I hadn't really been interested in "FlashForward", but the husband and a friend were interested in the show (for slightly different reasons), and I heard a bit more about the premise and thought it interesting enough to give it a try.
We hadn't had a chance to watch the show until tonight. I was surprised to see Brannon Braga's co-creator credit as I hadn't known that he was attached to this show. After watching a bit of it, this was definitely right up his alley, and I think he's found a great outlet for it. I did like his episodes from "Star Trek: The Next Generation", but they didn't always fit in with the feel of the show as a whole. And he could only really do so much on "24". But he might just have found his element here.
I liked the first show a lot - good story, nice setup, and they really put together a terrific cast. I've always liked Courtney B. Vance, and I think Joseph Fiennes is really good in this as well, though I do lament that they didn't let him keep his English accent. Maybe they thought it would appeal to more people if he just had an easy-to-understand generic American accent.
I had heard rumbles about a connection between this show and "Lost", but I hadn't really paid attention to details. It took me looking at imdb to figure out that the lead female/doctor was the same actress who played Penny on "Lost" (and a friend reminded me that she also played Charlie's wife on "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles", which I had seen in her imdb listing but couldn't place her character name), and the husband saw the billboard advertising Oceanic Airlines. I laughed at the tag line about them having the best safety record or something like that. And from the imdb listing on the show, it appears another "Lost" alumnus will soon be appearing on the show.
The ending of the first show was great. All the people crumpled over weren't creepy, but the lone person walking around nonchalantly was definitely so.
I liked the show enough that I wanted to watch the second episode right then, and it didn't disappoint. The little girl who plays the daughter reminds me a bit of Heather O'Rourke from "Poltergeist" - little blonde girls who know things they shouldn't know are creepy. But, I was annoyed that she got in trouble for pushing the boy, but it seems no one else got in trouble when the other kids were the ones taunting her, and the boy was the one taking her stuffed animal away and even damaged it. She didn't hit him, only pushed him, and that's because of what he did. But she's the one who gets in trouble? Not fair.
Wow, Alan Ruck looks different! I recognized him but couldn't think of his name until I saw it in the credits. Cameron sure looks different.
I like all the side stories developing, and I think my hunch is right about girlie tech who saw her ultrasound vision and John Cho's character having no vision at all. That's gotta be unnerving, especially when the woman cop had no vision either and then bang, she's dead. Of course, phone call from random lady (who I know won an Oscar for "House of Sand and Fog", but I know her really from "24") confirming the date of his death probably doesn't do much to cheer him up.
But I think Joseph Fiennes' character is a bit of an ass. His wife is admitting to him her vision of being with another man, so she's wracked with guilt about cheating on him. But he completely withholds from her that he might be giving her a reason to leave him since he was drinking again in his vision, so he's totally letting her take all the blame!
But that last scene was amazing, and the look on Joseph Fiennes' face was perfect. Your blood would be chilled hearing your little daughter say that name too!
I'm hooked!
The website I liked to above also has links to each of the episodes if you didn't see them. I highly recommend it.
Showing posts with label Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Show all posts
Monday, October 5, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
"Terminator Salvation" - spoiler movie review
I've been a fan of the "Terminator" franchise for quite some time now (though I disavow the existence of T3 because I thought it was that bad [but I think I'm going to actually have to watch it again so that I can even remember what happened in it other than that there was a female terminator, I think, and a woman veterinarian], and I'm really sorry that "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" won't be back for a third season), so I was intrigued when they announced that a fourth Terminator film was in the works, and then I was excited when it was revealed that John Connor would be played by Christian Bale.
A friend, the husband and I went to a midnight screening of "Terminator Salvation" on opening night in the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight in Hollywood. It's really the kind of film you want to see on the big screen.
Generally, I liked the film, but it was nothing like I expected, so I want to see it again, partly because I think I will then be better able to have an opinion on it. From the trailers, the film was about John Connor's ascension to be the hero and leader that we know him to become. *This* is the saga of the adult John Connor, who led the resistance of humans against the machines, who helped humanity fight back from the brink of annihilation, who sent a man back to protect his mother, knowing that man would actually become his father, who basically grew up without a normal childhood but was instead hunted and had his life threatened numerous times and who was never able to enjoy the joys and pitfalls of childhood but who knew that the fate of all humans lay in his hands. Yeah, no pressure there.
I knew that Kyle Reese, John Connor's father, would be in the film since it was announced that Anton Yelchin would be playing him. (I joked that seeing the midnight screening of "Terminator Salvation" at the Cinerama Dome was seeing the second half of the late-night Anton Yelchin film festival since two weeks prior, the three of us had also gone to see a midnight screening on opening night at the same theatre of "Star Trek", in which Anton Yelchin plays Pavel Chekov.)
But in the lore of the terminator universe, you don't actually learn that much about John in this film. Yeah, you see a bit of his leadership quality, and you see how people are drawn to him, and you see how even the command comes to realize that John is more powerful and holds more sway than them.
But part of the story is also Kyle, the kid who ends up fighting his way into the resistance. I had thought Anton Yelchin was a bit young to play Kyle, but I had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be a kid when John met him, a reminder that came thanks to Sarah's tapes to John. You see the determination in Kyle that turns him into the soldier that John trusts with his mother's life.
But in the grand scheme of the movie, the major focus is on a third character - Marcus Wright. Who, you say? What role did he play in the terminator universe? Well, none, until now. The film is really about his journey, his discovery, his redemption, his heroics, and his sacrifice. But he's barely in the trailer, and if he is, there's no mention of him. So I'm sitting and watching the film and confused that so much time is being spent on this guy that I don't know and have never heard of in that universe, and where the heck is John Connor?
I liked Marcus' story, but I wished that the trailer had given even a hint of him, had told us that it wasn't just about John, but about the people around him. The end of the film sets up John as the actual leader since the rest of the command died when their submarine was blowed up by Skynet, so the next installment will probably be more like the movie I was expecting to see. And I'm ok with that. But I wish they hadn't set up my expectations wrong.
Marcus is a very engaging character, and you feel for him when he still can't believe that he's a machine, and you see his body slump when he tries to infiltrate Skynet's headquarters, and the robot guard registers him as an ally and allows him to pass. It seems like Marcus would have almost preferred to have been shot at and/or killed because that would have proven that he was human. And then you really feel for him when he finds out that he's been a pawn all that time, that he's been used to lure both Kyle and John to the facility to be killed. And you root for his redemption in being able to save both of them and in ultimately giving his life, his heart, so that John can live. And you know that in this story, without him, without his actions, neither Kyle nor John would have lived.
Marcus is a great character - but he's a stranger in the terminator universe who presumably only made a one-movie appearance since he's dead by the end. That's what I don't understand. There's some focus on history, but the main character is not actually John Connor, but rather, someone we've never known before.
But as far as history is concerned, I did love the use of Sarah's tapes, and especially that it was Linda Hamilton and at least the first passage is what we saw Sarah taping in the first film. There's a later segment that I don't specifically remember from the first film, but I'm assuming it's from that as well since it's still her voice. I don't believe any of the other films have mentioned the tapes at all, so that reliance on history was terrific, and even the use of the well-known picture of Sarah that Kyle eventually carries around with him.
I liked that John had a wife, but I'll admit that when I saw that he had a wife, and a very pregnant one at that, I thought for sure she'd be a goner by mid-way through the film. I'm glad to see she'll be around for the next one. I wonder if they'll ever talk about how they met and got together, because I think that would be interesting. Given how his years of growing up went and how he was never really able to trust anyone, who's the woman who broke through that enough for him to love her and marry her?
Those spine-like machines were NASTY. They had a model in the lobby of the Arclight theatres, and with the way it was designed, it really looked like some kind of Klingon weaponry to me.
That was pretty cool when John and Kyle fell into the terminator-making factory. Cool and creepy.
I liked the little mute girl.
I didn't really like when Blair turned so quickly and easily and betrayed the Resistance to set Marcus free. It just seemed to come out of nowhere.
I had heard rumblings that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be in the film, but I'd never really heard if that was true or not, so it was cool to see him as that particular model of terminator. I don't know how they did those sequences, but he definitely doesn't look like that now!
One major thing that I didn't understand came towards the end of the film. John comes across the Arnold model, who tosses him around and presumably tries to kill him. Meanwhile, a metal model is attacking Kyle, and then John runs into the metal model, who I think is about to kill him, but then the Arnold model comes around the corner and destroys the metal model. Now, they're both terminators, even though they're different models, and they're not like Marcus who is differently programmed. So why would one model destroy another model when both should have programmed into their systems to target and destroy/kill John Connor?
I thought Christian Bale did a decent job as John, for what he had to do, but he is still using that speech affectation he adopted for "Batman Begins" where he seems to think that talking in an unnaturally low, raspy voice makes him sound more mature or authoritative or something, because he does that here too, and not just when John needs to be whispering. It's very distracting and slightly annoying because it makes no sense and it makes it hard to hear him. I'm really looking forward to seeing "Public Enemies", so I hope that Michael Mann, his director on that film, has weaned him of that bad habit.
Sam Worthington was excellent as Marcus. I've heard that his performance in this film is what led to him being cast in James Cameron's "Avatar", and if that's true, I can certainly see why.
Anton Yelchin was good as the very young Kyle Reese, and I actually liked him better in this film than in "Star Trek", partly because he didn't have a very distracting Russian accent. But, I have to say, Kyle Reese will always be Michael Biehn to me.
Anton Yelchin as a very young Kyle Reese.
Michael Biehn as THE Kyle Reese.
Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter to Ron Howard) was very good as John's wife. I know she's been in a bunch of other stuff, but I don't think I've seen any of those. She played a character that I thought was completely worthy of being John Connor's wife.
I was surprised when I saw Helena Bonham Carter's credit pop up. She was good in the film, though it's a small role. Jane Alexander was fine too, in an even smaller role.
I always like seeing Michael Ironside, even though he often plays the same character.
I hadn't known that Danny Elfman did the music for the film, but he did a good job.
A friend, the husband and I went to a midnight screening of "Terminator Salvation" on opening night in the Cinerama Dome at the Arclight in Hollywood. It's really the kind of film you want to see on the big screen.
Generally, I liked the film, but it was nothing like I expected, so I want to see it again, partly because I think I will then be better able to have an opinion on it. From the trailers, the film was about John Connor's ascension to be the hero and leader that we know him to become. *This* is the saga of the adult John Connor, who led the resistance of humans against the machines, who helped humanity fight back from the brink of annihilation, who sent a man back to protect his mother, knowing that man would actually become his father, who basically grew up without a normal childhood but was instead hunted and had his life threatened numerous times and who was never able to enjoy the joys and pitfalls of childhood but who knew that the fate of all humans lay in his hands. Yeah, no pressure there.
I knew that Kyle Reese, John Connor's father, would be in the film since it was announced that Anton Yelchin would be playing him. (I joked that seeing the midnight screening of "Terminator Salvation" at the Cinerama Dome was seeing the second half of the late-night Anton Yelchin film festival since two weeks prior, the three of us had also gone to see a midnight screening on opening night at the same theatre of "Star Trek", in which Anton Yelchin plays Pavel Chekov.)
But in the lore of the terminator universe, you don't actually learn that much about John in this film. Yeah, you see a bit of his leadership quality, and you see how people are drawn to him, and you see how even the command comes to realize that John is more powerful and holds more sway than them.
But part of the story is also Kyle, the kid who ends up fighting his way into the resistance. I had thought Anton Yelchin was a bit young to play Kyle, but I had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be a kid when John met him, a reminder that came thanks to Sarah's tapes to John. You see the determination in Kyle that turns him into the soldier that John trusts with his mother's life.
But in the grand scheme of the movie, the major focus is on a third character - Marcus Wright. Who, you say? What role did he play in the terminator universe? Well, none, until now. The film is really about his journey, his discovery, his redemption, his heroics, and his sacrifice. But he's barely in the trailer, and if he is, there's no mention of him. So I'm sitting and watching the film and confused that so much time is being spent on this guy that I don't know and have never heard of in that universe, and where the heck is John Connor?
I liked Marcus' story, but I wished that the trailer had given even a hint of him, had told us that it wasn't just about John, but about the people around him. The end of the film sets up John as the actual leader since the rest of the command died when their submarine was blowed up by Skynet, so the next installment will probably be more like the movie I was expecting to see. And I'm ok with that. But I wish they hadn't set up my expectations wrong.
Marcus is a very engaging character, and you feel for him when he still can't believe that he's a machine, and you see his body slump when he tries to infiltrate Skynet's headquarters, and the robot guard registers him as an ally and allows him to pass. It seems like Marcus would have almost preferred to have been shot at and/or killed because that would have proven that he was human. And then you really feel for him when he finds out that he's been a pawn all that time, that he's been used to lure both Kyle and John to the facility to be killed. And you root for his redemption in being able to save both of them and in ultimately giving his life, his heart, so that John can live. And you know that in this story, without him, without his actions, neither Kyle nor John would have lived.
Marcus is a great character - but he's a stranger in the terminator universe who presumably only made a one-movie appearance since he's dead by the end. That's what I don't understand. There's some focus on history, but the main character is not actually John Connor, but rather, someone we've never known before.
But as far as history is concerned, I did love the use of Sarah's tapes, and especially that it was Linda Hamilton and at least the first passage is what we saw Sarah taping in the first film. There's a later segment that I don't specifically remember from the first film, but I'm assuming it's from that as well since it's still her voice. I don't believe any of the other films have mentioned the tapes at all, so that reliance on history was terrific, and even the use of the well-known picture of Sarah that Kyle eventually carries around with him.
I liked that John had a wife, but I'll admit that when I saw that he had a wife, and a very pregnant one at that, I thought for sure she'd be a goner by mid-way through the film. I'm glad to see she'll be around for the next one. I wonder if they'll ever talk about how they met and got together, because I think that would be interesting. Given how his years of growing up went and how he was never really able to trust anyone, who's the woman who broke through that enough for him to love her and marry her?
Those spine-like machines were NASTY. They had a model in the lobby of the Arclight theatres, and with the way it was designed, it really looked like some kind of Klingon weaponry to me.
That was pretty cool when John and Kyle fell into the terminator-making factory. Cool and creepy.
I liked the little mute girl.
I didn't really like when Blair turned so quickly and easily and betrayed the Resistance to set Marcus free. It just seemed to come out of nowhere.
I had heard rumblings that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be in the film, but I'd never really heard if that was true or not, so it was cool to see him as that particular model of terminator. I don't know how they did those sequences, but he definitely doesn't look like that now!
One major thing that I didn't understand came towards the end of the film. John comes across the Arnold model, who tosses him around and presumably tries to kill him. Meanwhile, a metal model is attacking Kyle, and then John runs into the metal model, who I think is about to kill him, but then the Arnold model comes around the corner and destroys the metal model. Now, they're both terminators, even though they're different models, and they're not like Marcus who is differently programmed. So why would one model destroy another model when both should have programmed into their systems to target and destroy/kill John Connor?
I thought Christian Bale did a decent job as John, for what he had to do, but he is still using that speech affectation he adopted for "Batman Begins" where he seems to think that talking in an unnaturally low, raspy voice makes him sound more mature or authoritative or something, because he does that here too, and not just when John needs to be whispering. It's very distracting and slightly annoying because it makes no sense and it makes it hard to hear him. I'm really looking forward to seeing "Public Enemies", so I hope that Michael Mann, his director on that film, has weaned him of that bad habit.
