Sunday, January 13, 2008

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Impressions


Not bad. Not great, but not bad either. There's certainly potential here in what's the first television series to catch my attention since Rome. That's not surprising though since I've been a fan of the franchise ever since I was a kid.

Airing on CTV, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles begins after the conclusion of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and finds Sarah (Lena Heady) and John (Thomas Dekker) still on the run from the law. As we saw in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, those crafty cyborgs aren't so easily defeated, especially when there's still a franchise to milk from its proverbial teet.

While that last statement is a little harsh but true, the pilot episode was entertaining. It had pacing issues and felt more like it was rushing to set everything up than to tell a smooth story, but in the end I got what I wanted: cyborgs smashing the snot out of each other. It looks like the series is going to make heavy use of time travel, and while this will allow the writer's to completely bypass and re-invent whatever they'd like, it also brings about a strong cheese element as time travel has been completely done to death. It _is_ cheesy that yet another T-800 has been sent to kill John, and yet another re-programmed Terminator has been sent to protect him, but then again I'm not watching the show for excessive amounts of drama, and at least the protector isn't another Arnold.

John's protector this time around is Cameron (Summer Glau), an unknown Terminator model who appears to be able to emulate emotion much more convincingly than any of her predecessors. Though similar to a T-800 (she's not liquid metal), she's certainly no Arnold, as Cameron is much more soft spoken and, well, feminine, even when using her cyborg strength, taking bullets, and generally kicking ass.

I'm also just going to say that Summer Glau is bloody hot, and I swear her cleavage has gotten larger since Serenity. She's actually TV-safe nude for a reasonable length of time in the pilot episode, which is just fine by me. In fact, I predict, using my uncanny powers of deduction, that John will form some kind of romantic relationship with her and ultimately loose his virginity to a cyborg. There is no fate but what the ratings make for themselves.

The next episode airs tomorrow at 9:00 pm. If the character development can be beefed up a bit, I think the series will have a solid chance of doing the impossible, being a television show that actually holds my attention. Only time will tell, unless they go back in time and change things. They can do that you know, but only if Cameron's naked. It's a new time travel rule to get guys like me to watch TV.

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