Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles

I'm liking this show more with each episode. They even made me like Brian Austin Green and made him kind of cool, which is no small feat. Let's pray McG doesn't screw up the franchise with his Terminator sequel, although casting Christian Bale as John Connor is a great start.
 
Jon Starr said:
Just don't like how the first ep, Cameron was able to act like a regular girl (and claimed to be different), yet in the recent episodes, she acts like an idiot robot that doesn't know what to do at school. Doesn't make sense to me.
Click to expand...

That drives me insane!

There are a few quirks. I don't really like that they've taken such an incredible film, Terminator and, to a lesser degree, Terminator 2, and made it a TV show. It really loses a lot of it's magic. I get that there's a chance to make money with it, but it's kind of a slap in the face, if you know what I mean.
 
Tom Marshall said:
That drives me insane!

There are a few quirks. I don't really like that they've taken such an incredible film, Terminator and, to a lesser degree, Terminator 2, and made it a TV show. It really loses a lot of it's magic. I get that there's a chance to make money with it, but it's kind of a slap in the face, if you know what I mean.
Click to expand...

I suppose so, but I guess it's really all a preferred taste. I myself am more of a fan of T2, and I feel that it does capture a lot of what the terminator series had. Maybe it misses Arnold, but I feel the actor playing Sarah makes up for it on a smaller scale.

Considering what it is, an obvious "product", a way of making money, it's pretty well done. It may not be on the level of lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica, but it's decent. I find it much better than the Bionic Woman. I think it's just missing that big mystery factor that all big shows seem to have. I suppose we can wonder who creates skynet, but I dunno, doesn't have as big of an impact.
 
I liked the original movie verses T2 because the original was much more raw than the sequel. Sort of how a band's first album is more raw. Guns 'N' Roses' first album, Appetite was much better than their follow ups, in my opinion.

True, the TV series is better than you would expect something like it to be. The Bionic Woman just didn't pull you in, either through the story or the characters. I watched the last of my Bionic Woman episodes that I recorded and I kind of did other things while it was playing. At least the Terminator series grabs my interest enough to watch it and even wait for each new episode to air.
 
Jon Starr said:
Just don't like how the first ep, Cameron was able to act like a regular girl (and claimed to be different), yet in the recent episodes, she acts like an idiot robot that doesn't know what to do at school. Doesn't make sense to me.
Click to expand...

Just rewatched the pilot to be sure, and the only person you see Cameron acting like a "regular girl" with is John. (And, of course, how much of a "regular girl" is she if she's hitting on the weird new kid that strong? :D ) Even with Sarah, she's different--maybe not "idiot robot" different, but definitely more Terminator-like.

I stand by what I said before--Cameron was programmed specifically to interact with John, in order to identify and protect him. Outside of that specific circumstance, she's as out of her league as Arnold was in T2 until they turned on his neural net (in the deleted scenes ;) ) and let him learn.
 
Captain Pierce said:
I stand by what I said before--Cameron was programmed specifically to interact with John, in order to identify and protect him. Outside of that specific circumstance, she's as out of her league as Arnold was in T2 until they turned on his neural net (in the deleted scenes ;) ) and let him learn.
Click to expand...

I disagree with this on a fundamental logic level.

Cameron had to fit into society and make everyone -- not just John -- think she was a normal teenage girl. She had to keep this up until she identified and connected with John. So it wasn't just John she was acting 'normal' with, it was everyone around her.

It would have been logical to program her to continue to 'fit in' with humans, even after connecting with John and becoming his protector. Standing out as 'different' would attract attention to them, which is something her programmers would want to avoid at all costs. Therefore, she SHOULD continue her 'normal girl' personality, at least whenever she is out in public. Behind closed doors with only John and Sarah, she can drop the charade and be more robot-like. But whenever they are around other people, she should seem just like a normal teenage girl.

Flawed writing, in my opinion.
 
jpeck said:
It could also be the actors or directors fault.
Click to expand...

Good point. I can see it being the director's fault, even the producer's fault -- not the actor's fault. If the actor is doing it wrong, it's up to the director to notice and fix that, unless the producer overrides him.

