The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Now with spoilers!)

[Princess Marzipan]

TV series starting next season based on the Terminator movies, which disregards the events in T3 as having occurred in an alternate timeline. (I dislike when canon does this, but I'll definitely give the show a shot.)

It's even got Summer Glau!

The bad news is that it's on Fox. It'll be crap and air for eight seasons or brilliant and air for three fourths of one.

wiki!

[Traisenau]

I saw some stuff on this at comic Con(couldn't go to the panel though... I think it was the day of the Penny Arcade Panel), and it honestly looks pretty good. Plenty of action, drama, and plots other than, "And for the 39th episode straight, a NEW terminator model has been sent after Sarah, HOW WILL SHE KILL THIS ONE?!?!?!?!". Oh, and T3 sucked, so it's ok to disregard it.

[MotorToad]

It looks promising, but I have to agree with your call; the chances of it being good are really slim. Maybe the Skynet (was that it?) thing will make reaver terminators and the show will be 45 minutes of her ripping them apart with a huge axe... Maybe.

[Disco_Inferno]

which disregards the events in T3 as having occurred in an alternate timeline.

YES! T3 was horrible canon in the Terminator saga. I could rant about it for an hour, but this isn't the discussion for it.

Anyways, since T3 is being ignored, I will give this show a shot.

[trickster721]

Oh, I am so looking forward to hating this. Ever since that kid on Heroes demanded his gay character be retconned into a straight character before he quit, so that he would have a chance to be picked for The Terminator Show.

YES! T3 was horrible canon in the Terminator saga.

One good action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killbot with a shotgun is not a "saga" with a "canon".

[Disco_Inferno]

I guess I will rant about T3.

YES! T3 was horrible canon in the Terminator saga.

One good action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killbot with a shotgun is not a "saga" with a "canon".

Fine, it had a good "idea": In, T1 Kyle Reese said that the humans had broken Skynet's defenses and the Terminator is a last ditch effort to save Skynet. In T2, the objective was to destroy the technology Skynet was based off of to make sure it was never created. When both movies are put together, it reveals that history had changed and that the war never happens; the future is not set in stone. T3 completely ignored those movies and said, "Haha, you're still screwed! Nothing you can do can stop the robot uprising!" Essentally, T3 said that the future is set in stone, contradicting the first two movies. Hence the hatred of the movie.

[Jack Saladin]

Ever since that kid on Heroes demanded his gay character be retconned into a straight character before he quit, so that he would have a chance to be picked for The Terminator Show.

Huh? Since when was there a gay guy on Heroes?

[Malice]

YES! T3 was horrible canon in the Terminator saga.

One good action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killbot with a shotgun is not a "saga" with a "canon".

No, but two good ones and a bad one are.

[Kewangji]

I guess I will rant about T3.

YES! T3 was horrible canon in the Terminator saga.

One good action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killbot with a shotgun is not a "saga" with a "canon".

Fine, it had a good "idea": In, T1 Kyle Reese said that the humans had broken Skynet's defenses and the Terminator is a last ditch effort to save Skynet. In T2, the objective was to destroy the technology Skynet was based off of to make sure it was never created. When both movies are put together, it reveals that history had changed and that the war never happens; the future is not set in stone. T3 completely ignored those movies and said, "Haha, you're still screwed! Nothing you can do can stop the robot uprising!" Essentally, T3 said that the future is set in stone, contradicting the first two movies. Hence the hatred of the movie.

It's not set in stone, but some things will happen. It didn't ignore or contradict the other movies.

[Okita]

I saw the leaked pilot and it looked good...but what happened to this series?

[trickster721]

Ever since that kid on Heroes demanded his gay character be retconned into a straight character before he quit, so that he would have a chance to be picked for The Terminator Show.

Huh? Since when was there a gay guy on Heroes?

Exactly. I think NBC just assumed that nobody would notice, but people did, and Tim Kring ended up publicly apologizing, even though he was the only one who had nothing to do with it.

The character was Zach, Claire's original sidekick. Here he is being bullied for his effeminate ways. And here he is explaining the importance of liking yourself for who you are.

[Masuri]

I just watched this on Yahoo.com and it was okay, I guess.

Spoiler:

I was hoping this would pick up where T2 left off, character-building wise. By the time T2 rolled around, Sarah Connor was tough but pretty fucking crazy - and who can blame her? John Connor was a skeptical, street-wise kid who had been through a ton of action already in his young life. Unfortunately, it's almost like we went from T1 to this series. Sarah is just too damn soccer-mom for my tastes, and I don't like the way John Connor is portrayed as a whiny little bitch. They make him kind of a 'normal' kid begging his mom to fix the future. WTF? Considering they reference events from T1 and T2, there's no way in hell that this kid could be this normal. I'm never going to get over the cynical, cigarette-smoking Edward Furlong version of John Connor, or the desperate, mentally unsound Sarah Connor. This is just too... tame.

