May 20 2009
Sarah Connor Chronicles Offically Canceled, Mourning Period Begins
After months of rumors that it was inevitable, Fox finally pulled the plug on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Like most people, I was skeptical when this series began, but now I find myself frustrated and saddened by the cancellation of what I thought was the best show on television. Great shows get canceled all the time - see Arrested Development, for example - and T:SCC’s continuously awful ratings doomed the show to the dreaded Friday night time slot shortly before its demise. It’s a real shame, because T:SCC had well-developed characters, hard core science fiction themes, and was the perfect expansion of James Cameron’s Terminator mythology. Spoilers ahead.
One of the best things about T:SCC is that it embraces and celebrates all that made the first two Terminator films so great while totally neglecting the third movie. Cameron’s original themes are kept intact, and the story of Sarah Connor picks up right where you’d expect it to. If she had escaped from an institution and blew up a ton of crap in T2, then wouldn’t she be a fugitive? Of course, and that’s exactly what she is. In addition to hiding from Terminators, John and Sarah have to hide from the authorities. And if the authorities find them, that makes the job of the Terminators that much easier.
So what made this show different from the movies? Isn’t it just a case of an advanced model of Terminator sent back in time by John Connor to protect his past self from Terminators? Well, not really. There is a Terminator protecting John - played brilliantly by Summer Glau - but in the very first episode, she, John, and Sarah all jump forward in time, accidentally bringing the head of a T-800 with them. Temporarily, because of the jump, John and Sarah are able to evade the authorities. They decide to take down Skynet, going on the offensive.
The character development was terrific, too. Sarah becomes more and more obsessive, and the idea of calling her “crazy” seems increasingly accurate each week. John goes from a whiny, scared boy who listens to his mother to a brave, aggressive man who tells others what to do. The show took its time with John’s arc, too, making it all the more believable. Most interesting of all, though, was the development of Cameron, the “female” Terminator sent back to protect John. As a model we’ve yet to see, she’s far more advanced - at least intuitively - than the other machines, so much so that you really have to question if she’s “alive” or has a soul. The same question can be posed toward Terminator-turned-Online Computer System John Henry.
Which gets us to the best part of the show - the hard core science fiction. Gone is the Reagan-era action, replaced with questions about life and faith - they type Philip K. Dick and Asimov used to ask. There’s discussions of the singularity, and the issues of multiple timelines and parallel universes are addressed. You could tell that the writers really did their homework and plotted out a course of how we got from the present to the future in terms of artificial intelligence. Heck, even Moore’s Law is mentioned at one point. If all the science babble isn’t your thing, though, there was more than enough suspense in the show, and maybe coolest of all, a T-1000 as a major player.
If you haven’t seen the show and are skeptical - as I was - that this would be a crappy action series, you’re totally wrong. T:SCC was the smartest show on television that actually gave a crap about the groundwork laid down by James Cameron. There were layers to every episode, and it’s a damn shame that the show ended when it did - the Season 2 finale was a mind f*ck the likes of which no one could have expected. I’m looking forward to seeing Terminator: Salvation, and if it’s half as interesting as T:SCC was, it’ll be incredible.
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You’ve got to be kidding me. It would take me a while to explain all the ridiculous conclusions you draw here, but suffice to say TSCC has almost none of the key elements that compelled people to watch T1 and T2. That’s why they started with 18 mil viewers and ended with…3. The writing was trite, amateurish, pretentious, and pseudointellectual science-fiction hackery.
You can pooh-pooh the “Reagan-era” action (jingoism?) all you want, but the first two films had a lot more - stuff that TSCC was missing in its neverending quest to trample on the wishes of Terminator fans.
@ Yoshi
Correlating a show’s viewers with its quality is about the worst argument you can make.
Thanks for reading.
You’re welcome.
The point was about the quality of the writing. I added the comment about viewers as a consequence of that.
@ Yoshi
I know, but you’re assigning causation to correlation. It’s an assumption, and a weak one.
But hey, show’s off the air, so whatever.