Tag: John Connor (Page 3 of 4)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.4 – Let my Cameron go

Sure, it was another episode light on action and logic – but heavy on nicely realized post-apocalyptic green screens – but at long last, the show’s creators delve into Cameron’s origins, and they are interesting, indeed. Cameron, it turns out, is modeled after Allison Young, one of John’s favorite resistance fighters in the future. She’s caught by the machines and interrogated at length and in depth. After a failed escape attempt – she’s lucky she survived the jump off the aircraft carrier deck, never mind actually getting away from the machines – she discovers that her interrogator is an infiltrator Terminator that…wait for it…looks just like her. The machine was just picking Allison’s brain so she could do a convincing job of being Allison when she hit their camp and took them out.

What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, it looks as though Cameron’s chip is getting a little twitchy again, because after looking at a helium balloon, she goes blank – with no idea who she is and no ID to confirm her identity. She does, though, have a lot of cash, which attracts the eye of a opportunistic leech named Jody, who takes Allison – Cameron hasn’t yet remembered that she’s a machine – under her wing. The two check into a shelter for a couple days, though the catch is that they must submit to therapy. Allison is a virtual tabula rasa in her first meeting, but before long remembers what she is and vows to put John Connor’s head on a stake. The shrink, as she conveniently pointed out in their first session, must contact the authorities when someone speaks of harming another, but more on that later.


“Scout’s honor, if I had any idea you were a killing machine from the future, I totally wouldn’t have lied to you like that.”

Catherine T-1000 Weaver, meanwhile, is slowly luring Agent Ellison into her web, though the endgame on this one seems a bit fuzzy. Since she’s already a more advanced model of Terminator than the one she’s recruiting Ellison to hunt down, why would she care about Cromartie? Is there an edge that the machines would get by replacing Catherine Weaver with not just any old Terminator but a liquid metal badass? I’m still unsure how Catherine was able to convince Ellison to sign on, especially after her clumsy speech about the death of the original Catherine’s husband, and Machine Catherine’s clear hatred for all things human, but maybe it’s one of those Austin Powers things where Basil Exposition just tells us to go along with it, so we do. Ugh. Continue reading »

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.3 – Running to stand still

Um, this is classified as an action show, right?

For the second straight week, an hour passed in which the overall story arc – assuming there is one – was pushed forward a few inches, tops. Catherine Weaver reaches out to Agent Ellison in the hopes of seducing him into working for the dark side. That’s pretty much all that happened in the grand scheme of things. The rest of the hour was taken up by an attempt by Cromartie to lure Sarah and Derek out into Nowheresville while he attempts to take out John back in the city. Oh, and John once again put his life in jeopardy, this time to hang out with Riley. We understand that it must be hard for a teenager to be so deathly serious all the time, but damn, man, you’re the last hope of mankind. Cowboy up, punk.

Any way you can get me out of this show? Can't just just have me killed or something?

Back to this whole story arc thing – do the producers even have a plan? They have to, right? Otherwise, they don’t get the green light to go on…right? Still, after watching tonight’s awesome season premiere of “Heroes,” and sifting through the dozens of story lines they unveiled, this show, by comparison, is moving like the turtle that Matt Parkman thought was talking to him in the desert. Are budgetary issues preventing them from a) adding new cast members to expand the story, or b) throwing in some splashy action sequences? Heck, this week’s episode didn’t even include a flash-forward to some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Instead it was all dark, crowded warehouses and the Santa Monica pier. Wheeee.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.2 – Boring, Sarah, Boring

“Oh, this isn’t cool.”

Those are the words I uttered when the beginning-of-episode recap came and went this week with neither a glimpse nor even a mention of the sexy T-1000 who made such a memorable appearance in the final moments of the season premiere. And I can’t imagine I’m the only one. When Shirley Manson transformed from a urinal into a liquid-metal killing machine last week, it was – to paraphrase David Medsker – a moment of the “hell, yes” variety, and to follow that up with an episode which mostly acts like it never happened…?

Frankly, it verges on the unforgivable.

