Author: David Medsker (Page 21 of 65)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.12 – Sydney saved my life tonight, sugar bear

December 9, 2008 /

Remember the scene in “Animal House” where Pinto takes the checkout girl to the Delta Tau Chi toga party? She gets drunk, they fool around, and then she passes out right when Pinto reaches under her bra and realizes she’s artificially padded her rack with a bunch of tissue?

“Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is the checkout girl.

The last two shows have been nothing but padding. Enough, already. If you have a story to tell, then tell it; please don’t waste our time with these episodes that completely ignore half of the cast to focus on people who will not likely be seen or heard from again. Yes, Terminators are coming back to kill people besides John, we get it. You’ve made that abundantly clear. Now for the love of Jebus, start pushing your story forward. If we’ve hung in there this long, I think we’re entitled to some kind of payoff. Lord knows, we’ve been patient.

Outside of showing “When Derek Met Jesse” in the future, the only important takeaway from this week’s episode is that John Connor is not the only savior of the resistance in the future. John might lead the resistance, but a girl named Sydney – still in the womb when tonight’s episode begins – gives the humans a huge advantage when she turns out to be immune to a biological agent the machines use to wipe out a compound. Derek and Jesse save Sydney in the future, and then her blood saves them both from dying from the virus. Cut to our present, where Derek is helping Sydney’s mother deliver her before she dies, and realizing that Sydney’s sister Lauren is the one who gave him the antidote. Sweet and surreal, yes?

And completely pointless, in the current economic climate. If the story arc at season’s end hasn’t given up a little sumpin’ sumpin’, they’re getting canned, and they’ll have no one but themselves to blame for being so prudish on the front end. Sorry, but that’s just the way society works these days. Blame Lindsay Lohan.

In fairness to the uber-conservative show runners, there is another takeaway from this episode: Cameron gets the bejeezus kicked out of her by the Triple-8 assigned to kill Sydney, and is even knocked “unconscious” at one point. They’re setting up that ‘faulty chip’ plot device, to be sure. God help them, then, if they do nothing with it in next week’s final episode of the year.

Actors, Actresses, External TV, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.11 – Baby, the stars shine bright

December 2, 2008 /

Sarah’s not nuts after all. Well, let’s qualify that: she may very well be nuts, but she’s not nuts about the three dots, as a lengthy flashback episode – gin joints! The Charleston! Twenty-three skidoo! – explained that the machines use three particular stars in relation to the other stars around them as a means of telling time…in years. Very valuable information to us now, but couldn’t Cameron have figured that out before Sarah decided to get medieval on the bathroom mirror? Just a thought.

Tonight’s episode reveals that Cameron has been spending her sleepless nights (cyborgs, apparently, do not dream of electric sheep) at the Hall of Records, reading up on…oh, who the hell knows. One night she stumbles upon a picture from a speakeasy fire in 1920…and she recognizes someone. Soon she’s researching the written history of a man who built a real estate empire from nothing – while another real estate baron suffered a suspicious string of bad luck at the same time, including the death of his son in the speakeasy fire – only to disappear completely in 1925. Where did he go, and why would he erect a building in the name of his rival’s dead son? Cameron knows, but can’t tell. She visits the building, given landmark status and due for reopening in 2010, and finds her man, behind a wall…with a Tommy gun. Nice!

Of course, she kills him, and as far as we know, she leaves the body, which is just nuts. N-V-T-S nuts.

Gotta be a bad girl in this world.
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External Movies, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.10 – I am trying to break your heart

November 25, 2008 /

It’s one of those moves that we felt like we should have seen coming, though we had no way of knowing, because the writers were holding all the cards. And what few cards they played before tonight’s Big Reveal were blatant misdirections that make no sense in retrospect. You know, kind of like a “Saw” movie.

Jesse finally, allegedly, comes clean to Derek. She claims to be working for the resistance to keep John on the righteous path; Future John is apparently getting too close to Cameron, and behaving erratically. Jesse’s mission: seduce Present John into taking out Cameron with live bait…live bait named Riley. Of course. That’s why we never her saw her family before now – so we wouldn’t know she was a “foster child.” Pretty sneaky, sis.

Credit must be given to genius “Terminator” commenter Eddie Offerman – seriously, read his blog on transform matrices, it’ll make your head spin – who laid out his “splintered universe” theory of time travel as an explanation for Reese not remembering Charles Fischer while Jesse did. I wasn’t convinced at first (I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, myself), but after Jesse’s comments to Derek this week, it makes sense. Take Cameron out in the past, and get your savior back. This assumes, of course, that Jesse is telling the truth about anything, which is a bet that I’m reluctant to take at the moment.

