“Self-Made Man”

December 1st, 2008

After catching up with last week’s episode of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, I posted on twitter that anyone who was actually interested in science fiction television should be watching this show instead of Heroes (Five episodes behind and feelin’ fine). There are a lot of reasons for this, from the show’s willingness to engage with the human implications of its events to its simultaneous interest in building its characters individually as opposed to en masse as part of broader story arcs. While at times one wishes the show would be less vague in terms of the grand scheme of things, it manages to take that vague setting and find a foundation in the characters and their plight.

At its core, “Self-Made Man” is a procedural mystery: spotting a Terminator model in a photograph from New Year’s Eve 1920, Cameron goes on a journey through the archives in search of a clue to why a Terminator would be sent back to that particular date. But what the Josh Friedman and his staff have been demonstrating all season is that they have a command of this series: even those elements which feel quite simple (in this case, largely inconsequential and without detailed reasoning beyond an episodic context) are executed with such a precise sense of both character and theme that it doesn’t matter when we don’t get the “Why?”

While other shows spend so much time focused on building suspense for that particular question and forget to build characters, Terminator is carving out a niche for itself as the kind of show that uses its characters for more than acting out plots – while it’s still not to the level of some of Lost or BSG, it is nonetheless quality science fiction television at this stage of the game.

First off, to get it out of the way: yes the John/Riley plot was boring, uninteresting, and really quite simplistic. I also felt that the episode could very easily have come two weeks ago: outside of the opening scene with John investigating the dots, most of it tied into events from earlier this season (John’s awkward bed scene with Cameron, John’s struggles with murdering Sarkozy) as opposed to our most recent development (that Riley is a time traveller herself). It seemed odd that we got no mention of that: yes, not having Brian Austin Green and Stephanie Jacobsen in the episode kind of made that difficult, but budget-driven cast issues still made the storyline stand out as really awkward.

There’s an irony in that the storyline about the robotic Terminator and the wheelchair-bound history student was more comfortable than the story about two people will full mobility and emotional capacity, but it’s true: Summer Glau has so completely bought into this role that I am willing to suggest she deserves some sort of recognition for it. No, she’s not asked to deliver the kind of emotional range you’d normally see, but there was some great work with very understanded emotions in this episode in particular.

It was a simple mystery on one side of the coin, but the point I’d make is that it ultimately says more about Cameron than it would about the Terminators in general. She appears to have been doing this for a while, and it’s interesting (and logical) that we don’t get an answer as to why. It’s interesting because it raises the question of whether she’s there for late night companionship (she doesn’t sleep, after all, so solving a mystery all night is a better use of her time than laundry), investigations into Terminator activity (doing as she did during this episode, spotting those periods where Terminators have landed and tried to change the future), or investigations into her own work (whether it’s her bomb building or whatever she wanted help researhing in terms of weapons technology). It’s all interesting ideas that add a certain layer to her mission.

But it makes sense that we don’t get an answer – the whole point of Cameron as a character is that we don’t get her feelings, even if they’re technically there. She isn’t going to offer up her inner most thoughts, even to someone who is in Eric’s position. While her cryptic nature is obviously a sign of her robotic existence, it is also a reflection of what is her form of cancer: whatever happened in that explosion has stayed with her, and she is afraid of what it could become. We know from multiple sources that John ends up emotionally linked with Cameron in some capacity in the future, so her fear of hurting him (and her concern for him) are coming from someplace that might be beyond “programming,” which is something I don’t know I expected from the series when it premiered.

Billy Lush was a good choice to play our bone-cancer strickened scholar, helping Cameron and in the process getting a free if unsolicited medical checkup. There was a nice if simple parallel between them: he living captive by his body’s past and (if she is to be believed) present condition but fully capable of using his mind, and she in completely control of her body but unable to control what her mind might make it do. Lush did some great work this summer in HBO’s Generation Kill, and he was strong here as well: just the right kind of foil for Cameron, someone who would be most intrigued by her abilities but, at the same time also offended by her lack of social aptitude.

While there is reason to be concerned, as Alan Sepinwall is, that these various good episodes aren’t yet adding up to anything substantial, I think this is the better pattern: while we’re answer-free, we’re also free from the time of convoluted storytelling that Heroes implemented in its second season. For me personally, I got what I wanted to get out of this episode: psychological investigation, interesting use of the show’s science fiction setting, and a nice action sequence to boot. Both Cameron-centric episodes this season have been really good, so it’s pretty clear that the “Let Summer handle this one” strategy is something to emulate in the future.

