Know thyself: Terminator has the goods for the long haul
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- January
- 17
OK, so it took me a few days to catch up, and I had to put up with Fox’s slightly wonky online media player with its frequent pauses and skips (which might totally be the fault of my wonky Comcast Internet connection). But I really liked the second episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
But I’m not the only one who missed its initial airing Monday. Without a mighty lead-in from the Giants-Dallas NFL Playoff game, the second installment dropped 44 percent of its viewership. From the insult-to-injury files, Deal or No Deal took in 50 percent more total viewers.
I’m not worried, though. Fox invested a lot of time, effort and money into this show, and it shows in the carefully crafted back-story, which respects the original movies (the first two that matter, anyway), and in the stellar casting. In fact, I think the strength of the three lead actors alone should give the network cause to show some patience and faith in this show if ratings lag.
To be honest, I was a little impatient during hte first 10 minutes or so of “Gnothi Seauton”, Monday’s episode. The dynamic between John and Sarah (Thomas Dekker and Lena Heady) isn’t really working for me, but I can’t quite figure out why. Maybe it’s that it’s not your typical mother-son relationship. But once the suspense and action ramped up, I completely forgot about that.
Case in point: the scene in the apartment among the slaughtered resistance fighters.
Summer Glau’s terminator, meanwhile, continues to intrigue. The way she reacted with seemingly genuinely fear of Carlos’s guard dogs, how she emulated the stance and attitude of the girl outside Carlos’s house and how she mimicked Enrique’s laughter are all examples of how I think Glau convincingly conveys a machine programmed to learn and adapt to human behavior.
She’s at times confident and other times unsure of herself, neither fully robotic nor human. She was decidedly robotic when she blew away Enrique, by the way (How hardcore was that?), and in the end she was vindicated when Ellison played back his voicemail revealing Enrique had planned to sell them out.
I love how Cromartie has reassembled himself. That whole “headless horseman” look with the motorcycle helmet was so freaky. The fact that his consciousness survived in his severed arm and made the time jump, along with his skull, after the shoot-out in the bank vault sort of disappoints me, though.
The point of the story is for Sarah, John and Cameron to make a stand against SkyNet with a fresh start in a new time. But if Cromartie can follow them and Ellison can simply pick up their trail, then why not just start the story in 2007 in the first place and forget the time jump? Of course there needs to be villains, and you know from the casting that these are the adversaries our trio faces. I just felt a little like the basic conceit of the series was undermined. Not a fatal flaw by any stretch, but it irked me a little.
One result of the time-jump was to create a third timeline in the mythology of the story. You’ll find a great explanation of why at this blog, whose author has endured the mental gymnastics to ponder potential inconsistencies with Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines never happened as far as good taste and this series are concerned.)
The current reboot relies on the premise that the time travels we’ve seen have essentially changed the past/future. I won’t even attempt to sum up why. Seriously, it’s that confusing. Just know that going forward, SkyNet becomes self-aware and declares war on humanity in 2011. Sarah, John and Cameron have four years to stop that from happening.
The only caveat is that the planned Terminator movies to star Christian Bale may abandon that conceit entirely.
OK, now that I’ve tied my brain in knots, I’ll just finish by saying I plan to watch next Monday’s episode, when it airs.
Photos courtesy Fox Broadcasting Co.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 12:38 pm by Brian Howard.
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