I thought I had already blogged this about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Whoops! I guess not.
***
S2 E1-2!!
- That is one bam-slam opening. Everything goes to hell, that's just
the recap, then it goes to hell _again_ and that's before the main
credits. They almost overdid it with _two_ car crashes, but it
emphasizes how fragile John and Sarah really are, they're not
superheroes, and how much protection they need.
- SUMMER. Man she's just fantastic. The whole "I love you" bit was
just agonizing, you couldn't know whether or not it was a trick and it
reminded me a lot of HAL in 2001 and also A.I.: the machine begging
for its life, aping human behaviour so well that it's a question of
whether it's still a machine at all. But of course she is. And she was
so threatening! and she's so itty! So much of her performance is her
body language, the way she chooses to move and hold herself and even
just look at people. And Cameron is still really unfathomable, as much
of a mystery as any person is.
- ELLISON. I love Lena and Summer and the rest, but Richard T. Jones
is just so amazing. He has great dignity, but also that nasty
understated ironic humour, and I like that he's religious without
being a jerkball about it, and when he recited the Pale Rider bit the
hairs on the back of my neck stood up. All the actors/writers rave
about him in the commentaries, and you can see why. He just brings it
to a whole new level. I wish he had more scenes, and more scenes with
Lena, too.
- All the callbacks to the movies were so great -- Shirley's killer
finger, "call to him," the way they use LA as a background. This is a
show that actually uses its urban setting. Power plants! traffic
controls! City Hall! Emphasizing this is a network, a civilization,
and how fragile _that_ is, too -- we're always getting Derek's
perspective on how everything went to shit.
- I didn't like him at first -- well, more the character -- but Dean
Winters won my heart. Even if I think he's lying to his wife about not
loving Sarah. It would be hilarious if the wife finishes him off, not
the killer robots, and who could blame her?
- They didn't kill the priest! They didn't kill the little Latino
family! Once again the show is about human life, preserving it, the
actual sanctity -- which sounds soppy but they did it just right.
THERE ARE LATINO PEOPLE IN LA! Who would've thought. Even if they
didn't get any lines. (The way the white actors/director/writer kept
referring to that Hispanic girl in the S1 finale commentary as "the
chola" pissed me off so much I screamed at the TV set and dubbed her
"Maria" in my head, JUST SO SHE WOULD HAVE A NAME, DAMMIT.)
- It is my headcanon that in the premiere John killed wossname to
protect Sarah and it was his first kill and his first time seeing her
totally helpless and dependent on _him._ (NB: I wrote this before the show
made it clear John did kill him.) And what really fucks him up
is his realization that his plea in S1, for her to save him and kill
the monsters and give him a normal life like all any parent ever wants
to give their child, is impossible, as it is for any parent. She can't
save him, nobody can. He now has a giant case of PTSD. (It's kind of
hilarious that he cuts his hair, it is such a female "I'm gonna butch
up" thing. But it's also putting away childish things, a kind of
self-harm, a military induction, Army of One. He also looks a _lot_
more like Derek.)
Otherwise, the way he acts makes NO SENSE. (See above note.) It doesn't make sense how
totally guilty and hovering Sarah is, and it makes no sense how he
absolutely stone cold refuses to put down Cameron, betrays the humans
and PULLS A GUN _ON HIS MOTHER._ (I think they resolved that last
horror a little too fast.) Hasn't he seen her kill people before, or
at least he knows that she's done it? Sarah seems both terrified of and for her son now,
Derek kind of grimly approving. (And then also a bit terrified.) That
reading also makes sense of "you should go to school," because
otherwise WHY WOULD SHE SAY THAT, and how alienated and angry and
depressed he is there now. Sarah's going to desperately try to rescue
his normalcy, his humanity, but John is on the verge of tossing all
that away, because he thinks it's already gone and there's no getting
it back. There was that shot deliberately ranging him with Cameron
across her would-be funeral pyre from the humans, his mother and two
surrogate fathers, and that had to have sent a chill up Derek's spine,
because that's how it was in the future. The one they're trying to
prevent. Cameron was John's shield, his messenger, his buffer from the
actual people around him.