Sam Worthington was excellent as Marcus. I've heard that his performance in this film is what led to him being cast in James Cameron's "Avatar", and if that's true, I can certainly see why.
Anton Yelchin was good as the very young Kyle Reese, and I actually liked him better in this film than in "Star Trek", partly because he didn't have a very distracting Russian accent. But, I have to say, Kyle Reese will always be Michael Biehn to me.
Anton Yelchin as a very young Kyle Reese.
Michael Biehn as THE Kyle Reese.Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter to Ron Howard) was very good as John's wife. I know she's been in a bunch of other stuff, but I don't think I've seen any of those. She played a character that I thought was completely worthy of being John Connor's wife.
I was surprised when I saw Helena Bonham Carter's credit pop up. She was good in the film, though it's a small role. Jane Alexander was fine too, in an even smaller role.
I always like seeing Michael Ironside, even though he often plays the same character.
I hadn't known that Danny Elfman did the music for the film, but he did a good job.
Monday, May 18, 2009
one fewer hot chick on Friday night
So this week is the "upfronts", where the networks announce their schedules for next year. Fox announced their schedule on Monday, and while rumours had swirled over the weekend, Monday morning brought confirmation that "Dollhouse" had indeed been picked up, albeit only for another 13 episodes to start with. Hopefully, the audience will build, and they'll order the rest of the season. I'm really excited about that because while some questions were answered with the season finale, there are still lots of questions that haven't been answered, and there's so much more to be learned about everyone. I wonder what they're going to do with Victor, and how Dr. Saunders is going to be now, and most important of all, will they bring November back? I sure hope so.
A friend posted this link to an interesting story about "Dollhouse".
But then there was the bad news. As had been rumoured now for quite some time, no renewal was forthcoming for "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". I'm sad about that because I really enjoyed the show, and they really went out with a bang. I wonder if they knew they weren't coming back when they made the finale. Most of the major loose ends were tied up, and they would have embarked on a new set of stories, so at least it was a good enough place to end.
On a related note, the same friend posted this link which has a running count of the status of television shows on all the networks.
A friend posted this link to an interesting story about "Dollhouse".
But then there was the bad news. As had been rumoured now for quite some time, no renewal was forthcoming for "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". I'm sad about that because I really enjoyed the show, and they really went out with a bang. I wonder if they knew they weren't coming back when they made the finale. Most of the major loose ends were tied up, and they would have embarked on a new set of stories, so at least it was a good enough place to end.
On a related note, the same friend posted this link which has a running count of the status of television shows on all the networks.
Friday, February 13, 2009
"Dollhouse" - February 13, 2009 episode
Caroline nervously paces the room, as she has to make a very difficult decision that she doesn't want to make. Something has happened, and one of the ways she can get out of it is to volunteer for a program, and after five years, she'll be done and free.
Next, two mopeds are shown racing through the streets, and as the two veer off, one driver ends up crashing the bike to the ground, and it's revealed that Caroline (who we later learn is now called Echo) is that driver. She picks the bike up and catches up to the other driver, racing through Chinatown and into a sort of restaurant/club with a big banner that says "Happy Birthday, Matt". It turns out that the other driver is the birthday boy himself, and the two continue to have fun at the party. Echo is in this very, very short white dress, (yeah it's barely-legal short), but she looks amazing in it, dancing with Matt. He goes to get them a drink, and Echo ends up leaving the party and getting into a black van. She is taken away to a compound where she tells people that she may have found the guy, and she's trying to figure out if she should go back to the party after her treatment.
However, her treatment is actually a mind wipe, as we see a rewind of all the memories they're stripping from her. It turns out that Matt had paid for a weekend of fun with her, and we see how they met and what their weekend entailed. After she left the party, one of Matt's friends asked where she was, and Matt made a Cinderella reference about the clock striking midnight (metaphorically since the friend confusedly pointed out that it was 5am at the time), but Echo's transformation back to her old self is very different than Cinderella's.
After the treatment, Echo has a blank look on her face and doesn't remember anything that's happened. She's taken to see a doctor, who arranges a massage for her, but while she's waiting, her attention is caught by flashing lights, and she goes upstairs to investigate and sees a girl (who is a new recruit being mapped) strapped to a table with gadgets all around her. The tech who wiped her mind notices her and ushers her out, trying to come up with an explanation of what she saw.
We learn that Echo is an "active", someone who has had their own personality and memories completely wiped and who is imprinted with the memories and personality of whatever type of person is needed and requested by the company's clients. But none of them seem to know what's going on or that their memories aren't real, so I wonder why they all think they live in this big house. Really nice set, by the way.
Some kind of big-shot executive is shown talking to his daughter (she's supposed to be 12, but she looked younger than that to me) at home, but as soon as she hangs up, she is subdued by strangers and kidnapped. The man shows up at the Dollhouse offices and says that he just wants someone to facilitate the ransom exchange - he doesn't want the people caught or brought to justice, he just wants to pay the money and get his daughter back. Echo gets this task and arrives at the man's house. He is uncomfortable with the way she is handling the conversations with the kidnappers, to the point that when she says she knows what she's doing because she's been doing this for years, he laughs derisively at her since he knows that she's simply an active. He knows he's not supposed to reveal to her that she's an active, but he makes a cryptic comment about whether or not she was a clown or something else the previous day, which confuses her and which makes her flash on her imprintation process, which disorients her.
A meeting is arranged on the docks, and the money is being taken away by the head kidnapper's men but suddenly, something goes wrong with Echo and she collapses. When the client asks what's wrong, she says not to let them all get on the boat. The deal had been that when the money was on the boat, they would release his daughter. Echo says they have no intention of releasing the girl. When the client tries to stop the last man, the client ends up getting shot, and the kidnappers get away with the money and the girl.
Echo is picked up by the van, and she's talking what sounds like nonsense. But then it's revealed that her imprint personality was a kidnap victim, and one of the men she saw on the docks was one of the who kidnapped her, which is what caused her breakdown. She is determined to track them down to save the little girl, right after her treatment. The word "treatment" seems to be a trigger that works with the actives. Echo's Watcher...ummm...I mean...Handler figures out what's going on and tries to get them not to wipe her memory just yet because Echo is the key to finding the little girl. The tech nerd who's been wiping minds turns out to be one of the people who developed the system, and there's some discussion about the ethics of what they're doing and whether they're simply providing a service or engaged in something more sinister. The imprints come from a composite of multiple personalities, and one of the personalities used for this particular character had been abused as a child and had never gotten over it, having killed herself within the past year. The handler manages to convince them not to wipe Echo's mind yet, so they set out to find the kidnappers. Based on her phone conversations with the kidnappers and what the little girl had said when she was on the phone with her father, Echo figures out that one of the kidnappers knows the little girl and is probably one of her teachers. When a suspect is identified, they head to the suspect's sister's secluded cabin.
Echo is dropped off and knocks on the door, and they eventually let her in. She tells the other men that they're not going to get anything out of this because the one man is going to kill them all, and that he wants something more than money, namely, the little girls. She explains exactly what the man is going to do and what he has done, killing his partners, taking the little girls, abusing them and then dumping them for dead, and she confronts him and tells him to his face that she's not afraid of him anymore. As the men engage in a firefight, she goes to rescue the little girl. The man who had been the abuser is killed, and the others are letting her leave, but then the door explodes in, and a team from Dollhouse, including the new recruit she'd seen earlier, take out the rest of the men and recover all the money and will remove all evidence. The client is still alive and will be happy to get his daughter back.
This time, Echo's mind is thoroughly wiped, and the girls lay down in recessed beds that are about the size and shape of a coffin with a glass cover overhead. Weird sleeping setup.
Meanwhile, an FBI agent has been trying to track down the Dollhouse, something that seems more like a rumour and myth than reality, but he's convinced it's real. He takes measures to get more information about the location of the Dollhouse. At the end, someone is sending a picture presumably to the FBI agent, and it's a picture of Echo. The person is also watching a video of Echo when she was Caroline while two people lay dead behind him. I don't really understand this part, but based on the previews for the next episode, the husband is speculating that the man watching the video is Alpha, a rogue active (since all the actives seem to be named after the phonetic alphabet), and the dead people are Caroline's parents.
There were parts of the story that I found to be a bit confusing, but overall, I really enjoyed the show. I liked the marked difference in Caroline and Echo - whereas Caroline was frazzled and nervous and jumpy and looking worried and concerned, Echo is cool and polished and calm, almost to the extent where she would probably fit right in if she decided to move to the town of Stepford. The imprinting idea also has a bit of the Stepford Wives feel to it, although in that case, they didn't just replace the personalities, but rather, the entire being. However, the FBI guy did say that getting rid of the personalities is a kind of murder in and of itself.
They've set up the question of Echo's past, what happened that led her there. And that also makes you wonder what the backstory is for all the other people there. And why do they all think they're there, living there, sleeping in weird quarters and not even questioning how weird that is, and what exactly do they think they're getting treatment for?
Much of the advertising that I've seen has focussed on Eliza Dushku with mannequins, which I think is a good representation. Mannequins are a clean slate (and Caroline doesn't think a clean slate can be possible), and you can dress them up to be and look like whatever you want, to suit whatever you need. That's the same for the actives - they're clean to start with each time and then they're dressed up through imprintation.
Echo and the mannequins, instead of the bunnymen
Echo in the mind-wipe chamber with her handler and tech.
I really liked Eliza Dushku, who played all the different aspects of her character, or multiple characters. I know her a little from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", but I got into Buffy late in the game, so I've only seen some of Eliza's appearances on that show. I can see why she'd be interested in this role since she will be mostly playing a different character every week because of the imprints and yet still be building the character of Echo as time goes by. The variety of challenges will be like it was for Scott Bakula on "Quantum Leap", but in this case, she will actually be playing different characters every week, not one character pretending to be different people every week.
Because the debut of "Dollhouse" was right after the return of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on its new night, they had little vignettes of Eliza Dushku and Summer Glau talking about the two shows and each of their characters. It's funny that they're packaging the two together. Even one of Eliza's publicity shots as Echo resembles a publicity shot of Summer as Cameron.
Eliza Dushku as Echo
Summer Glau as Cameron
Another publicity shot of Summer Glau as Cameron, showing Cameron's terminator roots.
Summer Glau, in a picture that better shows how pretty she is.
So, yeah, I know Summer is pretty, and she's pretty hot too, but in the vignettes with the two of them, Eliza looked so much prettier. Sorry, Summer, you're pretty, and you're hot, but Eliza is just smokin'. Yeah, I'm jealous.
I was surprised to see another familiar face - Amy Acker, whose name the husband recognized, but I didn't until I saw her on screen as the doctor attending to Echo - she played Fred in "Angel". I'd only really watched the last season of that show. She's not included in the cast pictures I've seen online, so I'm not sure how big her role is, but they've certainly set her up as an intriguing character because of the scars on her face.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of the show, and Hot Chicks Night on FOX looks like it's gonna be terrific.
Next, two mopeds are shown racing through the streets, and as the two veer off, one driver ends up crashing the bike to the ground, and it's revealed that Caroline (who we later learn is now called Echo) is that driver. She picks the bike up and catches up to the other driver, racing through Chinatown and into a sort of restaurant/club with a big banner that says "Happy Birthday, Matt". It turns out that the other driver is the birthday boy himself, and the two continue to have fun at the party. Echo is in this very, very short white dress, (yeah it's barely-legal short), but she looks amazing in it, dancing with Matt. He goes to get them a drink, and Echo ends up leaving the party and getting into a black van. She is taken away to a compound where she tells people that she may have found the guy, and she's trying to figure out if she should go back to the party after her treatment.
However, her treatment is actually a mind wipe, as we see a rewind of all the memories they're stripping from her. It turns out that Matt had paid for a weekend of fun with her, and we see how they met and what their weekend entailed. After she left the party, one of Matt's friends asked where she was, and Matt made a Cinderella reference about the clock striking midnight (metaphorically since the friend confusedly pointed out that it was 5am at the time), but Echo's transformation back to her old self is very different than Cinderella's.
After the treatment, Echo has a blank look on her face and doesn't remember anything that's happened. She's taken to see a doctor, who arranges a massage for her, but while she's waiting, her attention is caught by flashing lights, and she goes upstairs to investigate and sees a girl (who is a new recruit being mapped) strapped to a table with gadgets all around her. The tech who wiped her mind notices her and ushers her out, trying to come up with an explanation of what she saw.
We learn that Echo is an "active", someone who has had their own personality and memories completely wiped and who is imprinted with the memories and personality of whatever type of person is needed and requested by the company's clients. But none of them seem to know what's going on or that their memories aren't real, so I wonder why they all think they live in this big house. Really nice set, by the way.
Some kind of big-shot executive is shown talking to his daughter (she's supposed to be 12, but she looked younger than that to me) at home, but as soon as she hangs up, she is subdued by strangers and kidnapped. The man shows up at the Dollhouse offices and says that he just wants someone to facilitate the ransom exchange - he doesn't want the people caught or brought to justice, he just wants to pay the money and get his daughter back. Echo gets this task and arrives at the man's house. He is uncomfortable with the way she is handling the conversations with the kidnappers, to the point that when she says she knows what she's doing because she's been doing this for years, he laughs derisively at her since he knows that she's simply an active. He knows he's not supposed to reveal to her that she's an active, but he makes a cryptic comment about whether or not she was a clown or something else the previous day, which confuses her and which makes her flash on her imprintation process, which disorients her.
A meeting is arranged on the docks, and the money is being taken away by the head kidnapper's men but suddenly, something goes wrong with Echo and she collapses. When the client asks what's wrong, she says not to let them all get on the boat. The deal had been that when the money was on the boat, they would release his daughter. Echo says they have no intention of releasing the girl. When the client tries to stop the last man, the client ends up getting shot, and the kidnappers get away with the money and the girl.
Echo is picked up by the van, and she's talking what sounds like nonsense. But then it's revealed that her imprint personality was a kidnap victim, and one of the men she saw on the docks was one of the who kidnapped her, which is what caused her breakdown. She is determined to track them down to save the little girl, right after her treatment. The word "treatment" seems to be a trigger that works with the actives. Echo's Watcher...ummm...I mean...Handler figures out what's going on and tries to get them not to wipe her memory just yet because Echo is the key to finding the little girl. The tech nerd who's been wiping minds turns out to be one of the people who developed the system, and there's some discussion about the ethics of what they're doing and whether they're simply providing a service or engaged in something more sinister. The imprints come from a composite of multiple personalities, and one of the personalities used for this particular character had been abused as a child and had never gotten over it, having killed herself within the past year. The handler manages to convince them not to wipe Echo's mind yet, so they set out to find the kidnappers. Based on her phone conversations with the kidnappers and what the little girl had said when she was on the phone with her father, Echo figures out that one of the kidnappers knows the little girl and is probably one of her teachers. When a suspect is identified, they head to the suspect's sister's secluded cabin.
Echo is dropped off and knocks on the door, and they eventually let her in. She tells the other men that they're not going to get anything out of this because the one man is going to kill them all, and that he wants something more than money, namely, the little girls. She explains exactly what the man is going to do and what he has done, killing his partners, taking the little girls, abusing them and then dumping them for dead, and she confronts him and tells him to his face that she's not afraid of him anymore. As the men engage in a firefight, she goes to rescue the little girl. The man who had been the abuser is killed, and the others are letting her leave, but then the door explodes in, and a team from Dollhouse, including the new recruit she'd seen earlier, take out the rest of the men and recover all the money and will remove all evidence. The client is still alive and will be happy to get his daughter back.