Cultural Observations

• Okay, I know John transported quite a few years into the future, but it’s still kind of problematic for him to suck at video games. Someone with as much computer skill as him should probably have some hand-eye coordination of some sort even when his internal bloodlust is starting to take over his system.
• What year is this, in the Terminator perspective – I don’t know why that building would have that placard for a speech so far ahead of time if this is still in 2008, but I don’t think that much time has passed since they first jumped forward to this point. Still, I could be wrong, and that date would make a lot more sense. Regardless, kind of convenient, but the ensuing scene was a lot of fun.
• While I know that it’s called the Sarah Connor Chronicles, can’t say I missed Sarah – Lena Headey has grown well into the role, and was great in last week’s episode, but the Cameron Chronicles has a nice ring to it.
• It may have felt like a budget episode in terms of casting, but the enormous period setting stuff required plus special effects likely made this one even out. I think it was worth it, though, episode felt really well constructed on all sides of the camera.

“Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today”

November 10th, 2008

At the end of “Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today,” Sarah Connor says that nothing ever changes: that it is the same thing that drives her every day, and that all of her decisions will continue to revolve around that concern. While I don’t doubt this mother’s dedication to her son’s safety, I feel like this statement paints a picture of this show as something repetitive, something that boils down to an action-packed joy ride of destruction at its best and an elaborate holding pattern at its most languid.

And there have been moments when Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles has felt like both of those things, especially in the early parts of its first season. However, like the first season finale before it, this week’s episode (the eighth of the show’s twenty-two episode season) is an example of the ways in which the show has resisted becoming a pure action series, and how those potentially slow-moving sections have given the show a chance to build characters who believe in things, who have complex emotions, and who can fire off some guns while remaining grounded in some kind of reality.

As this week’s episode weaves in and out of everyone’s stories, there was never once where I questioned whether that character had something to contribute to this story (even if the device seemed unnecessary, gimmicky), and each of them reached an apex of sorts in this episode as it relates to their characters. For a season that has spent considerable time tracing the origins of Skynet through the introduction of Shirley Manson’s Terminator model, it is telling that the most action-packed episode so far is all about people (as sucky as they might be, Riley) – it’s also the best episode of the season so far.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this, mainly because I’m falling ill and really need to get some sleep, but what makes this episode work is Cameron. Despite this not necessarily being about her, she is the one who we get the most interesting glimpse of. The best thing the show has done so far this season is the work in humanizing, both in future and present, this robot who has always straddled that line. From the moment her emergency protocol kicked in during the premiere, pleading with John to spare her life, the question of Cameron’s humanity has been an important part of their interaction. This episode, however, took that up a few notches.

First and foremost, we have her scene in John’s bedroom, essentially a preview of the future: a time in which John and Cameron are romantically involved. It makes a lot of sense: it explains why, precisely, John would send Cameron in particular back to protect his mother/self, and it also explains what we saw in our glimpse into her origins as a copy of another girl, Alyson. It isn’t entirely clear what we’re seeing here, but it’s hard not to see the paralells to something like Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons – here, though, there isn’t supposed to be any personality, any traces of any other person, and yet there are pieces of Alyson throughout this episode. That scene on the bed is utterly creepy in most senses, but on one level it rings of truth: an emotion from Cameron that actually feels like an emotion. Coupled with her message, essentially that Riley isn’t there in the future but she is, it’s an unnerving scene for quite a few reasons.

But more unnerving is that moment where Cameron and Derek enter the police station in search of John in Mexico. Her urgency to find John is not robotic in that sense: the camera clearly cuts to Derek, pondering why she is throwing all caution to the wind and searching for John in a way less methodical than suicidal. As Cromartie himself said, Cameron is making mistake: they’re not big ones, as humans like Sarah or John are bound to make, but they are uncharacteristic and they could place John in some danger of, at the very least, philosophical distress.

It’s an extra layer that wasn’t there in the first season to the same degree. Yes, Sarah and John’s relationship hasn’t really advanced beyond its original tensions: he is still a teenager, she is still an overprotective mother, and their run from the law feels on occasion to be a bit repetitive. However, in a moment like this one, their relationship feels natural and understandable. While some have likely found Riley a bit of a contrived influence on John’s life, I find her both charming and refreshing: while it might not be maturing John into a badass overnight (which seems to be the expectation of some), it does give him another outlet, and that at least is taking the characters to new places.

