T-2.5

[chronovore]

Not bad, but not good; Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is not shaping up quickly enough for me. The idea that a serialized Terminator TV show could be made is a good one. I mean, there's a lot of potential in the world for further storytelling, and the characters they've selected for the core ensemble are intriguing. But the show could deal with a lot more "24" and less... "Party of Five"? I don't give a crap about John's life at high school, and how well he's getting along with the other kids.


The bad-guy Terminator unit had lost its flesh; it was walking around dressed in rags and a mask, looking like a bum/serial-killer hybrid. That was cool, but instead of keeping that look, they had him go find some genius scientist who is close to making a big breakthrough on human tissue, pull a "transparent aluminum" moment of paradoxical invention, just so the Terminator can get a new coat of skin. The Terminator then KILLS the scientist, presumably to stop stories about a 2m tall chrome-deaths-head robot running around with a skinbag over it. In essence, the killer robot goes an incredibly roundabout way for making a disguise of very questionable usefulness, when in fact it appears to already know how to make its own skinbag, since it taught the scientist how to do it. So... it's pointless. Arguably if it could be shown that the robot was unable to perform some portion of the routine...

AW FUGGIT! I'm not going to spend an hour explaining "why the transporters don't work." As much as I enjoyed the first two episodes, it is too soon to be stumbling on its own stylistic and internal consistency issues.

The detective who's chasing the group doesn't really seem to be doing any detecting, just running around and telling everyone what Sarah and John are suspected of having done in the past. Sarah Connor isn't the savage, "I know what's coming" amazon from T2, but rather a Mom who is kind of concerned for her son who will spend his life fighting robot skeletons after most of the world dies. In this third episode, she lets a computer scientist live who MAY be building the future of SkyNet, and only burns down his house. Which, you know, may-or-may-not make him call the police and expose her. And he may-or-may-not rebuild the thing better than before. WTF?

I'm all for watching Summer Glau play another charming, quirky, funny, and ass-kickingly violent weird, dark girl. I like Lena Headey, just as I liked her in 300. The young John Connor is not bad, either.

Comments

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

...THAT'S IT! That's definitely part of the issue; these characters HAVE depth that we've seen in movies, but they're less deep in this ongoing TV show, where there SHOULD be more depth. Hm.