This time, Echo's mind is thoroughly wiped, and the girls lay down in recessed beds that are about the size and shape of a coffin with a glass cover overhead. Weird sleeping setup.
Meanwhile, an FBI agent has been trying to track down the Dollhouse, something that seems more like a rumour and myth than reality, but he's convinced it's real. He takes measures to get more information about the location of the Dollhouse. At the end, someone is sending a picture presumably to the FBI agent, and it's a picture of Echo. The person is also watching a video of Echo when she was Caroline while two people lay dead behind him. I don't really understand this part, but based on the previews for the next episode, the husband is speculating that the man watching the video is Alpha, a rogue active (since all the actives seem to be named after the phonetic alphabet), and the dead people are Caroline's parents.
There were parts of the story that I found to be a bit confusing, but overall, I really enjoyed the show. I liked the marked difference in Caroline and Echo - whereas Caroline was frazzled and nervous and jumpy and looking worried and concerned, Echo is cool and polished and calm, almost to the extent where she would probably fit right in if she decided to move to the town of Stepford. The imprinting idea also has a bit of the Stepford Wives feel to it, although in that case, they didn't just replace the personalities, but rather, the entire being. However, the FBI guy did say that getting rid of the personalities is a kind of murder in and of itself.
They've set up the question of Echo's past, what happened that led her there. And that also makes you wonder what the backstory is for all the other people there. And why do they all think they're there, living there, sleeping in weird quarters and not even questioning how weird that is, and what exactly do they think they're getting treatment for?
Much of the advertising that I've seen has focussed on Eliza Dushku with mannequins, which I think is a good representation. Mannequins are a clean slate (and Caroline doesn't think a clean slate can be possible), and you can dress them up to be and look like whatever you want, to suit whatever you need. That's the same for the actives - they're clean to start with each time and then they're dressed up through imprintation.
Echo and the mannequins, instead of the bunnymen
Echo in the mind-wipe chamber with her handler and tech.I really liked Eliza Dushku, who played all the different aspects of her character, or multiple characters. I know her a little from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", but I got into Buffy late in the game, so I've only seen some of Eliza's appearances on that show. I can see why she'd be interested in this role since she will be mostly playing a different character every week because of the imprints and yet still be building the character of Echo as time goes by. The variety of challenges will be like it was for Scott Bakula on "Quantum Leap", but in this case, she will actually be playing different characters every week, not one character pretending to be different people every week.
Because the debut of "Dollhouse" was right after the return of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on its new night, they had little vignettes of Eliza Dushku and Summer Glau talking about the two shows and each of their characters. It's funny that they're packaging the two together. Even one of Eliza's publicity shots as Echo resembles a publicity shot of Summer as Cameron.
Eliza Dushku as Echo
Summer Glau as Cameron
Another publicity shot of Summer Glau as Cameron, showing Cameron's terminator roots.
Summer Glau, in a picture that better shows how pretty she is.So, yeah, I know Summer is pretty, and she's pretty hot too, but in the vignettes with the two of them, Eliza looked so much prettier. Sorry, Summer, you're pretty, and you're hot, but Eliza is just smokin'. Yeah, I'm jealous.
I was surprised to see another familiar face - Amy Acker, whose name the husband recognized, but I didn't until I saw her on screen as the doctor attending to Echo - she played Fred in "Angel". I'd only really watched the last season of that show. She's not included in the cast pictures I've seen online, so I'm not sure how big her role is, but they've certainly set her up as an intriguing character because of the scars on her face.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of the show, and Hot Chicks Night on FOX looks like it's gonna be terrific.
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - February 13, 2009 episode
Sarah wakes up in the hospital and hears a sheriff's deputy and a nurse talking outside her room. The deputy is trying to get information on and from Sarah, but the nurse won't let him disturb her. Sarah feels the gunshot in her leg and looks at her chart, which identifies her as a Jane Doe. Sarah feigns being asleep/unconscious when the nurse checks on her, and the nurse then closes the door. Sarah hears the voice of Kyle Reese, but then she hallucinates his presence in her room as well. Kyle is telling her to pull herself together. She still has the bullet in her leg, but she manages to trick and overpower the deputy and escapes. At Kyle's urging, she calls Derek to tell him about what happened to her and that he needs to go take care of the van and building to erase evidence of her visit. In the parking lot, she then kidnaps a female doctor and takes her to a motel room, where Kyle is waiting. While pointing a gun at the doctor, Sarah tells the doctor to take the bullet out of her. She says she can't go to a hospital, and the doctor notices healed marks on Sarah and asks why. Kyle notices as well and asks Sarah what happened. Sarah says they stabbed her to get to their son. Sarah is really talking to Kyle, but the doctor thinks she's just talking to herself and Sarah doesn't correct the doctor when the doctor thinks Sarah is the victim of abuse from a man, a situation the doctor is evidently sympathetic to.
The doctor agrees to try to get the bullet out, and she tells Sarah that women have a high pain tolerance, especially those that have given birth. When Sarah asks whether it's going to be similar, the doctor says yes, and as she starts, she tells Sarah it's like the first big contraction, and Sarah is shown reacting to pain. To distract her, the doctor asks Sarah about John, and Sarah talks about John while Kyle is listening.
Sarah later wakes up, and the doctor says that because of the location of the bullet, she can't take it out under those primitive conditions without the risk of Sarah dying. She gets Sarah to trust her and agree to go back to the hospital. Sarah and the doctor sneak into the hospital and end up in the morgue, where the doctor can operate without the high risk of being seen. Sarah is still hesitant to let her operate, but Kyle implores her to let the doctor do it, especially when the doctor says that the bullet is moving and will kill her if they don't take care of it.
Meanwhile, Derek leaves Jesse and goes to meet John at the hospital, since John has taken Riley there after her suicide attempt. Derek questions why John brought her to such a public place as a hospital where they would ask all kinds of questions, but John says he made the call. When Derek then gets the phone call from Sarah, he tells John about Sarah being shot, and John wants to go, but Derek says that he'll go and John has to stay with Riley since there are consequences to making a call.
John is told by a doctor that because Riley tried to commit suicide, she would be on a 72 hour 5150 hold and that CPS would be called since she's in foster care and there could be issues with that. John later goes to see Riley, who is mostly embarassed about what happened. Riley is surprised and a bit unnerved to see that Cameron is also there, and it's evident that Cameron is still suspicious of her.
Out in the hall, John doesn't know what to do about Riley and asks Cameron what the future him would do since Cameron knows the future him. She says that the future John has much more important things to do.
As Riley is in her hospital bed, Jesse shows up and says they're leaving. John and Cameron are later questioned by the doctor because Riley is gone. John says they need to split up to find her, but Cameron says that no, they don't need to find out and walks off. Meanwhile, Jesse has brought Riley back to her place and agrees to let her stay for just an hour or so.
The Sheriff and his deputies are investigating Sarah's car with all the blood as well as the recording device that Sarah had with her. The Sheriff then receives word that Sarah has escaped, and when they get to the hospital, he is disgusted that Sarah was able to subdue his deputy and escape. He realizes that Sarah couldn't have gone far with the bullet still in her leg, and it's later reported to him that a particular doctor is late for her shift, and it's apparent that he knows the doctor.
Ellison is still working with John Henry, and when Ellison goes to visit him, John Henry has some put-together robot toys and talks about how the ball/socket movement on them is so much more efficient than the hinged socket approach used by humans. Later, John Henry recounts for Ellison all the crimes that his former incarnation committed, and as he's listing them, the images of the crimes flash on the panel next to him, much to Ellison's horror. Ellison finds out that John Henry has access to the internet, which he tells Catherine is a bad idea. However, Catherine wants John Henry to be able to learn and discover things for himself, to answer the questions that he has.
Catherine later visits John Henry because he asked for her, and he tells her that he knows she's not human, that she's made of metal like him, but different metal. When she asks if he's told anyone else that, he says no, and she says she'd like it to stay that way. John Henry also mentions what element he's made out of and that quite a percentage of mines that have that element are now owned by Catherine's company. He plays a recording he accessed of an unsecure line where there's a problem with one of the mines. This discovery perturbs Catherine, who gets up to leave, but John Henry asks what she's doing with all the mines and elements and such, but Catherine declines to answer. Before she leaves, though, she becomes possessed by the spirit of Bryan Adams and tells John Henry that "everything I do, I do for you". When John Henry asked what Catherine was doing, it didn't seem casual or friendly but rather suspicious. John Henry presumably is eventually supposed to turn into Skynet, but since he now has the benefit of Ellison's teaching, which Skynet didn't before, it would be interesting if John Henry himself ends up stopping Catherine from having Skynet created.
Back at the building where Sarah was, the people are packing stuff away and are getting ready to clear out. I'm presuming they're packing the element that's being mined. Catherine shows up and kills everyone, presumably to erase all the evidence, and she even blows up the entire building. Her walking out of the exploding flames reminded me of a similar scene in T2, when the T-1000 emerged from a flaming explosion in its molten form before reshaping.
Back at the Sheriff's station, the Sheriff and a deputy are starting to piece things together. As the Sheriff is about to leave, a huge explosion from outside can be heard, and when they go outside to investigate, Sarah's Jeep has exploded and is in flames, completely destroyed. Meanwhile, Derek has snuck into the station and burns the other evidence as well.
Sarah wakes up after surgery, and the doctor says she got the bullet out and that everything is ok. Derek arrives, but the doctor points Sarah's gun at him, thinking he's the one who has been abusing Sarah. Derek tries to talk her down and after distracting her, pulls out his own gun to point at her, so they're kind of at a standstill. Then the Sheriff shows up, but it's evident from the interaction that he and the doctor are in a relationship and that he's the one who's been abusing her. In the end, the doctor shoots him. Sarah and Derek leave, but as they're driving, they seem the plume of smoke emanating from where Sarah says the building was.
Overall, I liked the episode, but I'm a little annoyed that they didn't say anything about who brought Sarah to the hospital. OK, they don't have to reveal to us who it is right now, but it would have been nice to have had *someone* at least voice the question. And, considering the last episode had Sarah seeing a descending UFO, it would have been nice to have that addressed, whether any of it was real or whether it was simply a hallucination. Or whether they are the ones who dropped Sarah off at the hospital on their way out of town. But then, she was hallucinating images of herself previously, and this episode, she hallucinated the entire presence of Kyle, so who knows.
And speaking of Kyle, I'd read in TV Guide earlier in the week that Kyle would be back in this episode as a figment of Sarah's imagination, but I was really surprised when I read that Kyle would be played by Jonathan Jackson, who I kind of know from a long time ago as Lucky Spencer from "General Hospital". I wasn't sure how he was going to be, but I really liked him as Kyle, though I have to admit that Michael Biehn will still always be THE Kyle Reese to me. I was struck at the resemblance that Thomas Dekker, who plays John Connor, has to a young Jonathan Jackson - good casting of father to son.
Jonathan Jackson as Kyle Reese
Jonathan Jackson in his younger years.
Another picture of Jonathan Jackson when he was younger.
Thomas Dekker as John Connor
Michael Biehn as the real Kyle Reese
In watching the opening credits, there was another name that for some reason caught my attention - Connor Trinneer. Now, I have no idea why his name registered with me. If I had to come up with his name, I don't think that I would have been able to do it. But in seeing his name, my thought was "Hey, isn't that Trip from 'Enterprise'?" Considering that I only watched "Enterprise" in its first season and I've not been very good about paying attention to actors' names, I was really surprised that I recognized him. When I saw him on screen, playing the Sheriff, that confirmed it for me. How weird seeing him again after all this time.
The doctor agrees to try to get the bullet out, and she tells Sarah that women have a high pain tolerance, especially those that have given birth. When Sarah asks whether it's going to be similar, the doctor says yes, and as she starts, she tells Sarah it's like the first big contraction, and Sarah is shown reacting to pain. To distract her, the doctor asks Sarah about John, and Sarah talks about John while Kyle is listening.
Sarah later wakes up, and the doctor says that because of the location of the bullet, she can't take it out under those primitive conditions without the risk of Sarah dying. She gets Sarah to trust her and agree to go back to the hospital. Sarah and the doctor sneak into the hospital and end up in the morgue, where the doctor can operate without the high risk of being seen. Sarah is still hesitant to let her operate, but Kyle implores her to let the doctor do it, especially when the doctor says that the bullet is moving and will kill her if they don't take care of it.
Meanwhile, Derek leaves Jesse and goes to meet John at the hospital, since John has taken Riley there after her suicide attempt. Derek questions why John brought her to such a public place as a hospital where they would ask all kinds of questions, but John says he made the call. When Derek then gets the phone call from Sarah, he tells John about Sarah being shot, and John wants to go, but Derek says that he'll go and John has to stay with Riley since there are consequences to making a call.
John is told by a doctor that because Riley tried to commit suicide, she would be on a 72 hour 5150 hold and that CPS would be called since she's in foster care and there could be issues with that. John later goes to see Riley, who is mostly embarassed about what happened. Riley is surprised and a bit unnerved to see that Cameron is also there, and it's evident that Cameron is still suspicious of her.
Out in the hall, John doesn't know what to do about Riley and asks Cameron what the future him would do since Cameron knows the future him. She says that the future John has much more important things to do.
As Riley is in her hospital bed, Jesse shows up and says they're leaving. John and Cameron are later questioned by the doctor because Riley is gone. John says they need to split up to find her, but Cameron says that no, they don't need to find out and walks off. Meanwhile, Jesse has brought Riley back to her place and agrees to let her stay for just an hour or so.
The Sheriff and his deputies are investigating Sarah's car with all the blood as well as the recording device that Sarah had with her. The Sheriff then receives word that Sarah has escaped, and when they get to the hospital, he is disgusted that Sarah was able to subdue his deputy and escape. He realizes that Sarah couldn't have gone far with the bullet still in her leg, and it's later reported to him that a particular doctor is late for her shift, and it's apparent that he knows the doctor.
Ellison is still working with John Henry, and when Ellison goes to visit him, John Henry has some put-together robot toys and talks about how the ball/socket movement on them is so much more efficient than the hinged socket approach used by humans. Later, John Henry recounts for Ellison all the crimes that his former incarnation committed, and as he's listing them, the images of the crimes flash on the panel next to him, much to Ellison's horror. Ellison finds out that John Henry has access to the internet, which he tells Catherine is a bad idea. However, Catherine wants John Henry to be able to learn and discover things for himself, to answer the questions that he has.
Catherine later visits John Henry because he asked for her, and he tells her that he knows she's not human, that she's made of metal like him, but different metal. When she asks if he's told anyone else that, he says no, and she says she'd like it to stay that way. John Henry also mentions what element he's made out of and that quite a percentage of mines that have that element are now owned by Catherine's company. He plays a recording he accessed of an unsecure line where there's a problem with one of the mines. This discovery perturbs Catherine, who gets up to leave, but John Henry asks what she's doing with all the mines and elements and such, but Catherine declines to answer. Before she leaves, though, she becomes possessed by the spirit of Bryan Adams and tells John Henry that "everything I do, I do for you". When John Henry asked what Catherine was doing, it didn't seem casual or friendly but rather suspicious. John Henry presumably is eventually supposed to turn into Skynet, but since he now has the benefit of Ellison's teaching, which Skynet didn't before, it would be interesting if John Henry himself ends up stopping Catherine from having Skynet created.