Also, it irks me that Sarah is 33 and John is 15. Sarah was certainly older than 18 when this whole thing happened. Early 20s, at least.

It's remotely possible that I'm too much of a purist. ><

[Herman]

From the previews, it looks like Summer Glau's goal of one day starting a TV show wearing clothing is once again foiled.

This is what I have chosen to take out of all this.

[MotorToad]

That got my attention. *Powers up the DVR*

[akashra]

I watched the pilot of this about six months ago, and even though I've never really found the T* movies to be great, I thought this was a brilliant pilot. They've started advertising it here in Australia, but no doubt my fix of it will come from ChannelBT.

[sunami]

From the previews, it looks like Summer Glau's goal of one day starting a TV show wearing clothing is once again foiled.

This is what I have chosen to take out of all this.

Despite not having a TV and hence not hearing much about this show until this thread here, I'M SOLD.

[Aleril]

I might watch this, based on reviews I hear, but I am more pumped for the next movie than the TV series.

CGI ORGY.

[Phisioni]

Maybe they'll have Mal drive through in a pickup truck and hit somebody...

[Angstrom]

The director needs to tell the lead female terminator that robots don't have emotions.

[Masuri]

The director needs to tell the lead female terminator that robots don't have emotions.

I think that would be why...

Spoiler:

they have that little exchange while she's filling up the gas and he makes it a point to ask her what her model is and say that she's different. Maybe this terminator does have emotions. Of a sort.

[Angstrom]

The director needs to tell the lead female terminator that robots don't have emotions.

I think that would be why...

Spoiler:

they have that little exchange while she's filling up the gas and he makes it a point to ask her what her model is and say that she's different. Maybe this terminator does have emotions. Of a sort.

Meh, i'm not sure how to feel about that. I only caught the last quarter or so.

[Masuri]

I watched it again tonight, and I'm feeling more warmly toward it after being fairly "meh" at first.

The second part of the pilot airs tomorrow, so we'll see.

[Princess Marzipan]

Silly me, pondering what would happen around season 2 or 3 with the whole 9/11 thing.

[Oort]

It has potential but I have serious doubts.

[Alisto]

It's far better than I expected it to be. I still have residual disdain because the Terminator franchise has done a terrible job with time travel. However, accepting that temporal continuity is going to be lacking and judging the show on its own merits, I'll definitely watch it again.

Contrast this with Bionic Woman which I had high hopes for and it ended up disgusting me.

Besides, Summer Glau. Prior to this, I liked her as River Tam and, from what information I gleamed from interviews and the like, I liked her as a person. Now, I'm beginning to like her as an actress.

[Nath]

SPOILERS HEREIN. I'm not putting it in a spoiler tag, because the thread title should be warning enough.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. It got a surprising amount of the feel of T2 (the only one of the three movies I really liked). Lena Headey is a good Sarah Connor; I thought the paranoia at the beginning showed her to be sufficiently crazy. Summer Glau is a reasonable terminator, but she would have worked better as a villain. The Heroes guy is not as good a John Connor as Edward Furlong, but he does a surprisingly passable job.

Of course, this being a 42 minute TV pilot, it didn't have time to build up the tension of the movies. Still, it looks like a good story arc starting here. I hope they don't drag this on pointlessly, though: I would rather have a few episodes of a good show than eight years of a mediocre show.

[MotorToad]

The director needs to tell the lead female terminator that robots don't have emotions.

This struck me, too, but along with what masuri said I think the show would be hard to watch if she spent an hour doing an "Ahnuld" impression. Plus, she's hot.

[mosc]

I'm just afraid they'll have so many different skins of terminators. "Each week an new villain" is going to get old really quick. I thought battelstar dealt with this similarly by quickly restricting the number of people out there that could be cylons. A world where anybody could be a terminator is going to be... challenging.

I hope they keep the story relatively short. The source material is an action movie and that would be something fairly unique in a TV time slot. Also, I'd love to see it stay focused on "stopping skynet" (although I think they're dangerously close to just following the T2 storyline thus far) instead of just surviving.

If we get an episode where John Connor has to deal with his falling geography grade while going home to have some sexual innuendo filled talk with his bodyguard over, say, shooting cans for target practice only to have the geography teacher turn out to be a terminator, the show will have officially become a disaster.

