Anyone watch the Sarah Conner....

JustAsking

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I watched the first couple of episodes, but the formula is going to be the same and it's far too predictable. There's only so far you can go with the storyline of running from the terminator, with your own guardian terminator and mother. It's almost so f*cked up that it promotes and glamorizes school shootings, this show needs to be stopped before that becomes something that doesn't shock people anymore. I can see the headlines, "Boy shoots classmates, apparently re-enacting Sarah Conner Chronicles episode".
But you can't beat that "grief counseling" scene with the teenage terminator and the cheesy school counselor, can you? That was pure gold. Such as:

Counselor: "Many kids are saying that you were the last one to see the girl before she died. Is that true?"
Teenage Terminator: "Is what true? That the kids are saying that I was the last one to see her, or that I actually was the last one to see her."
Counselor: (looking a bit rattled): "That you were the last one to see her."
Teenage Terminator: "How could I know if I was the last one to see her."
 

transformer_99

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But you can't beat that "grief counseling" scene with the teenage terminator and the cheesy school counselor, can you? That was pure gold. Such as:

Counselor: "Many kids are saying that you were the last one to see the girl before she died. Is that true?"
Teenage Terminator: "Is what true? That the kids are saying that I was the last one to see her, or that I actually was the last one to see her."
Counselor: (looking a bit rattled): "That you were the last one to see her."
Teenage Terminator: "How could I know if I was the last one to see her."

Sounds a lot like the dialog of the congressional commission interviewing Donald Rumsfeld on C-Span and the circles of bs that he testified to. It makes for witty script writing, except when you consider the subject matter and what's really happening as current events in this nation.
 

DGirl

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I have YET to watch that show.." I don't think I ever will either.." But, hubby's been taping it..."
But, what happened to " MOMMENT of Truth?" That show is OFF already!!? I was getting into that!!!:mad:
 

bobabooey69

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The series is not perfect, but seems to have the soul of the first two films, and completely ignores the horrible, hoooorrible third film...which by itself earns it BIG brownie points in my book.

What does piss me off is that they have not discussed what Terminator model Cameron is. In the films as soon as they encounter the machine they discuss the model and series. The fact this has not been disclosed is stupid.

Anywho...I'll go and be nerdy somewhere else.
 

Lex

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But you can't beat that "grief counseling" scene with the teenage terminator and the cheesy school counselor, can you? That was pure gold. Such as:

Counselor: "Many kids are saying that you were the last one to see the girl before she died. Is that true?"
Teenage Terminator: "Is what true? That the kids are saying that I was the last one to see her, or that I actually was the last one to see her."
Counselor: (looking a bit rattled): "That you were the last one to see her."
Teenage Terminator: "How could I know if I was the last one to see her."

I agree, JA. Cameron (the girl terminator) is the key to this show really working. Her role is to play off of Sarah and John as both quasi-daughter and quasi-sister/girlfriend. The show sort of hinges on her robotic (now) Inabaility to grasp human emotions and pragmatic language skills (social skills and knowing social cues) like sarcasm, personal space, not staring at people, etc. She comes off believably like a bright teenage girl with Autism, but in a way that is not disrespectful to those with the disorder and yet still enabling the writers to have her deliver the corny AHHH-NOLD lines without it being too far over the over the top.
 

bobabooey69

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Good points Lex, and yes Summer Glau is very fun to watch.
I do have to say Lena Heady and the kid also do a very nice job.

The series is still only a few episodes old, I will give it a season to find it's place.
 

JustAsking

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I agree, JA. Cameron (the girl terminator) is the key to this show really working. Her role is to play off of Sarah and John as both quasi-daughter and quasi-sister/girlfriend. The show sort of hinges on her robotic (now) Inabaility to grasp human emotions and pragmatic language skills (social skills and knowing social cues) like sarcasm, personal space, not staring at people, etc. She comes off believably like a bright teenage girl with Autism, but in a way that is not disrespectful to those with the disorder and yet still enabling the writers to have her deliver the corny AHHH-NOLD lines without it being too far over the over the top.
Yes, you described her exactly. Although she is slightly odd, she would not be the wierdest kid in a large highs school. There would certainly be ones with worse social skills, etc. She would not, however, pass the excruciatingly rigorous test for the "cool girls" club, because she is missing typical human reference points right now, and she is certainly not cool. She might never be a "Heather".

