Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – ‘The Tower is Tall but The Fall is Short’
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- October
- 22
So Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has secured a full-season order. That’s good news and well-deserved, though not necessarily based on the merits of episodes like Monday’s bummer-fest, “The Tower is Tall but The Fall is Short”.
It was a good but not great effort, a useful installment that filled in lots of blanks, offered a few laughs and a few nuggets for your mind-grapes but ultimately was devoid of much action or suspense, the show’s mainstays.
First, the good news. As the TVGuide.com link above reveals, the future is indeed bright for Sarah and Co. It didn’t seem likely as reports surfaced in recent weeks of a ratings slump that had the show on the chopping block and the Fox folks ready to drop the axe.
Turns out, all it took was a pre-baseball playoff berth to draw in a quarter-million viewers whose eyeballs had drifted elsewhere in the early season. That put the show on a par with the equally awesome, entirely different and similarly ratings-challenged Chuck, its NBC competition in the 8 p.m. Monday timeslot.
If I had my druthers, both shows would have long futures and one would be rescheduled so I wouldn’t have to rely on my DVR to catch both.
Back to the episode at hand, now.
This was a creepy, unsettling, and yet, usefully informative episode. We learned a lot about John’s mental state. We learned about how the T-1001 came to be Catherine Weaver. And we learned that fighting Skynet takes a psychological toll.
So what’s Catherine Weaver’s role? We learn that the T-1001 killed the real Weaver and her husband and assumed her identity. But she kept the Weavers’ daughter Savannah around. The child knows her real mother is gone and lives in terror of this new maternal figure—so much so that at one point she urinates when told to come sit by her.
I found this storyline so uncomfortable, seeing that little girl in the care of this evil killing machine. At least I think she’s evil. She seems to be guiding the development of Skynet. But if we know Skynet comes to exist, as evidenced by the presence of so many different terminators and future resistance fighters, why would the T-1001 have to do anything to help it along?
Unless she has a plan to make it even better, more efficient in some way.
Then what of the freaky red-headed terminator who came back to go after Dr. Sherman? She killed that bus driver and that woman so casually. And yet the self-destruct chip and the odd appearance of Derek’s AWOL girlfriend Jesse had me wondering if that machine was sent back to kill Boyd to keep him from helping Skynet or sent back to protect him.
Maybe at some point the future John Connor and the resistance realize where he and Sarah had done more harm than good. Derek’s girlfriend Jesse indicates that future John has an army of terminators helping the resistance and that some of them go bad and turn on their handlers, just as Cameron did once. Is Jess really there to escape the war? Or was she sent back to steer the 2008 John and Sarah to do things they might not know to do?
Those photos show she’s been doing surveillance on the Connors, and her intentions are suspect at the least.
Meanwhile, Agent Ellison—ridiculously underused yet again—is growing suspicious of Weaver’s intentions. He is curious about the research downstairs, and I think he’s growing impatient with being Weaver’s “robot hunter.” He’ll make a good ally of Sarah eventually, I think.
If he survives.
Here are a couple of the better scenes from the episode, the first Cameron’s elevator fight scene with the red-headed terminator and the second Derek and Jesse’s scene in the hotel room, both courtesy of Fox’s official Terminator Wiki site.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 10:05 am by Brian Howard.
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