Back at the building where Sarah was, the people are packing stuff away and are getting ready to clear out. I'm presuming they're packing the element that's being mined. Catherine shows up and kills everyone, presumably to erase all the evidence, and she even blows up the entire building. Her walking out of the exploding flames reminded me of a similar scene in T2, when the T-1000 emerged from a flaming explosion in its molten form before reshaping.
Back at the Sheriff's station, the Sheriff and a deputy are starting to piece things together. As the Sheriff is about to leave, a huge explosion from outside can be heard, and when they go outside to investigate, Sarah's Jeep has exploded and is in flames, completely destroyed. Meanwhile, Derek has snuck into the station and burns the other evidence as well.
Sarah wakes up after surgery, and the doctor says she got the bullet out and that everything is ok. Derek arrives, but the doctor points Sarah's gun at him, thinking he's the one who has been abusing Sarah. Derek tries to talk her down and after distracting her, pulls out his own gun to point at her, so they're kind of at a standstill. Then the Sheriff shows up, but it's evident from the interaction that he and the doctor are in a relationship and that he's the one who's been abusing her. In the end, the doctor shoots him. Sarah and Derek leave, but as they're driving, they seem the plume of smoke emanating from where Sarah says the building was.
Overall, I liked the episode, but I'm a little annoyed that they didn't say anything about who brought Sarah to the hospital. OK, they don't have to reveal to us who it is right now, but it would have been nice to have had *someone* at least voice the question. And, considering the last episode had Sarah seeing a descending UFO, it would have been nice to have that addressed, whether any of it was real or whether it was simply a hallucination. Or whether they are the ones who dropped Sarah off at the hospital on their way out of town. But then, she was hallucinating images of herself previously, and this episode, she hallucinated the entire presence of Kyle, so who knows.
And speaking of Kyle, I'd read in TV Guide earlier in the week that Kyle would be back in this episode as a figment of Sarah's imagination, but I was really surprised when I read that Kyle would be played by Jonathan Jackson, who I kind of know from a long time ago as Lucky Spencer from "General Hospital". I wasn't sure how he was going to be, but I really liked him as Kyle, though I have to admit that Michael Biehn will still always be THE Kyle Reese to me. I was struck at the resemblance that Thomas Dekker, who plays John Connor, has to a young Jonathan Jackson - good casting of father to son.
Jonathan Jackson as Kyle Reese
Jonathan Jackson in his younger years.
Another picture of Jonathan Jackson when he was younger.
Thomas Dekker as John Connor
Michael Biehn as the real Kyle ReeseIn watching the opening credits, there was another name that for some reason caught my attention - Connor Trinneer. Now, I have no idea why his name registered with me. If I had to come up with his name, I don't think that I would have been able to do it. But in seeing his name, my thought was "Hey, isn't that Trip from 'Enterprise'?" Considering that I only watched "Enterprise" in its first season and I've not been very good about paying attention to actors' names, I was really surprised that I recognized him. When I saw him on screen, playing the Sheriff, that confirmed it for me. How weird seeing him again after all this time.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
the 13th
This year, there are three months in which the 13th day of the month happens to fall on a Friday. Some people view such days to be indications of bad omens. I'm just discovering that those days for me are indications of very busy weekends.
Friday, February 13, 2009
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" returns from its hiatus to a new night, moving from Monday to Friday. The last episode before the break was a bit odd, so I'm interested to see where the story is going to go. And TV Guide online's description of this week's episode indicates the appearance of a particular character, which I'm interested in, but I'm also interested in seeing the person portraying that character.
This Friday also sees the debut of Joss Whedon's new show called "Dollhouse". I don't know much about it, but I love the look of the billboard ads I've been seeing as well as the tagline: "She can be anyone, except herself." And hey, I became a Joss fan with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and I also like Eliza Dushku, so I'm looking forward to seeing the show.
On the theatrical side, this Friday will mark, appropriately enough, the release of the remake "Friday the 13th". Yep, Jason reigns again. I'm not a huge horror fan, but not because I don't like them. I just have a really hard time not getting scared out of my mind by them, so because I often have trouble handling the really bad ones, I don't see many of them. But I have seen a number of films in the "Friday the 13th", "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" series, and the trailer for this new version of Jason's journeys actually looks really good. The husband wants to see the movie, so I've decided I'm going with him. He has agreed that we'll go to a daytime showing, as I hope that will give me time to get over the movie before it starts to get dark. And yes, I'll be bringing Teddy, who is probably going to have his head severely mangled.
Friday, March 13, 2009
The movie "Race to Witch Mountain", a remake of the original "Escape to Witch Mountain", will be released that day, and we already have our tickets for a screening at the El Capitan Theatre. I loved the original (though I don't remember much about it anymore), and the trailer for the new film looks great, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Also released that day is "Sunshine Cleaning", which I became interested in after seeing the trailer. I believe the film is opening in limited release that day, so I may not get a chance to catch it that weekend.
That may also be the weekend we drive out to Hemet for the day to see a Disney exhibit, though we're not set on which weekend to go yet.
And what about Friday, November 13, 2009? Well, we don't have anything definitely planned yet, but that day might very well be in the middle of a week of us vacationing in town, but it's too early to know for sure yet.
Friday, February 13, 2009
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" returns from its hiatus to a new night, moving from Monday to Friday. The last episode before the break was a bit odd, so I'm interested to see where the story is going to go. And TV Guide online's description of this week's episode indicates the appearance of a particular character, which I'm interested in, but I'm also interested in seeing the person portraying that character.
This Friday also sees the debut of Joss Whedon's new show called "Dollhouse". I don't know much about it, but I love the look of the billboard ads I've been seeing as well as the tagline: "She can be anyone, except herself." And hey, I became a Joss fan with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and I also like Eliza Dushku, so I'm looking forward to seeing the show.
On the theatrical side, this Friday will mark, appropriately enough, the release of the remake "Friday the 13th". Yep, Jason reigns again. I'm not a huge horror fan, but not because I don't like them. I just have a really hard time not getting scared out of my mind by them, so because I often have trouble handling the really bad ones, I don't see many of them. But I have seen a number of films in the "Friday the 13th", "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" series, and the trailer for this new version of Jason's journeys actually looks really good. The husband wants to see the movie, so I've decided I'm going with him. He has agreed that we'll go to a daytime showing, as I hope that will give me time to get over the movie before it starts to get dark. And yes, I'll be bringing Teddy, who is probably going to have his head severely mangled.
Friday, March 13, 2009
The movie "Race to Witch Mountain", a remake of the original "Escape to Witch Mountain", will be released that day, and we already have our tickets for a screening at the El Capitan Theatre. I loved the original (though I don't remember much about it anymore), and the trailer for the new film looks great, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Also released that day is "Sunshine Cleaning", which I became interested in after seeing the trailer. I believe the film is opening in limited release that day, so I may not get a chance to catch it that weekend.
That may also be the weekend we drive out to Hemet for the day to see a Disney exhibit, though we're not set on which weekend to go yet.
And what about Friday, November 13, 2009? Well, we don't have anything definitely planned yet, but that day might very well be in the middle of a week of us vacationing in town, but it's too early to know for sure yet.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - December 8, 2008 and December 15, 2008 episodes
December 8, 2008 episode
Derek enters some kind of room with a broken-down bus and other machinery while he's on the phone with Sarah. He then encounters a young woman and an older woman who is very pregnant and obviously hurt. Derek and the younger woman train guns on each other until Derek tells her that he's a friend of Sarah Connor's, and the younger woman puts her gun down.
The scene jumps back to six months prior, where Sarah and Cameron, with guns, force themselves into a cabin occupied by dad David, mom Ann and teenage daughter Lauren. Ann and Lauren are the two women that Derek is with in the first scene. The family thinks that Sarah and Cameron are there to rob them, but Sarah explains that they're actually trying to protect the family, and that the family needs to leave with them now. Lauren knocks out Sarah from behind as Cameron is in another room, so David takes her gun and wants to know "the truth". [At this point, the husband's comment was "You can't handle the truth." I didn't know what Sarah was going to say, but I thought she was going to make up some kind of lie. I was wrong.] Sarah tells them about terminators and that one is on its way to kill them. Cameron then shows up and easily disarms David. Sarah and Cameron then herd the family into the car and take off, but Sarah ends up running into another car - a car driven by the terminator sent to kill the family. Sarah gets the family back to the cabin while Cameron and the terminator fight it out.
Sarah wants to know about the family to find out who the terminator is after and why. David says there's nothing going on and he's just into banking, but he's later outed by Lauren, who produces emails that tie David to a cybernetics company. He says he's been doing some illegal stuff for the company, and he asks what Lauren was doing on his computer, to which she replies, "Looking at lesbian porn." I loved that the reaction from David is that Lauren is lesbian. Yeah, because she really meant that, and how she got his email is the issue at hand with a maniacal machine outside that wants to kill them. Ann is upset that David didn't tell her about any of this, to which his response is, "What is it about 'illegal activities' don't you understand?" He then says that she never asked him where the money came from that he brought him. She says she assumed he'd earned it. I thought David was being an ass throughout this whole scene. I mean, ok, yeah, he hasn't fully accepted the terminator thing and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around, but he tries to deflect blame onto Lauren and Ann. David had a job, and he brought home money. How on earth was Ann supposed to know he was getting more money because of illegal activities? "Welcome home, honey, did any of the money you earned and brought home come from you doing illegal things?" Yeah, that makes sense to ask.
Sarah has the front door rigged to shock whoever comes in as a protection against the terminator, but when a man appears outside, Ann dismantles the wires because it's neighbor Roger, who is revealed to be having an affair with Ann and who came because Ann called him. [There were a few moments when Roger first appeared outside in silhouette/shadow that he almost looked like a hulking Michael Myers to me.]
As they're arguing, Cameron is then thrown through the front window, and she's motionless. The terminator is seen approaching, and David decides to sacrifice himself by going outside so the terminator can kill him there and spare his family, but he's not the target, and the terminator just tosses him aside and continues toward the house. Ann reveals to Sarah that she's pregnant and that David is not the father, and Sarah realizes the terminator is after her baby, so she tells Lauren to hide in a closet and she takes off with Ann. Lauren is later saved by Cameron, who knocks out Roger by mistake. Sarah and Ann are then seen running when a car comes screeching up, taking out the terminator in the process. David and Cameron and Lauren are in the car and help Sarah and Ann in, driving off as the terminator is unable to keep up his pursuit.
Lauren is tending to an unconscious Ann, and Derek asks how the terminator found them. Lauren says she screwed up and called Roger because she just wanted to feel normal. Later, when Lauren is outside and Derek is tending to Ann, Derek tells her he knows that Lauren didn't call Roger. Ann admits that she did and that it's her fault that the terminator found them.
Meanwhile, there have been flash forwards to 2027, where a virus is decimating the human population. Derek is sent to investigate a bunker, where he discovers that everyone is dead. Derek sees a very pregnant mother with two children lying next to her, all looking like they're peacefully sleeping but are instead dead. (This is an image that Derek had flashed back on when he first saw Lauren and very pregnant Ann.)
Jesse finds the image too disturbing to handle, and he goes back outside. He is looking at his gun when a female voice is heard behind him - Jesse. This would have been the moment they previously talked about, when Derek thought about killing himself because even he couldn't take it, and Jesse ended up saving his life. He says that everyone inside is dead, but she says she was sent to investigate a signal that they received, so someone must be alive, probably in the radio room. They go back inside and make their way and when Derek pounds on the radio room door, there is indeed a response, and they find a girl inside, who we later find out is Sydney, the child that Ann was pregnant with. Soon after, Jesse starts to show symptoms of being infected by the virus, and Sydney says despite their masks, both Derek and Jesse have probably been infected and will soon die. They make their way back to the main compound, and Jesse has gotten worse and Derek is starting to show symptoms as well. Sydney is led away to see if they can formulate an antibody based on her natural immunity to the virus. Both Jesse and Derek are very sick, but an antibody is developed and administered, which has an immediate effect in curing them. The person administering the shot to Derek is Lauren, who thanks him for saving her sister.
Back in the present, Lauren helps Ann to give birth to Sydney, and immediately after, Ann dies. She had hung in long enough just to make sure Sydney could be born. Derek invites Lauren to come live with them, but after Derek returns from talking on the phone to Sarah, Lauren and Sydney are gone. Lauren knows that she has to take care of Sydney, and she's accepted the responsibility. She leaves behind a necklace that she had previously been warned could be used to identify her. She's going into hiding with Sydney, yet another child who has to grow up too fast to accept a responsibility far beyond her years.
December 15, 2008 episode
Sarah is seen driving, but on a non-plot-point note, I loved the opening shot that circled around the car and then rested on a shot of Sarah. Sarah arrives at a UFO conference in search of more information about the three dots symbol. She is dismissed by one of the seminar instructions as someone who just wants to attend and see the freaks and make fun of them, but another attendee takes her interest seriously. The woman tells Sarah about someone named Abraham who had been blogging about working with a metal alloy that was indestructible and had properties that were beyond anything developed by man. She says that Abraham is actually Alan Park, who had been working on a project involving lidar. There's an attack on them, which Sarah thwarts, and after that, the woman admits that she (really he) is actually Alan Park aka Abraham.
Alan never knew where he did his work, so Sarah convinces him to see a hypnotherapist to try to remember details. As Alan is talking in the session, Sarah had slipped a microphone in his bag and is listening to and recording everything he says. While Sarah is listening, someone comes into the room where Alan and the therapist are, and then Sarah hears gunshots. When she gets to the room, both Alan and the therapist are dead. Sarah then takes the tape she has and in listening to Alan's account (being picked up in a van at a local park, the direction the van was going, how long they drove, what kinds of sounds he heard), Sarah is able to recreate the journey that Alan took in being taken to work every day. (I loved the bit that Alan said he always heard rain but it didn't make any sense, and Sarah figured out that the car was being hit by strong sprinklers.) She finds the building where Alan worked, and while she initially buys the story of the guy inside that he doesn't know anything, she turns to leave, and he pulls out a gun and shoots her. She shoots and kills him, but she's badly hurt and bleeding. She had been hallucinating images of herself anyway, and as she crawls outside half delirious, she sees a spaceship descending. But she had seen a picture of the spaceship earlier. Did she really see the ship or was she just hallucinating?
I liked this whole story segment, even though Sarah spent all of it away from people she knows, but the story was compelling enough to keep my interest. I did figure out that the "woman" was Abraham, though I didn't figure out the "man now living as a woman to hide" aspect. I'm not entirely sure I understand all the hallucinations Sarah had. I think they were all hallucinations of when she was originally running from terminators. I really do hope the spaceship aspect is just a hallucination because while I can accept terminators and time travel and all that, I don't want alien people to be incorporated into this story. Maybe in her delirium, she thought she saw the spaceship when it was in fact just a vehicle that pulled up, and the vehicle happened to have the three dots symbol on the side as part of a company name.
Riley comes to see John and tells her about having flipped out on her foster mother. In flashbacks, Riley's story is told. She's from the future, and she was a starving child scrounging around. Jesse took her under her wing, and when Jesse arrived in the present, she brought Riley with her, who was amazed at all the nice new things in the apartment they were staying in. Jesse brought Riley for one reason - to come between John and Cameron. John notices that Riley has a bruise on one cheek, but she says it's nothing. It's revealed that she got kicked out of the foster house, and she'd gone to see Jesse and wanted to live there, but Jesse said that Riley had a job to do and slapped her, which accounted for the bruise.
