Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Say that 10 times as fast as you can. I guess its better than the supposed name of Terminator 4 – Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins…….ok?..

Admittedly, I was quite sceptical about this show before it aired. How could you make a show based on movies that had HUGE budgets, without cutting major corners and making it look cheep. Well, you cant, but you can try pretty hard. And this show did a good job even though it took a while to get going.

The pilot episode, spent most of its time trying to be a terminator movie on a smaller scale. The terminator “Cameron” was excellent. Summer Glau portrayed the terminator in a very believable way, even more so than the terminatrix in T3. That being said, the portrayal of Cameron, significantly changed in subsequent episodes. She became very awkward, and robot like with her interactions with other people, compared to the ease she seemed to have in the pilot. I found this to be an irritating inconsistency, especially when they have insinuated that Cameron is a different type of terminator than the 800 series.

There were some times in the early stages of the show, where I contemplated that I would stop watching it. I found the early episodes doing things that the producers of the show insisted they wouldn’t do – like the “terminator of the week” scentario. It seemed that we were constantly being introduced to yet another terminator that had travelled across time and needed to be stopped. The episode where John finds the terminator who had turned himself off is a prime example. It also seemed as though these terminators were VERY easily stopped. Does anybody remember how difficult these things are to stop????? But this show grew on me as I watched it. The Cromartie terminator was a very cool character, and the ability to rebuild himself into the creepy Deadwood guy was an example of the new places this show could go.

As the series continued, I became more interested in the stories and more interested in the characters. The show certainly causes me to geek-out when it references key scenes from T1 ,T2 or T3. It is very effective in doing this (and it happens a lot), but in my opinion is somewhat of a cheep trick. Having someone reminisce about the scene where Arnold saves Sarah from the mental institute, immediately ties the show to a memory of a classic movie scene. Does triggering the memory of an amazing movie make a TV show amazing? Not really. But this show looks like it is going places, even with David Silver tagging along. Let’s just hope it gets the budget that Battlestar Galactica seems to have.

7.0 out of 10

Why not 8? Terminator with an identity crisis
Why not 9? Why the hell did they change the endoskeleton design??
Why not 10? Sarah needs to harden up a bit