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The highly rated and surprisingly excellent Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is back for a second season. But if the first episode is any indication, we're in for a rough ride.
Spoiler Alert! The following will be a full recap of the episode that reveals pretty much every important event in the episode. If you haven't seen it yet, avert your eyes.
The Season One finale concluded by placing Cameron in a vehicle rigged to explode and then revealing the actual identity of Sarkissian as he walks away from the explosion, looking back ominously. This ending could have set up the first episode of Season Two to be all about Sarkissian and getting the Turk, but they squandered that potential by doing something really bizarre with the opening sequence.
At the conclusion of Season One, we see Sarkissian walking away from the Connor residence as the bomb goes off, as if it was merely some sort of a warning strike. In the Season Two opener, however, Sarkissian and one of his thugs burst into the house with guns and start threatening John and Sarah. Cameron slowly wakes up and limps into the house, dispatching Sarkissian's thug while being really careless with a stray container of kerosene and a lit Zippo. When she gets into the room with John and Sarah, Sarkissian is dead. Okay, I'm going to stop right there.
WTF?!? He's the owner of the Turk, clearly pissed off that his hard drive was stolen, they made a huge deal of revealing his identity in the very last moments of the Season One finale, and right in the opening sequence for Season Two they kill him off-screen? This guy could have been a great villain for at least an episode or two. What a bunch of wasted potential.
But it's not over yet! As we see through Cameron's eyes, the screen reveals to us what is by far the lamest plot twist the series has yet undergone. In the explosion, Cameron's chip was somehow damaged in such a way as to reverse her programming so that her goal is now to terminate John instead of protect him. Okay, first of all, I don't know what universe it is where physical damage to a processing unit alters software code in a way that changes the function of the code without just completely breaking the program, but hey, suspension of disbelief, whatever, I get it. So when Cameron raises a gun to John, the messy fire situation she left downstairs causes a conveniently timed explosion, giving Sarah and John time to escape.
One thing I have to mention before going on: Even with the wasted character potential and dumb plot elements in this sequence, it still could have been one hell of an intense, edge-of-the-seat experience, except that the director decided to roll the entire sequence in '80s-style slo-mo with no audio, as a downright terrible song serves as the soundtrack. Seriously, what the hell were they thinking? This doesn't make the scene "artsy," it doesn't give it a "surreal" feel, it just takes all of the suspense and all of the intensity and strips it away, leaving nothing but the naked stupidity of the writing to gawk at.
For most of the rest of the episode, John and Sarah are running away from Cameron and realize they have to kill her. This is a good time to explain why I think this was a lame plot twist. First of all, Reese warned about this so many times and there were so many allusions to the possibility of it happening in the first season that all sense of "Oh @!$%#!!" is removed from the event. It was foreshadowed to the extent that it wasn't "shocking" as was undoubtedly the intention, but merely vaguely surprising. And for most of the rest of the episode, I spent the entire time wondering how much the show was going to suck without Cameron in the picture anymore. Now, I'm no producer, but as far as I know, "Man, this show is going to suck from now on" is not the sort of thing that should be going through a viewer's head when an important alteration to the plot has been made.
In the meantime, Derek and Charley are trying to find John and Sarah. Eventually they all meet up again and John and Sarah have managed to turn off Cameron by removing her chip. John "repairs" the physical damage to the chip by hand (more ridiculous suspension of disbelief) and against his mother's wishes, puts the chip back in to revive her instead of incinerating her. She wakes up, the Terminate command is overridden (although it's not really clear whether this happens because of John's "repair" job on the chip, or because Cameron has some sort of rudimentary affection for John for saving her life), and Cameron's back to normal. Whew. They almost made the show really suck. Good save, especially the bit with the Terminate Override.
The most notable subplot, however, is that some disposable third-party character now has ahold of the Turk for some reason (this is never explained, unless I just missed it), and has found a buyer in the form of the CEO of a large tech company.
Here's another stopping point. The casting for this show has always been brilliant. Lena Headey is amazing as Sarah Connor, Thomas Dekker is the first person I've seen who can play the part of a young John Connor without coming off as a whiney bitch, and Summer Glau is the perfect badass-machine-with-a-deceptive-exterior. And even all of the supporting characters are well-cast, from Ellison to Chromartie all the way to Andy Goode. So what I really want to know (and this is going to be harsh) is who the @!$%# died to put in charge the moron who thought it was a good idea to cast the lead singer of Garbage in this role?
First off, from the white outfit and the heavy makeup to the fiery red hair and dumb hairstyle, she looks like she just walked out of a comic book. She sticks out like a sore thumb on this show. Furthermore, the Scottish accent doesn't work well for her character at all, and to top it all off - not to doubt the girl's creative talent in other venues - she can't act her way out of a music video. Her line delivery ranges from wooden to hammy, with nothing natural in between, and that added to the ridiculous appearance and distracting accent makes for possibly the worst new character I've ever seen on a TV show. And in the final moments of the episode, it's revealed - in a spectacularly poorly-written scene which really served no purpose at all other than to make the reveal - that she's a T-1000. Why?
If you couldn't tell, I'm supremely disappointed. In fact, no, supremely disappointed doesn't even begin to cover it. I absolutely loved the first season of this series. A friend of mine told me that, against all odds, yes, the Terminator TV series was actually worth watching, so I gave it a shot, and wow, he was right. It quickly became my favorite series behind Battlestar Galactica, and I've been waiting for season two with bated breath. But this premiere was an absolute catastrophe of an episode. I can only hope the show makes a swift recovery, because what I'm seeing so far doesn't look promising.
