The Time Tourists

[Review] - “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” Episode 1

I just finished watching the first episode of Fox’s latest action drama, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Since it pertains to time travel, it warrants a review. But since I don’t want to talk to my future counterpart about this show (since I don’t want him to accidentally give away the fate of the series), I’m going to go this one alone and share my thoughts while they’re fresh. If I review any future episodes of the show, I will stick to the same guideline.

So, with that said, let me begin with a summary of the premise of the show. If you haven’t seen it and want to be surprised, you might want to skip this review for now, since there are several major twists in the story I’ll be bringing up.

Let’s begin with a review of the facts in the Terminator universe to date:

The Terminator (1984) was about a killing machine that was sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor, who, in the year 2029 is leading a resistance movement against a machine empire called Skynet. The machines reason that if they kill the mother of John Connor, he will never be born and they will win the war, so they send a T-101 “Terminator” cyborg back in time. The future John Connor responds by sending back one of his comrades, Kyle Reese, who at least knows what Sarah looks like because of a photograph John has shown him.

But the thing is that this Terminator isn’t exactly well-informed or precise; he looks up Sarah Connor in the phone book and, finding three of them, decides to err on the side of caution and kills two other women before he arrives at John Connor’s mother. Reese meets up with Sarah Connor, teaches her how to make pipe bombs and helps her learn to fight back. Reese is also smitten with Sarah and they have a brief romantic encounter just hours before the Terminator storms in, gets its flesh exoskeleton burned off, and eventually kills Reese. Sarah defeats the Terminator by crushing it in a machine press, and she heads off for Mexico, where she reveals to the audience that she’s pregnant with a son… Reese’s child. To cement the inevitability of the future, a boy takes a picture of Sarah at a gas station; it’s the same picture John Connor shows Reese in the far future.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) takes place when John Connor is ten years old (presumably in 1994) and living with foster parents while his mother is stuck in a mental institution, believed to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Once again, a Terminator model 101 appears, freshly reprogrammed and sent by John’s future self to protect him from a machine called the T-1000, which is made of liquid metal and pretty much impossible to destroy. The Terminator and John go retrieve Sarah, and the three track down Miles Bennett Dyson, the creator of Skynet (which, according to the Terminator, is supposed to go online in 1997 and very shortly thereafter begin launching nuclear missiles at mankind in an event called “Judgment Day”). The group heads over to Cyberdyne Systems, where they destroy the place, as well as an arm and a CPU chip recovered from the last Terminator. Dyson dies in the process, and the Connors and the Terminator eventually destroy the T-1000 by dropping it into a vat of molten metal. The T-101 destroys itself the same way, so that there will be no trace of future technology left for someone to use to create Skynet, and the film concludes with Sarah saying that “the future is not set”

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) doesn’t make any sense, since it purports that Skynet’s awakening is delayed until 2004, but that future events are otherwise unchanged. Once again, a T-101 is sent back, and this time, a T-X model (popularly known as the “Terminatrix”) is after John Connor and the people who will become his lieutenants. Sarah Connor is dead, but her casket is full of guns, just in case Judgment Day decides to happen after it was originally planned. A whole lot of stuff gets blown up, and John Connor eventually winds up in a mountain shelter where he finds out that Skynet is basically the internet and, as Judgment Day starts going on, John picks up a HAM radio and takes charge. There are other plot points (such as the origin of John Connor’s wife, the Air Force taking over the Skynet project, and other stuff), but it’s not important because the movie is stupid.

The producers behind The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2007) clearly agree with my assessment, because they’ve basically taken the stance that the third movie never happens. I’m not sure that they are really keeping well in line with the other two films, either, since the chronology seems to be a little bit off and the theme of the show is not “the future is not set,” but rather, the far bleaker, “no one is safe.” So, think of this as being like Smallville or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where it ties in to the themes of its parent films, but it’s a completely different entity.

The first episode begins in 1999, where John and Sarah Connor are living a fairly normal life under the alias John and Sarah Reese. Sarah’s engaged to some guy, and John’s fifteen years old and in high school. Sarah has a nightmare about a Terminator killing John, and the two flee to rural New Mexico, where they start over again. John meets a cute young girl, but he doesn’t have time to get to know her, because his substitute teacher cuts a gun out of his thigh and starts shooting up the classroom, hitting the girl with several shots. John runs, and the rest of the class sees that the substitute has a robotic leg and glowing red eyes. I’m assuming this will be a plot point in later episodes, since the police and FBI later mention that 19 witnesses saw it.