But here is where the fun starts, I think. She learns at a fierce rate, and she will certainly surprise everyone. I am still laughing about the grief counselor scene. After the pointlessly brief 3 minutes of counseling, she gets up and says very seriously (but obviously just placating the idiot counselor), "Thank you for the grief counseling. I feel much better now.", without really showing much excitement.

In T2, there was a little bit of this Android-learns-to-be-human stuff when Arnold has those conversations with John about human crying. Its pretty cheesy, but they manage to rescue it with his appropriate use of the "hasta la vista" phrase that John teaches him when he is blowing away the advance terminator.

Summer Glau takes this to a new level, I think where it is both interesting and sometimes very funny. She must be a very funny person in real life. She kinda reminds me of Mary Lynn Rajskub, playing Chloe on 24. When you see Mary Lynn in real life she is so funny you split a gut laughing. I think both of these women ironically use their great sense of the absurd to play these especially bright and almost autistic nerdy girls very convincingly. It gives them a chance to be on the outside looking in at typical superficial social interaction, standing in as a proxy for the viewer.

For example, on 24, Chloe will sometimes say something really insensitive and immediately dissemble with, "Oh, I suppose that is really insensitive, isn't it?". And it is simultaneously funny and endearing at the same time.

Yes, I am a nerd.
 

JustAsking

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I just found this interview with Summer Glau on her Cameron character:

Question: What are the logistics of sort of playing that deadpan? How flat do you have to play it, or is there an inflection that we maybe aren’t picking up necessarily?

Summer Glau: Well, I always told Josh it’s just me trying to be as honest as possible as Cameron. I never want to ask the audience to laugh at me because then it just doesn’t feel real, and so I just approach everything and try to be really sincere, as Cameron would be. She’s so – I think that is what is so funny about her is just that she can’t be anything but genuine. She’s very open, like a child. She absorbs the behavior around her and tries to understand it as best she can, and sometimes it ends up being extremely funny.

 

Mem

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I think the show is pretty good, at least watchable. Maybe it will get better. I don't think that the Terminator chick is a very good actress. I know she is supposed to be a robot like creature, but even then her acting is bad. They need a very good actress to pull it off. I read somewhere that the mom is Australian, she has a pretty good American accent.

When I first watched Heroes I did not like it. Too much storyline on the cheerleader. Later in the season I started watching again and was surprised by how good it was. While I was watching I was thinking "wow this is really good TV".
 

smudgey

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I watched this just to see Summer Glau as the new terminator-type person, but ended up loving the first ep! I'm not sure it will last very long as a series, but as long as my muse Summer stays on, I will watch :)
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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I agree about T and T2. Both were iconic movies.

Remind me NOT to ask what you think of Prison Break! :tongue:

I don't think anything about Prison Break. I've never bothered watching it. I feel about the same way toward television drama as you feel toward comedic films. There's a very short list of TV dramas that were able to hold my interest or that I felt were well-done enough, particularly in terms of writing/story, to be up to my standards. I've also never tried watching Lost. I hate 24. Get bored by most episodes of Star Trek: TNG, The X-Files, and Ghost in the Shell: SAC. Don't care for Law & Order or CSI or any of their spinoffs. I hate ER. Hate Grey's Anatomy. Never "got" Buffy. serial drama just ain't my bag.

The small handful that I have liked?

Gargoyles, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, Firefly... I feel like there's more but that's all I can think of right now. I thought the show "The Kindred," based on the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, could have developed into something good but it wasn't on long before it got canceled.

As a child I used to watch Knight Rider, Transformers, The Dukes of Hazzard, X-Men and a bunch of other shows that haven't really held up very well.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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I agree, JA. Cameron (the girl terminator) is the key to this show really working. Her role is to play off of Sarah and John as both quasi-daughter and quasi-sister/girlfriend. The show sort of hinges on her robotic (now) Inabaility to grasp human emotions and pragmatic language skills (social skills and knowing social cues) like sarcasm, personal space, not staring at people, etc.