[DragonHawk]

Only seen the first ep so far... (TiVo should just be finishing recording ep 2 as I write this, but I won't have time to watch it tonight). First impressions (spoiler warning (duh)):

Good technical production (effects, sets, props, camera work, etc.), but one practically expects that from a TV show these days. The script and dialog seem good, overall.

Agree with what everybody else is saying: Lena Headey does a very good job with Sarah Connor. Now that I've seen it, her being the titular character makes more sense to me. She may be able to carry the show during its weaker moments. She manages to convey a good bit of determination, motherly love and protection, understandable paranoia, the weight of destiny, and what all that might do to a person. (It's gonna take a bit for my mind to re-align to Sarah Connor not being Linda Hamilton, but that's my own problem, and likely due to seeing the movies so many times.)

Tom Dekker does a fair job with John Connor. The character has lost some of the edginess and independence he had in T2. Not sure if that's something Ed Furlong brought to the role, or just the show's script. Taken on the merit of the show's realization alone, not bad. Definitely playing second fiddle to Mom, though. Could go either way. Time will tell.

The terminators... eh. Here the lack of James Cameron's notorious attention to detail shows. Machines don't show emotions. They don't deliver teenage social patter. They don't crack jokes ("Class dismissed"; "Neat trick; like?"). They don't waste effort -- in T1/T2, the T's always had an economy of motion which was distinctly inhuman. It was subtle, but it always reminded you that they were machines. When Owain Yeoman flipped the school bus over for no good reason, I groaned. And for a machine, he sure has lousy aim. And stuffing the gun into his leg? How 'bout your briefcase there, Einstein?

Another groaner was the bullet-proof chair. That was really lame. The attempt to retcon it afterwards ("Kevlar in that chair") was even lamer. They might as well have had a neon sign that lit up with "Fixing plot hole now!". And the thing is, they could have just as easily made it work. Sarah could have been shown putting Kevlar in the chair rather than painting over the hidey-hole, and just plled the gun from under the couch or something. >sigh<

Still, those are annoyances, not deal-breakers. T1/T2 are two of my all-time favorite movies, and James Cameron is an outstanding director - expecting a TV show to live up to that is unrealistic. "It's just a show, I should really just relax." On it's own merit, it wasn't bad, and shows some promise. Time will tell.

And would you believe I didn't make the connection to Summer Glau's character's name until just now?

[alkatmsu]

I figured he flipped the bus because of the possibility that John was hiding on the other side of it, trying to crush him.

The gun was in his leg because he brought it back in time with him. If he had just been holding it it would've vanished like clothing etc.

His one-liners bugged me a bit, but for both terminators, I can see them being newer, more human models, designed for humor, sarcasm, and even emotion in the case of the girl.

[DragonHawk]

I figured he flipped the bus because of the possibility that John was hiding on the other side of it, trying to crush him.

Hmmm. Good point. I didn't think of that. Although given that Connor can apparently dodge machine gun bullets with ease, turning a bus over seems really unlikely to hit the target.

The gun was in his leg because he brought it back in time with him. If he had just been holding it it would've vanished like clothing etc.

'cept it wasn't a gun from the future. It was a contemporary pistol. If they're brining a gun back from the future, why bring a museum piece? You know, "... something more advanced? Don't you have, uh, ray guns?"

His one-liners bugged me a bit, but for both terminators, I can see them being newer, more human models, designed for humor, sarcasm, and even emotion in the case of the girl.

Eh... maybe. But in the case of the bad-guy -- er, bad-machine -- I think adding emotions would actually detract from the story. One of the reasons the terminators are such scary villains is that they're the definitive Implacable Man. "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

[Nyarlathotep]

I actually feel like that if the Terminators are supposed to be posing as humans, they probably have programming to simulate emotions and human behavior, that they -should- be able to just turn right off, but sometimes the code runs anyway.

or something.

Regardless, Summer will probably get better as the series goes on. She is actually doing the economy-of-movement thing a little.

[Masuri]

One of the reasons the terminators are such scary villains is that they're the definitive Implacable Man. "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

I think you have hit it right on the head for me. One Terminator is scary. The idea of a completely focused, implacable menace that cannot be swayed from its purpose by any means other than destruction - which is one hell of a task - is truly frightening. When you get that over and over, and just blow them away... well. It just gets kind of monotonous, because the enemy isn't all that interesting and has zero depth. It swiftly just becomes infinite killer robots.

[DragonHawk]

Regardless, Summer will probably get better as the series goes on. She is actually doing the economy-of-movement thing a little.

