The Boredom Of The Chase
Posted on | February 26, 2008 at 9:18 pm | Comments Off
Is it mere coincidence that tonight I watched last night’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and then read a news article about the threat posed by killer robots? I think not.
BTW, I am enjoying the show, though possibly not as much as I should. I like that it has direction and a story arc/quest that’s not getting derailed. Too often, these types of science fiction-y shows end up being too episodic in nature – the questers go from town to town, finding new clues in their quest, running from someone, and helping the random troubled guest stars they encounter. I think of the Incredible Hulk TV show as the model for this sort of thing, although I suppose it goes back even further to such shows as The Immortal and even further back, to The Fugitive (and yes, I know that’s not SF, but I suppose it was the major “chase show” template). So far our little Terminator clan is mostly staying put, and they’re far from helping out others in need. In fact, people who interact with them frequently end up much worse off (usually dead) than they were before. Yeah, there’s a lot of hokey time travel elements to the story, and I’m pretty tired of that sort of thing, but at least it’s fairly well handled here. You really can’t avoid time travel when dealing with the Terminator franchise. The best you can hope for is that it doesn’t make your head hurt.
Though she’s a good actress and very beautiful, I’m not totally buying Lena Headey in the Sarah Connor role. She tries, but she just doesn’t quite have that Linda Hamilton edge. Summer Glau, late of Firefly/Serenity and The 4400, is great as the Friendly Terminator and new clan member, but Thomas Dekker’s John Connor is a whiny petulant brat. He’s growing on me a bit, though he has a really long way to go to become the Last Hope For The Human Race, and I’m not sure I’m real interested in that journey.
The production values are pretty good, but you never quite forget it’s a TV show with a limited budget instead of a feature film. For all the prevalency of CGI morphing and such in today’s televised SF, there’s precious little of that sort of thing in Terminator. However, there is a lot fighting, gunfire, and explosions.
There’s only two episodes left in the season (both of which will be airing on Monday night) and there’s some doubt it will be picked up for a second season, but I kinda hope it does. There’s some interesting directions they could go with the story, and I really want to see if they continue to avoid the standard Chase Show route.
But all it really needs is some monkeys to mix in with the robots.
Latre.