John runs out to the parking lot, and is nearly killed by the substitute Terminator. But suddenly, the machine is run over by a truck. The cute girl from the class opens the door and says “Come with me if you want to live.” (The episode goes on to crib many more lines and twists from the films, don’t worry.)

More fighting ensues as Sarah gets involved, and eventually, the cute girl Terminator takes them to a time machine and they travel to the year 2007, where they will supposedly be able to stop Skynet once and for all. But since three naked people show up on the LA Freeway (due to the time machine only being able to send back living flesh and not clothing or weapons), Sarah Connor’s face makes the news, and the stage is set for everyone to go ahead and start trying to kill her again.

Now, sure, I can shut my brain off and watch stuff go boom, but from a time travel perspective… what the heck is going on, here? First of all, if Skynet was originally intended to go online in 1997 and didn’t, the future is going to be different, no matter what anyone does to make Skynet magically reappear ten years later. There may not even be a Judgment Day, or a war; the 2007 Skynet may not arrive at the conclusion that humanity needs to be eradicated, nor will it necessarily construct Terminators. The conceit of the show is that yes, it will, but there’s no reasoning behind this assumption.

Second, if John Connor is constantly going through this barrage of Terminators sent from the future to kill him, wouldn’t he and his mother just change their names and identities? How would the machines know who they were? The show attempts to explain around this by having the girl Terminator say “They’ll eventually find you. They always do.” But the Terminators seem to be as ill-equipped as the police in finding the Connors; they sit around and watch computer screens, hoping information about the Connors will appear.

Third, let’s consider the idea of a time machine for a moment here. In the Terminator universe, using a time machine is a one-way ticket; the machine doesn’t travel with you. That’s fine. But if the time machine can send multiple beings to any point in time, why can’t Skynet send back an entire army of T-1000s to end this John Connor nonsense once and for all? And if John Connor’s so good at reprogramming these things, why doesn’t he send his own army of Terminators back to 2007 to destroy Skynet? Or, for that matter, why doesn’t Skynet send MORE Terminators to 1984 to aid the first one, since it clearly didn’t succeed in killing Sarah Connor? What’s Skynet afraid of… messing up history?

Finally, the whole school shooting scene, aside from being awfully obvious about trying to generate plot points, makes the least sense of all. In the scene, the Terminator poses as a substitute teacher and grimly carves a pistol out of its thigh as it reads the roll. When he gets to “John Reese,” he starts shooting. This scene might have sounded good in the writers’ room, but it doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t the Terminator just gain John’s trust, keep him after class, and kill him with a quick blow to the head when there are no witnesses? Why doesn’t the Terminator just detonate itself and blow up the entire school? Why doesn’t the Terminator shoot from under the desk? And, if Terminators can smuggle weaponry underneath their skin, why can’t they use the same technique to bring future technology with them when they travel back in time?

I guess the problem is that the entire Terminator franchise isn’t about subtlety; it’s about big action sequences and invincible bad guys who can smash through walls and get run over repeatedly by trucks. As such, the show delivers, though I doubt it will be delivering for long if it can’t come up with some better plots and fresher ideas. But while we’re on the subject, let me offer my own take on how this show could have been done right.

First of all, the show would have benefited from beginning in the future, just like all of the Terminator films. But this time, instead of John Connor sending something back in time, the story could have focused on his memories of his mother, and the adventures they had together before she died, while juxtaposing the events of his future war with the 1997 timeline. That would have been interesting.

Second, it would have been interesting if Skynet HAD still been born in August, 1997 due to the efforts of Dyson’s partner, an little-known figure whose work Dyson had been taking credit for during his entire career. The identity of this figure could be kept a secret, and the adventures of John and Sarah in 1997 could have been the fruitless quest to find the man before Judgement Day occurred.

Third, I would have loved to have seen the story do something other than sending single-minded Terminators back in time. As I said before, the obvious idea would have been to send a secret army to assist John and Sarah, only to find that Skynet had sent its own secret army back to prevent its birth from being disrupted. The possibilities of such a story are amazing, especially if the Connors weren’t aware of which models they could trust… and which models were their enemies. (NOTE: Apparently, this does happen in the series, and we’ll see it in the second episode. I’m interested to see how they use the idea of “future emissaries” who are from differing timelines.)

But, ah well. Fox delivered a show that’s derivative of the movies instead of being original. I guess I’ll have to live with what we’ve got. I’ll be watching next week to see if the show gets any better!

TIME TOURISTS SCORE: C