new show review: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
January 15th, 2008 by screenwriterguy
Beware of time travel.
Not, you know, as a person. If Doc shows up with a tricked-out Delorian and wants to go for an adventure, by all means, hop on. (Just don’t kiss your mom. In fact, that’s good advice, time travel or no…) No, I mean as a writer, beware of time travel. Structuring a story is hard enough. Adding movement through a fourth dimension makes the task exponentially harder.
My main collaborator and I once attempted a storyline involving a woman going back in time, where her former self knocked her unconscious, only to then go back in time again and get knocked out by another version of her… I forget, and it makes my brain hurt just to try to remember it, but the resulting–ultimately dropped–plot device was something we still refer to as “the closet full of Cindies.” One thing I’ve learned: if you mess with time travel, keep it reeeeal simple.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles does suffer a bit from it’s time jumping. It’s less a problem of story logic, and more the deus ex machina available to the writers that the future versions of our characters can always remember later to send someone back into the past to plant something to save the characters in the present. (See, it’s already confusing, not to mention a cheap way out.) But I’ll forgive the creatives, thanks to moments when Sarah gets reports from the future on the well-being and character of her grown son. That’s fertile ground.
T:TSCC will fight an uphill battle to free itself from the baggage of the franchise and earn its own identity. Watching the pilot, I wasn’t always sure where I was in the timeline of this universe, and I didn’t want to have to remember. (I know there was one that I watched just because Claire Daines was in it… and then wasn’t there one where Winona Ryder was Sigorney Weaver’s clone, or something?) I wanted the TV show to tell me a story without expecting me to recall details from the 80s. Though the primary ideas of this fictional universe make for great action movie scripts, ultimately I’m not sure it’s a franchise that sustains itself well over weekly installments. Some ideas just work for TV by the nature of their premise; you could do a Ghost Busters TV show without thinking twice. But how many twists and turns will we get from “Machine tries to kill boy. Mom and other machine stop it?”
There does glitter some promise of sustainability, at least if you watched both nights of FOX’s “premiere event.” While the first episode focuses on putting us into the mythos of the movies, the second relegates the terminator itself to a minor subplot, allowing a chance to get to know our three temporal fugitives. There is promise that these chronicles may actually revolve around Sarah Connor, and the tiniest, tiniest moments of sexual tension between John Connor and the Glau terminator go far. (Yes, Glau is a terminator. I’m not giving much away there; It’s all over the billboards and bus ads…)
Best aspect: Stuff gets blown up, if that’s your thing, and Summer Glau is fun for looking at. This is definitely a FOX show. One wonders how a waif like Glau manages to take on only roles as quirky, quiet death machines. I don’t feel the action-movie intensity that the ads hyped from the shows reviews, but there is a reasonable facsimile.
Worst aspect: A saccharine, ham-handed inclusion of 9/11 into the terminator universe in the second ep.
Verdict: Other than some tantalizing hints that Glau’s character ain’t like the other terminators, I don’t see enough twists and turns of the intellectual kind to keep me interested. Look at it this way: If you had yet to give up on The Bionic Woman, check this show out. If you will watch anything that has ‘Star’ as the first word in its title, check this show out. More discerning audiences might not be interested for long.
Odds of success: Then again, what else are you watching? It’s a whole new ball game since I was reviewing shows this fall now that the Writers’ Strike taught us to go a few months without TV. Are audiences soaking up T:TSCC hungrily? Or have they checked out of television completely? Logic says if there’s any time a seed could take root, it’s right after a forest fire. In any event, it’ll take continued character development to push this show past a season or two of story. Here’s hoping they continue to refine the smart bits.
Similar Posts: