A couple of weeks ago, The Sarah Connor Chronicles hit the airwaves at Fox, a show that has garnered a lot of buzz in the geek world due to the fact that it’s a Terminator continuation and that it stars one of the favorites of Joss Whedon’s vocal fan-base: Summer Glau.
If you haven’t seen this show yet, go watch it on the Fox website now. (Now is the perfect time if you don’t feel like watching the State of the Union Address on live TV.)
In the three hours that have aired–before it was preempted by the SoTU tonight–the show has done a great job of washing the bad taste of Terminator 3 out of my head. Glau is a more interesting Terminator than Arnold ever was, especially since there’s still a whole lot we don’t know about what she can do. Thomas Decker as John Connor and Lena Headey as his harried mother bring a different set of facets to those now-iconic characters that we haven’t seen before.
Oh, and the action. The action is still there–in spades. There is, of course, another Terminator model chasing down the Connors, no matter how they try to escape. And some of those escapes are impressive, even for sci-fi action shows.
The story picks up a bit after the end of Terminator 2. Sarah and John have settled into an near-normal life. John in particular is enjoying the chance to be more of a normal kid. Sarah still suffers from the nightmares of the nuclear destruction wrought by SkyNet.
Needless to say, all hell shortly breaks use throwing the Connor’s back on the road and on the run, this time accompanied by a new protector: Glau’s Cameron, who starts out as the most personable Terminator ever, flirting with John when he starts at a new school.
Time travel figures more heavily in this show than it ever has in the movies. Any time that happens, I begin to worry for the quality of the show. Shades of the Enterprise temporal war and the cheap outs that Stargate: Atlantis gave us continue to haunt my expectations for this new show. So far, though, it hasn’t been used too much.
But we have only seen three hours of the show. And it’s ratings are sliding, so we may not have many more to watch, even with the ongoing writer’s strike. What you can do, though, is check out Popular Mechanics’ run down of the different Terminator models, including the newest one.
Bottom line is, I’m still enjoying the show immensely. Yes, the characters are different, but a lot of time has passed since those first two movies–that wears on people, even ones who grow up to be legendary heroes of the human race.
Leave a Reply