Thoughts on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Alright.  Let me begin with this: I have mad love for this show.  I just finished Self Made Man, the 11th episode of season 2 and the knowledge of the impending end is enough to give me a lugubrious outlook on life.  In hindsight, I really should have done my blog-an-episode spree about this show instead of Angel. Don’t get me wrong,  David Boreanz fighting crime on his own time and in his own way is interesting and fun but Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is just full.  I’ve been trying and trying to think of another way to put it, but I can manage nothing better.  Instead of trying to address singular issues episode-by-episode, I am going to do my best to explain in some semblance of intellectual blather why this show works and what exactly I mean by describing it as full.

The show takes follows in the arc of the three Terminator movies before it, although it manages to mostly skip over the third movie (utterly terrible by *hopefully* everyone’s standards) with a nifty trick.  I won’t ruin it for you folks that have yet to see the show but have no fear, the show’s producers had some idea of just what was good and what wasn’t when they started this journey.  T:SCC follows the story (and sometimes stories) Sarah and John Connor as they fight to save the future from the horrors of the computer network SkyNet.  Aiding Sarah (Lena Headey) and John (Thomas Dekker) is Cameron, a terminator sent back from the future by John himself.  Cameron is played by Summer Glau, the former enigma River Tam from Joss Whedon’s show Firefly.  Cameron’s mission is to protect John from any dangers and we get the pleasure of seeing Summer Glau do (albeit a little bit more robotic now) what she did so well in Serenity: kick the crap out of bad guys.  I’ll be doing another post after I finish the show, one filled with much more plot analysis but for now let me address a few other things.

I’m not sure at what point in each season the show’s producers/writers has suspicions or fears of getting cancelled but T:SCC runs with a sense of urgency that is at once both exciting and alarming.  It seems that so many television shows these days are so lackadaisical and only get around to operating on a believable schedule when there are three episodes left in the season and stuff needs to be pulled together.  Other episodes are filled with crazy happenstances and coincidences that allow for neat little wrap-ups and clean beginnings and endings.  Contrastingly, T:SCC has characters getting cut, shot, and bruised in almost every episode and this is believable because our characters are skimming death’s surface every episode.  Throwaway episodes, episodes that disrupt the successive plot progression just long enough to tell a neat little story that is started and finished without any offshoots or complications within the regular programming period, are (up until this point) non-existent.  John and Sarah’s mission to stop SkyNet propels the narrative arc of the show into a crazed race to the finish, and to be honest, I appreciate that.  It’s nice to know that when I tune in, (and of course, by this phrase I mean turn on my computer and watch) I won’t be watching a 42 minute segment that requires almost no knowledge of the characters and won’t be adding to the ultimate end of the show in the least.  The producers have a story to tell and I’m glad they aren’t taking their time getting around to it.  This sense of urgency is the cause of the fullness of this show.  There’s no dead space, no emptiness, just good story and good characters jammed into the relatively small amount of time given.

The question of who is the main character in the story is also an interesting one.  Sarah, the shows titular character, is an obvious choice, but we can look just as easily to the focus of the story and realize that everything is about John.  Usually we can look at the amount of time we get with a character to determine their ‘main-ness’ but in this case there is no real difference.  Either way, this begs the question: Why does it matter?  The main character is often the lens through which a story is seen.  This person’s opinion or attitude can tinge the presentation of an issue or idea.  Episode 2.8 gets at this idea through the Tarantino-like presentation of Cromartie’s (Garret Dillahunt) pursuit of John and Riley (Leven Rambin) on their trip to Mexico.  I don’t think a definite character can be assigned the glorious role of The Main, but it is interesting to notice the changes we get if we allow the two characters to fill that role.  Sarah’s thoughts seem to run in a very militaristic line, always thinking of the mission at hand, the greater mission overall, the safety of her team members, and the possible threats to her tasks.  People are tools to Sarah, instruments to achieve an end, and Cameron is even less than that.  The terminator is treated with a disrespect bordering on malice and if it weren’t for her strength and (seemingly) blind and thoughtless commitment to her mission, Sarah would most certainly take her apart piece by piece.  Even her former fiance, Charlie (Dean Winters), is no longer judged on anything other than his usability after the initial break-up.  Sarah shows instances of sympathy, but these are more often than not only evidence of her struggle with maintaining her stoic front and not proof of any actual change.  John, on the other hand, seems to treat people with a little more respect and understanding than his hardened mother.  He shows this appreciation for people (and Cameron)  at several points (relationship with Riley, disregard for his mother’s orders to destroy Cameron) and his need for these people and other people in general alienates him from his mother.  It’s probably true that a portion of this separation is due to age but there is still a fundamental difference in ideology between these two characters.  John’s urge to treat Cameron as more than a machine and trust her is indicative of his romantic nature and even though it does and may continue to get him into trouble, it is still easier to relate to him.  I mean, I want to trust Cameron even though I know I shouldn’t, I want to believe that she is more than just a thoughtless machine, and with scenes like her over-riding her termination sequence, what else should I believe?  The juxtapositiion of these two characters is compelling and creates excellent interaction that can fuel such a minimally casted show.

As I said, there will be more, plot-driven, thoughts to come.  That is, of course, if I can manage to write anything through the tears I will most definitely shed over the ending of this great show.

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