Science fiction, simply by nature of being about future society, has often been a genre where women’s roles were expanded. Though most Victorian sci-fi novels featured male protagonists, they often acknowledged a more liberal notion of women’s roles. In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the peaceful Eloi are described as a communist society where men and women are equal. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race features an even more obviously communist society with the Vril-ya, where both female and male Vril-ya work while they are children so that they can pursue whatever academic or philosophical pursuits that interest them. The perfectly equal communist utopic was a pretty common thing in early science fiction, and it even continues as far as the original Star Trek in the 1960s (The United Federation of Planets is considered a post-capitalist liberal democracy, or a utopian socialist society). That both of these time periods were ones where we saw the beginnings of both first and second-wave feminism is probably not much of a coincidence.
In terms of film and television, science fiction often afforded women the better and more interesting roles. Princess Leia, after all, wasn’t just a helpless woman in a tower (or a sexy slave outfit), but rather a self-sufficient freedom fighter in her own right. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s really celebrated the sci-fi heroine with characters like Sarah Connor, Ripley, and Dana Scully. I grew up loving the women on Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular, since my family tuned in every week. I pretty much wanted to be Dr. Crusher when I grew up. But recent years have seen a noticeable decline in the strong, self-sufficient sci-fi heroine. Many attempts (Firefly, Dollhouse, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) were given terrible timeslots and cancelled after one or two seasons. After the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which was known for its fantastic and nuanced female characters, ended in 2009, pretty much the only really great sci-fi heroine we had left on TV was Fringe’s Olivia Dunham (which just completed its last season this January).
Now, I’m not sure if it’s partly due to the popularity of the Hunger Games’ s Katniss Everdeen, but it looks like the sci-fi heroine of my youth is finally making a comeback in Continuum (Showcase, Sundays @ 9 p.m., beginning its second season this week), and Orphan Black (Space, Saturdays @ 9 p.m.). Continuum is a time travel story, sort of in the vein of the Terminator films. Essentially, the future is controlled entirely by corporations who run the place like a police state, but there are many ‘terrorist’ groups fighting against these companies for freedom. Normally this story would follow the freedom fighters, but the main character is instead Kiera Cameron, a City Protections Officer. (Basically a cop, whose job is to protect people from these terrorist cells and uphold the status quo of the corporations.) She also rocks a series of cybernetic enhancements and a special suit that shields her and make her more effective as a protector of the law. She’s dragged back to our present by accident when a terrorist group called Liber8 sends themselves back in time in order to try and change the future.
Kiera is truly rounded female character — strong, intelligent, but also vulnerable. While she has a fairly staunch moral code, it’s tested over and over again throughout the first season. She’s also a mother, not often something you see in this type of show, and part of her struggle is because she wants to get back to her son and fears what will happen to him if the future gets changed too much. The show plays around with multiple theories of time travel, as well as character motivations, in such a smart way that’s it’s completely refreshing to watch. Even if Kiera weren’t such a great character, it would probably be a pretty good show– but with her, it’s a truly great show.
Orphan Black’s Sarah is a very different woman from Continuum’s Kiera, but no less a joy to watch. Sarah is tougher, much more streetwise, definitely more of a free spirit, and someone who barely stops to blink when her doppleganger jumps in front of train one night. Instead of being scared, she sees it as an opportunity to assume a new identity to get away from her crazy boyfriend, steal some money, and get her own daughter back. However, things don’t go as planned when she discovers that the woman whose identity she’s taken isn’t the only one running around Toronto (the show is filmed and set here) who looks exactly like her, and that someone is going around killing them off. It turns out that all these women are clones and they’ve banded together to try to find out what’s happening to them and why. The best part of this show is definitely Tatiana Maslany’s performance — she plays not only Sarah, but all of the clones as well, and assumes completely different accents, personalities and mannerisms for each one. Her performance is quite riveting, and while I’m not sure where the actual storyline is going yet, it’s more than enough to keep me watching. That and her foster brother Felix’s pretty fantastic outfits.
Motherhood is often a very treacle-y subject on TV, and women are often either good mothers or evil ones, with little acknowledgement that even mothers are human beings with wants and needs and flaws. These shows do an excellent job of avoiding these things. In flashbacks (flashforwards?) Kiera is often shown struggling with her role as a mother and police officer, and that gradually gets even more complicated as certain things are revealed in the first season and even she has no idea what is wrong or right anymore. Sarah obviously loves her daughter fiercely, though she had to abandon her for two years with her foster mother– and of course there’s always the question of whether she would be better off with a woman who didn’t hesitate to steal someone else’s identity and money to get her back. Furthermore, these are women with identities set outside of just the realm of motherhood, and I feel like they actually do a pretty good job of representing modern motherhood with all its challenges and nuances.
Then, of course, there is the always welcome “badass” quotient. Kiera is basically a cyborg, and has many abilities that come in handy throughout her investigations into finding out what’s going on with Liber8 in the present. As part of Sarah’s new identity, she has to learn how to shoot and she picks it up almost alarmingly quickly. These are ladies who know how to take care of themselves and, if anything, the men in their lives are their sidekicks for once. That’s really all I want in a TV show, and I’m pretty excited that we currently have two airing that do it so well.
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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise.
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