“Hey robot, is it possible to get a blood stain out of silk?”

But now I have a new question: if Jesse and Riley’s mission is successful, what happens when Future John meets Allison, the girl that the machines duplicated and then killed to create Cameron in the first place? Personally, I’m betting that Future John locks her away the second he meets her so that she never gets caught, since she would literally be his lost childhood in the flesh. Man, what kind of splinter in time would that create, and wouldn’t that screw up Future John even worse than having Cameron around? Also, what happens to the people in the future when one of their own is sent back to change an event? How is reality altered for them? Will John just suddenly start acting differently right before their eyes? Would Future Cameron disappear if she’s terminated in our time? Help us, Obi Wan Ken-Eddie. You’re our only hope.

I’m suddenly thinking of the episode where the Connors were robbed, and it was because Riley forgot to set the alarm. Did she really forget, or was that by design? Will they even make a mention of that incident once John discovers who she really is? And if Jesse is really still working for the resistance, then I’m still perplexed why Jesse killed Future Charlie last week instead of Present Charlie. She could have undone all kinds of hurt by letting Derek kill Present Charlie (or as my wife calls him, Warren, from his days on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) while he was young. She put on this big dog and pony show for Derek by kidnapping both Charlies, but in the end it looks as though she was protecting a bad guy. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, in Weaverville, our child psychiatrist is found dead after Babylon, renamed John Henry by Dr. Sherman, needed the alternate power during a blackout and inadvertently killed him. To me, Ellison’s comment that “something killed Dr. Sherman but it wasn’t John Henry” could be taken two ways. The obvious answer is that he meant that John Henry just wasn’t properly coded with ethics and morals – best line in the episode: “It runs on commands. Start with the first ten.” – but with the way that Catherine was detailing Dr. Sherman’s death as Ellison was watching the video, I couldn’t help but think that the lady doth protest too much. Maybe the camera footage is bogus, and Catherine killed him with her magic tongue of death, who knows. The important takeaway from Weaverville is that a resurrected Cromartie is now the spokesperson for John Henry. That’s just all kinds of wrong, right there.

Oh, one other thing: Sarah is losing her mind down a paranoid, “Beautiful Mind”-type rabbit hole. Do the three dots mean something, or were they just the last act of a man who was bleeding to death? The Connor’s bathroom mirror hopes they find the answer to that one sooner than later. And God only knows what Sarah would do to Riley if she were to discover Riley’s true intentions while in this “heightened” state. I’m not 100% sure how she’d react, but I’m betting it would look an awful lot like a “Saw” movie.

External TV, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

24: Redemption: Escape 2 Africa

November 23, 2008 /

Somebody on the “24” staff is clearly a music fan. The first sign of this was when a sinister corporation was named McLennan & Foster, after the leaders of the late, great Go-Betweens. (A moment of silence, please, for Grant McLennan, who passed away in 2005. Thank you.) In “24: Redemption,” tonight’s bridge episode between Day 6 and the long-gestating Day 7, the President-elect’s son is named Roger Taylor (double word score, as the drummers for both Queen and Duran Duran share that name), and Roger’s trader friend is named Chris Whitley. You’ll appreciate the irony of that one later. And now that we think about the music references, this might explain why Jon Voight’s evil schemer has the first name of Jonas. Roger’s wife, meanwhile, is named Samantha. Pity her last name isn’t Fox.

Anyway, the story begins in Afrika-ka-ka-ka-ka – hey, if the show’s producers are throwing in musical references, I may as well throw in a shout-out to the Chemical Brothers – where Jack is helping out Carl Benton, a former soldier buddy, run a state-funded school in Sangala as a means of doing penance for his many, many crimes against humanity. The problem is that the brutal Colonel Juma (played by Tony Todd, and henceforth known as Colonel Candyman) is planning a coup, thanks to a generous donation by the aforementioned Jonas brother (Jonas Hodges, technically). Candyman is stealing children and “enlisting” them to fight for him. He catches two kids from Benton’s school and comes a-calling for the rest. Jack had just been served with a subpoena by Frank Tramell (Gil Bellows, sporting a tragic widow’s peak) and was about to go dark again – this is at least his third stop since he left Big Dick Heller’s house at the end of Day 6 – when the Colonel’s men show up. Benton tells Jack where the dynamite is. Sweeeeet.