Cameron is still suspicious of Riley and tells John that Riley is lying about getting the bruise from running into a door. John won't listen to Cameron though. They find Riley in the bathroom, and Riley has slit her wrists in an attempt to kill herself.
Catherine wants Ellison to teach morals and the difference between right and wrong to John Henry, but Ellison refuses. Ellison later visits the reverend at his church, and the reason for Ellison's breakup from his wife is revealed. They were married and happy and trying to conceive a baby. Then came September 11, 2001. His wife had indeed gotten pregnant, but she didn't want to raise a child in that kind of world, so she chose to terminate the pregnancy without telling Ellison, but he later found out. He then decides to go back and accept Catherine's offer. Ellison is playing chess with John Henry, and he talks to John Henry about Dr. Sherman, and Ellison tries to teach John Henry about the value of all human life.
I really liked the reveal of how Ellison's marriage broke up because it was heartbreaking. I'm not sure I understand why Catherine wants Ellison to teach John Henry. She's a terminator, and she presumably wants Skynet to develop, and ultimately Skynet is going to destroy humanity. So why does she want Skynet to learn about the value of human life and have morals? Does she want Skynet to be modified so that machines and humans will be able to live together?
There are a lot of questions that are being brought up in the stories, and all the time jumping was getting a little irritating to me, though in the case of this show, where time jumping is an integral part of the backstory, I can kind of understand it, and at least in the previous episode, everything got tied together nicely. I'm still enjoying the show, so I'm looking forward to seeing more when the show returns in February 2009.
Derek enters some kind of room with a broken-down bus and other machinery while he's on the phone with Sarah. He then encounters a young woman and an older woman who is very pregnant and obviously hurt. Derek and the younger woman train guns on each other until Derek tells her that he's a friend of Sarah Connor's, and the younger woman puts her gun down.
The scene jumps back to six months prior, where Sarah and Cameron, with guns, force themselves into a cabin occupied by dad David, mom Ann and teenage daughter Lauren. Ann and Lauren are the two women that Derek is with in the first scene. The family thinks that Sarah and Cameron are there to rob them, but Sarah explains that they're actually trying to protect the family, and that the family needs to leave with them now. Lauren knocks out Sarah from behind as Cameron is in another room, so David takes her gun and wants to know "the truth". [At this point, the husband's comment was "You can't handle the truth." I didn't know what Sarah was going to say, but I thought she was going to make up some kind of lie. I was wrong.] Sarah tells them about terminators and that one is on its way to kill them. Cameron then shows up and easily disarms David. Sarah and Cameron then herd the family into the car and take off, but Sarah ends up running into another car - a car driven by the terminator sent to kill the family. Sarah gets the family back to the cabin while Cameron and the terminator fight it out.
Sarah wants to know about the family to find out who the terminator is after and why. David says there's nothing going on and he's just into banking, but he's later outed by Lauren, who produces emails that tie David to a cybernetics company. He says he's been doing some illegal stuff for the company, and he asks what Lauren was doing on his computer, to which she replies, "Looking at lesbian porn." I loved that the reaction from David is that Lauren is lesbian. Yeah, because she really meant that, and how she got his email is the issue at hand with a maniacal machine outside that wants to kill them. Ann is upset that David didn't tell her about any of this, to which his response is, "What is it about 'illegal activities' don't you understand?" He then says that she never asked him where the money came from that he brought him. She says she assumed he'd earned it. I thought David was being an ass throughout this whole scene. I mean, ok, yeah, he hasn't fully accepted the terminator thing and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around, but he tries to deflect blame onto Lauren and Ann. David had a job, and he brought home money. How on earth was Ann supposed to know he was getting more money because of illegal activities? "Welcome home, honey, did any of the money you earned and brought home come from you doing illegal things?" Yeah, that makes sense to ask.
Sarah has the front door rigged to shock whoever comes in as a protection against the terminator, but when a man appears outside, Ann dismantles the wires because it's neighbor Roger, who is revealed to be having an affair with Ann and who came because Ann called him. [There were a few moments when Roger first appeared outside in silhouette/shadow that he almost looked like a hulking Michael Myers to me.]
As they're arguing, Cameron is then thrown through the front window, and she's motionless. The terminator is seen approaching, and David decides to sacrifice himself by going outside so the terminator can kill him there and spare his family, but he's not the target, and the terminator just tosses him aside and continues toward the house. Ann reveals to Sarah that she's pregnant and that David is not the father, and Sarah realizes the terminator is after her baby, so she tells Lauren to hide in a closet and she takes off with Ann. Lauren is later saved by Cameron, who knocks out Roger by mistake. Sarah and Ann are then seen running when a car comes screeching up, taking out the terminator in the process. David and Cameron and Lauren are in the car and help Sarah and Ann in, driving off as the terminator is unable to keep up his pursuit.
Lauren is tending to an unconscious Ann, and Derek asks how the terminator found them. Lauren says she screwed up and called Roger because she just wanted to feel normal. Later, when Lauren is outside and Derek is tending to Ann, Derek tells her he knows that Lauren didn't call Roger. Ann admits that she did and that it's her fault that the terminator found them.
Meanwhile, there have been flash forwards to 2027, where a virus is decimating the human population. Derek is sent to investigate a bunker, where he discovers that everyone is dead. Derek sees a very pregnant mother with two children lying next to her, all looking like they're peacefully sleeping but are instead dead. (This is an image that Derek had flashed back on when he first saw Lauren and very pregnant Ann.)
Jesse finds the image too disturbing to handle, and he goes back outside. He is looking at his gun when a female voice is heard behind him - Jesse. This would have been the moment they previously talked about, when Derek thought about killing himself because even he couldn't take it, and Jesse ended up saving his life. He says that everyone inside is dead, but she says she was sent to investigate a signal that they received, so someone must be alive, probably in the radio room. They go back inside and make their way and when Derek pounds on the radio room door, there is indeed a response, and they find a girl inside, who we later find out is Sydney, the child that Ann was pregnant with. Soon after, Jesse starts to show symptoms of being infected by the virus, and Sydney says despite their masks, both Derek and Jesse have probably been infected and will soon die. They make their way back to the main compound, and Jesse has gotten worse and Derek is starting to show symptoms as well. Sydney is led away to see if they can formulate an antibody based on her natural immunity to the virus. Both Jesse and Derek are very sick, but an antibody is developed and administered, which has an immediate effect in curing them. The person administering the shot to Derek is Lauren, who thanks him for saving her sister.
Back in the present, Lauren helps Ann to give birth to Sydney, and immediately after, Ann dies. She had hung in long enough just to make sure Sydney could be born. Derek invites Lauren to come live with them, but after Derek returns from talking on the phone to Sarah, Lauren and Sydney are gone. Lauren knows that she has to take care of Sydney, and she's accepted the responsibility. She leaves behind a necklace that she had previously been warned could be used to identify her. She's going into hiding with Sydney, yet another child who has to grow up too fast to accept a responsibility far beyond her years.
December 15, 2008 episode
Sarah is seen driving, but on a non-plot-point note, I loved the opening shot that circled around the car and then rested on a shot of Sarah. Sarah arrives at a UFO conference in search of more information about the three dots symbol. She is dismissed by one of the seminar instructions as someone who just wants to attend and see the freaks and make fun of them, but another attendee takes her interest seriously. The woman tells Sarah about someone named Abraham who had been blogging about working with a metal alloy that was indestructible and had properties that were beyond anything developed by man. She says that Abraham is actually Alan Park, who had been working on a project involving lidar. There's an attack on them, which Sarah thwarts, and after that, the woman admits that she (really he) is actually Alan Park aka Abraham.
Alan never knew where he did his work, so Sarah convinces him to see a hypnotherapist to try to remember details. As Alan is talking in the session, Sarah had slipped a microphone in his bag and is listening to and recording everything he says. While Sarah is listening, someone comes into the room where Alan and the therapist are, and then Sarah hears gunshots. When she gets to the room, both Alan and the therapist are dead. Sarah then takes the tape she has and in listening to Alan's account (being picked up in a van at a local park, the direction the van was going, how long they drove, what kinds of sounds he heard), Sarah is able to recreate the journey that Alan took in being taken to work every day. (I loved the bit that Alan said he always heard rain but it didn't make any sense, and Sarah figured out that the car was being hit by strong sprinklers.) She finds the building where Alan worked, and while she initially buys the story of the guy inside that he doesn't know anything, she turns to leave, and he pulls out a gun and shoots her. She shoots and kills him, but she's badly hurt and bleeding. She had been hallucinating images of herself anyway, and as she crawls outside half delirious, she sees a spaceship descending. But she had seen a picture of the spaceship earlier. Did she really see the ship or was she just hallucinating?
I liked this whole story segment, even though Sarah spent all of it away from people she knows, but the story was compelling enough to keep my interest. I did figure out that the "woman" was Abraham, though I didn't figure out the "man now living as a woman to hide" aspect. I'm not entirely sure I understand all the hallucinations Sarah had. I think they were all hallucinations of when she was originally running from terminators. I really do hope the spaceship aspect is just a hallucination because while I can accept terminators and time travel and all that, I don't want alien people to be incorporated into this story. Maybe in her delirium, she thought she saw the spaceship when it was in fact just a vehicle that pulled up, and the vehicle happened to have the three dots symbol on the side as part of a company name.
Riley comes to see John and tells her about having flipped out on her foster mother. In flashbacks, Riley's story is told. She's from the future, and she was a starving child scrounging around. Jesse took her under her wing, and when Jesse arrived in the present, she brought Riley with her, who was amazed at all the nice new things in the apartment they were staying in. Jesse brought Riley for one reason - to come between John and Cameron. John notices that Riley has a bruise on one cheek, but she says it's nothing. It's revealed that she got kicked out of the foster house, and she'd gone to see Jesse and wanted to live there, but Jesse said that Riley had a job to do and slapped her, which accounted for the bruise.
Cameron is still suspicious of Riley and tells John that Riley is lying about getting the bruise from running into a door. John won't listen to Cameron though. They find Riley in the bathroom, and Riley has slit her wrists in an attempt to kill herself.
Catherine wants Ellison to teach morals and the difference between right and wrong to John Henry, but Ellison refuses. Ellison later visits the reverend at his church, and the reason for Ellison's breakup from his wife is revealed. They were married and happy and trying to conceive a baby. Then came September 11, 2001. His wife had indeed gotten pregnant, but she didn't want to raise a child in that kind of world, so she chose to terminate the pregnancy without telling Ellison, but he later found out. He then decides to go back and accept Catherine's offer. Ellison is playing chess with John Henry, and he talks to John Henry about Dr. Sherman, and Ellison tries to teach John Henry about the value of all human life.
I really liked the reveal of how Ellison's marriage broke up because it was heartbreaking. I'm not sure I understand why Catherine wants Ellison to teach John Henry. She's a terminator, and she presumably wants Skynet to develop, and ultimately Skynet is going to destroy humanity. So why does she want Skynet to learn about the value of human life and have morals? Does she want Skynet to be modified so that machines and humans will be able to live together?
There are a lot of questions that are being brought up in the stories, and all the time jumping was getting a little irritating to me, though in the case of this show, where time jumping is an integral part of the backstory, I can kind of understand it, and at least in the previous episode, everything got tied together nicely. I'm still enjoying the show, so I'm looking forward to seeing more when the show returns in February 2009.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - November 24, 2008 and December 1, 2008 episodes
November 24, 2008 episode
Ellison is awakened in the middle of the night to find Cameron in his front yard, poking a long stick into the yard, looking to see if he has buried Cromartie there. She tells him to go back to bed.
Sarah is still obsessed with the symbol of three dots in a triangle, and she finds a company called Dakara Systems that uses that logo. Sarah and Derek break into their offices and steal their hard drives to see what information they might have. They're working on some kind of software that requires further development, so they're looking for investors, and John sets Sarah up with a fake identity as a potential investor.
Jesse arrives back at her apartment to find Derek, who has found her stash of pictures of the family, and he wants an explanation pronto. She says she was looking for John and Cameron and had no idea that Derek was living with them.
Ellison arrives at work at Zeira Corp. to find the police, who say that they found a man - Dr. Sherman - who was trapped in the building during a power outage, and he went hours without air conditioning or ventilation and died. When Ellison confronts Catherine, she says that Dr. Sherman was working with the artificial intelligence program - Project Babylon - and that when the power outage hit, the AI shut down everything but its own power to ensure its own survival. So the AI did what it had to in order to preserve itself, no matter the consequences, including to human life. Ellison talks to the techs, who say that the AI wasn't programmed to do what it did, but rather, that it made new rules to save itself. Ellison wonders whether the AI knowingly killed Dr. Sherman, to which the tech says that it's not capable of doing that. Ummm, hello, did NONE OF YOU ever see "WarGames"? There was this whole discussion about the 80s. Isn't "WarGames" quintessential 80s? "Computers don't call people." "Well, yours did."
Sarah meets with the head of Dakara Systems, who says that his son has built a program, which the son has named Emma. The man says that the Air Force had a chess game competition (the same one the Turk was in), and that one of the competitors has a chip that would be able to handle the program his son wrote, but they need to be able to license the chip. Sarah tells Cameron to sell the jewels and everything they have so that she can be the investor so Dakara can get the chip. Sarah looked so much like Rachel from "Blade Runner" with her hair done up that way. More 80s stuff! After the meeting where they get the chip, they go back to the office, but they're disappointed to find out the chip doesn't work - it's a fake. It was supposed to be able to handle a certain amount of memory and server space to run the son's program, but it can't, resulting in epic fail. (OK, I'll admit that I didn't really understand everything that was going on during that scene, other than that the chip didn't do what they thought it was going to do. The husband kind of translated what was happening.)
John goes to see Riley at her house, and we see that Riley lives with a couple who takes in foster children. John wants to tell her the truth about everything, but he can't bring himself to do it.
Riley is then shown with Jesse, and Riley is saying that she can't do it anymore, that John came close to telling her, but he didn't. Jesse obviously recruited Riley, but I was wondering if she recruited her from her own time or from the present time, but from a later scene, it's clear that Riley is from the future because she knows about the coming apocalypse. The scene where Riley ends up shoving her foster mother was pretty intense.
Ellison asks to communicate with the Babylon AI - which is named John Henry (not Joshua?) - to find out what happened when Dr. Sherman died. Ellison asks John Henry if Sherman was actually dead at the end of the power outage. John Henry confirms that he was, but then Ellison asks why John Henry then called the paramedics if Dr. Sherman was already dead. Through additional questioning, Ellison figures out that John Henry has no feelings and no regard for life, which accounts for its actions concerning Dr. Sherman. He later tells Catherine that they taught the AI so much, but they didn't give it any morals, so the people are actually responsible for the death of Dr. Sherman.
Sarah, John and Cameron track down the guy who sold Dakara Systems the chip, and it turns out that he's an actor hired by the head of Dakara (not in the Yakuza as the head of Dakara had claimed to Sarah). Sarah then goes after him again, and he says that he just wanted the money for his son. His son is crushed that his father didn't really believe in his project. Sarah and Cameron are able to retrieve their money.
When Sarah is later examining her face in the mirror, she finds an indentation or marks of blood in the shape of three triangular dots. Freaky. (BTW, the husband noticed this in the scene right before, before she went into the bathroom and saw it herself.)