But her written dialogue doesn't match a 'normal' teenager when in public, so I still have to fault the writers to some extent.
 
That's the problem with the collaborative process. It's VERY HARD to actually see where the fault should be placed. There are usually a committee of staff writers who are responsible for making sure a particular script meets its requirements. The show isn't using the same director from episode to episode. If there is a problem with character development I'd be tempted to lay it at Josh Friedman's doorstep since he is the developer of the series. He also wrote the first couple episodes which set the table for the season.
 
Last edited:
chapelgrovefilms said:
It would have been logical to program her to continue to 'fit in' with humans, even after connecting with John and becoming his protector. Standing out as 'different' would attract attention to them, which is something her programmers would want to avoid at all costs. Therefore, she SHOULD continue her 'normal girl' personality, at least whenever she is out in public.
Click to expand...
She has a normal girl personality? Is this something that we'll see in Season 2?
:grin:
 
I really don't mind Cameron's acting/dialogue/character at all, but that could stem from my low expectations of TV.
 
Well she is really good at imitating people's emotions. So perhaps it has to do with that?

Bah, no point in trying to find a reason for a flaw in the show.
 
chapelgrovefilms said:
I disagree with this on a fundamental logic level.

Cameron had to fit into society and make everyone -- not just John -- think she was a normal teenage girl. She had to keep this up until she identified and connected with John. So it wasn't just John she was acting 'normal' with, it was everyone around her.

It would have been logical to program her to continue to 'fit in' with humans, even after connecting with John and becoming his protector. Standing out as 'different' would attract attention to them, which is something her programmers would want to avoid at all costs. Therefore, she SHOULD continue her 'normal girl' personality, at least whenever she is out in public. Behind closed doors with only John and Sarah, she can drop the charade and be more robot-like. But whenever they are around other people, she should seem just like a normal teenage girl.

Flawed writing, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

I disagree with this based on my experience in high school. :) "Different" kids are (or at least were where I went to high school) routinely ignored except for the occasional verbal abuse; given that Cameron takes the "sticks and stones" cliche to a whole new level, even that would probably lose its appeal after a while, and most people would simply ignore her. Which I think would be better, actually--you'd want her to stay off the radar.

Also, as John pointed out, what she did in the pilot wasn't exactly "normal girl" behavior. :) I still think that was a subroutine installed specifically for her to find John and gain his trust; she probably did pretty much exactly the same thing to every new guy in that school for however long she was waiting there for him until he showed up. Once he arrived, there was no reason for that subroutine anymore, so either she canceled it out or it canceled itself. (Although it could have been funny to see her cozying up to every new guy they met for a couple of episodes. :) )
 
Well, forget Cameron's personality, or lack thereof. Now we have a new wrinkle.

It looks to me like Cameron is going to 'go bad'. Could that be why she secretly hung onto what I assume was the 'brain' of the terminated terminator? Is she maybe going to need a brain transplant to fix her 'badness'? It's got possibilities...
 
Yeah, after this last episode, I'm reminded of a line from Babylon 5: "No one here is exactly what they seem." Both Cameron and Reese seem to have hidden agendas, and given what we know about either, they may not even know that they have them. :)

I do wonder how, if Cameron was with the Resistance not long after Kyle Reese was sent back, why the Terminator in the second episode only got "Unknown Cyborg" when he scanned her.

Going back to her personality, the thing I have been disappointed in was the lack of followup to her line in the pilot, "I am different." (I think somebody mentioned this before, but I latched onto her interaction with John and argued that into the ground. :) ) Although, I'm still needing to catch up on a couple of episodes, I haven't seen much sign of that (other than her being hot, of course :D ).
 
I was actually pretty happy that they made an effort to keep Derek Reese's future world pretty consistent with the original film. (Maybe one day we'll figure out what Skynet wants with all those jumbo jet engines.) What's not at all clear -- when Connor and Kyle Reese attacked the science lab, it was presented in the first film as the end of the war and the destruction of Skynet -- but that didn't seem to be the case in the episode. But . . . it isn't clear one way or the other.

In any case, considering their ages, the Reese brothers should be alive at the time of the show -- which DOES contradict the first film.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top