So yet another guy from the future comes back to send a message to the Connor clan, barely surviving long enough to spit out his message that they should go to their friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant. We get a brief flash-forward…we’re talking about five seconds long…so that we can get an idea of the importance of this plant, but while glimpses of the future always look awesome, you can’t help but look at the brief scenes and think, “Well, that was nice. Too bad they probably blew 95% of this week’s special-effects budget on that sequence.” In this case, it was apparently more like 99%, since the FX otherwise remain at a bare minimum this week…but I digress. Sarah and Cameron quickly get jobs at the plant, with Sarah almost managing to act more suspicious than Cameron in her attempts to ingratiate herself to the boss man, Carl. (It’s bad enough when she does it in the office, but when she turns up at the local watering hole, it’s even worse.)

John’s freak-out at the end of last episode apparently wasn’t as profound as it might’ve looked from his haircut, but he’s clearly still a changed (young) man. Although it was done a little heavy-handedly, his return to school made a very good point: how do you just go through the motions when you already know what the future holds? With the help of a new female friend, apparently. It’s funny that Busy Phillips should play the very pregnant realtor who shows Sarah Connor their new digs, since even before she made her appearance, I was already thinking that Riley (Leven Rambin), totally reminded me of Kim Kelly in “Freaks and Geeks.” At the moment, though, there’s not much to the character of Riley, aside from the fact that she’s kind of cute and she clearly thinks John is, too.

There was an ungodly amount of conversation in this episode, much of it stupefying in its banality. The worst offenders were the conversations between Sarah and Carl, of course, though the drivel being spouted between John and Riley wasn’t much better. The scenes with Agent Ellison and Charley Dixon were interesting in a let’s-get-all-the-loose-ends-from-last-season-wrapped-up kind of way, but they weren’t overly satisfying, mostly because Charley was a great character. I’m sure we’ll see him return, because I refuse to believe that he won’t eventually kick his wife to the curb in favor of Sarah, but it was a shame to see him go nonetheless.

This may well have been the most boring episode of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” to date, and after the success of last week’s season premiere (granted, I liked it better than David did, but, still, even he admitted that there was plenty of action to be had), it could prove to be a momentum-killer of gargantuan proportions. Virtually nothing of real note happened until the final quarter of the episode, and when things finally did get rolling, with the near-meltdown of the power plant, it still wasn’t very exciting. Even the one moment which should’ve been creepy – the shot of Carl’s body hanging from the ceiling of his living room – was ineffective, since the “Carl” at the plant was acting so mechanical and robotic that you already knew he had been replaced by a Terminator.

When Shirley Manson finally reared her head at the very last second to make a liquid-metal appearance that was even shorter than last week’s, it felt like a slap in the face to those who had just sat through the previous 50+ minutes waiting for her arrival. Better she should never have showed up at all.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.1 – Hey baby, can you bleed like me?

Warning: spoilers abound. If you haven’t seen the episode, stop reading right now.

For as much action as there was in the season premiere for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” not a whole lot happened. They set up a whole bunch of stuff to happen later, but as a stand-alone episode, it was like a Michael Bay movie: stuff gets blow’d up, and you’re entertained while it’s happening, but the minute it’s over, you think, why did they need that much time to tell that little story? There is a reason for it, of course, but it’s a cart-before-the-horse reason, as if they wrote the episode backwards and worked their way to the beginning. When they got stuck, they inserted a car chase and blew shit up.

But that ending. Man, oh man, is it awesome. The last two minutes, in particular, are of the “Hell, yes” variety. Pity there was so much chaff around that sweet, sweet, wheat.

The episode opens with a decidedly not-dead Cameron, rebooting her frazzled memory chip after surviving a car bomb. (This kind of bomb apparently does not burn hair. Must be from the future.) She finds the culprits in the process of beating Sarah and John, and dispatches with them both. Then she sees John…and her chip tells her to terminate him. Holy shit! Run, John, run! How’s that for a Sweet 16; the robot that he’s wanted to have sex with for a good month or two now wants to kill him. That’s a buzz killer.

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Old Show, New Season: “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”

If you’ve read my review of the first season of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” then you already know that, although I felt the show lost a little momentum after its premiere, it kicked into overdrive with its fifth episode and roared full-throttle from there to the season finale. Granted, there were only a total of nine episodes in the strike-shortened season, but, still, the addition of the character of Derek Reese – John Connor’s uncle – into the mix not only turned the show from “not bad” into “pretty damned awesome” but also forced me to make the admission that, despite being a really terrible rapper, Brian Austin Green is actually quite serviceable as an action hero.

So if you watched the show last season, then there’s probably only one question to which you’re really dying to get the answer: did Cameron (Summer Glau) survive the bombing of her vehicle…?

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