Just finished watching the latest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles from the Fox website, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the latest episode was the best yet – and as far as the franchise goes, this series is the best yet.
For starters – they stay true to the story without being as linear as the movies. They’re more like the comics. Terminators are men, women, who knows – maybe at some point they’ll introduce dogs and children. The machines are THINKING, ADAPTING, GROWING. Both good and bad, working int he present day – and if one message is clearly evident – THE FUTURE IS NOT SET.
The performances are dead on balls accurate – the nods to the movies as well as the comics are obvious and contribute without dominating. The next movie in the series is called Salvation. Personally, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles IS the salvation for the franchise! IMHO, they had better work overtime on the 4th picture, I’d had to see another Superman/Smallville situation.
You take a franchise that has undergone SIGNIFICANT plot development beyond the secure environment of a comic series or films and toss out a 90 minute turkey which could have been released 20 years ago starring Christopher Reeve – and you have a Superman/Smallville situation. I pray that the Terminator franchise doesn’t undergo it, but just the same, I would not complain to see 7 or 8 seasons of this series if they do it RIGHT. There are INFINITE possibilities for this storyline, the movies have only shown us a snapshot in time. Here we have every week, live action, blood and guts, bone on steel. I mean come on, Summer Glau literally tore the CPU from another Terminator’s head to shut him down in the last minutes of the latest episode – CAMERON CUT THAT OUT OF THE MOVIES. I nearly fell off my seat! It’s fantastic!
On a related note, FUCK TIVO. Who needs it, I mean really? At this point – who doesn’t have a broadband internet connection? You run the wire from your video card to your television, load up the on-demand on the website, and you’ve got the episode with no commercial interruption. Long term? Buy the DVD’s of course, make sure those writers get their fair shake at least! But short term, miss an episode? FUCK TIVO. You’ve got to schedule it, record it, play it back and manually skip the commercials. At that point the advertisers already got paid so why the fuck should YOU have to even deal with it?
Load up the website, watch an ad or two, then watch the show without any commercial interruption. Worked for me. As much as I love high definition, and all the things that come with it – I’m looking to catch up with the story, I could care less that it’s not in 1080P as long as it looks good and I can watch it NOW, ON DEMAND.
On demand over the Internet folks, that’s the future – and if Hollywood keeps pumping out shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I have little doubt we’ll see a day where you don’t have to check the schedules to find out when your show is on, you just hit PLAY when YOU WANT TO. Rest assured I’m ready for episode 6, this show is fucking HOT.
Sorry to have to disagree with you here, but “on demand over the web” doesn’t scale well to say “I want to watch this on my 50-inch HDTV”.
That shit may play if all you’re normally watching is SD, but until I can watch it, easily painlessly, full-screen on my wall in 50-inches of high-tech ecstasy, it’s a non-starter. 🙂
But I wholeheartedly agree with you on the writer in the show. What I liked was that it “felt real” … Derek Reese *sounded* like someone from the future who’d been fighting a war, “I don’t want to be the one to bring metal down on the Connor family”… a lazy writer would have written that line in a “current day” sense… I don’t want to lead the machines to you, or whatever, but using words the way they did, you FEEL like he’s been part of a resistance, where mistakes happen often enough that there’s slang for it… “bring metal down on”… when you catch the red-glowing eyes of the enemy.
Just great all-around.