Mania Grade: C+

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Info:

• Episode: The Turk
• Starring: Lena Heady, Summer Glau, Thomas Dekker
• Produced By: Mario Kassar
• Network: Fox
• Series: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES: The Turk

Ellison is looking for clues in TERMINATOR:THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES:The Turk(2008).
© Fox

OK, you’ve seen the letter grade above so I know a few particular comments have skipped the review and went right to commenting. Let’s put our fanboy-ism aside for a minute and take a real look at what happened, and what didn’t happen in this episode.

The Terminator universe is built on three main points: pulp/science fiction plotting, big robots, and probably the most important thing is the cat and mouse suspense of the franchise. The true thrill of the movies is the situation of regular people on the run from an unstoppable killing machine. The idea was still consistent in T2 because even though our hero’s had a Terminator on their side he was an antique compared to the new model that was chasing them. You could argue it was the little bit of humanity he gained that allowed him to beat the “liquid cop” or you could just say that he triumphed due to his programming to do anything it takes to protect John Connor. At any rate, the people on this series seem fairly settled, not really in any danger at all. Sure ,the Terminator is busy forcing a scientist to make him some skin but Sarah and John don’t know that. In the first and second and even in the third film John would be taking advantage of the lead time to run more. They were able to run plenty in T2 and still investigate the creation of Skynet.

So, there’s no suspense of forward momentum feeling to the episode, what’s left? Well Sarah finds an intern who may be responsible for the earliest creation of Skynet. She sets up a date with him to check him and in fact he has created a super chess playing computer. There’s a thematic element of Sarah dealing with her humanity and her ability to do what it takes to save her son and the world. We get the theme hammered over our head in the opening moments of the episode where Sarah tries to kill the scientists behind The Manhattan Project. These scientists turn into Terminators giving us the only real action sequence of the episode. Does anyone else think these Terminators moved a bit like the new Cylons? A smart series can get points across without making you feel like the loser in a UFC fight. A good example is of course, Battlestar Galactica. BSG is able to use thematic elements as subtle yet integral parts of the viewing experience. So far this series hasn’t been as clever in this respect.

Cameron, as charismatic as she is continues to be inconsistent as a character. Sometimes she’s more human, and sometimes she isn’t. Granted, since episode one she’s spent more time acting robotic than human, but it’s still happening here and there. This isn’t Cameron learning more how to be human. Learning is evolutionary; it’s not the Hokey Pokey. Once she learns something it should be ingrained into her but instead, she is doing this dance where she steps into humanity and steps back out again.

Overall there was zero suspense this week and not very much of importance happened other that Sarah holding onto her humanity when she has to decide what to do about the intern and his mega chess playing computer. Speaking of Sarah dealing with her humanity, she already went through this evolution between Terminator and Terminator 2. She was completely a regular human in the first film and by the end of it she was pregnant and had accepted the destiny of her son and what she must do. Over the time between the first and second film, she lost her humanity and became a machine herself physically and mentally with only one goal; to protect her son. In fact in Terminator 2, she actually finally recovered some of her humanity because of interactions with her son and a true machine. Now, we’re going to see her grow again from a human to a machine. You could justify by saying hey, they were in comfortable hiding for two years maybe believing that the fight was over so Sarah reverted to being a regular human and now she must convert herself again to a machine capable of killing someone for what they will do rather than what they have already done. If that’s the argument you subscribe to I can accept it but not be happy about it because this is a character development we’ve already seen once and done better than we can ever hope to see on a television series. The biggest advances this series needs to make are to build some real suspense and to find a way to make us actually care about John, the man that will eventually save us all. I know I know he gets a monologue about how he should have saved a girl committing suicide because he’s supposed to that as a leader but it wasn’t well done enough for me to really care.