How does one say goodbye to a cherished television program that one has enjoyed? How does an actor say farewell to a character they have come to inhabit over the course of a number of years? We are finding out now with the final season of Continuum, which returned this past Saturday for the first of its final six episodes airing on on SyFy (Saturdays, 9PM EDST).

There had been some concern among fans, and even among the cast and crew, that the show was going to end without any resolution, leaving us all wondering at the fate of Kiera and her fellow Time travelers. We are however going to at least have some closure, according to Omari Newton, who plays Lucas Ingram, when I spoke to him briefly at Dragon Con over Labor Day weekend. While he of course would not go into any detail, he said that he hoped that fans would be happy with how things were brought to a close.

Our story opens where we left off, with Kiera locked in and an uneasy truce with Liber8, and Matthew Kellogg having taken control over Alec’s company, Piron. As the the first episode, Lost Hours (all the episodes this season have “Hours” in the name), begins Kiera’s relationship with fellow time traveler from an alternate timeline, Brad, is placed under a new strain by the arrival of some new time travelers, also from the alternate timeline, who have their own agenda and their own mission which could threaten everyone. Through a series of events, Kiera finds her desire to return to her own time reignited and will have to fight battles on several fronts to have any chance of seeing her son again.

All this is well and good but clearly some corners had to be cut to be able to make these final six episodes. Right off the bat there is some really terrible CGI that I would sooner have expected in the cut scenes from a older generation video game system than from this show, which has had fairly decent and consistent FX to this point. Any science fiction fan loves a good power suit. Too bad we did not get a good looking powered suit here. The editing throughout this first episode feels choppy and even sloppily done. Perhaps they had to cobble together a (relatively) cohesive story from less than they had hoped and anticipated they would have available to tell the story. Perhaps that would explain why the story line feels so forced, and somewhat convoluted, like they are just trying to hard to take the show to its conclusion. As the story clumsily progresses through this first episode, there’s a sense that something is missing and a feeling that they are spoon feeding details in a desperate attempt to fill in holes in their shooting scripts. When it comes down to it, the real star of this first episode is Vancouver, B.C. That town is just gorgeous.

This is not to say that the show is all bad. I can recall having been burned by so many series that ended without any resolution over the last few years (I could do an entire article about that! And I just might have to!), like Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Kings, and Invasion, just to name four, that I am grateful for what we are getting… I just hoped and expected more. Perhaps this was just a rough start to set the stage for a great finish.Yes lets go with that.

Either way, I will be watching, and I will let you know here!