When I first heard they were ...
Question: When I first heard they were making a TV show based on the
Terminator films, I was reluctant to get excited. It seems my reluctance was well-founded. The show is totally uneven. I know they can't do as much on TV as they can in a film, but I know for sure that TV can do much better than this. First of all, the acting is sub par at best.
Summer Glau, whom I loved in
Firefly, hasn't exactly won me over as the new Terminatrix. In fact, and I can't believe I'm saying this, she's actually giving me newfound respect for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Lena Headey is definitely not on par with Linda Hamilton. I would even go so far as to say that the character of Sarah Connor seems like a totally different person (though the writing may be equally to blame for this).
Thomas Dekker is the only bright spot so far, and that isn't saying much. It almost seems like they just threw a cast (and the show) together all willy-nilly and simply assumed it would be successful just because it was based on a popular movie trilogy. Give me a show like
Lost any day, whose creators seemed to take just as much time putting together a stellar cast as they did developing a great story. And speaking of the story, it seems jumbled and even has me (and I consider myself fairly intelligent), somewhat confused. So are they now saying the third
Terminator film took place in 2011? I was under the impression it took place in 2003, when the film was actually released. And the bombs did drop at the end, didn't they? If I can dissect the
Terminator story and sound like a total geek for a moment, the entire process of trying to stop Judgment Day seems entirely futile due to what is known as "The Grandfather Paradox." Some of the great sci-fi writers have rightfully put tons of thought into the logistics of time travel and wrote some compelling and intelligent stories without ignoring basic reason. Writers like H.G. Wells, who successfully incorporated the paradox in
The Time Machine to explain why the main character couldn't save his beloved from dying. More recently, films like
Twelve Monkeys also intelligently incorporated the paradox with great success. The
Terminator films resolved the issues it had with the paradox in the third installment. But now here comes
The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The main problem is: If they stop Judgment Day, then Kyle Reese wouldn't be sent back in time by future John to save Sarah from the original Terminator (no war means no Terminator). Therefore, he and Sarah never would have slept together and John never would have been born. So in order for John Connor to even exist, logically Judgment Day
has to happen. Also, using that same line of thinking, if Kyle was never sent into the past, Sarah wouldn't even know about the war. So how could she stop it from happening? Perhaps I give it more thought than the average viewer (or the characters, it seems), but it seems to me that the story was pretty much finished after
T3, with all the potential time-travel paradox plot holes pretty much diffused. I wouldn't mind a movie or TV show that takes place in the future, chronicling the war with the machines, but another story about trying to stop what is essentially unstoppable seems like a total waste of time, even if it were well put together (which I don't think this is). Your thoughts?
Answer: From where I sit, not being nearly as obsessive about these things,
The Sarah Connor Chronicles seems to be proceeding as if
T3 never existed. Which is OK by me. There's no question this show isn't going to live up to a lot of scrutiny where its time-travel logic is concerned (and please, folks, spare me the detailed debates). I'm just going along for the ride, which I found pretty sensational in the first two hours. And if you think Thomas Dekker is the reason to watch and Lena Headey and Summer Glau are the weak links, we're clearly watching this show from two different planets. As for a comparison to
Lost: There we agree.
Lost is one of a kind, with incredible storytelling and casting, whereas
Sarah Connor merely takes a popular franchise and makes something new and exciting of it. Not quite a classic, yet.