(And speaking of the future, they never explained either Derek's visit
with future John, or the Chopin music that plays when Derek's tortured
AND that Cameron dances to. Does that come up later?).
- I actually kind of miss the voiceovers. I hate the new credits and
how they explain everyone like it's a fucking NFL lineup.
(Thankfully those went away pretty quickly.) I guess that
might partly have been caused by the "what is this anyway" fallout
from the writer's strike and the typical Hollywood producer mania to
overexplain everything, but blah. The voiceovers were a great callback
to the movie and to classic LA noir, and they also let you inside
Sarah's character more -- Lena is playing it very blunt and stoic, and
she's a great actress (and still emotes, as in the scenes with John),
but without that glimpse into her head she's too opaque and flat. Yeah
the voiceovers were too long and not voice-directed that well and
often florid, but hell, SO WERE THE ONES ON THE X-FILES.
- T didn't really notice the voiceovers were gone and didn't miss them
that much. Heh.
- Wow, John is now an asshole. Derek is also kind of an asshole, but
he has terrible childhood PTSD and....well so does John now too. Well,
I find Derek hot, and John is still kind of a baby. But rapidly
growing out of that. It's like he's going to have to choose, be like
Sarah, or be like Derek -- preserve life, at terrible risk, or kill
and be dead inside, like Derek, like a machine. Trust, or betray.
Derek as the surrogate adult John/Kyle figure is great, tough and
macho and really, really fucked up. They're really questioning a lot
of the action-movie ethos through him, and it's pretty subtle.
- Wow, Riley-the-character is a terrible actress. (I like the actress
herself, she's v cute and appealing yet vulnerable with a little bit
of weirdness.) She might be ditzy enough as a person to get away with
just walking up to him and demanding money, but she doesn't _know_ him
at all. YES, John, why is this cute hot blonde coming on to you? WHAT
HAPPENED THE LAST TIME A CUTE HOT GIRL DID THAT?
AND WHY DID YOU TELL HER THE CODE? Of course it's fitting in now with
John-2.0-the-asshole, but....erk. Both T and I also thought there was a missing scene in
between the morning-after scene (a sex scene??) because otherwise,
Mama Lion goes from "who the fuck is this" to "yeah she can stay in my
house"? Where are Riley's parents? John is making a point of not being
suspicious of her, "this is my life and these are my choices, fuck you
Mom and my guardian angel robot," but I can't think Sarah and Cameron
would be so blase. Riley popping up and getting attached to John and
having no fucking background would be a red flag.
- T pegged Shirley Manson as a robot within about five seconds of
first seeing her, heh.
- That is....one Biblical robot. 0.0
- The Silkwood bits with Sarah were upsetting, partly because it was
typical Hollywood woman-in-jep (naked, wet, not in control of her
body, being fucked with by men -- blech) but also because it rams home
_again_ how fragile human life is, how fragile she is, how we've built
up this whole world -- nuclear power, AI, weaponizing everything -- we
can't control. Skynet wanted to control us, to get the goddamn
unpredictable humans out of the equation, solve for zero. If zero is a
smoking postapocalyptic ruin, OH WELL. But we're doing pretty well
getting there all by ourselves. It was surprisingly awful when that
cancer survivor who liked Sarah was killed, and when the asshole power
plant boss just messed with her. Both actors sold their parts really
well -- all the acting in the series, even the "bit" parts, is just
stellar.
- Lena does a really great job of fitting Sarah in as a civilian and
being a little bitter about her wasted life -- "computer courses"
(HAHAHAHA), waitressing for years and years, being stuck as a temp
janitor, that heartbreaking line about forgetting what she wanted to
be from S1 when she was talking with Andy. I wish we saw a little more
of that. But just seeing it at all is great. The show keeps bringing
us back to "ordinary people," the Latino priest, the guy with a
conscience at the plant, the kids playing in the park (who turn out to
be the Not-Dad 1 and Not-Dad 2). Because that's what's
really at stake. Life, "just" ordinary life, the fight to save it in the
future against the machines, the fight to save it in the present
because fighting the battle itself turns you into a battle robot.
descensus Averno facilis est