Brikar

Season One
Starring: Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker, Summer Glau
Developed by Josh Friedman

Episodes
Ignoring the events of "Rise of the Machines", the TV series picks up after "Terminator 2: Judgment Day". Sarah Connor and her son, John, future leader of mankind's resistance against Skynet and it's human-hunting machine army, are living life under aliases. Sarah has become involved with Charlie Dixon, an EMT. After Charlie asks her to marry him, Sarah freaks and she and John move to a new town. At school, John meets Cameron Phillips, ostensibly just your average teenage girl.

But when a Terminator named Cromartie shows up at John's school and opens fire, Cameron reveals her true nature: she's an infiltrator unit sent back through time to protect John. As Cromartie and the FBI close in on the Connors, Cameron puts into motion a radical plan to alter the future: she and the Connors jump nearly a decade into the future, from the 1990s to the year 2007, with new aliases and the resources to finally fight the future.

The first few episodes of "Sarah Connor Chronicles" are decent enough. It's not until about halfway through this 9-episode, strike-shortened season that things really kick into gear and the show starts pulling together a rather compelling narrative. Imagine if the temporal cold war from "Star Trek: Enterprise" had actually been done right - here, both the resistance and the Skynet army send back agents to various points in time, trying to shift and maneuver the outcome to their own liking. Though multiple Terminators show up over the course of the nine episodes, the show manages to avoid becoming a "Terminator-of-the-week" mentality. Each machine seems to serve a greater purpose to the narrative, building layers of the plan rather than simply showing up, being dealt with and not mattering.

At the center of it is Cromartie, who manages to be both compelling and creepy. The audience is kept guessing as to what his plan is. On the opposite side is FBI agent James Ellison, who slowly begins to unravel the truth about the Connors and Cromartie and wrestles with his own faith.

The big surprise, of course, is Brian Austin Green, who shows up partway through the season as Derek Reese, John's uncle from the future. Green gives a great performance, and adds a lot to the mythos of the show, expanding the "Terminator" universe in new and exciting ways. We get more glimpses of the future, and the start of the war against the machines, through him.

There are some misteps - Summer Glau's terminator character, Cameron, seems to change a great deal between the pilot and the subsequent episodes. She's less human-seeming and more machinelike, though her character arc is one of discovery regarding human behavior and a soul. The idea of a Terminator learning to dance is the sort of thing that sounds retarded on paper, but seen in execution here is actually quite well done and intriguing.

Overall, it takes a few episodes for this series to get going, but once it does, it manages to be a worthy entry into the "Terminator" series, proving that the concept can work well on a smaller scale and a weekly basis. It manages to do what the movies haven't - that is, not being exactly the same thing three times over. It's smaller and more intimate, more concerned with developing characters, and in planting long-term seeds for a war that's taking place across not just the nuclear-ravaged battlefields of the future, but of time itself.

VIDEO
As a TV show, even one with a pretty big budget, this show will likely never look as good as it's 100-million-dollar-plus feature film brethren. That said, despite a few shots in the pilot that look terrible, "Sarah Connor Chronicles" looks pretty great. There are a few shots in the pilot that are overly grainy, but I can't tell if this is done for stylistic purposes. My guess is leaning toward not, since the effect is never repeated again, even in other action sequences in the same episode. For the rest of the episodes, the video is clean and sharp with good color and black levels.

AUDIO
Again, this show will never sound as good as the movies. But for a TV show, the 5.1 Surround track is dang good. Bass levels are solid and the effects and dialogue are always clear. Bear McCreary's score sounds good, too, though personally, I don't think his work is as good here as it is on "Battlestar Galactica".

EXTRAS
I have to give this set serious props for the wealth of bonus material here.

The main extra here is a making of doc that's rather in-depth. It's pretty well done compared to the usual lame talking-heads itty-bitty featurettes you find on, say, a $130 "Star Trek" boxed set... Anyway, well-done and very informative. There are also audio commentaries, but I haven't listened to them. There's an extended version of episode 7, but the inserted footage is rough. This isn't a fully-completed extended version. Also included in the box are deleted scenes, none of which are earth-shattering in any way; a gag reel that's funny enough but nothing on the level of, say, "Firefly" bloopers; and cast auditions, though Summer Glau's is actually her practicing a ballet dance routine.

I picked this set up at Best Buy for $20, and it came in a very nice Steelbook package with far better cover art than the standard edition. Very slick.

OVERALL
Solid audio/video, great features and an enjoyable entry into the "Terminator" franchise make this an easy recommendation as Season 2 begins on Fox.

SCORE:
Season: B
Video: B+
Audio: B+
Extras: A
Overall: B+

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Brikar

Addendum: Summer Glau is smokin' hot in this.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Stag

Yup, she sure is...

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"I want to do a motorboat on Shatner's manboobs" - Sam Cogley