Tag: Terminator (Page 4 of 5)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.6 – There must be something we can talk about

October 20, 2008 /

That sound of merriment you hear is the cast and crew of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” doing a happy dance upon receiving the news that their season has been extended by nine more episodes. If we’re lucky – and the producers are smart – they will take whatever episode they’re working on right now and make it the most ass-kicking, sexiest episode they’ve done to date. They seem to think they have all the time in the world to tell their story. They don’t. Give up the goods, or the machines win, and you don’t live to see Season Three.

John and Sarah uncover a name on Skynet’s hit list, and when they find him, they discover that…he’s a child psychologist. Why Skynet would want him is unclear, but Catherine Weaver could sure use his help, since daughter Savannah is scared to death of her “mother.” Curiously, they put John and Catherine in the same building in this episode, which makes me wonder: if she had made eye contact with him, would her CPU have told her to kill him? Catherine hasn’t shown the slightest interest in the whereabouts of the Connors yet. Does she know of them? She must, right?

Either way, the scene of Catherine doing a photo shoot was money. “Turn your head a quarter inch.” Whizz. “Perfect. Now another half inch.” Whizz. The way her face fell after the photographer gave up on trying to get a warmer smile from her was priceless – as was the therapist’s diagnosis of Cameron as having Asperger Syndrome – and her attempts to show warmth to Savannah were great in how difficult it is for her to show emotion in a convincing manner, which made it even sweeter that her pet AI project is starting to show some human tendencies as well, ignoring its task to throw riddles at the programmers. Catherine brings the therapist on board to consult with her “child” AI project, which now makes it unclear whether they wanted to kill the therapist (since he’s trying to help both John and Sarah with their issues) or use him to get their pet project off the ground. I’m sure we won’t see him again for another month, if we see him again at all.

“You want to know why I traveled back in time? Indoor plumbing. I haven’t taken a real shower in years.” Continue reading »

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2.5 – God save those born to die

October 6, 2008 /

Shakespeare once said, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” John Connor is years away from even seeing the crown (and when he does, it’ll be made of tattered, twisted metal), but everyone around him, to paraphrase Chuck D, has got him like Jesus. Not in the crucified sense but in that his life is not his own, and never was. He’s meant for great things, and he needs to appreciate the sacrifice people are making for him in the past, present and future. They’ve made this point in nearly every episode, but tonight’s episode marks the first time that I felt sorry for John Connor.

I do not, however, feel sorry for Sarah Connor. For someone who’s trying to keep a low profile, perhaps she should refrain from kidnapping small children, even if she saves their lives in the process. I get why she did it: two other Sarah Connors died before the T-888 locked on to her, so her survivor’s guilt kicked in when they discovered that Martin Bedell (but not the Martin Bedell) is brutally murdered. So she saves the life of grade schooler Marty Bedell – and even helped him with his book report – while this week’s time-traveling killing machine abandons his mission to kill young Marty in order to acquire the actual Martin Bedell, a military school student that would go on to become one of John’s most valued fighters…and would ultimately die for him. But more on that later.


“Hey, you don’t know me, but years from now, you’re gonna die for me. Are you cool with that?” Continue reading »

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action

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

September 30, 2008 /

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 »

External TV, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV Action

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

September 22, 2008 /

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.

Continue reading »

External TV, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV Action

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

September 15, 2008 /

“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.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External TV, Reviews, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, test, TV, TV Action, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

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