And while he felt extraneous during most of the first season, James Ellison is really playing a bigger role this time around. His belief in Sarah is almost concerning to her: she’s terrified of this man who once hunted her down who now believes that there is something much bigger at play. There’s a lot of unresolved tensions here: we have Shirley Manson’s project, we have word of a SkyNet Civil War of sorts, and we also have Derek’s secret acquaintance who obviously is back for a reason. Plus, this episode added another onto the pile: for what purpose was Cameron making a “small bomb?”

This is the achievement of this episode: despite being in many ways a resolution, of Cromartie as a character (I’ll miss Garret Dillahunt, but it felt like a fitting end) and of this particular chase sequence, it also felt like a good turning point for these characters. We have Ellison making his final choice in his battle to protect as opposed to hurting the Connors, we have Riley learning more and more what kind of boy “friend” she has, and we have the seeds of humanity starting to manifest in Cameron. At the same time, there’s a lot of things unresolved, most of them deeply philosophical and therefore full of potential for the of the season. While the show will still have its slow moments, and it will still have its gun battles, these episodes bring them together in a way that reminds us that this show is, at the very least, better than we would have expected from its pilot.

Cultural Observations

• I have no way of being sure, but based on first impressions I’d say that the Mexico set was the same one that FOX used when shooting Arrested Development’s scenes in Mexico. I personally found this quite funny, although it only briefly took me out of the episode.
• I may say this is the best episode of the season so far because of its intersection of these ideas, but I found last week’s episode more shocking and visceral – taken as a pair of episodes, this is some high-calibre television.
• Last week, it was announced that the show will be moving to Fridays in January – whether its ratings will drop in kind is hard to predict, but with consistent quality I think it can hold onto its numbers, which would actually make it a big improvement for FOX’s Friday lineup.

I don’t normally post news, but I figure this is frustrating enough to enjoy a bit more analysis outside of my Twitter feed. Ironically, it was through Twitter that the news was revealed to me. From FOXBroadcasting’s new twitter feed came the following:

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse launches Friday, February 13th

My immediate response: seriously, FOX? Are we going to go through this again? After Whedon’s last FOX show, Firefly, was destroyed by mismanagement by FOX, fans of the creator have already had reason to be slightly concerned about the show’s trajectory. Now, with the creative side seemingly together, comes the next blow – that even when it does air, its opportunity for success has shrunk dramatically.

The thing is, a lot more could have been done: FOX could have premiered the show behind an episode of American Idol, something that is increasingly common and that their other new drama, Lie to Me, is likely getting on January 21st. Nothing about this move seems even remotely like a network that is fully behind this show: and would premiering it a week early and avoiding the ominousness of Friday the 13th really have killed them?

I’m excited for Dollhouse, even as someone who outside of Firefly and Dr. Horrible is woefully behind on my Whedonverse viewing, but these signs keep popping up that this show is cursed. I don’t want to be a harbinger of ill-will towards the series’ fate, and I would love to feel more optimistic, but considering that repeats of NCIS and other crime procedurals are the shows performing best on Fridays something tells me that FOX’s attempt to rekindle The X-Files’ success in the timeslot a decade ago isn’t going to work…and if this means that Whedon’s fans are going to have to pick up FOX’s slack at promoting one of his series AGAIN, I don’t think this is the kind of deja vu the show is trying to discuss.

Below the jump, though, let’s take a look at what the rest of FOX’s January schedule brings us – to be honest, it’s quite reasonable, if frustrating for fans of the network’s science fiction dramas.

Mondays: House and 24

It’s a good combination for a variety of reasons: it uses House as a lead-in (something that I argued last year they should do more often and now are doing twice in one year), and it gives 24 some established backing for its first season in two years. The show suffered creatively and in the minds of viewers during its uneven sixth season, so any boost it can be given will help the network. Plus, this is a highly competitive lineup on a highly competitive night – Chuck, in particular, is in some trouble.

Tuesdays: American Idol and Fringe

This stays the same from the earlier announced lineup, and it’s a smart choice (Idol returns on January 13th, by the way): Fringe has the chance to grow as House did, debuting on its own and then benefitting from the huge Idol audience.

Wednesdays: American Idol and Lie to Me

Lie to Me is a new series about someone who can tell if someone is lying by simply observing their mannerisms, and benefitting from the Idol lead-in will be key to its success.

Thursday: Bones and Hell’s Kitchen

Bones avoids Fridays once again by landing in a Thursday slot that, to be honest, is less competitive now than in the past, and might just be a good spot for the show (Survivor is really the only competition left with Ugly Betty/Earl fading). And while it will struggle against the behemoths that are Grey’s/CSI/The Office, Hell’s Kitchen has its fans.

