Sarah Connor: TSTL

Big sigh. Spoilers ahead, btw...

In the never ending quest for something new to watch in my 'copious' spare time, I sat down with DH last night to check out Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on FOX. [We recorded it from last week and finally had a chance to watch the first two episodes.]

Now I recall the scrappy heroine from the movies who went from '80s big hair chick to hard bitten resistance fighter in the space of a few short hours, and I liked her. Thrust into a bizarre reality, Sarah Connor kicked ass and took names in order to protect her future son, who would one day save the human race.

Nice premise. Of course, they made it into a TV show. And they naturally left most of their brains out in the parking lot.

Why is the 'new' Sarah Connor TSTL? Well, it's not just her, per se, but let's start with using the alias Sarah Reese. Come on folks. Reese was the guy who got her pregnant - her adult son's best friend from the future who came back to 'save' her and inadvertantly became his best friend's father. As a fugitive, you might want to get over yourself and NOT use a name that would link you to your future/past.

Next, if you're a fugitive, why oh why would you enroll your teenage son in public school for heaven's sake? Then he's in the system. If he shows up one day with a bullet wound, don't you think the school nurse might be alarmed? Ever hear of home schooling?

Now, those things are dumb enough. Most of the second episode involves Sarah and the new friendly Terminator [played by Summer Glau of Firefly] pounding it into young John's head that he shouldn't leave the house. Of course, being a teenager, he must do exactly what his mother tells him not to do [granted, he's a kid, but he grew up knowing he was not safe anywhere. You'd think he'd 'get it' by now.] He goes, where else, to the mall. Where there will be a lot of people, because it's better to be recognized by hundreds in a place where there are security cameras all over the place, than to mosey down to the local mom and pop to pick up a soda and some chips, ya know?

He goes into a computer store and starts looking up his mom's ex boyfriend while the big screen monitor behind him displays everything he's looking at. A helpful sales clerk [can you tell this is fiction?] explains to him what a jerk he is and then he leaves and goes to the ex-boyfriend's house. Why? Why would you go see someone who could identify you? Because...you're T S T L??

Oh, the best is the time travel - PYT, [pretty young terminator] jumps Sarah and John [alias Sarah and John] into the future [conveniently 2007] and when Sarah demands to know why, PYT says, 'Because you die in 2004.' Oh.

Of what?

Cancer. So they jumped over Sarah's having cancer? Unless they jumped over whatever it was that caused her to get cancer, she still probbaly has it, so what was the point of jumping through time? Because now they don't have to spend all that money making everything look like 2000, I suppose.

If they really wanted to end the whole thing, they should send someone back in time to right before the first Terminator showed up and be prepared to blow his shiny metal ass to Kingdom come and keep doing that every time a new terminator shows up.

Ah well. I may take in another episode or two, but odds are I'll spend too much time nitpicking to really enjoy the show. I don't think it will be long before it's terminated.