29.9.08

What's Wrong With Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?

Is it the title? Possibly. My associate Mer-Man tells me he hates the show because every time he's flipping through the channels on his digital cable and sees the word 'Terminator' his hopes are raised for a second that the amazing film Terminator is on, or even the fractionally less amazing film Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and then he has to deal with the crushing realization, as he turns the channel, that he won't have the opportunity to watch either of those films.

Personally, I blame the show's utter lack of quality on a fundamental failure to understand what makes Terminator interesting. This is a show that had John Connor, after being flung into the future in an attempt to race the clock and stop Skynet from even going online, then be enrolled in High School. Really? That's the best possible use of his time? History class? Sure, he's sixteen, but in the second episode they went and bought fake IDs - they couldn't have made his ID say he was 18?

That's not the biggest problem, though. No, the biggest problem is how talky every single one of the terminators are. With Summer Glau's terminator (ear-gougingly named "Cameron") it almost makes sense, as I'm sure she was set to read/write mode in the future.

But why are the evil terminators so set on making clever comments all the damn time? If they're not quipping after killing people, they're taking time to explain the origin of the mousetrap and cleverly commenting on its similarity to his victim's current situation. The worst example is the show's new main villain, a T-1000 pretending to be the Scottish head of a computer corporation. I'm not going to go into everything wrong with the character, there's just too much to get into here, so I'll focus on the scene introducing of her T-1000 abilities: One of her underlings is annoyed about being re-assigned, and he complains about her behavior to another employee while standing in the men's room (If you're reminded of Robocop here, that's because the show likes to rip off things that are superior to it) . The other employee leaves, and as the underling walks up to the urinal, it morphs and changes colour, then grows, revealing itself to be his boss, the T-1000, who then stabs him in the head.

That's right, she pretended to be a urinal. Now, I'm not going to get into the disgusting quesiton of just how long she pretended to be a urinal for, but I am going to address the far bigger one: Why on earth would she do that? There are any number of things she could have pretended to be here: walls, floors, partitions, the mirror... Yet she chooses a urnial, in an actual stall. Which means that at some point she had to come into the men's room, tear the urinal out of the wall, hide it somewhere, and then take its place on the wall.

It did all of this for the purpose of killing someone because that person pissed it off. Which isn't exactly the kind of motivation one would hope from the most advanced killing machine ever devised.

And the retarded cherry on top? She's the head of a corporation that seems to be focused on a building some manner of 'skynet'. Here's a tip to the showrunner: Of all the possbile ways that skynet could come into being, the absolute least intersting and most obvious one is "Termintors went into the past to build it". And it seems like that's the route the show is taking.

Well, at least it's not going to be taking it much longer, as the show will likely not last until the end of the year. It's a sad thing too, since it really wouldn't have been that hard to make a good Terminator show. They just didn't.

Here's a good starting point - maybe the main characters could keep dogs around, since that's the best possible way to detect a terminator.

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