I’m gonna blow shit up! Mama said blow shit up!

After singlehandedly killing half of the henchmen sent to abduct the boys, Jack is naturally captured and tortured – the show maintains its one-torture-per-hour requirement, don’t worry – and while that red-hot sword to the ear had to hurt, we were surprised that the guy didn’t just cut off one of Jack’s arms. He was planning to kill him anyway, and even said he would make it as painful as possible. Jack has four limbs, just sayin’. Jack ultimately used two of those limbs to snap the guy’s neck…and they weren’t his arms. I have to learn how to do that.

The most important things to take away from this episode as we head into Day 7 is that newly inaugurated President Allison Taylor has one hell of a mess waiting for her, and it’s quite possible that Senator Roark (outgoing President Noah Daniels for newcomers) is in cahoots with the mysterious Jonas brother, because one of his last Presidential orders was to evacuate Sangala, rather than call in some nearby troops and fight the insurgence. Jonas brother, meanwhile, saw to it that Chris Whitley, the trader assigned to erase Jonas’ ties to Colonel Candyman but suspected something was amiss, was thoroughly examined (read: tortured) and then buried in cement. I will admit that I do not know the real Chris Whitley’s music very well, but he surely deserved a better fictional death than that.

The other thing to remember is that Jack agreed to surrender to authorities in order for the boys in Benton’s school to gain entry into Sangala’s US embassy, which serves as the redemption part of the episode title and the reason that Jack was seen in those teasers a year ago explaining his actions to an indifferent, if not hostile, government committee. Damn paper-pushing bureaucrats. They have no idea what it means to be Jack freaking Bauer. Maybe they’ll get some perspective when they realize that their next supervillain is…Tony Almeida? Whaaaaaa? Yeah, we’re just as curious as you are as to how they explain that. See you in January.

24, TV, TV Action

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.9 – Pleased to meet me

November 18, 2008 /

Is it wrong of me to think Sarah Connor’s doomsday nightmares are awesome? Seriously, is there anything cooler than a T-1000 cactus? Or Cameron breast-feeding a tortoise? If that is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.

As the producers of the show continue to treat the story arc like their private garden, planting seeds here and there – Cameron’s constant talk about her sensory perception, Sarah’s walking nightmares – they used this week’s main plot to explore two concepts of time travel that I’m not sure can peacefully coexist. Jesse captures a “Gray” (machine-assisting human) named Charles Fischer (Richard Schiff in a bit of inspired casting), but Derek doesn’t remember him. Jesse explains the relentless interrogation techniques Fischer used on his prisoners, and finally makes the big reveal that, dunt dunt duuuuuuunh, she knows this because Fischer used those techniques on Derek in the future, and Derek told her all about it.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

“All right, tell me right now what it’s like to win an Emmy. Tell me, damn it!”

Derek seems to think that the reason he doesn’t remember this is because the future she left behind is now different than the one he left behind, and he attributes the change to the various things he’s done in the present to undo Skynet’s evil scheme. It’s an interesting concept, but riddled with holes – does this mean his memory is just randomly erased when the future changes? – and leads me to think that there are two, far more likely explanations: either Derek has blocked the memory as a defense mechanism – Fischer did admit shortly before Jesse killed him that he knew who Derek was, and wondered how Derek didn’t recognize him – or Jesse is lying. Actually, both could be true.

Now here’s the part I’m having a reeeeeeeeaally hard time with. Future Fischer breaks into Present Fischer’s place of work and does all kinds of nasty computer stuff that lands Present Fischer in the slammer. Future Fischer explains, like some sufferer of Stockholm Syndrome, that he never would have survived Judgment Day had he not been in prison when it happened, implying that it is the return of Future Fischer that puts Present Fischer on the path to that prison cell to begin with. But is that even possible? The Connors change people’s futures all the time, but only certain aspects of it; the rest is still up to the individuals. Can someone travel back in time and put himself on the path to evil? And while we’re talking about the case against Present Fischer, are there no security cameras at this supposedly data-sensitive company where he works? Jeesh.

One last stating-the-obvious story problem this week: how the hell did John and Cameron not think to check Ellison’s trunk when they were looking for Cromartie? Heck, they didn’t even need to knock on the door. Just pop the trunk, take the body, and go. Surely Cameron would have thought of that, right? Sigh. I hate it when characters do everything but the one thing they’re most likely to do in real life.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

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