This is one thing I thought was dumb about the first episode. Summer Glau was perfectly normal and human in every single way in the scene in which she was introduced. She was actually far more human than she ever was on Firefly or Serenity in that scene and it was interesting seeing her like that. Then, after she was revealed to be a Terminator, she inexplicably became robotic and awkward. wtf? When John asked her about how she was behaving earlier and noted that she seemed different than other Terminators, she said that she was, and I thought maybe she had programming improvements to make her seem more human and was only acting robotic around Sarah and John because they knew who she was. But since then, she hasn't been able to act human again even when it would have been helpful or appropriate.

I was terrified in that first episode with the OUTRAGEOUS setup, when the evil terminator was John's teacher and the good terminator was his classmate/love interest. Oh my god that had some high-level cheese potential. I was thinking it was going to turn into another Buffy, where they combined stupid OC-style high school drama with fighting the forces of evil. dumb. fortunately they didn't go that route, but it was still unforgivable threatening us with the possibility.

other nitpicks:

-one of the things that created drama in the first movie was that they had ONE chance to send something back. Skynet sent back a single terminator. The resistance sent back Kyle Reese. That was it. Nothing else forward or back. Those in the past were cut off from the future.
-in T2, okay, they actually had a chance to send TWO things back. We lied. Fine.
-in T3, the future has been changed. They had another chance to send two more things back apparently. Getting a little corny now... but okay whatever.
-in this show... holy shit... they can send back whatever they want. Terminators. Resistance fighters. guns. equipment. Furthermore, building time machines is so easy you can do it with a small computer and some equipment available in the late 20th century and compact enough to store in a few safety deposit boxes. Forward time travel is now possible as well as reverse time travel, which was never possible before. Drama created in the original story gone.

-the rules of sending back only organic material. they don't stick to this. okay the terminators can get back because they are encased in organic material. Why can't they encase more stuff in organic material? if it's so easy to time travel why not wrap tanks and guns and bombs and huge hunter/killers in skin and send those back? The terminator in episode one was creative enough to hide a gun inside his leg. Skynet's not smart enough to think of this?

-I don't buy for a second that a metal endoskeleton sitting in a bathtub full of skin juice is going to come out looking like a real person, with convincing musculature, skin tone, hair, age marks, wrinkles, etc. lame. Humans are a lot more than just skeletons and skin.

-I really don't like the fact that the plot revolves around them trying to fight Skynet. They could have made this much more interesting as a human interest piece focusing on the relationship between Sarah and John and not straying from the original mythology/timeline.
 

D_Tintagel_Demondong

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This show is already dragging, as most sci-fi serials tend to do (Enterprise, Atlantis, and most especially, Deep Space 9). The serial format doesn't work well with sci-fi. I stopped watching The Journeyman after episode 2 because it already started to become monotonous.

I agree with NIC about the android's sudden change of behavior -- from her human-like coy charm to her analytical, emotionless nature. Since meeting John was the first, and possibly most important, part of her mission, then I suppose she could have been programmed to shut off any redundant characteristics (like personality), after this milestone was accomplished.

Spock, Data, T'Paul, have shown that dispassionate reactions in traumatic situations can be amusing. A good example is when the cyborg got her face smashed into the car's windshield and she phlegmatically said to the occupants, "Please stay calm." I also like her detached practicality, like when she apathetically suggested that Sarah kill the cell phone salesperson, or when she told John to let the teen girl jump from the building. You want to love her and hate her at the same time.

The writers need to recompense the thrill-seeking action fans, but try too hard. Both cyborgs got hit by a car in the same five minutes in episode 2. They have full-spectrum vision but can't see a car coming? Of course, they didn't just get dinged by these cars; it had to be as graphic as possible so that the young male viewers will yell, "Wicked! Did you see that?" This show has barely managed to avoid the cheap shoot-'em-up endings, the outrun-the-explosions, the drive-the-big-truck-through-the-gate, the peel-my-skin-off-my-face-in-the mirror-for-no-good-reason, the you-shoot-at-me-100-times-and-miss-but-I-shoot-you-once-and-get-you-in-the-heart cheesy television action.

The girl cyborg is just another WB-style character, complete with Buffy-style butt kicking (I've seen enough roundhouse kicks, thanks), faces and heads getting shot off, impalements galore, and as much violence as Fox will allow.