Catherine takes Ellison to a room - where Cromartie has been hooked up and is now the physical manifestation of John Henry. Cromartie was right - Ellison ended up helping him even though he didn't want to, and that by Cromartie not killing Ellison, Ellison has helped to bring Cromartie back to life.
Jesse tells Derek that in the future, John is really tight with Cameron, and he seems to be making erratic decisions because of her. She came back to try to change things, to try to stop that connection, which I guess is what Riley is for. Derek tells Jesse that John is actually his nephew because he doesn't want there to be any more secrets between them, but Jesse doesn't tell Derek about her connection to Riley. Meanwhile, Riley has gathered herself together, and she goes to John's house to reconnect with him.
December 1, 2008 episode
At Sarah's request, John has been looking for companies that use three dots in a triangle as part of their company logo or literature, and John has found hundreds of them in many different kinds of fields. As Cameron comes into the room, Sarah hands the laundry basket to Cameron and says that she should make herself useful. John makes a comment about her being the best killing machine ever invented, and they're using her for laundry (This line for some reason reminded me of Marvin the Paranoid Android's line of "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge."), to which Sarah then takes the basket from Cameron and gives it to John and walks out. John stands for a minute and then gives the basket back to Cameron, saying that after all, she doesn't sleep.
And then we find out what Cameron does with her nights.
She knocks on a door, and a man (Eric) in a wheelchair answers it, and she's brought him a bag with three donuts - the same stuff she always brings him. It's eventually revealed that he works the night shift at some kind of library, and he lets her in to look at things after hours. Eric's in a wheelchair because he had bone cancer. She looks at some pictures in frames and at one in particular and says that she recognizes a particular man (Stark), but she doesn't tell him that she recognizes him as a terminator. The picture was taken at the scene of a speakeasy fire on December 31, 1920, scenes of which were shown at the beginning of the episode. They track down further information about him, and he's also seen at the premiere of Rudolph Valentino's "The Sheik", which is also attended by businessman and real estate tycoon Chandler.
They further discover that Stark probably robbed a lot of banks to get the money to do what he needed to do, and he bought a lot of land in the San Fernando Valley, making him a rival of Chandler. It turns out that Chandler's son was killed in the speakeasy fire, and Chandler's right-hand man is also killed shortly thereafter, and from there, Chandler's empire crumbles. At first, Cameron thinks Stark killed Chandler's son on purpose, but it turns out that it was an accident. The cause of the fire had been thought to be a fire bomb, but an eyewitness who admits to being drunk and thinks she imagined it in her stupor said she saw a flash of lightning and then a naked man appeared in the middle of the room. Cameron figures out that the terminator's appearance accidentally caused the fire and also accidentally killed Chandler's son. The picture that Cameron has originally seen had Stark looking up, and she figures out that he was looking at the stars and figuring out the date, realizing that he arrived at the wrong time.
Chandler's son was an architect, and he was going to be the designer of a particular building, so since he was killed, Stark had to make sure the building was completed. The building, however, was going to be on the exact spot of the speakeasy, and since his son was killed there, Chandler wanted it to remain a memorial garden. Stark took down Chandler's empire for the sole purpose of being able to purchase a particular location - Pico Tower. And then he disappeared. Eric tells her it's been closed for some time but that it's being renovated to be re-opened.
OK, so this Pico Tower is supposed to be located at the intersection of Pico and Third. And I was thinking, ok, that's not going to work because Pico and Third run parallel to each other. But I guess I was thinking of Pico and Third STREET, because Pico and Third AVENUE apparently [sic] do intersect.
Cameron goes to Pico Tower and sees a sign that says the building is scheduled to be re-opened on December 31, 2010 - the terminator arrived 90 years too soon. The keynote speaker for the re-opening is scheduled to be the governor. She goes to the ballroom and looks around and figures out that the governor would be assassinated during that evening, and she looks for the best spot to take the shot from. She goes to the back of the room, finds where the wall sounds hollow and punches through - to discover Stark there with a gun, since he had himself built into the building in the perfect spot. He reactivates, and the two have a really cool battle, which she eventually wins.
Earlier in the evening, John gets a phone call from Riley urgently asking him to come pick her up from somewhere, and she sounds upset, so John agrees. When he arrives, though, it turns out she's at a party, and she said some guy was just bothering her but things are ok now, and she convinces him to stay. She's flirting with another guy, and she's playing some kind of war video game, which she then gets John to play, but he gets frustrated and upset and loses. He says he's leaving, and Riley is about to leave with him, but she's taken the boy's lighter, and he wants it back. When she refuses, he starts to physically restrain her, but John steps in and beats the crap out of him until Riley stops him. They go to a hill and park, and they talk a bit about themselves. It seems that Riley is trying to get him to tell her the truth about everything and is using jealousy and whatever she can to achieve it. She tells him that her parents died in a fire when she was very little - I wonder if that means they died on Judgement Day? She leans over to kiss him, and they make out.
Cameron returns to the library and talks to Eric, and she ends up telling him that contrary to what he'd said earlier believing that he was free of the cancer, his cancer had actually returned, that she knows he hasn't been eating much, and he's been losing weight, and she tells him where he has a small tumour growing. Eric is crushed to hear the news and asks her to leave.
When John returns home in the morning, he sees Cameron carrying the laundry basket, and she asks where he's been all night. He says he was out. She sees lipstick on him and deduces that he was with Riley.
That night, Cameron returns to the library, but when he knocks at the employee entrance, a woman opens the door. Cameron asks about Eric, but the woman says she doesn't know anything, just that she was called to fill in. Cameron says he used to let her in after hours and asks if she likes donuts. The woman takes the donuts and allows Cameron in.
One of the things I loved about this episode was that with all the technology of the terminators and computers and the Turk and all the other advanced technology, the way to solve the puzzle of Stark was Cameron having to look at old-time media - newsreels, phonorecords, microfiche of news articles and 35mm film. I also liked that the events happened in the course of just one night. I also really liked the full flashbacks where we were shown what happened as they figured it out.
So it seems that Derek had the day off this time, and Sarah was only in it briefly, so she got a nice rest. I liked watching all the detective work between Cameron and Eric as well as their interaction.
So, why did the terminators want to kill the governor? Hmmm, hopefully, we'll find out more in a later episode.
Ellison is awakened in the middle of the night to find Cameron in his front yard, poking a long stick into the yard, looking to see if he has buried Cromartie there. She tells him to go back to bed.
Sarah is still obsessed with the symbol of three dots in a triangle, and she finds a company called Dakara Systems that uses that logo. Sarah and Derek break into their offices and steal their hard drives to see what information they might have. They're working on some kind of software that requires further development, so they're looking for investors, and John sets Sarah up with a fake identity as a potential investor.
Jesse arrives back at her apartment to find Derek, who has found her stash of pictures of the family, and he wants an explanation pronto. She says she was looking for John and Cameron and had no idea that Derek was living with them.
Ellison arrives at work at Zeira Corp. to find the police, who say that they found a man - Dr. Sherman - who was trapped in the building during a power outage, and he went hours without air conditioning or ventilation and died. When Ellison confronts Catherine, she says that Dr. Sherman was working with the artificial intelligence program - Project Babylon - and that when the power outage hit, the AI shut down everything but its own power to ensure its own survival. So the AI did what it had to in order to preserve itself, no matter the consequences, including to human life. Ellison talks to the techs, who say that the AI wasn't programmed to do what it did, but rather, that it made new rules to save itself. Ellison wonders whether the AI knowingly killed Dr. Sherman, to which the tech says that it's not capable of doing that. Ummm, hello, did NONE OF YOU ever see "WarGames"? There was this whole discussion about the 80s. Isn't "WarGames" quintessential 80s? "Computers don't call people." "Well, yours did."
Sarah meets with the head of Dakara Systems, who says that his son has built a program, which the son has named Emma. The man says that the Air Force had a chess game competition (the same one the Turk was in), and that one of the competitors has a chip that would be able to handle the program his son wrote, but they need to be able to license the chip. Sarah tells Cameron to sell the jewels and everything they have so that she can be the investor so Dakara can get the chip. Sarah looked so much like Rachel from "Blade Runner" with her hair done up that way. More 80s stuff! After the meeting where they get the chip, they go back to the office, but they're disappointed to find out the chip doesn't work - it's a fake. It was supposed to be able to handle a certain amount of memory and server space to run the son's program, but it can't, resulting in epic fail. (OK, I'll admit that I didn't really understand everything that was going on during that scene, other than that the chip didn't do what they thought it was going to do. The husband kind of translated what was happening.)
John goes to see Riley at her house, and we see that Riley lives with a couple who takes in foster children. John wants to tell her the truth about everything, but he can't bring himself to do it.
Riley is then shown with Jesse, and Riley is saying that she can't do it anymore, that John came close to telling her, but he didn't. Jesse obviously recruited Riley, but I was wondering if she recruited her from her own time or from the present time, but from a later scene, it's clear that Riley is from the future because she knows about the coming apocalypse. The scene where Riley ends up shoving her foster mother was pretty intense.
Ellison asks to communicate with the Babylon AI - which is named John Henry (not Joshua?) - to find out what happened when Dr. Sherman died. Ellison asks John Henry if Sherman was actually dead at the end of the power outage. John Henry confirms that he was, but then Ellison asks why John Henry then called the paramedics if Dr. Sherman was already dead. Through additional questioning, Ellison figures out that John Henry has no feelings and no regard for life, which accounts for its actions concerning Dr. Sherman. He later tells Catherine that they taught the AI so much, but they didn't give it any morals, so the people are actually responsible for the death of Dr. Sherman.
Sarah, John and Cameron track down the guy who sold Dakara Systems the chip, and it turns out that he's an actor hired by the head of Dakara (not in the Yakuza as the head of Dakara had claimed to Sarah). Sarah then goes after him again, and he says that he just wanted the money for his son. His son is crushed that his father didn't really believe in his project. Sarah and Cameron are able to retrieve their money.
When Sarah is later examining her face in the mirror, she finds an indentation or marks of blood in the shape of three triangular dots. Freaky. (BTW, the husband noticed this in the scene right before, before she went into the bathroom and saw it herself.)
Catherine takes Ellison to a room - where Cromartie has been hooked up and is now the physical manifestation of John Henry. Cromartie was right - Ellison ended up helping him even though he didn't want to, and that by Cromartie not killing Ellison, Ellison has helped to bring Cromartie back to life.
Jesse tells Derek that in the future, John is really tight with Cameron, and he seems to be making erratic decisions because of her. She came back to try to change things, to try to stop that connection, which I guess is what Riley is for. Derek tells Jesse that John is actually his nephew because he doesn't want there to be any more secrets between them, but Jesse doesn't tell Derek about her connection to Riley. Meanwhile, Riley has gathered herself together, and she goes to John's house to reconnect with him.
December 1, 2008 episode
At Sarah's request, John has been looking for companies that use three dots in a triangle as part of their company logo or literature, and John has found hundreds of them in many different kinds of fields. As Cameron comes into the room, Sarah hands the laundry basket to Cameron and says that she should make herself useful. John makes a comment about her being the best killing machine ever invented, and they're using her for laundry (This line for some reason reminded me of Marvin the Paranoid Android's line of "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you to the bridge."), to which Sarah then takes the basket from Cameron and gives it to John and walks out. John stands for a minute and then gives the basket back to Cameron, saying that after all, she doesn't sleep.
And then we find out what Cameron does with her nights.
She knocks on a door, and a man (Eric) in a wheelchair answers it, and she's brought him a bag with three donuts - the same stuff she always brings him. It's eventually revealed that he works the night shift at some kind of library, and he lets her in to look at things after hours. Eric's in a wheelchair because he had bone cancer. She looks at some pictures in frames and at one in particular and says that she recognizes a particular man (Stark), but she doesn't tell him that she recognizes him as a terminator. The picture was taken at the scene of a speakeasy fire on December 31, 1920, scenes of which were shown at the beginning of the episode. They track down further information about him, and he's also seen at the premiere of Rudolph Valentino's "The Sheik", which is also attended by businessman and real estate tycoon Chandler.
They further discover that Stark probably robbed a lot of banks to get the money to do what he needed to do, and he bought a lot of land in the San Fernando Valley, making him a rival of Chandler. It turns out that Chandler's son was killed in the speakeasy fire, and Chandler's right-hand man is also killed shortly thereafter, and from there, Chandler's empire crumbles. At first, Cameron thinks Stark killed Chandler's son on purpose, but it turns out that it was an accident. The cause of the fire had been thought to be a fire bomb, but an eyewitness who admits to being drunk and thinks she imagined it in her stupor said she saw a flash of lightning and then a naked man appeared in the middle of the room. Cameron figures out that the terminator's appearance accidentally caused the fire and also accidentally killed Chandler's son. The picture that Cameron has originally seen had Stark looking up, and she figures out that he was looking at the stars and figuring out the date, realizing that he arrived at the wrong time.
Chandler's son was an architect, and he was going to be the designer of a particular building, so since he was killed, Stark had to make sure the building was completed. The building, however, was going to be on the exact spot of the speakeasy, and since his son was killed there, Chandler wanted it to remain a memorial garden. Stark took down Chandler's empire for the sole purpose of being able to purchase a particular location - Pico Tower. And then he disappeared. Eric tells her it's been closed for some time but that it's being renovated to be re-opened.
OK, so this Pico Tower is supposed to be located at the intersection of Pico and Third. And I was thinking, ok, that's not going to work because Pico and Third run parallel to each other. But I guess I was thinking of Pico and Third STREET, because Pico and Third AVENUE apparently [sic] do intersect.
Cameron goes to Pico Tower and sees a sign that says the building is scheduled to be re-opened on December 31, 2010 - the terminator arrived 90 years too soon. The keynote speaker for the re-opening is scheduled to be the governor. She goes to the ballroom and looks around and figures out that the governor would be assassinated during that evening, and she looks for the best spot to take the shot from. She goes to the back of the room, finds where the wall sounds hollow and punches through - to discover Stark there with a gun, since he had himself built into the building in the perfect spot. He reactivates, and the two have a really cool battle, which she eventually wins.
Earlier in the evening, John gets a phone call from Riley urgently asking him to come pick her up from somewhere, and she sounds upset, so John agrees. When he arrives, though, it turns out she's at a party, and she said some guy was just bothering her but things are ok now, and she convinces him to stay. She's flirting with another guy, and she's playing some kind of war video game, which she then gets John to play, but he gets frustrated and upset and loses. He says he's leaving, and Riley is about to leave with him, but she's taken the boy's lighter, and he wants it back. When she refuses, he starts to physically restrain her, but John steps in and beats the crap out of him until Riley stops him. They go to a hill and park, and they talk a bit about themselves. It seems that Riley is trying to get him to tell her the truth about everything and is using jealousy and whatever she can to achieve it. She tells him that her parents died in a fire when she was very little - I wonder if that means they died on Judgement Day? She leans over to kiss him, and they make out.
Cameron returns to the library and talks to Eric, and she ends up telling him that contrary to what he'd said earlier believing that he was free of the cancer, his cancer had actually returned, that she knows he hasn't been eating much, and he's been losing weight, and she tells him where he has a small tumour growing. Eric is crushed to hear the news and asks her to leave.
When John returns home in the morning, he sees Cameron carrying the laundry basket, and she asks where he's been all night. He says he was out. She sees lipstick on him and deduces that he was with Riley.
