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I feel that overall, the show has really improved from its debut. When I saw that next week will be the season finale, I was honestly disappointed. I'm hoping that this show had enough "oomph" to get renewed next season.
There’s some stuff to like about this episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and a few things to complain about too. This week, the FBI agent gets some major advancement in the story arc, almost too much for the first season actually. I expected the agent to stay on the fence leaning towards thinking Sarah is crazy for the rest of this season so she and John would be chased from two sides making for some great parallels in how they deal with the agent versus how they choose to deal with the attacking terminators. But that wasn’t to be. Last week, he recovered the hand of the destroyed terminator and he’s kept it away from the rest of the evidence. There’s not much way he could have such a piece of evidence and at least believe some of Sarah’s story. So he decides to investigate Sarah’s background to learn more about her mission, the one he now believes to be real. While I was disappointed to see him choose her side this early in the series, his research into who Sarah is was interesting. He visited the facility where Sarah was kept and “treated” back at the beginning of Terminator 2 and he got access to the recordings made of Sarah’s sessions. I loved seeing Lena Heady do such a great job with these scenes. Linda Hamilton created these scenes and broke the mold so Lena had big shoes to fill with these scenes and while she wasn’t as intense she did bring a more melancholy sort of presence to them that made the scenes hers rather than an attempt to replicate what’s already been done.
Agent Ellison next visits Sarah’s doctor, who has gone a little crazy after the events of the first three films. He believes in Sarah and what she has said will happen so he’s gone into hiding in fear of the return of the machines. Unfortunately, the creators didn’t get the original actor who played the doctor. It would have been cool to see him in the role again. The exchange between the doctor and Agent Ellison is a bit ridiculous but fun enough. This actually leads to Sarah and Agent Ellison’s first meeting on the series and she’s saving him from a burning cabin. Seeing the doctor get thrown into one of those cells was too much but at least maybe we’ll see him again.
This brings me to Sarah and Cameron and their missions. Sarah is tracking down the hand while Cameron is on a mission to find the new Turk. Both Sarah and Cameron’s missions find success very easily either by information that seems to come out of nowhere or by coincidence. It all just feels too easy for them. Summer Glau has a history in ballet so going undercover as a ballet student came pretty natural to her. It was interesting to see the two sides of this ever evolving terminator as both a heartless killer and now as a graceful ballerina. Even after the mission is over, Cameron continues to practice ballet, perhaps in an attempt to understand the purpose of it? We’ve seen this type evolution of a robot before but I’m starting to enjoy this story arc. For Glau fans you get fan service seeing her both as a ballerina and as a police officer.
While investigating at Agent Ellison’s house Sarah finds the tapes of her time in the institution and she takes one with her. Later we learn that she planned to destroy the tape, which is a pretty easy thing to do, but she put it off long enough for John to find and watch the tape. The tape shows Sarah apparently signing away her role as a parent to John and he gets all ticked off about it. After all of this time why is it so surprising to him? He remembers pretty clearly what happened back in T2 so what’s the problem. This story for him is really lame and it ties up with a sweet little bow at the end too. Oh, as far as John’s uncle, could the creators do any more to make us dislike him?
Overall, I enjoyed this episode. I loved seeing Cameron walk out as her ballet teacher and her thief brother are killed by thugs with no concern at all and then seeing her gracefully doing ballet. I liked the crazy doctor even if much of his story gets too ridiculous. I know some critics complain about Sarah’s narration on each episode but I actually like it. It shows an introspective side of her than continues the previously mentioned melancholy personality. This is a sad Sarah Connor after years of being beat down by having the fate of the world on her shoulders and constantly being on the run. We’ve already established Heady can’t play the angry Sarah that Linda Hamilton played so I’m really settling in to this version of Sarah. Having the writing of her character improve has helped me settle into this version too. There’s nothing to like about John again this week. He originally always wanted to skip school but all of a sudden he has to go even throwing some of Sarah’s own words at her in order to leave her to work on the missions alone. You could say the change is a character evolution but I really believe it’s a character inconsistency. It’s sad to have so many complaints here after such a good run of episodes previously. As I said I enjoyed the episode, but it felt more like a guilty pleasure rather than an entry in a smartly evolved science fiction series.
