John (Thomas Dekker) and Sarah (Lena Headey) watch chess in THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES: QUEEN'S GAMBIT(2008).
© Fox

Mania Grade: A
Episode: Queen's Gambit
Starring: Lena Headey, Summer Glau, Thomas Dekker, Richard T. Jones, Garret Dillahunt,
Written By: Natalie Chaidez
Directed By: Matt Earl Beesley
Network: Fox
Series: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES: Queen's Gambit

When this series first started, I really wanted to like it but in the end was fairly disappointed with the execution of the first couple of episodes. Last week’s episode and this one are setting a new trend of improvement that really has me excited for the future, pun intended. There have been times when shows go through a retooling with new writers and viewers can usually tell. This time though it feels like the writers have just upped their game. The characters are getting more development and everyone seems to have something important to do. I love that we got a little back-story of John and Sarah’s training even if the “jungle” looked a little like a forest section of a state park. I also liked seeing Sarah working out even if she is still so skinny it’s hard to believe she could even do one pull up. These sequences are moving the series in a great direction as far as character development is concerned. I do still wish Sarah and John were on the run more, because this thematically would be more interesting to me. I’d love to see John develop his leadership skills without having the easy access that he currently has to followers in the high school. With that said though, the writers are making the high school sequences interesting and I’m intrigued by the characters being developed in the high school. To synopsize, I’d like to have seen the creators do something a little different with the characters but what they are doing appears to have legs and has me interested more than I expected back around episode two.

This episode finds Goode back with a new Turk, and a new development partner. If Sarah knows anything she should know that truly changing the future is complicated and with Goode alive the future she hoped to stop could still happen. I really need to see Sarah deal with this situation of whether to kill someone who’s an unknowing participant in the creation of SkyNet. She’s never really faced this situation, even in the films she was rescued from it. Again this week just as it seems that Goode would have to be killed someone else does the job. Even before that Sarah commented that Cameron would kill him if the situation called for it. I would love to see Cameron do something like this even against Sarah and John’s wishes in favor of her original mission parameters created of course by John. She’s done it a little here and there such as when she stopped John from trying to help the teenager that committed suicide.

Speaking of the girl that killed herself, I’m a bit tired of her story and I hope we have seen the end of it. The story served as a device to get Cameron and John involved with other students but now it’s time for it to be done. We never saw the girl enough to truly care about her so as a plot device her death was fine but now it’s enough. The best scene tied to her story though was Cameron’s meeting with the guidance counselor. Her answers to his questions were priceless and when she turned the tables on him by asking him if there’s anything he’d like to tell her I loved it. As I mentioned earlier, I did like seeing John interact with the other students he interacts with though. So again the suicide did serve its purpose.

The big revelation in the episode is that the last resistance fighter from the future is John’s uncle. I’m not sure how I feel about this though. I’ll just have to see how it plays out. I’ve been expecting for a while to see Sarah’s ex come into the fold and having Derek wounded created the perfect opportunity. The question is will he have a part with some weight or will he just appear when someone gets hurt? Here’s a complaint; what about having some fights that are more than just the two Terminators slam each other against available walls? I know more happened in the final fight than that but that was the majority of what happened in the fight and every fight so far. Summer Glau is very graceful due to her ballet training as we’ve seen in Firefly and Serenity so why not take advantage of that? I know these Terminator’s are supposed to be heavy metal but wouldn’t it be interesting if part of Cameron’s advancement was that she could be nearly indestructible but also light on her feet and able to fight in many different styles? With every complaint in this episode though comes potential for something interesting. What will the FBI agent do with the Terminator hand? Finally seeing Cameron looking at the Terminator’s brain was interesting. She knows this brain is similar to her own and it appears that she has issues with killing this machine. Cameron’s consideration of whom and what she is was also played on in an amusing way at the robot show when she interacted with the primitive robots. This episode was full of really great stuff, much improved over the first two episodes and a further evolution of last week’s solid episode. I’m really impressed with the improvements in the series and hope the trend continues.