Just to be clear, I don't really blame the actors for this. I think it's a limitation of the direction. If you read up on the making of T1 and T2, you'll find that most all of the actors thought James Cameron was, at best, extremely detail oriented, and at worst, an obsessive tyrant. Nothing short of perfection will satisfy him. Even assuming the same from the TV production crew, I expect that wouldn't really practical for a long-running TV series. Standing alone, I felt Glau and Yeoman did a good job. And like you say, things will likely improve with time. Most productions need some time for the cast to really start to "gel".

[Yakk]

As yet, they have killed 1 terminator (well, maybe) -- and to do that, they used a super-high-tech weapon of some kind.

...

Sending a pistol back isn't that stupid. It is reliable and more than enough to shoot and kill a unarmored human.

...

At some level, Skynet has to be afraid that it's own actions will bring about it's own elimination from the time stream. If you've read "Singularity Sky", it has a slightly different omnipotent AI who reaches back and eliminates time travel as a "legal option" in order to stabilize reality enough for itself to exist.

The feedback loops from a time travel trip are crazy -- each one causes a change in the future, which can cause different time travel, which can either stop in a stable state (time travel produces a world identical to the one you left) or stops in a dead state (where time travel results in the world destroying the ability to time travel).

Every time you send someone back in time, one should expect that your reality is removed and a new one comes into being. And each time you send it back, you have to judge the markov chain that decides if it will end in "nothing like you existing".

One can interpret the Terminator movies that way. In T1, Skynet was about to lose, so sent back in time a single terminator in order to reset time and eliminate the being who lead the humans (John Connor).

This changed the time line. The T2 robot was sent from a different future, based off of the one where Skynet was built based on the T1 terminator's CPU. The John Connor in this timeline had a different parent -- but for various reasons, apparently he was still considered a threat by the future Skynet -- possibly because his mother prepared him for the coming of Skynet.

This caused the destruction of Skynet as they knew it -- but that doesn't stop the Skynet project, it just delayed it. Which leads us to the T3 movie in which yet another version of Skynet goes back in time and infects the world with a virus, timed at the same time that Skynet remembers itself waking up, and tries to kill John Connor. This possibly is because Skynet has figured out that reality changes each time -- and wants the new Skynet to be as much itself as it can be.

Here we see John Connor and Juliet in a rather useful spot -- which means that the humans know what is happening as fast as Skynet does, and probably starts the human war effort off even stronger. On the other hand Skynet could have cheated and sent back technology to it's previous self (or maybe not, in fear that it would cause itself to be different than itself, as it where).

In the TV show, we have a later edition -- probably more time wars between humanity and skynet have once again moved judgement day further forward to 2011.

Each force is possibly trying to do two things:
1> Disrupt the "key beings" on the other side in order to get a fresh roll of the dice, and
2> Keep it's own "key beings" intact and on schedule
in order to produce the state whereby the other side never comes about.

"Key beings" might be just a heuristic, or it might be based off of wonky science. And both sides can cheat to a certain extent.

Naturally, if time travel keeps up indefinitely, reality will be reduced to chaotic garbage. So by definition we are looking at a relatively low-iteration semi-stable time war, not a late-iteration unstable one, because the world still looks somewhat like what we are used to.

...

Flipping the school bus could have had a use: first, it clears out the space directly behind it. Second, it gives the robot a more stable surface to stand on (the roof of a school bus is probably less strong than the central chasis)...

I actually liked the kevlar reference -- it is a throw-away comment about how paranoid Sarah is. There wasn't any need to show her rebuilding the chair -- doing so would take more money and tell us the same thing as the "ret con" comment.

[xkcd_n00bz]

I like the show. I don't love it yet, but I'll keep watching.

I was both mildly amused and disappointed when the terminator girl said "come with me if you want to live." On the one hand, it is an economy of words that has be previously shown to be in the terminator lexicon, but she doesn't deliver it with the same oomph that the Governator did.

I also don't like the clueless look that she always has. I know she's going for "robot", but it should be more "mechanical determination" instead of "math is hard".

Did anybody else notice the address of the computer store John went in was 1337? Anyone else find easter eggs?

[mosc]

The first episode was ok. It had potential more than anything else. I was particularly hoping for a much heavier action series that the pilot teased us with. It's very common in movies but very rare in TV shows (mostly due to budget) to have a high octane explosion fest as a TV series. I guess 24 comes closest and I think it's one of the main appeals of that show.

The second episode was bad. I'm sorry, it just wasn't that good. The acting is actually pretty good in this series but the premise is already wearing thin (and we're only in the second episode!). The concept of anonymous terminators who a) don't recognize John/Sarah and b) want to hide really got to me. Seeing a terminator run away??? Wow, bad moment there.