Friday: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse

Don’t get me wrong: I think Sarah Connor has been good all year, and I think it deserved its full season pickup, but it won’t perform well on Fridays. The only chance these shows have of finding a grip is if they considerably outperform the current reality series floundering in those timeslots – and even then, the future doesn’t look good.

Overall, it’s a good schedule: it greatly improves their competitiveness on Mondays and Thursdays, while using the return of American Idol to keep Fringe competitive and try to launch a new type of procedural at the same time. But for Whedon fans or fans of Terminator, this is a bitter pill to swallow: sadly, business is business.

“The Mousetrap”

September 22nd, 2008

It is clear that my Monday evenings are officially going to become way too busy – here it is Wednesday, and I’m just getting to the week’s episode of Sarah Connor. This is only going to get worse when Chuck returns next week (Although I already downloaded that premiere [available on iTunes, Hulu and Amazon] and will have a review ready ahead of time), so I don’t know if I’ll be blogging Sarah Connor except maybe to drop in some thoughts later in the week about a particularly solid episode.

Which, really, brings me to “The Mousetrap,” an episode that feels (much more than last week’s) like something closer to where the show was at towards the end of last season. This is both good and bad: on the one hand, the show can’t constantly be this action-driven, placing characters in mortal danger and having Garrett Delahunt ever so close to finally killing John Connor, but on the other it results in an episode that moves along at a strong pace. Yes, I still have some issues with Shirley Manson’s inability to act, and I think that they do need to get a bit more natural pace going along, but there’s enough positives here that I have no intentions of stopping watching the show altogether as we dig deeper into the fall season.

What makes “The Mousetrap” work is that it’s action juxtaposed with character: Sarah has to balance her past relationship with Charlie and her quest to keep John safe, two things that happen to coincide with Cromartie’s rather dangerous actions designed to kill her son. Dean Winters and Sonya Walger, ultimately, make this episode work as well as it does: yes, the regular cast holds up their end of the bargain as well, but they bring something that much more tragic to Michelle’s eventual death. The right choice in guest star can go a long way towards making something like this resonate, and the show was right to cast these two actors considering how much they made us care/empathize with two people who are completely outside of the show’s mythology.

I spent most of the episode, though, wishing they had cast somebody else as Michelle so that Walger could take over Shirley Manson’s lifeless role as the head of whatever the heck that corporation is called. I get that she’s a Terminator, so she’s a bit stiff and the like, but she just isn’t an actress: this is a role that is supposed to be menacing but also welcoming, charming but also dangerous, and yet she only has one speed. People say so much about Anna Torv on Fringe, and with good reason, but compared to Shirley Manson she’s a frakking muppet: Manson has yet to mature into the role, and it’s a problem considering how much we’re supposed to care about this side of the plot. If Ellis wasn’t involved in the storyline, I would have deux ex machina’s the whole thing after this week’s episode and had her permanently transform into Walger.

The rest of the episode was your basic thriller stuff: loved the Mousetrap ploy, and the cell tower destruction strategy, so the show is succeeding at making Cromartie out to be the threat he should be. And the various Terminator realities the show dealt with was good: Cameron too easily lifting the enormous computer box (Seriously, what was in that thing?), and then Cromartie not being able to swim (likely having to walk back). I also like that Cromartie isn’t just killing everything that moves at the funeral: he is only there to kill John Connor, simple as that.

I’m perhaps a bit less stoked about John’s new gal pal Riley, but I find her fairly charming and I think that, when the show eventually reveals that she is somehow related to the show’s mythology (Leven Rambin wouldn’t have been added to the credits otherwise, clearly), I won’t find the new addition unwelcome. While I’m not totally for John being all teenager-y at all times, he is a teenager nonetheless and this feels like a more traditionally youth-driven point of rebellion that is (at least) proving to be a bit of a different pace for the series.

So while my rush to watch the show is going to be limited, I still want to keep up with it – if it stays this way even as I get even busier, that’s a good sign.

Cultural Observations

• I’m curious to see what exactly they have planned for Ellis and Manson, as the storyline right now seems like all we’re really going to get is Richard T. Jones inadvertantly working for the side of evil. This is fine, but still – I need a bit more information before I can really form an opinion of the side story.
• I’ll be curious to see if Dean Winters is around much longer – something tells me that he won’t be too happy about the whole situation with Sarah, and that he might stay away until the point when grief and blame turns to thoughts of revenge…against Sarah, or against Cromartie, I don’t quite know yet.

