Monday, October 20, 2014

quick note on Sarah Connor Chronicles

Wow, "Goodbye to All That" was one of the most heartbreaking episodes of anything I've ever seen on television, and this is a show about fucking killer robots for Christ's sake. The acting, the writing, the directing -- everything. They also solved the Voiceover Problem, HEARTBREAKINGLY, by having Wee!Martin and Sarah read aloud from the Oz book. That was brilliant.

This ep also really confirms my feeling that the show is actually critiquing, if not downright deconstructing, a lot of the action-movie myths and cliches -- not just Derek's brutal detailing of Kyle carrying the wounded soldier for six hours (Brian Austin Green is shattering in this ep), but his story about the deer, Martin's future death, "We all die for you" -- and the counterpoint of Sarah reading the storybook to the child she's trying to protect. And the title from Robert Graves's memoir -- well, that's just perfect.


I wasn't as crazy about "The Tower is Tall but the Fall is Short," i.e. "Everybody Goes to Therapy," but Thomas Dekker is quite as heartbreaking as Green was in the previous ep. (And wait, is the show now saying that John did kill the guy in the finale, not Sarah? Because that actually does work.) But my girl Shirl totally redeemed herself from the uneasiness I was feeling about her rather stiff performance (I know, I know, she's supposed to be stiff, but at times it seemed to be tipping over from "deliberate" into "non-actor freezing up") with just two fucking words: "Cow's blood." Oh, we howled. People who think this show is grim and humourless just don't fucking get it.

(Come to think of it, I've seen Shirley Manson in taped interviews where she was bubbly and charming and very warm, so I think, rather like Lena Headey, she's playing stiff and stoic against type -- which interests me because I wonder how much I'm projecting my own cultural bias about women, especially mothers, here. The men are the ones emoting and falling down and barely keeping up, the women are the ones gritting their teeth and just keeping on fucking going.)