Remember how I was pretty sure that season two of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was going to be better than the first? Well, the season premiere aired last night, and it kicked a sizable amount of ass. It’s early yet, but if last night’s episode was any indication, it feels like Sarah Connor has really found its footing as a fun, fast-paced, sci-fi soap opera that also features a ton of car crashes.
As amazing of a description as that might be, that doesn’t mean the show’s perfect–John Connor was entirely too emo and even got all Richie Tenenbaum last night, and Shirley Manson’s head creeps me right the fuck out, and there was something awesome that happened that was, alas, for some ungodly reason, dependent on both a urinal and a pun about pissing somebody off. But all in all? Yes. Oh, and there were also explosions. And terminator-o-vision. And etc. Watch it here.
I found it weak and sloppy compared to the writing in season one, which I re-watched over the weekend.
Cameron asks Sarah to call to John when Terminators can mimic voices?
John fixes a Terminator chip from the advanced future in record time using nothing but a rag while sitting in a scrap yard?
John’s established now as a character who puts a personal and unsubstantiated emotional hunch above the world-saving mission of keeping himself alive?
The writing was leaps and bounds beyond that in season one.
The chip didn’t get fixed. The whole point of the episode was Cameron’s “crossing against the light” and choosing not to kill him. Granted, it was an absurd risk (which I can interpret only as John being convinced he’d die without her, mom be damned), but I rationalized it by assuming that the gun was empty, and that they retained the option to set her on fire had she made a wrong lurch.
Shirley Manson makes 1991 Robert Patrick look like a loose and expressive actor.
We’re assuming that John killed Sarkissian and feels bad about it, right? I didn’t expect that to become a multiple-episode arc o’ guilt.
Bah. You’re missing the point, b!x. Stuff blew up! Summer acted badass! John took his shirt off! There was an awesome musical montage! What more could you want?
Seriously though; as sloppy as some of the technical writing was, I thought the show did a really good job of establishing new, interesting characters and stories for the season, even if it is somewhat of a hard reboot.
My only real complaint was the Star Trek villain informing people that Babylon was “from the bible”.