September 8, 2008

By Brian Seiler

Where we left off:  The Turk, a “supercomputer” that looks like three hard drives in a NAS box, is on the loose, Cromardie the super-robot is murdering people to the tune of a bad Johnny Cash song, and Cameron – the other super-robot – gets blown up in a car bomb.

And Then:  You know, the funny thing about car bombs and ultra-titanium indestructible robot monsters is that they’re not really a very intimidating combination.  Add that to the fact that a science fiction television program without its young hot chick performs about as well as a deep sea diver without his scuba tank and it’s fairly obvious that Cameron is going to come through intact.  The new season picks up where the old season left off, with John Connor and his mother Sarah butting heads in traditional coming of age fashion, Sarah being conspicuously more attractive than she was in the movies, and nobody trusting the robot that continually pulls their grits out of the freezer.

Unexpected Addition:  Shirley Manson – you know, the singer from Garbage – shows up looking like some strange combination of an escaped lizard monster and one of Hillary Clinton’s discarded pantsuits.  Unfortunately, the twist at the end of the show gets revealed early in the precedings, as all educated folks know that anybody wearing a nehru jacket is, by definition, from the future.  All of that would have been fine, of course, if she could have settled on an accent (I can’t tell how hard she’s trying, but her Irish comes through at extremely odd times), or if her last scene hadn’t been written by rejects from the nightmare factory.  Creepy frog women and urinals do not mix.  That’s the stuff therapy sessions are made of.

On the Whole:  The show’s biggest problem in its initial run was its pacing, which was a little fast by television serial standards.  A long introduction to the new season does its best to cover all the plot points from what came before, but ultimately fails.  Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles still has all the big action you’d expect (along with the expenses), but only time will tell whether it will perform well enough to justify its budget, let alone the costs of my future psychiatric care.  Also, let’s all hope that Cameron was lying when she started shouting about loving John or this series could get really weird, really fast.  Bad pornographic Japanese cartoon weird.

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