Tuesday, September 9, 2008

New TV!

The TV season is starting again, and that means new TV! Last night Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season opened with a a pretty decent episode. A decent episode for explicitly bad television. This is a show that I like in spite of itself. Somehow they make mindless fun work. This is what Knight Rider will try to do but will completely fail to accomplish.

This season opens with the aftermath of Cameron's car bomb and the FBI assault on Chromartie's apartment. As the last season closed, Sarah, John, and Cameron were trying to retrieve the Turk, a chess computer that will eventually develop into SkyNet. The man who has the Turk put a bomb in Sarah's Jeep in order to kill her but ended up hitting Cameron instead. Cameron is damaged and reverts to her standard terminator programming: Kill John Connnor. This provides most of the action for the episode as Cameron chases John and Sarah across the city.

At the end of the last season, the FBI had tracked down Chromartie and broke into his apartment only to be slaughtered. The FBI agent (I'll really have to try to remember his name) is left alive and spends the rest of the episode lying to his superiors about what happened. Meanwhile EMT Guy (also don't recall his name) and the guy from 90210 meet up to try to chase down Sarah and John. The biggest development, though, was Shirley Manson as a T-1000 who is running a company that is developing technology that will become the terminators.

Towards the end of the episode, Cameron is squished between two trucks and she resets to normal--that is she decides not to kill John. And thus the season begins with our plucky group of robots, teenagers, freedom fighters from the future set to do battle with Shirley Manson.

Couple things:

The cold open was cool as hell. Has any show ever done anything like that before? It was a solid 3-4 minutes without dialogue. Just visual story telling with a sort of metal soundtrack. The photography wasn't amazing by any means, but it was effective, and it struck me as an innovative way to start the season. It also had a nice symmetry with the final scene from last season with the FBI going after Chromartie.

In Shirley Manson's first scene, it seemed like she was trying to do an American accent. It went away in the rest of her scenes, and it needs to stay gone. I don't think she has the acting skills necessary to do an accent consistently. So, letting her speak naturally will improve her performance and give her character a little more depth.

Buuut, she was playing a T-1000 that likes to hang out in mens' rooms disguised as a urinal. What? Yes. Couldn't she have been a trashcan? And if your staff is small and overworked, would you really want to kill one of them? These robots need to work on their personnel management skills. Step 1. Don't hide in the bathroom. Step 2. Don't kill your staff.

Also, she's a terminator who has come back in time to make sure that future terminators are built. This raises a TON of time travel contradictions, but the most glaring is that it proves that any attempt to stop the creation of terminators is futile since she couldn't come back in time if they weren't built eventually.

More importantly, I started to wonder if this development was at odds with the theme of the original movie. Although it's about killer robots from the future, it really was a movie of it's time. In the original movie (and the second one), it was the government's search for security from external threats and mutually assured destruction that lead to the creation of SkyNet and the end of the world. Without the Soviet Union, why is the government building SkyNet? And shouldn't government scientists be involved in this and not some shadowy private company?

Anyway, better forget all that before next Monday.