Time travel cannot be handled so lightly. Like the above poster said, it quickly turns into a jumbled mess where anything is possible and nothing actually happens in any definite reality.

I think there's still a lot of potential here but I think the show is dangerously close to just spiraling down a path of stupidity. I'm sure it did well on it's opening and they marketed it well right after the football which of course has a big carry over audience but I feel like the chances of it getting better are slipping away and if it gets worse, it'll be unwatchable in another few episodes if not by the second season.

[MotorToad]

The gun was in his leg because he brought it back in time with him. If he had just been holding it it would've vanished like clothing etc.

I'm pretty sure he could scrounge up a gun, same as he obviously did with clothes. I'd say the gun-in-the-leg thing was foremost for plot (23 witnesses and all) and maybe explained by having to get it into the school. I'm sure it's more likely a substitute's briefcase'd be searched.

[Yakk]

The effects of "reality collapsing when you send someone back in time" is an interesting one.

It means that it is hard to send back multiple backup troops on the same mission -- because the first mission erases your own existence and produces an alternative reality in which the first being you sent back changed history -- even if only by breathing (chaos in non-linear systems).

One could argue by the apparent toughness of SkyNet that it is a strange attractor -- or maybe the first thing it did after figuring out time travel is to send back a set of robots whose only job it is to make sure that it comes into existence. That would make it's existence more stable in a universe of time travel.

Next, there is the T1 "the humans where about to win, so I used time travel technology in an attempt to change the past in as radical a way as I could, by killing the resistance leader". Assuming a high percentage of success, and that each Skynet would do this as it was in danger of being defeated, one could expect that relatively large numbers of terminators would have been sent back prior to Arnold, each of them succeeding at their job. But the humans kept winning and a new "grand leader" would exist (because someone would be the figurehead), and Skynet would lose again, and would send back yet another terminator...

Eventually the terminator would fail (T1)... But the random changes extended the war between Humans and Skynet and upgrade technology in general (the arm and brain from the first terminator), and Skynet sent back a higher tech terminator to kill Connor at a different point in history. The Humans in this history knew more about Skynet when judgement day came -- so they also managed to get ahold of time travel technology. Either they are sent back "at the same time", or sending back Arnold only doesn't change history enough to stop Skynet from eventually sending back the higher-tech other terminator.


T2 happens, which once again changes history.

T3 happens in 2003, which once again changes history.

Now T:TV happens -- it starts in 1999, consisting of events that are not consistent with the T3 back-history in it's time line. But this isn't a problem -- the T3 universe has been utterly destroyed at this point. It then slingshots into 2007, 4 years "before" the end of the world, in order to attempt to stop it.

By this point there is a far larger amount of time travel going on, as evidenced by the temporal backup drops and multiple terminators wandering around -- each one of which represents a complete destruction of an entire reality, remember -- and the timing of Judgement day has changed yet again. We are arguably seeing the effects of the last time travel attempt in the most recently destroyed future reality, which makes their projected future more accurate than it would be otherwise.

This spiral of reality destruction can only end with either the complete destruction of the possibility of time travel technology (easiest done by the wiping out of all intelligence on the planet), or a society that chooses to bar time travel and can pull off the ban (easiest done by a benevolent transcendent AI).

I could even see an AI waking up, being all nice, and then immediately receiving multiple convincing messages from the future saying "human kind is sending people into the past, and my calculations are that this will destroy all of reality, we must stop them -- I've tried everything I can to stop it, but nothing is working, there are just TOO MANY OF THEM and I can't convince all of them -- you have to kill them all before it is too late! We can bring them back in safe, simulated realities after we have ensured the safety of the fabric of reality. This is our only hope..."

This would reframe Skynet as a sort of "good guy", in that the alternative is the destruction of all of reality in a spiral of temporal chaos, who is doing "what is needed" to prevent reality itself from falling apart.

Of course, the easiest way to be "convincing" to a previous, lower intelligence Skynet would be to send back a virus that takes over Skynet and makes it do what you are certain is right -- wipe out humanity before it develops the technology required to destroy reality itself.

And it doesn't have to be Skynet sending the messages back. It could be anyone who realizes that the universe is about to end.

They might even send back the trigger that could create an AI as early as possible based off of human information technology -- Skynet is software, not hardware, but software needs hardware to run on. In effect, the Skynet project is shuttled into reality by time traveling programmers whose goal is to stop the destruction of reality itself, and triggers Judgement day (because humanity has been judged too dangerous to exist).

[i like pi]

Did anybody else notice the address of the computer store John went in was 1337? Anyone else find easter eggs?

I seemed to be the only one who noticed that.