And so, with the success of various sci-fi-laced serial dramas over the past 3 years (and the relative failure of a sequel in the original medium), the producers behind my favorite action sci-fi flick of all-time have brought the Terminator franchise to the small screen, with the mildly-anticipated Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show itself isn’t scheduled to start airing on Fox until mid-January 2008, but I saw the pilot episode this evening and thought I’d write down some thoughts.
As you can guess from the title, the story is set somewhere between "Judgment Day" and "Rise of the Machines," as Sarah and John Connor continue their lives as wanted criminals on the run from the FBI. The cast has some potential: Lena Headey (300) plays Sarah, Thomas Dekker (Heroes) plays John, and Summer Glau (Serenity) plays a high-school girl that turns out to be John’s robot protector. The usual hallmarks of the franchise are all there: two Terminators slug it out in an effort to change the future, while Sarah and John have mother/son pep talks and run from various exploding vehicles.
The particular choice for Evil-Terminator was not quite as good as any of the regular cast unfortunately: Owain Yeoman does his best to create a facsimile of Robert Patrick’s stellar performance in Judgement Day, and he busts through walls and tears apart school buses with a casually blank "robot" look. I have to say that nobody has ever really managed to pull off the "Terminator stare" quite like Patrick did over 15 years ago. (Even Arnold himself was never quite as menacing.) The difference, you see, is that Patrick always looked like he was sizing you up, calculating the most efficient way to break you in half; other actors have simply kept their faces neutral, and imho it just lacks the gravitas of a real killing machine.
The story itself is a tricky thing to review this early on. The Terminator mythology is relatively thin, when compared with the labyrinthine foundations of shows like Heroes or Lost. Everyone knows that John Connor is eventually going to lead the resistance against the machines in the early 21st century, and has been dodging time-traveling robots for most of his life. Apart from that, there’s precious little else that matters. (In fact, one could argue that the essence of the Terminator movies lies in how the screenplay was a near-perfect distillation of the killer-robot-from-the-future concept. With no unnecessary details to worry about, all that was left was an astounding juggernaut of an action movie.)
Another issue I had was that the SCC cast is tiny, so aside from waiting for the next big machine-on-machine slugfest, it’s difficult to see how this show could actually work from week to week. The Terminator movies, I think, were never written to be drawn-out in this manner. What made them so great was the fact that the pacing and story were as merciless and to-the-point as its characters. Punctuating the action with the usual pep-talk or moment-of-silent-introspection was something they avoided like the plague, but in a TV setting, it’s difficult to imagine how they wouldn’t eventually do this.
Overall, the pilot was mildly entertaining, and Summer Glau is, as always, interesting to watch. It’s not Firefly, but then again, neither is anything else on TV these days.