Tuesday 11 June 2019

Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 1 (2008)



Four years after blowing up Cyberdyne Industries, Sarah Connor and her son John are keeping their heads down from the authorities and looking over their shoulders for any sign of implacable cyborg killers from the future, even while hoping against hope that their actions might actually have prevented those cyborgs from ever existing.

Spoiler: the cyborgs turn up.

And as with Terminator 2, at least one of them - who has the form of a young woman - appears to be on their side.  This terminator, known as "Cameron", helps John survive an attempt on her life.  She informs John and Sarah that they only delayed the rise of the machines (from 1997 to 2011), they did not prevent it, and persuades them to leap eight years forward in time to 2007, in an attempt to avert the "new" Judgement Day.

Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles posits that both sides of the Skynet war have sent numerous agents back in time to try and affect the outcome of the future conflict, which I think is a necessary conceit to sustain a weekly show.  It would rapidly get very repetitive to have only a single terminator pursuing them.  This structure, plus the human entanglements they inevitably experience, gives plenty of potential challenges and adversaries (and the occasional ally) for the Connors to face.

This first season of the show was cut short by the 2008 Writers' Strike (which would also cause certain plotlines to be dropped or altered in season two, as I understand it), but the nine episodes that did get delivered are pretty solid in both scripts and performances.  Lena Headey is a good casting choice as Sarah Connor IMO - though apparently a controversial one at the time - and Brian Austin Green shows that he's got a lot more to him than Beverly Hills 90210 in his turn as future soldier Derek Reese.

If you liked the first two Terminator films, and don't mind that the lower budget of TV will mean far less spectacular effects and action scenes, then this is a decent if "non-canon" way to kill some time until Terminator: Dark Fate si released in the latest attempt to revive the franchise.

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