Torchwood Season 2, eps 5-8

Who would have thought after several depressing episodes, Torchwood could turn around and come out with a couple of episodes that are strangely life-affirming?

( Spoilers are mentioned herein. )

The two most recent episodes are my favorites of the season, and it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Sarah Connor Chronicles

Sorry about the length. I would do more LJ-cutting, but I want people to be able to read the review in general without spoilers (or at least, spoilers for beyond the first half hour of the first episode), having the choice to see the spoilers if they've seen the show already or just don't care. There's no way to nest cuts, so it has to be this way.

I'll admit, when I first heard about the plan to make a Terminator TV series, I was skeptical. A Terminator without Ah-nuld, or Linda Hamilton? And I remember what happened when someone decided to make a Robocop TV series, after all. I doubted that Sarah Connor Chronicles (a name you just can't say three times fast) would be a patch on the quality of the movies, because even though special effects have improved (particularly due to Moore's Law), you just couldn't make an action-adventure series anywhere near as intense as the movies on a TV series budget—or with network TV BS&P, even in this fairly relaxed era.

But then I learned that John Connor would be played by the kid who played the cheerleader's cameraman in the first season of Heroes, and another character would be played by Summer Glau, whose autistic asskicker River Tam was one of many great things about Firefly and Serenity. These were both actors whose prior roles I had enjoyed, and the pilot episodes were available for free or cheap on the iTunes Music Store, and I hadn't tried out iTunes video before anyway, so I figured why not give it a shot.

And I had to admit, the pilot did have its good points. There was a decent amount of action, staged in such a way as not to suffer from the TV seies constraints, and there were also a number of references back to the first two Terminator movies. And there was a rather clever ( spoiler for the end of the first episode. )

The first few episodes after that were a bit disjointed, with a number of loose ends that haven't yet been tied up. For example, ( Spoiler )

? And even though the producers said it wouldn't be a "Terminator of the week" show, a couple of episodes made it seem like one. But with episodes 6 and 7, the series has really started coming together, with revelations that are interesting and sometimes chilling.

There's a lot of continuity back to T1 and T2, also, with no major contradictions that I've seen apart from some problems with dates. And the lack of Ah-nuld doesn't really hinder things as long as there's no need to show his character. In fact, it makes more sense that every Terminator would look different, as there's no better way to tell when someone's a machine than when he looks exactly like some other machine.

As to the fundamental question of it being "just another evil robot show," it's actually not. It's really not a "Terminator of the week" action show after all. It's not action-adventure, it's a suspense drama. It builds on and expands a part of Terminator 2 that more or less vanished from the film early on: a study of the effects on your family life of the knowledge that your kid is going to grow up to save mankind if the machines don't kill him first. T2 was that for about a third of the way, then it turned into a nonstop slam-bang action-adventure movie. SCC is more about the downtime, what the characters do when they're not at all-out war with the machines. There are skirmishes and battles, occasional action set pieces, but not the sort of all-out, unstoppable-machine-that-knows-just-where-you-are stuff from the movies.

There are only three major weak points besides the somewhat slow start. One of them is that, though the special effects and makeup are wonderful ( most of the time, they fall flat in one specific spoilery situation. )

But their budget, though big for TV, is not limitless, and as Achilles' heels go, that one's not so bad.

The other major weak point is, in my opinion, only a weak point if you're looking to pick nits. Summer Glau's character is a Terminatrix named (in a nod to franchise-creator James that you'll either find clever or annoying) Cameron, who has to learn about the human condition in order to pass for one. As the comparison is somewhat inevitable, it is fairly accurate to say that she comes off as "River Tam meets Commander Data," and is thus tempting to accuse the show of a lack of originality.

But lest we forget, Data was by no means original himself; he drew on Roddenberry's failed 1970s pilot The Questor Tapes, which in turn blatantly ripped off Isaac Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw from The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and the Foundation series—and the Terminator franchise has its own claim to the archetype in Ah-nuld's character from T2. ("I know now why you cry…but it is something I can never do.") Glau pulls off the role extremely well, undoubtedly drawing on her experience portraying the similarly-isolated-from-humanity River Tam. She is so good as this kind of character, in fact, that it mildly worries me that she might get typecast. And just like in the Serenity movie, she can still kick serious butt.

The last weak point is that, though the show exposits as much as it reasonably can about backstory, you'll really get the most out of it if you're conversant enough with Terminators I & II to appreciate the full significance of the many little references and character cameos. There's even (what I believe to be) a throwaway reference to S.M. Stirling's tie-in novel Infiltrator. To Terminator fans such as myself, this isn't a weakness but a strength, but I expect it could prove offputting to people who've never seen or don't remember the earlier films.

I could go on, but this post is about long enough. My verdict is that after a slow start, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has started getting considerably better, and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here. Unfortunately, due to the writers' strike, it only ended up with 9 episodes this season—the two-hour season finale airs Monday—and its eventual fate is still uncertain. Still, I advise checking it out. You can find it online in the usual "free" places, and on the iTunes Music Store pretty cheaply; the most recent three episodes are available on Fox's website.

Character questionnaire meme

Eek! I can has been tagged by liralen! I have no intention of turning this LJ into a memefest, but given that it's a writing meme, I find it hard to resist.

1. Choose a few of your own characters.
2. Make them answer the following questions.
3. Feel free to go ahead and add some questions yourself!!
4. Then tag three people.

( Shelly the Aegis Librarian )

Tagging: jarodrussell, masonk, demiurgent. As always, if you're tagged you can ignore it, and if you're not tagged you can pretend you were tagged if you want to.