Sarah Connor Chronicles - Week 6 of 8

Holy crap!

This week’s episode singlehandedly squashed my doubts about the show, and was leaps and bounds ahead of what came before it. I don’t know how the show managed to go from “mediocre” to “incredibly awesome” in one week, but it did. I’ll wait until next week to see if it maintains this new confidence or if it was just a fluke — but wow, even if this show ends up getting tanked, that episode alone is a fine hour of Terminator mythology that can stand alongside the movies. When it ended I immediately wanted to rewind and watch it again, and the only other show that makes me want to do that is Lost.

The storytelling this week took a cue from Lost, I think, in that it told the story of Derik Reese in a series of flash backs (technically flash forwards, I guess, since they occurred in his future). I really like this style of storytelling because I think it works best for the kind of stories I like… it gives you information from the beginning, information from the end, and then fills in the little details slowly over the course of an episode, or, on a larger scale, a season or even the entire series.

For example, what the hell was in the piano room in the basement? That was creepy as hell. They were all locked up in a room after the machines took over, and they pressed their ears against the floorboards… “is that piano music?” It reminded me of Battlestar Galactica, when the four remaining Cylons heard mysterious music… I thought that maybe they were just sharing a hallucination. But no. Derik was taken down there, and what he saw confused and scared him. But what was there? We don’t know yet.

And we finally saw Cameron of the future. I was pretty naive thinking they’d drop the ball on this one — I had even thought up an entire backstory for her on my own because I thought they would never explain it. Yet there she was, and she was there from the beginning of the entire Terminator story arc, too. Since this episode took place in the year John Connor sent back Kyle Reese to protect his mother (the first Terminator movie), she was by his side. What’s interesting is that in my little “backstory,” she was John Connor’s lover. They hinted at it this week, after some of John’s officers were upset that they were letting “one of them” roam around, even though she was reprogrammed. Then someone said, “it’s what John wants.” She was his aide, essentially, and it implies that he trusted her more than what would be expected if she was just brainwashed.

I thought it was amusing that they didn’t cast an older John, instead they just referred to his off-screen presence, such as “John will see you now.” I was hoping that when Derik met him, they’d show him, but I realized that it’s been 20+ years and we have not yet seen future-John. Throwing him in all willy-nilly (yes, willy-nilly) is a big step. Naturally, they want to build the suspense. However, the rumors for the Terminator 4 movie have Christian Bale cast as future John, so we’ll see what happens with that. Maybe the show won’t show him because they want it to tie into the movie.

And what the hell was in the room where John was? Maybe I missed something? It looked like some sort of super-computer, and for a split second I thought they were making John himself into a machine. It’s entirely possibly I got distracted and missed something — was that the time displacement machine?

It’s also interesting that Cameron blatantly lies and collects bits and pieces of Terminators she kills. Obviously there is more going on inside her head than she’s letting on — which is strange, because a robot would just do what it’s programmed to do. Which means either she’s not just a run-of-the-mill robot, or she was programmed by future John to lie for a reason we haven’t seen yet.

Other great things: the music, as always, by Bear McCreary. Battlestar would not be what it is without it, and this show would struggle without it as well. The scene in the future when a Terminator walks into their hideout and starts… well, terminating, had that metallic, industrial tone that made the movies so menacing. And the buildup of both the piano music room and the “John will see you now” segment really built the suspense.

It was also genuinely disturbing seeing the machines salvaging jet engines. What the hey are they up to? Do they need them for time travel or what?

I really hope this show gets a full season order, because as of right now we have two more weeks and that’s it. I would love to see more of the future and how these new characters were there all along. This whole “destory Skynet in the past to protect the future” thing is good, but it isn’t sustainable, because if they do that, then there is nobody to go back in time in the first place to stop it. You can’t go back and kill your grandfather, in other words. The name of the show is also still a bit misleading, and this week’s episode is an example: it wasn’t really a chronicle of Sarah Connor at all.

I’m not sure what it should be, though. Terminator 4 is going to be called “Terminator: Salvation,” so something along those lines would have probably worked better. I think the average viewer doesn’t really like a show with a tongue twister title, especially if it isn’t accurate.

Did you see it? What did you think? Best episode yet? Complete failure?

Best line?  Once again Cameron repeating what she’s heard.  I thought this gag might get old but it’s still really funny.  “It’s a big scary robot,” and “I freak him the hell out…”  I lol’d.