“Automatic for the People”

September 15th, 2008

“That was dangerous. It could upset people.”

This is what Cameron tells John the morning after their season premiere ordeal, a statement that he thinks is about the people he placed into danger directly (Derek and his mother). Cameron corrects him, though, noting that the issue is in the future rather than the present: in other words, John’s future reliance on or relationship with Cameron is clearly a concern for the future.

And this is an episode all about the future, about turning back to a show that is your standard mission-driven action series that uses the various qualities of your main characters. While this is good, as there’s some decent setup for the season ahead here (including a wonderfully contrived plot device), it does seem like a bit of a let down after last week.

When it looked like John was finally going to grow a pair, somehow I didn’t expect him to go all out and…invite a girl over to his house and refuse to make her leave. Oooh, what a badass. In all seriousness, though, it’s a bit of a momentum killer, even if the show still has a good trajectory.

Sure, they blew a lot of their budget in the first episode, but this is a slow episode for more reasons than a lack of money. It’s slow because the show suddenly needs to shift from an action-packed and emotional episode to something that feels more like an episodic series. The issue with this, more than anything, is that the show hasn’t felt like this since its sixth episode last season or so. It felt like an urgent rush, with a Terminator slowly threatening to attack this family and a computer that, if falling into the wrong hands, could prove dangerous.

These two threads, though, are woefully absent here. We don’t get any of Cromartie, and we don’t see Shirley Manson until the end of the episode. The threat here is entirely in the future, and this is one of the things that the show suffered with in the very beginning. The threat wasn’t real so much as it was forced onto the series: SkyNet is part of the show’s intense mythology, but this doesn’t mean the show can take for granted the driving force that needs to be behind these issues. When Derek came from the future, this all became clear: now, he’s so much just another member of this team of misfits that the resonance is gone, even with the little flashforward to what happens at the Nuclear facility in the future.

What we do get is an example of the fact that the show can work: Cameron as the security badge scanning pool shark, Sarah as the seductress, and Derek as the recon man. It’s a much less complicated structure than last week, but it is important that there is a formula here: it’s not quite a procedural, but if it’s going to do a 22 episode season there needs to be episodes like this. The main problem with this is that, while Lena Headey plays the role well, I do think that she isn’t quite Jennifer Garner, if you will, in terms of this kind of undercover work. When she’s pulling the cancer heartstrings, it works…but it could work much better.

The real story with these three is Cameron, who isn’t functioning as normal: the other T-800 model (I think that’s the model) kicks her ass, she barely knows how to respond, and she’s just “thinking” more…and as Sarah notes, this isn’t normal. I do like that, even though she didn’t kill John, something is still very wrong with Cameron.

The major issue with the episode is that John has nothing to do with any of this: he goes to school, meets a girl named Riley, brings her home and does some passive flirting, and then eventually turns it into some sort of rebellion against his mother. It’s a fascinating little turn of events because it goes exactly against last week’s badass haircut and a new attitude: instead, he just softened himself up for a new female companion. I understand the reasoning here: he can’t really enter into the drama in the same way as everyone else quite yet, and if it doesn’t involve much technology he’s pretty much useless.

But it does kind of kill things dead as far as momentum for his character: I think there is definitely some potential here, but the show for the first time shows no clear signs of where it’s really going other than its vague setup. The episode ends with them discovering the season’s bible, a bloody wall of prophecies from the resistance fighter who came back to warn them about the events at the Nuclear Plant. It’s a laundry list of things to stop, and seems pretty long.

What the episode does do well, though, is remind us that SkyNet is a threat – this event was either going to give SkyNet a victory in the present or the future, and that lose-lose situation (At least it wasn’t lose-lose-lose, right Michael Scott?) is a dire warning for the future. The show needs to be really careful, though, that it keeps the present drama reasonably exciting: with care, the show is still on the right track.

Cultural Observations

• As someone noted over at NeoGAF, there’s a bit of an issue about how they managed to have a Terminator Copy of Ryan Chapelle (I didn’t even acknowledge his new character name, he’ll always be Chapelle to me) ready considering that Cromartie’s transformation took too long. If I would offer a reason, it would be that they were probably planning to do this from the very beginning, and had been preparing it ever since he pulled the plug on the last test. Still, though, they need to address some of this stuff.
• We seemed to say goodbye to Dean Winters and Sonya Walger this week, as they head off to avoid the chaos of it all. We talked a bit more about Ellison’s faith, but for the most part it seemed like a bit of a waste of time.
• Still not sure why it was named after the REM album, anyone with a theory?