I can hear it now. "But Bradbury! Terminator is a good but fairly mindless action movie that can't possibly be translated into a coherent, enjoyable television show! This is on the same level as Flash Gordon! It doesn't even have Schwarzenegger!"
That's exactly what I thought going in. I was fully expecting campy sci-fi action with a robot-of-the-week plot mixed in with whiny, soap opera characters. You know what? I was wrong. Mostly. I'm afraid I've only seen up to the episode Heavy Metal (the fourth one), but it does seem to be slipping into the robot-of-the-week plot. Even though it hasn't slipped into a tired formula yet, it still takes the impact out of time travel and has the potential to introduce some nasty plot holes.
But even with these downsides, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is actually worth watching. I'm not claiming it's fine art, but it's one of my favorite shows right now. There are five main reasons why.
1. SARAH CONNOR
In a lot of fiction, the story begins with the main character learning that they're destined to be the king or that they have magical powers or there are robots from the future coming to attack them. They proceed to whine, bitch, and moan about it for much too long. It is annoying.
This is not how Sarah Connor works. She's a seasoned veteran who's lived with her sucky life for years now. She's used to it and has responded by becoming a paranoid badass. That's not to say that Sarah has no internal conflicts—like I said, she's paranoid and has issues with how far she can or should go to prevent the rise of the machines, plus she just found out she died of cancer in an alternate future. But she's also competent, proactive, clever, and really good with a gun.
Even without the Terminator tie-in, I'd watch this show for Sarah Connor. In one of my favorite scenes with her, the show's good Terminator, Cameron, is about to kill a police officer. Cameron was waiting outside a house with their car while Sarah meets with gang members to get fake IDs. The cop goes up to her and explains how gang members will hide their drugs in a stolen car with a guard loitering nearby. He prepares to take her in for questioning and she prepares to snap his neck like a twig. Luckily for the cop, Sarah is a great improviser and liar. She comes running up, starts ranting at her "stepdaughter" for hanging out in gang territory, and saves the day single-handedly using her powers of lying without hesitation.
The only bad thing I can think of about her is that she monologues every episode. Still, compared to Heroes' Mohinder monologues, hers are Shakespeare. They're usually relevant to the episode, are accompanied by interesting visuals and are about Oppenheimer or the original golem story instead of crap like the 10% brain myth.
2. JOHN CONNOR
John Connor isn't a warrior like his mother. He's still a teenager and he doesn't like his destiny. He goes to school and angsts about things. I think I recall him using a gun a few times, but he uses them fairly infrequently.
But even though he's not a warrior, John is more proactive than his mother in some ways. She may shoot at the Terminators, but usually while running away from them. He's the one who pushes to fight the future and keep Judgment Day from happening. In the first few episodes, he said this in a way that sounded an awful lot like "Mom, make it go away!", but he's starting to want to become the leader he's supposed to be—even if he's not sure how to do that yet.
He's an idealistic boy trying to become a hero while his two cynical companions try to keep him alive. Handled well, this arc of growth and coming of age could be truly epic.
One interesting aspect of John's story is what's going on in his high school. Mysterious murals began to appear on the walls. They're drawings of a door that gradually gained more detail, until it showed the door slightly open with blonde hair showing and a bra on the knob. Apparently, this revealed a secret that some blonde girl had. She has a breakdown in the bathroom with Cameron. Later, Cameron and John join a crowd in the parking lot and realize they're looking at her on the roof of a tall building. As Cameron holds back a horrified John, the girl jumps to her death. I was surprised the show had the guts to do it—they even had a student sarcastically yelling "Jump!" moments before her suicide.
In the next episode, John is seen thinking about it and he risks his life to strike a major blow against the Terminators. The secret of the girl and the murals is still up in the air and will clearly be a continuing subplot. I, personally, love this take on the high school hero. The events at his school are dramatic but not fantastical and they seriously impact his character without consuming the show.
3. ACTION
Apparently, one of the best ways to identify Terminators is that they don't look both ways before crossing the street. The few robots that appeared have been hit with a truly ridiculous number of vehicles in just four episodes and I love it. In one scene, Sarah steals a motorcycle, rides it towards a Terminator, and turns it sharply to the side while jumping off. The bike skids several yards towards the Terminator and hits its legs in a shower of sparks and shrapnel. The show doesn't have the relentless chases of the Terminator movies, but it's still full of gunshots, explosions, fistfights and the occasional car chase.
4. TERMINATORS ARE ACTUALLY ROBOTS
I find Cameron, who is as close to a good Terminator as Terminators can get, awkward and literal without being unbelievably naïve. In her first appearance, she had a brief conversation with John while posing as a human student. I've seen people on some forums complaining that she sounded much too human in this exchange compared to how she talks later. I disagree. In that scene and later ones, she only sounded marginally better than
"Rather than being like Buffy, huddled in the dank and dusty library with her trusty cohorts every day, I think it would be hilarious if Cameron inadvertently ended up becoming the Cordelia of the school: her tactlessness and thoughtlessness would probably be interpreted by high school girls as confidence and bitchiness, two qualities that any queen bee must have in abundance. After all, the loner-girl-as-superhero has pretty much become a cliche; the idea of the most popular girl in school being, in reality, a robotic assassin sent from the future to save the world--this I have not seen. And this I would like to see. If only to see John and Sarah's reactions."
--tze
But I digress. In one scene, the heroic trio were looking around an apartment inhabited by a team of humans from the future. The time travellers had been trying to find Skynet and all but one were killed by a Terminator. Cameron tries to rip open the safe, but they'd set a trap and she's knocked out. Terminators take fifteen seconds to reboot, but John and Sarah don't have that time because the Terminator that killed the hunting party is clomping up to the apartment. John starts trying to carry Cameron out to the fire escape. Sarah stops him, puts Cameron on a rolling office chair, and launches it out of the window. Whether it's moments like these, gratuitious displays of Terminator strength, awkward ways of speech, total lack of ethics or the fantastic acting of Summer Glau, Cameron is a robot from artificial skin to metal skeleton, and this show never lets you forget it.
The same goes for the villains. This show is exploring the different aspects of Terminators that the movies never got the opportunity to. What happens when a Terminator completes its mission? What if it needs to hide, but its skin was destroyed? The answer to that last question is particularly good. The main Terminator antagonist, Cromartie, loses his entire skin and his head is separated from his body. His body gets up and disguises itself from head to toe. It sticks a decapitated head on its shoulders and puts on a motorcycle helmet over it. Yes, that actually happened. Disappointingly, the head and body were shortly reunited and Cromartie went on to get his skin. He gives a formula for artificial skin and blood to a scientist who has the equipment to make it. After getting the skin, Cromartie resembles a hideously disfigured human. He kills the scientist and takes his eyes.
I've heard people complain about why he would do that to someone who would create the technology Terminators would need. I'd like to remind those people that when the scientist saw the formula, he muttered things like "[My colleague] was close… [other guy] was closer…". The scientist wasn't the best man in his field.
Anyway, Cromartie also needs to get plastic surgery to make his skin presentable. It's fascinating watching him create this new identity and serves a purpose: it creates a trail for the FBI character to follow. This show has a lot going on and it's all tied together.
5. TERMINATOR III HAS BEEN RETCONNED OUT OF EXISTENCE
That movie sucked.
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