John started as a whiner and he's now also a troublemaker. He has become the annoying Scrappy Doo, continuously being bailed out because he doesn't stay out of trouble. I almost wish he'd get shot. The writers seem to want him to grow into his role as a hero, showing his progress as he matures. Unfortunately, until then, we'll have to suffer from his laments about how he has to stay home while everyone else gets to play. How did he become a computer genius anyway? Using his laptop on the kitchen table?
 

Lex

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...
other nitpicks:

-one of the things that created drama in the first movie was that they had ONE chance to send something back. Skynet sent back a single terminator. The resistance sent back Kyle Reese. That was it. Nothing else forward or back. Those in the past were cut off from the future.
-in T2, okay, they actually had a chance to send TWO things back. We lied. Fine.
-in T3, the future has been changed. They had another chance to send two more things back apparently. Getting a little corny now... but okay whatever.
-in this show... holy shit... they can send back whatever they want. Terminators. Resistance fighters. guns. equipment. Furthermore, building time machines is so easy you can do it with a small computer and some equipment available in the late 20th century and compact enough to store in a few safety deposit boxes. Forward time travel is now possible as well as reverse time travel, which was never possible before. Drama created in the original story gone.

-the rules of sending back only organic material. they don't stick to this. okay the terminators can get back because they are encased in organic material. Why can't they encase more stuff in organic material? if it's so easy to time travel why not wrap tanks and guns and bombs and huge hunter/killers in skin and send those back? The terminator in episode one was creative enough to hide a gun inside his leg. Skynet's not smart enough to think of this?
...

I hear you NIC. As a former fan of X-Men comics, I can say that time travel stories tend to do these retcons all the time. In Marvel mythos, going back to change that past never changes the future since that future already happened before you went back to change it. What is does is create a similar, but divergent timeline each time you go back and make significant changes to the past. Think "Days of Future Past" in the X-Men comics and all the subsequent time travel stories that ramped up the amount and things that were displaced in time. The next logical and infuriating step is for people to "jump timelines" And end up in the wrong past or the wrong future.

In keeping with that thinking, you could see how the divergent, yet similar futures would enable the Resistance to do things a little differently. SO far, the future has not been so drastically different to be noticeable to what Kyle told Sarah.

Also--I did not see them transport machinery back. I assumed that the time travel machinery was built here and now by folks who were sent back.

I am not saying that they have not lost the tension of the first two movies--they have. What I am acknowledging is that they have targeted a fanbase who mostly do not have that attention to detail or were ever old enough to remember the first movie the way you and I do.

Maybe I am suspending belief too much, but I am having fun watching this.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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glad you're having fun with the show Lex.

I'm still Tivo'ing it as is. I'm just not very happy with it.

and re: time travel... one of the most challenging things to do in sci-fi, and it almost ends up stupid and with tons and tons of plot holes. So I guess I won't hold it against them too much, but I wish that writers/directors would use this plot device more responsibly/sparingly.
 

JustAsking

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I love the way Cameron answered the guy who called her a really scary robot. He asked what she was made out of and she answered in that unabashed style, "A completely organic outer skin covering a <something or other> titanium alloy battle chassis." And then she just keeps staring at him impassively as if she was talking about the weather.

I am pretty good at suspending disbelief if I am properly entertained. I don't care about the misuse of time travel, etc. It is a guilty pleasure of cheesy kick butt sci fi action that has just enough human/robot interest to make it fun.

I also find John to be somewhat of a whiner, but I suppose they will develop him a bit over time. Both of the women have excellent parts to fill and so far they are doing pretty good with them.

One thing is that they have the good sense not to overuse opportunities for melodrama. At the very end last night, the doctor/ex-boyfriend guy says to Sarah as he turns to go inside, "There's a storm coming." I was totally expecting Sarah to stare off to the horizon distractedly and say to the camera something ominous like "I know there is.". But her style is to also play it somewhat enigmatic and proprietary so she just left it unsaid. She is very attractive but her face also has a lot of character, which they exploit at times like that. There is pleny left unsaid, as they end a scene with her somewhat guarded and distracted expression. Its an efficient and convincing device.

Or maybe I am just easily amused.