That night, Cameron returns to the library, but when he knocks at the employee entrance, a woman opens the door. Cameron asks about Eric, but the woman says she doesn't know anything, just that she was called to fill in. Cameron says he used to let her in after hours and asks if she likes donuts. The woman takes the donuts and allows Cameron in.
One of the things I loved about this episode was that with all the technology of the terminators and computers and the Turk and all the other advanced technology, the way to solve the puzzle of Stark was Cameron having to look at old-time media - newsreels, phonorecords, microfiche of news articles and 35mm film. I also liked that the events happened in the course of just one night. I also really liked the full flashbacks where we were shown what happened as they figured it out.
So it seems that Derek had the day off this time, and Sarah was only in it briefly, so she got a nice rest. I liked watching all the detective work between Cameron and Eric as well as their interaction.
So, why did the terminators want to kill the governor? Hmmm, hopefully, we'll find out more in a later episode.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - November 17, 2008 episode
Sarah is sick with a fever, probably due to some kind of flu bug, and the illness makes her have nightmares, one that involves Cromartie still being alive, and one incorporating a turtle that she saved when they were on their way back from Mexico. Sarah's nightmares disturb her, so she makes a return visit to Dr. Sherman, but he is unable to help her when she doesn't want to discuss John and Cameron, even though she says that she's obsessed with a triangle of dots. He says that he won't be able to help her until she decides to be honest with him.
Because Sarah is so sick, John and Cameron go back by themselves to destroy the remains of Cromartie, but they are surprised to find them gone. John figures out that only one other person knew Cromartie's parts were there - Ellison. They pay a visit to Ellison, and Cameron throws him around his house (that was fun to watch, but she made a mess with all the stuff she broke) and comes close to choking him to death before John stops her, believing Ellison's claim that he had nothing to do with moving Cromartie's remains. I loved that at the end of the fight, Cameron flips Ellison onto his stomach, in a gesture similar to what Sarah did with the turtle. Cameron had asked John why Sarah had done that, and he said it was because when they see something in trouble, they try to help. Cameron's symbolic flipping of Ellison (even though she probably meant it to be literal since she didn't understand that people, unlike turtles, can survive while lying on their backs) was pretty cool. After Cameron exits, John sees a picture - THE picture of Sarah with the dog in the jeep, when she was pregnant with John - and John takes it. Why does Ellison have that picture? I thought Sarah gave it to Kyle? No, wait, Kyle had it in the future, and I think John gave it to him, so it makes sense that John has it now, but I can't remember if we saw the picture again after it was originally taken.
Derek is summoned by Jesse, who has captured a man that she tells Derek is Charles Fisher, a man who was a traitor to the human race and worked with Skynet and has been sent back by Skynet for some unknown purpose. Derek doesn't recognize the guy, who denies that he's Charles Fisher, and Derek won't let Jesse do anything to him until they're sure. Jesse decides to prove that the man is who she says he is by bringing the real Charles Fisher, from the current timeline, and showing that they have the same birthmark. Derek still isn't quite convinced, but using a technique that would make Jack Bauer proud, Derek starts torturing the younger version of Fisher to get the older man to talk, which he eventually does, admitting that he is indeed Charles Fisher. It's revealed that Fisher was in prison at the time of Judgement Day, which is why he survived, and when the terminators found him, they gave him the choice of helping him or die, and he chose the former. Jesse tells Derek that Fisher used a human as a test subject to teach the terminators how to talk to and interact with humans. Jesse then admits that it wasn't her who was the torture subject - it was Derek, though he has no memory of it. Derek is about to kill the younger Fisher when Jesse kills the older Fisher. After Derek buries the body, he and Jesse agree that they had to let the younger Fisher go. They still can't figure out how Jesse says that she and Derek talked about his torture for so long and yet Derek remembers none of it, and Derek then posits the possibility that they came from different futures, that in the future Jesse came from, Derek was tortured, but because Derek has now changed things in the present, he might also have changed the future, and in his future, maybe he wasn't tortured. I loved that idea. Since things are changing, who's to say that everyone from the future is from the same timeline? But I'm still suspicious about Jesse, and why she killed the older Fisher. We still don't know what she's up to or why she had those pictures of John and Cameron or the circumstances surrounding her arrival in the present timeline.
Sarah admits to John that it was her fault Cromartie found him. She tells him about the boy in the bowling alley that she let live, and that Cromartie found him and got the information out of him. John reassures her that they are not murderers, but she says that the boy was probably killed by Cromartie nonetheless.
Charles Fisher is going to work (I was wondering if he worked for Catherine's company, but you couldn't tell from what they showed), and he's intercepted by the FBI, and he's questioned about unauthorized entrances into the facility at odd hours. Fisher swears it wasn't him, but we are shown that it was the older Fisher who gained entrance, since it was just a fingerprint and retina scan that was needed, no badge. He went in and hacked into the computers and inserted some kind of virus program that they can't remove.
Ellison meets with Catherine, and he shows her what he has in the back of his trunk - Cromartie's remains. Cameron was right, and John was mistaken in believing Ellison. Ellison says that they need to take the thing apart and figure out a way to stop it so that the future can't repeat itself, but he's completely unaware that he has played directly into Catherine's hand, and that he is in fact doing what Cromartie said he would do - unwittingly helping Cromartie's mission. Ellison thinks he's helping prevent the war but instead, he is actually helping to ensure that Judgement Day goes forward.
Sarah is in the shed, looking at the clues on the wall again, and she realizes that a triangle of dots is right next to Dr. Sherman's name. What does that mean?
Because Sarah is so sick, John and Cameron go back by themselves to destroy the remains of Cromartie, but they are surprised to find them gone. John figures out that only one other person knew Cromartie's parts were there - Ellison. They pay a visit to Ellison, and Cameron throws him around his house (that was fun to watch, but she made a mess with all the stuff she broke) and comes close to choking him to death before John stops her, believing Ellison's claim that he had nothing to do with moving Cromartie's remains. I loved that at the end of the fight, Cameron flips Ellison onto his stomach, in a gesture similar to what Sarah did with the turtle. Cameron had asked John why Sarah had done that, and he said it was because when they see something in trouble, they try to help. Cameron's symbolic flipping of Ellison (even though she probably meant it to be literal since she didn't understand that people, unlike turtles, can survive while lying on their backs) was pretty cool. After Cameron exits, John sees a picture - THE picture of Sarah with the dog in the jeep, when she was pregnant with John - and John takes it. Why does Ellison have that picture? I thought Sarah gave it to Kyle? No, wait, Kyle had it in the future, and I think John gave it to him, so it makes sense that John has it now, but I can't remember if we saw the picture again after it was originally taken.
Derek is summoned by Jesse, who has captured a man that she tells Derek is Charles Fisher, a man who was a traitor to the human race and worked with Skynet and has been sent back by Skynet for some unknown purpose. Derek doesn't recognize the guy, who denies that he's Charles Fisher, and Derek won't let Jesse do anything to him until they're sure. Jesse decides to prove that the man is who she says he is by bringing the real Charles Fisher, from the current timeline, and showing that they have the same birthmark. Derek still isn't quite convinced, but using a technique that would make Jack Bauer proud, Derek starts torturing the younger version of Fisher to get the older man to talk, which he eventually does, admitting that he is indeed Charles Fisher. It's revealed that Fisher was in prison at the time of Judgement Day, which is why he survived, and when the terminators found him, they gave him the choice of helping him or die, and he chose the former. Jesse tells Derek that Fisher used a human as a test subject to teach the terminators how to talk to and interact with humans. Jesse then admits that it wasn't her who was the torture subject - it was Derek, though he has no memory of it. Derek is about to kill the younger Fisher when Jesse kills the older Fisher. After Derek buries the body, he and Jesse agree that they had to let the younger Fisher go. They still can't figure out how Jesse says that she and Derek talked about his torture for so long and yet Derek remembers none of it, and Derek then posits the possibility that they came from different futures, that in the future Jesse came from, Derek was tortured, but because Derek has now changed things in the present, he might also have changed the future, and in his future, maybe he wasn't tortured. I loved that idea. Since things are changing, who's to say that everyone from the future is from the same timeline? But I'm still suspicious about Jesse, and why she killed the older Fisher. We still don't know what she's up to or why she had those pictures of John and Cameron or the circumstances surrounding her arrival in the present timeline.
Sarah admits to John that it was her fault Cromartie found him. She tells him about the boy in the bowling alley that she let live, and that Cromartie found him and got the information out of him. John reassures her that they are not murderers, but she says that the boy was probably killed by Cromartie nonetheless.
Charles Fisher is going to work (I was wondering if he worked for Catherine's company, but you couldn't tell from what they showed), and he's intercepted by the FBI, and he's questioned about unauthorized entrances into the facility at odd hours. Fisher swears it wasn't him, but we are shown that it was the older Fisher who gained entrance, since it was just a fingerprint and retina scan that was needed, no badge. He went in and hacked into the computers and inserted some kind of virus program that they can't remove.
Ellison meets with Catherine, and he shows her what he has in the back of his trunk - Cromartie's remains. Cameron was right, and John was mistaken in believing Ellison. Ellison says that they need to take the thing apart and figure out a way to stop it so that the future can't repeat itself, but he's completely unaware that he has played directly into Catherine's hand, and that he is in fact doing what Cromartie said he would do - unwittingly helping Cromartie's mission. Ellison thinks he's helping prevent the war but instead, he is actually helping to ensure that Judgement Day goes forward.
Sarah is in the shed, looking at the clues on the wall again, and she realizes that a triangle of dots is right next to Dr. Sherman's name. What does that mean?
Friday, November 14, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - November 3, 2008 and November 10, 2008 episodes
November 3, 2008 episode
Ellison opens the door to find a mirror image of himself, which turns out to be a terminator who looks just like him. The Ellison-bot tries to kill him, but the bot is instead killed by Cromartie, much to Ellison's surprise, but Cromartie says that Ellison is going to be the one who will lead Cromartie to John and Sarah. Ellison is later arrested for murder, for a murder that was presumably committed by his lookalike bot. Catherine goes to visit him in jail and agrees to help him. In the guise of a police officer, Catherine gets the eyewitness to the murder to tell all the details of what he saw, which includes seeing the ball of light and the naked man appearing out of nowhere. The unbelievable tale gets thrown out and Ellison is released.
When John and Sarah and Cameron return home, they find that the house has been robbed, and all their money and diamonds and IDs have been stolen. Cameron figures out that it's because Riley left the house and forgot to turn the alarm on.
Cromartie ends up meeting Jodi, the girl who was in jail with Cameron, and Jodi recognizes the pictures of John and Cameron that Cromartie is showing around. Jodi takes him to the grocery store where John and Cameron normally shop, and John is there with Riley, but they miss seeing each other. Cromartie then canvasses the surrounding neighborhood and shows up at Casey's door. She pretends not to recognize the pictures, and when Cromartie leaves, she calls the house to warn them, but John ignores the phone. When Cromartie knocks on their door, John is freaked out, but Riley answers the door (which is what I was thinking, since Cromartie doesn't know Riley), and she manages to convince him that no one else is there, and he leaves.
Sarah and Cameron are able to track down the boys who robbed the house, and I laughed when one of them treated her like a girlie and was smack-talking her, to which she pulls out a gun and says to him "come and give it to me", totally deadpan. She then kills the group of them. Sarah finds a fourth boy in the bathroom, but she covers for him with Cameron and lets him go, making him promise to forget everything about what happened. Sarah has still retained some part of her humanity and can't bring herself to having this boy killed too, but I knew that was going to come back to bite her in the ass.
Sarah bans Riley from the house because she doesn't want John to get any closer to her, and she says that she just wants to protect him, but he angrily spits at her that she didn't protect him from killing the man to set them free.
At the end, Cromartie is shown questioning the fourth boy that Sarah let go. He seems prepared to tell Cromartie the truth, and you know the boy isn't going to survive his encounter with Cromartie.
November 10, 2008 episode
This episode is told from a hybrid "Rashomon"/"Time Code" viewpoint, where the story is told from the point of view of different characters in succession as the events unfold.
Sarah - She had invited Riley over for dinner, even though she was concerned about John's involvement with her. Cameron tells Sarah that she will talk to John about Riley, and then Cameron later tells Sarah that John won't see her anymore. After Cameron leaves, Sarah is taken off guard when Cromartie enters the house and captures her, but when they get to John's room, John isn't there.
Cameron - When she goes to talk to John, she lays in bed with him, scantilly clad, and she tells him how much danger he is putting Riley in. You could tell how uncomfortable her presence was making him. She then goes to the supply drop and runs into Derek there.
John - He's unnerved by his talk with Cameron, but then he sneaks out, and he meets up with Riley, and they take a bus down to Mexico to a city John knows. Unfortunately, a man recognizes John and knows that the authorities are still looking for him. A fight ensues when the man tries to blackmail John to keep silent, but Riley is caught in the melee and John returns. The authorities run a check on John, and John is allowed to call his family. His first call is to Derek, and his second call is to Sarah, but Sarah's unfamiliar responses alert John that something is wrong. Cromartie is presumably voicing Sarah's responses. John and Riley then later break out of their cell when Riley is able to distract the guard.
Sarah - She is kidnapped by Cromartie (who confirms that he knew where to find her because of the fourth boy in the bowling alley), and her attempts to escape only result in Cromartie throwing her in the trunk. She tries to get free, but then she hears a lot of commotion and the car is being driven and gunshots are fired, and when the car stops, the trunk is opened - and she sees Ellison and John.
Ellison - Because of the check run on John in Mexico, Ellison is alerted by one of his former colleagues about the check. Ellison goes down there just before Cromartie shows up and shoots the place up. After catching up with John and Riley, they take off in the car, and when Riley hears noises from the trunk, they stop and find Sarah in the trunk. Ellison says that he's paying back Sarah for having saved his life in the fire in the cabin. As they wait out Cromartie, John gets Riley to reluctantly leave and go home on her own, away from the danger of being with him.
Derek - He and Cameron have arrived at the jail after John's call, but John and Riley have already escaped. Derek gets Sarah's call and meets up with them.
Cromartie - After arriving at the jail, he searches for John. He then sees Ellison and is lured into a church, where he then engages in a spectacular firefight with Derek and Sarah (Jesus crucifixion poses abounding), but it's Cameron who ultimately takes him down, with the final shot coming from John himself. The ending of this episode is very much in contrast to the ending of the last episode, where he lamented having to kill the man, but John is already more hardened here, killing Cromartie with no mercy, though Cromartie is a terminator and not a man.
Cromartie's body is then buried, but Sarah loses it while trying to destroy his chip, and Ellison walks away as John is comforting Sarah, and Derek and Cameron are just looking on. I'm not really sure what the deal is with Ellison, because his actions in this episode seem to come out of nowhere from his actions working for Catherine. I'm not sure if he's just using Catherine to try to find out whatever he can and to have access to her resources. I guess we'll see how that continues to unfold.
Ellison opens the door to find a mirror image of himself, which turns out to be a terminator who looks just like him. The Ellison-bot tries to kill him, but the bot is instead killed by Cromartie, much to Ellison's surprise, but Cromartie says that Ellison is going to be the one who will lead Cromartie to John and Sarah. Ellison is later arrested for murder, for a murder that was presumably committed by his lookalike bot. Catherine goes to visit him in jail and agrees to help him. In the guise of a police officer, Catherine gets the eyewitness to the murder to tell all the details of what he saw, which includes seeing the ball of light and the naked man appearing out of nowhere. The unbelievable tale gets thrown out and Ellison is released.
