I hope it's not too late to come to the party. I realise this show has been off the air for some time.
I recently saw Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in its entirety on DVD and I was amazed, to be honest. It is, in my opinion, a very strong show.
I do wonder however what my reactions may have been if I'd been watching it when it originally aired. There were some quite intricate plot lines that were laid out over a fairly long period of time and there didn't seem to be many concessions to new audience members that I could see. I'm generally all right when it comes to jumping into a series at the midway point but perhaps this could have been a problem for some people.
Viewing it for the first time on DVD had a lot of advantages for me, the biggest being the elimination of any waiting between episodes. I'd sometimes watch two or three in a night. However, knowing in advance that the show was cancelled after only two seasons had an impact on how I experienced it as well - in that in the later part of the second season, I worried that the writers wouldn't be able to resolve all their plot lines in time.
This brings me to the problems with the show. As I said earlier, I think this show is incredible, but no show is perfect (no, not even Fawlty Towers).
For Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, first off, I felt that there were some high school related subplots in the first season that weren't particularly interesting and didn't go anywhere. However, these were not a major issue. The real issues for me started in the second season and they basically boil down to this: time-management.
No, I'm not talking about the multitude of alternative timelines produced over the course of the show by the constant altering of the course of history. I'm talking about how the writers approached a full twenty-two episode season and I am assuming here that they knew fairly early on that there would not be a third season.
So given that they had such a limited amount of time available, it is perplexing that they dedicated so much of the season to what was essentially another sub-plot. For those who have seen the show, I am referring to the Riley story arc.
The resolution of that plot was very well done, a solid two-part episode that was quite moving. However, I did feel that too much time was spent in getting to that point and that this time was taken away from the main story arc. And at the end of that double episode, with just three more episodes remaining in the season, I felt that the resolving the other story lines of the series would be a very challenging task.
Having said that though, I was impressed by how things were handled in the finale.
I understand why the writers did what they did with that. They could have given us an ending that resolved everything but they wanted to give us something else - something that can serve as an ending if need be but, at the same time, something that allows for future episodes in case the network decides to keep the show running.
They were hedging their bets. It's standard practice in these types of situations and perfectly understandable. I'd probably do the same in their shoes.
However, enough on that for the time-being. I really want to get to the heart of what it is I admire about this show.
To do that though, I have to go back in time a little to the first Terminator. I've always thought that was a brilliant movie and one thing I quite liked about it was its simplicity. And this allows one to forgive the little things - such as the absurdity of a machine that's designed to blend in with regular humans patterning itself off a bodybuilder with a thick Austrian accent or the fact that Sarah and Kyle voluntarily trap themselves at the end of the movie by going into that factory. However, as a simple thriller, it works.
But I never felt there was really anywhere else to take the series. For years, I was disinterested in Terminator 2. It largely felt like a retread, a bigger budget version of the first movie. I saw it once and was put off by that aspect of it. I also didn't care for the uneven tone, the offsetting of quite dark concepts with juvenile attempts to make the movie appealing to kids not old enough to watch the original. And there were pacing issues too. It was overly long and the antagonist went AWOL for a large proportion of it as well.
However, in recent years, I came back to it and gave it another chance. It's not as good as the original but despite the obvious similarities in the premise, it was attempting to explore new ground and the idea of stopping Judgement Day was an intriguing one, even if it is not as pure as the more basic story of the original. The terminator was no longer the villain; it was Skynet.
After that, I saw Terminator 3. The reviews were right. It had moments here and there but it felt largely pointless. Bringing the threat of Judgement Day back after it had been removed was one thing - but making it inevitable was another. Since there was nothing the characters could do to stop it, it was difficult to really care what happened next. As for Terminator: Salvation, I wasn't in the slightest bit interested. The future war has always been a background to the Terminator series. It's never been the point of the story. In the original, it was there to give the stalking killer plot line a unique twist. In Terminator 2, it serves as a motivation for Sarah Connor to do what she can to change the future. But to see it played it out would just be to watch a typical war movie... but with machines.
Then Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles came along and completely surprised me. It showed me that there were places to take the story. And they were interesting.
There were concepts to explore and it fully utilised the advantages it had as a TV series to explore them. Yes, television shows don't have the budgets of their bigger siblings - but they do have an advantage with time. The level of detail and exploration of character and theme that a television show can afford is far beyond the capacity of what the average movie can do in a two hour running time. Of course, how well a show takes advantage of that depends on the people behind it - but Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was in good hands.
We have Skynet pulling out all the stops, not simply sending back machines to assassinate John Connor. We have a terminators that actually take on full lives, with families and social contacts. A terminator that gets lost in time. We have more human resistance fighters heading back in time. There are factions among the machines; they don't all think alike. And that makes sense when you consider that they're capable of thinking independently. After all, that's how Skynet got started in the first place; it started thinking for itself. And it also has Cromartie, who I feel is the best terminator in the history of the franchise due to his ruthlessness and ingenuity. And the events that follow Cromartie's death are quite interesting as well.
The show also connects very well to the original two movies, taking on the best aspects of each of them. There were genuinely scary moments which harkened back to the original. Terminator 2 is largely devoid of the tension of its predecessor so it was nice to see that again. However, it also explored many of the better concepts from Terminator 2 such as the 'no fate' idea and Sarah's line that if a machine could learn the value of human life, then maybe people could too.
Furthermore, I really liked the extended cast of characters and have nothing but praise for the wonderful actors and actresses who brought them all to life.
The show impresses with strong set pieces. It's often tense. It's frequently very touching and moving. It's occasionally funny too, but never in a cheesy manner. And it's always compelling.
Added all up, it not only proved itself a worthy successor to the first two Terminator movies but it soared above them. A show not without its flaws but a very impressive series. And, in my own opinion, better than anything else in the franchise that came before or after it.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a fine television series. I wish there were more seasons. I wish there was more television like it.
