storyline that sticks to the present timeline of 2015 Vancouver. To be honest, that’s quite enough. Along with the Future Soldiers (played by Lisa Berry, Ty Olsson, Aleks Paunovic, Kyra Zagorsky, Michael Eklund and Garfield Wilson), Kiera has to contend with Kellog (Stephen Lobo), who is on a course to become a powerful warlord in a war-torn future; a budding romance with Brad (Ryan Robbins); and a shaky alliance with Liber8 that puts her relationships with Carlos (Victor Webster) and Alec (Erik Knudsen) in jeopardy. Barry explains Kiera evolved in Season 3, realizing Liber8 was smaller fish and that she needed to think bigger if she wanted to have an effect on the future and did so by aligning with the terrorist group to take down Sonmanto. The partnership carries over to Season 4, but it doesn’t mean they’re sharing a beer anytime soon.

As for the series finale episode, Barry is—as you’d expect—mum on the details, though he advises “There will be discussion,” among fans once the credits roll for the last time.

“In a weird way, Episode 6 has been a series of endings masked as a story,” he says. “We have a last shot and a last scene that I think is very important, but I don’t think the scene carries the weight of the rest of the episode on it.”

Continuum airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showcase.

This is just the first in a series of Continuum stories TV, Eh? will be posting as the series comes to an end. Look for interviews with stars Rachel Nichols, Victor Webster, Erik Knudsen, Stephen Lobo and Roger Cross, and creator Simon Barry, in the coming weeks.

Canadians can get a preview of the first episode on Showcase.ca before Friday’s broadcast.