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The original Terminator was a classic sci-fi premise turned into a mindless action film. All of you big fans are welcome to disagree with me, but from where I was sitting, it seemed like it traded a lot of plot potential for a lot of violence. Don’t get me wrong– you write a movie about a bunch of robots who take over the world and try rid it of mankind and there’s going to be a lot of violence. But it also sounds like the kind of premise that could lend itself to a lot of deep thinking about the nature of humanity, the definition of life, and questions about where to draw the line between technological progress and technological no-no. Humanity’s creation of a race of machines that ultimately take over has become a timeless sci-fi stitch, one I can’t see people getting tired of writing or watching until we hit a glass ceiling and can’t think of any new stuff to build. It was an important what-if to explore at the turn of the century with the industrial revolution, and it’s an important one to discuss now, when the way we live, breathe, read, eat, talk, exercise, drive and do our taxes can all easily change over night.
Yet all of this deep stuff has generally seemed lost in the Terminator franchise. Sure, there’s an occasional whisper of something interesting, like how the Terminator in T2 developed enough human emotion to sacrifice himself for the Connors. Yet this somehow pales in comparison to the intricate philosophical questions raised in The Matrix, despite whether or not you buy that movie’s basic premise. Terminator has always been about a war between John Connor and the machines after Armageddon– the machines keep sending a machine back to kill John before he can become the savior of mankind, and John keeps sending back a machine back to a) keep that from happening and b) stop Skynet from forming so the machines will never be built in the first place. Forgetting the age-old time travel problem that if you use a robot to stop itself from being created, it could never have gone back in time in the first place, this premise still gets a bit tiresome after a while.
T3 finally put an end to it. The final moments of that movie try to prove that no matter what John sends back from the future, Skynet is going to be built by someone, at some time, and it’s his destiny not to stop it, but to rebuild humanity. That movie seems to have nipped the whole thing in the bud. Finally, when T4 gets produced, we’ll probably get to go forward and see something new: John Connor fighting the robots he couldn’t stop from being built. The series may get the chance to say something new.
Then comes The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which turned out to be a delightful pilot. I didn’t have high hopes for this show because Terminator has never exactly been an intellectual property. Both the pilot and second episode are well-written, clever, not overly-violent, serious but not without humor, and most importantly, both John and Sarah Connor are portrayed by actors who get the story and their characters, and though they aren’t playing their characters exactly as they’ve been portrayed before, I don’t question for a moment that they’re mother and son or that they’ve been running from the law and evil machines for a real long time. Sure, they’re dark and brooding, but it’s understandable, and it isn’t played up too much to feel unsympathetic toward them.
In the pilot, a Terminator has found them even after they just moved to a new town, but luckily a good Terminator (named Cameron and played by top-notch actress Summer Glau) finds them and manages to kill off the bad one. At the end of the episode, in a very clever scene, she takes the Connors to a bank and breaks into the safety deposit box room, where a robot sent from the future to 1963 built several pieces of a time travel machine and put them in the boxes (since you can’t carry anything with you when you time-travel in the Terminator mythos). They use it to travel from 1999 to 2007, which does two very important things: it lets them jump over Sarah Connor’s death and lets the show take place in modern-day.
I was both surprised and impressed with this. Sure, it’s a little easy– the date Cameron wants to go to just happens to be the same time the pilot was filmed, which prevents them from having to recreate the world of 1999 for too long (which is more different than some of us might want to admit). Since this show was billed as the story of what Sarah and John were doing between the 2nd and 3rd films, I wasn’t expecting this. The pilot jumps our heroes three years after the events of T3!!! So now Skynet has already been built and Judgment Day is unavoidable. If I’m missing something, help me out here, but how exactly is this a gap filler between T2 and T3 now?? It looks like a sequel to T3, or rather, a movie that changes the events of that film, since John Connor wasn’t even around in 2004 to work with an Arnold-model Terminator one more time.
Not that I’m complaining. If it did change those events, the series would have a chance to do more than keeping rehashing the same story. The show doesn’t have to keep sending Terminator after Terminator into the past. This show has the chance to deal with the future as it comes and deal with the far more interesting issue of Cameron’s humanity, or lack-thereof. But I’m really afraid that by the end of the show, John will get sent back in time so T3 can happen exactly as it did (except, of course, that he seems to only remember the events of T2 in that film and doesn’t mention anything about going forward in time). If that happened, the series would be somewhat pointless, because the big point is that no one can stop the Terminators except for the John Connor of the future, and only after most of humanity is dead.
Again, this isn’t just the same Terminator all over again. Cameron isn’t like Arnold. She seems to have feelings, and they occasionally get hurt. She’s more robotic than the Connors, but only a little. She’s programmed to protect the Connors and kill Terminators, but she isn’t programmed to follow 15-year-old John’s orders like other Terminators have been. She has free will and boy, does she use it. These first two episodes are more fun than the whole trilogy combined, because of that. Although the writing doesn’t seem very consistent between the two episodes as far as Cameron is concerned– she seems a lot more human in the first episode, more robotic in the second. I hope this gets cleared up, and I hope she ultimately acts more like she did in the pilot. I think she and John have chemistry and might go places, despite the fact she’s a machine.
The show looks pretty. It’s shot like a movie, it moves like a movie. Everything is quite cinematic, proving that film to TV doesn’t have to be a huge step-down in quality. The show has a smaller budget, obviously, but it’s used wisely.
I was worried it might get canceled early, since it carries a cult following and might not bring in a lot of newbies. But especially with the current strike and the fact that very little newly-written stuff is on to watch, the show might have legs. I don’t think you need to know your Terminator to watch this show, but it would certainly help. It’s more of a sequel to T2 than T3 was, and is quite in line (as far as I can tell) with the canon of the first 2 films. Don’t expect a light and cheery show, but don’t be afraid to watch dinner with it, either. I was surprised and I’m giving it a chance; hopefully, in the long run, it’ll have some fresh things to say.
LLAP
-Cap’n Logan
