#my guess is not due to the terminal superwholockism

[vexedtonightmares]

:)

-a

[trainsinanime]

As I grow older and look back at the years of my life, I’m starting to realise and understand things about it that I saw differently back then. In particular:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles wasn’t actually that good.

This is probably not that big a revelation overall. It got cancelled after two seasons, there doesn’t seem to be a huge fandom around, and any and all Terminator movies afterwards completely ignored it. Still, there are some factors hiding it. Terminator SCC is easily better than any of the movies that came after it, and is easily the best thing where a Game of Thrones queen plays Sarah Connor.

But to be clear: Daenerys Connor, first of her name, queen of the robots and the time travel, was easily the best part of that movie, and I refuse to rank her against brillant but very different Sarah Lannister.

This is actually the main point in favour of Terminator SCC: It had absolutely amazing casting. Lena Heady, Thomas Dekker, Brian Green, Garret Dillahunt and Shirley Manson all play their roles beautifully, full of charisma, and you always know there’s more hiding beneath the surface than they let on - yet when it comes out, it still surprises you. And of course, Summer Glau, she who holds the show together single-handedly at times.

It cannot be overstated how amazing Cameron (the Terminator in this show, played by Summer Glau) is. Sometimes she seems like a mindless killing machine; sometimes she seems like the „robot is learning to be human“ trope; but she’s clearly neither. She is her own unique form of intellect who works completely differently from the humans around her, which causes all sorts of friction, but also allows her to relate to humans incredibly well at times. It’s always fascinating to watch her, what she does next, and why (and whether she herself understands why). There are certainly uses of this character that are a bit questionable, most notably any times they go for „sexy“, but as a concept, Cameron is just amazing and I refuse to hear any arguments to the contrary.

The charisma of this cast alone is often carrying the show alone, and it’s amazing to watch. Sadly, they often have to. The show does have its great ideas, and I will forever love its season one finale. Sure, you might say that anything is epic if you play American Recordings-era Johnny Cash over it (and then blow up Summer Glau), and that’s probably true, but it’s also true that most shows don’t even try. But when it comes to overall plot, the show is just lacking.

The show came out in 2008, at a time when everybody was trying to be both the next Lost and the grown-up version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and like a lot of shows of that era, you see it trying to be these things but not quite clicking.

The show tries for monster of the week, which is good enough, but doesn’t really tell character arcs as well as Buffy did. And it tries for big-picture mystery and philosophising, much like Lost, but unlike Lost, it’s bad at hiding that its creators don’t really have a clue where this story is going. So we spend a lot of episodes doing essentially nothing. Sending the characters to a therapist could be a good idea, but the show doesn’t really commit to it. Sending the characters to a sleep clinic is just bizarre. The great overarching plot is at first to stop Skynet, but that’s not particularly interesting. Instead in season 2, it tries to be about psychological effects of the constant warfare, and of how humans and machines might coexist, which is much more interesting, but the show doesn’t really commit to these bites until the very end, when, of course, it got cancelled. There are a lot of great story ideas and great individual stories, almost all of them centered around Cameron, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. She gets hints of an arc, but a lot of the times she also seems to be a walking JJ Abrams Mystery Box, full of secrets that the show tells us are intriguing, but without any follow-through.

(We also need to acknowledge that many of its best ideas are lifted directly either from Terminator 2, or from the deleted scenes of Terminator 2. There’s nothing wrong with stealing from a great movie, but if your show is really just that, but longer, with lower budget, and without the satisfying narrative arcs for its characters, that’s an issue.)

Going back to the show’s contemporaries, the obvious comparison is Dollhouse, which also got completely lost between its plot-of-the-week and overarching plot. It barely managed to find its feet in season two, when the writers realised that the weird post-apocalyptic bonus episode they made because the DVD department of their studio forced them to, was in fact the only good episode. Another point of comparison that was much stronger was Heroes, which largely ditched the monster of the week and fully committed to the long-running storylines. 

(Oh god, I just compared Heroes positively to something. Guys, if you weren’t there, you won’t believe how much the sci-fi fandom world improved when we all switched from Heroes to new Doctor Who. You may have complained about Superwholock, but at least we were finally rid of Sylar.)

I still think that thanks to its excellent cast, Terminator SCC was a much stronger show than it had any right to be, and if the stars had aligned just a tiny bit differently and it had been allowed to fully commit to long-running stories, it might have been truly amazing. But at the end of the day, it just never really managed to find much of a core until it was too late.

If you’re interested, it’s currently streaming… nowhere, at least in Germany. If you know me personally, I guess I can lend you the DVDs? Either way, I think season 1, which got cut short due to the writer’s strike, is pretty good. Season 2 is where all the show’s flaws really come to light, even though it also has all the best episodes.