When John and Sarah and Cameron return home, they find that the house has been robbed, and all their money and diamonds and IDs have been stolen. Cameron figures out that it's because Riley left the house and forgot to turn the alarm on.
Cromartie ends up meeting Jodi, the girl who was in jail with Cameron, and Jodi recognizes the pictures of John and Cameron that Cromartie is showing around. Jodi takes him to the grocery store where John and Cameron normally shop, and John is there with Riley, but they miss seeing each other. Cromartie then canvasses the surrounding neighborhood and shows up at Casey's door. She pretends not to recognize the pictures, and when Cromartie leaves, she calls the house to warn them, but John ignores the phone. When Cromartie knocks on their door, John is freaked out, but Riley answers the door (which is what I was thinking, since Cromartie doesn't know Riley), and she manages to convince him that no one else is there, and he leaves.
Sarah and Cameron are able to track down the boys who robbed the house, and I laughed when one of them treated her like a girlie and was smack-talking her, to which she pulls out a gun and says to him "come and give it to me", totally deadpan. She then kills the group of them. Sarah finds a fourth boy in the bathroom, but she covers for him with Cameron and lets him go, making him promise to forget everything about what happened. Sarah has still retained some part of her humanity and can't bring herself to having this boy killed too, but I knew that was going to come back to bite her in the ass.
Sarah bans Riley from the house because she doesn't want John to get any closer to her, and she says that she just wants to protect him, but he angrily spits at her that she didn't protect him from killing the man to set them free.
At the end, Cromartie is shown questioning the fourth boy that Sarah let go. He seems prepared to tell Cromartie the truth, and you know the boy isn't going to survive his encounter with Cromartie.
November 10, 2008 episode
This episode is told from a hybrid "Rashomon"/"Time Code" viewpoint, where the story is told from the point of view of different characters in succession as the events unfold.
Sarah - She had invited Riley over for dinner, even though she was concerned about John's involvement with her. Cameron tells Sarah that she will talk to John about Riley, and then Cameron later tells Sarah that John won't see her anymore. After Cameron leaves, Sarah is taken off guard when Cromartie enters the house and captures her, but when they get to John's room, John isn't there.
Cameron - When she goes to talk to John, she lays in bed with him, scantilly clad, and she tells him how much danger he is putting Riley in. You could tell how uncomfortable her presence was making him. She then goes to the supply drop and runs into Derek there.
John - He's unnerved by his talk with Cameron, but then he sneaks out, and he meets up with Riley, and they take a bus down to Mexico to a city John knows. Unfortunately, a man recognizes John and knows that the authorities are still looking for him. A fight ensues when the man tries to blackmail John to keep silent, but Riley is caught in the melee and John returns. The authorities run a check on John, and John is allowed to call his family. His first call is to Derek, and his second call is to Sarah, but Sarah's unfamiliar responses alert John that something is wrong. Cromartie is presumably voicing Sarah's responses. John and Riley then later break out of their cell when Riley is able to distract the guard.
Sarah - She is kidnapped by Cromartie (who confirms that he knew where to find her because of the fourth boy in the bowling alley), and her attempts to escape only result in Cromartie throwing her in the trunk. She tries to get free, but then she hears a lot of commotion and the car is being driven and gunshots are fired, and when the car stops, the trunk is opened - and she sees Ellison and John.
Ellison - Because of the check run on John in Mexico, Ellison is alerted by one of his former colleagues about the check. Ellison goes down there just before Cromartie shows up and shoots the place up. After catching up with John and Riley, they take off in the car, and when Riley hears noises from the trunk, they stop and find Sarah in the trunk. Ellison says that he's paying back Sarah for having saved his life in the fire in the cabin. As they wait out Cromartie, John gets Riley to reluctantly leave and go home on her own, away from the danger of being with him.
Derek - He and Cameron have arrived at the jail after John's call, but John and Riley have already escaped. Derek gets Sarah's call and meets up with them.
Cromartie - After arriving at the jail, he searches for John. He then sees Ellison and is lured into a church, where he then engages in a spectacular firefight with Derek and Sarah (Jesus crucifixion poses abounding), but it's Cameron who ultimately takes him down, with the final shot coming from John himself. The ending of this episode is very much in contrast to the ending of the last episode, where he lamented having to kill the man, but John is already more hardened here, killing Cromartie with no mercy, though Cromartie is a terminator and not a man.
Cromartie's body is then buried, but Sarah loses it while trying to destroy his chip, and Ellison walks away as John is comforting Sarah, and Derek and Cameron are just looking on. I'm not really sure what the deal is with Ellison, because his actions in this episode seem to come out of nowhere from his actions working for Catherine. I'm not sure if he's just using Catherine to try to find out whatever he can and to have access to her resources. I guess we'll see how that continues to unfold.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - October 20, 2008 episode
Dr. Boyd Sherman thinks he hears people rummaging through his house (he does - Cameron and Sarah are there looking through things), but all he sees is an open window. His name was on the wall along with the other clues, so they're trying to figure out what his connection is. What's the best way to investigate further? By utilizing his services, of course. Sarah takes in John and Cameron under the guise of needing therapy from Dr. Sherman, and after some discussion, he says he wants to talk to all of them separately. We find out later that they actually planted a listening device in the office so they could try to get information about the other patients.
Catherine is in her office doing a photo shoot, but she has seemingly developed the inability to smile convincingly. I could have sworn that she was smiling just fine previously with Ellison and such. Daughter Savannah is nearby playing, but when she's asked to be in the pictures, she refuses, and when Catherine presses her, Savannah runs away after having peed in her pants out of fear.
Catherine has other problems as well. The AI program isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's not reacting according to plan, and instead, it's flashing a series of random pictures. At some point during the episode, Ellison is in the building, and he finds out that there's a super-secret basement area that he's not allowed to go to, so he asks Catherine about it, and she says they're building something. It was kind of a throwaway scene, so maybe they're just setting up for Ellison finding out about the AI, with or without Catherine's consent?
Catherine takes Savannah to a therapist and conveniently picks Dr. Sherman, who shows Savannah a series of cards with facial expressions to depict a particular mood. Unbeknownst to Catherine, Dr. Sherman sees that Savannah has picked the card showing "scared". Savannah tells Dr. Sherman that her mommy is different and that she wants her old mommy back. Dr. Sherman figures out that the death of Savannah's father is still with her, and she feels like she's lost her mother as well, and Dr. Sherman tells Catherine that she must have changed because of her husband's death. Of course, there's no way he'd know that she's changed so much because she's now actually a maleable metal alloy that kills, but they probably didn't cover that in med school.
When John goes to see Dr. Sherman, he ends up meeting Savannah and teaches her a trick on how to tie her shoelace. In his meeting, Dr. Sherman encourages him to talk, that his office is a safe place, but since John knows the office is bugged, with Cameron and/or Sarah listening, he says nowhere is safe. In later sessions, John does open up to him a bit and tells him about the intruder that was encountered, with flashbacks being shown of what we didn't see at the time, leaving out the details about the terminators and such. Dr. Sherman says that he doesn't have to protect his mother, that he has the right to be just a kid, but Dr. Sherman doesn't know how much John longs to be just a kid. Eventually, John takes out the recording device and tells Dr. Sherman about how he really feels, that Sarah never wants him to feel safe, but that's probably a good thing because fear will keep him on his toes. Dr. Sherman had made some comment about John acting like the Vietnam vets that he previously treated, scouting out a room for exits when he first enters and such. He's dead on. John isn't just a kid. He's seen way more than a kid should, and he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders. I really liked the development of the scenes between John and Dr. Sherman.
Derek figures out that he's being watched, and after giving chase, he comes face to face with Jesse, who we learn is from his time and someone he had a relationship with. Derek thinks John sent her back like he sent Derek, but she reveals that she left on her own, so Derek says she's AWOL. Jesse says she just wants a new life, one that includes Derek.
Catherine watches old tapes of real-Catherine with her husband when she was pregnant with Savannah, and she learns mannerisms that she adopts, like stroking Savannah's hand in comfort.
Catherine thinks Dr. Sherman is doing a good job with Savannah, so she asks for his help on the AI project, which she describes as being like an interactive human child. She tells him about the pictures that it's flashing, and when she shows it to him, he laughs. He says the computer is trying to tell a riddle with the pictures, which means that it's bored and is trying to find ways to amuse itself, but of course, it's just a computer, so it can't possibly be doing that. Later, in Dr. Sherman's office, Catherine says that she wants him to do more work with the AI system, which he declines, saying he needs to tend to his patients, but Catherine wants him to work as a consultant, whenever his schedule allows, and she wants him to treat the AI just like another child that he teaches. Unfortunately, because John removed the listening device, no one else will know this conversation took place.
Another female terminator has come through the portal, and it's eventually revealed that the terminator is targeting Dr. Sherman. The new terminator and Cameron end up walking into the building and the same elevator at the same time and then realize who each other is, and there's a pretty awesome fight between the two as the elevator is moving. It's about to stop on a floor, and they stop their fighting and try to fix themselves up, even though they have messed-up hair and cuts and bits of metal showing through. A family of three get on the elevator, but the parents are so pre-occupied that they aren't even paying attention whereas their little boy is just staring at the two female terminators who are just standing there. When the family gets off on a floor, again, the parents don't notice anything, but as the boy looks back and the elevator doors are almost closed, the two terminators are fighting again. Cameron eventually defeats the other terminator and brings the bent-up body back to the house. They discover that it's a new model of terminator, one with a chip that self-destructs, and John figures out that they've changed them so that he can't reprogram any more terminators.
Early in the episode, a gunshot is fired, which immediately puts Sarah, Cameron and Derek on alert, but it turns out that John was cleaning a gun and accidentally fired it, grazing himself with the powder burn. Both Cameron and Derek are concerned that John may have been giving off a sign of suicide, but Sarah refuses to believe it. Derek tells him the story of a rough soldier who went outside one day and almost killed himself just like that. Derek says that tough people can just break.
It's later revealed that the soldier he was talking about was actually himself, and Jesse was the one who inadvertently prevented his suicide. After sex, Jesse convinces Derek to go get her something to drink. I knew something was up. Why couldn't she go get it herself? And sure enough, as he walks away, she has a pile of photos of Derek and John et al which she shoves under the bed. OK, so is she really Jesse or is she a terminator? If she's really Jesse, why is she spying on John and Derek?
At the very end, Sarah is back in Dr. Sherman's office, and the end of the struggle with the intruders is revealed in the flashback. Andrew's comment on this blog post about that episode was dead on - it wasn't Sarah that killed the intruder. John did. John the teenager who still isn't really comfortable with having to be the saviour of the entire human race. That's why he's been so freaked out, and why he wants to just be a normal teenager going to the mall and interested in girls, not someone that machines keep trying to kill.
I did like the contrasting of Catherine and Sarah as mothers. Catherine doesn't know how because she's not a human, and while she can't ever feel the feelings, she can mimic the actions, like letting her daughter sit on her lap. Sarah would probably have been a good mother, very nurturing, but from before John was born, Sarah knew what she had to raise him to be, what skills she had to teach him that normal kids don't ever have to learn. She's never been able to be nurturing or loving or kind to him because she can't allow him to be soft and unguarded - that could get him killed. She tells John that he can talk to her about anything, but he needs more than she can give him, and he knows that she probably wouldn't want to hear that he's scared or that he doesn't want to be shoved in that role, because they both know he has no choice.
Catherine is in her office doing a photo shoot, but she has seemingly developed the inability to smile convincingly. I could have sworn that she was smiling just fine previously with Ellison and such. Daughter Savannah is nearby playing, but when she's asked to be in the pictures, she refuses, and when Catherine presses her, Savannah runs away after having peed in her pants out of fear.
Catherine has other problems as well. The AI program isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's not reacting according to plan, and instead, it's flashing a series of random pictures. At some point during the episode, Ellison is in the building, and he finds out that there's a super-secret basement area that he's not allowed to go to, so he asks Catherine about it, and she says they're building something. It was kind of a throwaway scene, so maybe they're just setting up for Ellison finding out about the AI, with or without Catherine's consent?
Catherine takes Savannah to a therapist and conveniently picks Dr. Sherman, who shows Savannah a series of cards with facial expressions to depict a particular mood. Unbeknownst to Catherine, Dr. Sherman sees that Savannah has picked the card showing "scared". Savannah tells Dr. Sherman that her mommy is different and that she wants her old mommy back. Dr. Sherman figures out that the death of Savannah's father is still with her, and she feels like she's lost her mother as well, and Dr. Sherman tells Catherine that she must have changed because of her husband's death. Of course, there's no way he'd know that she's changed so much because she's now actually a maleable metal alloy that kills, but they probably didn't cover that in med school.
When John goes to see Dr. Sherman, he ends up meeting Savannah and teaches her a trick on how to tie her shoelace. In his meeting, Dr. Sherman encourages him to talk, that his office is a safe place, but since John knows the office is bugged, with Cameron and/or Sarah listening, he says nowhere is safe. In later sessions, John does open up to him a bit and tells him about the intruder that was encountered, with flashbacks being shown of what we didn't see at the time, leaving out the details about the terminators and such. Dr. Sherman says that he doesn't have to protect his mother, that he has the right to be just a kid, but Dr. Sherman doesn't know how much John longs to be just a kid. Eventually, John takes out the recording device and tells Dr. Sherman about how he really feels, that Sarah never wants him to feel safe, but that's probably a good thing because fear will keep him on his toes. Dr. Sherman had made some comment about John acting like the Vietnam vets that he previously treated, scouting out a room for exits when he first enters and such. He's dead on. John isn't just a kid. He's seen way more than a kid should, and he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders. I really liked the development of the scenes between John and Dr. Sherman.
Derek figures out that he's being watched, and after giving chase, he comes face to face with Jesse, who we learn is from his time and someone he had a relationship with. Derek thinks John sent her back like he sent Derek, but she reveals that she left on her own, so Derek says she's AWOL. Jesse says she just wants a new life, one that includes Derek.
Catherine watches old tapes of real-Catherine with her husband when she was pregnant with Savannah, and she learns mannerisms that she adopts, like stroking Savannah's hand in comfort.
Catherine thinks Dr. Sherman is doing a good job with Savannah, so she asks for his help on the AI project, which she describes as being like an interactive human child. She tells him about the pictures that it's flashing, and when she shows it to him, he laughs. He says the computer is trying to tell a riddle with the pictures, which means that it's bored and is trying to find ways to amuse itself, but of course, it's just a computer, so it can't possibly be doing that. Later, in Dr. Sherman's office, Catherine says that she wants him to do more work with the AI system, which he declines, saying he needs to tend to his patients, but Catherine wants him to work as a consultant, whenever his schedule allows, and she wants him to treat the AI just like another child that he teaches. Unfortunately, because John removed the listening device, no one else will know this conversation took place.
Another female terminator has come through the portal, and it's eventually revealed that the terminator is targeting Dr. Sherman. The new terminator and Cameron end up walking into the building and the same elevator at the same time and then realize who each other is, and there's a pretty awesome fight between the two as the elevator is moving. It's about to stop on a floor, and they stop their fighting and try to fix themselves up, even though they have messed-up hair and cuts and bits of metal showing through. A family of three get on the elevator, but the parents are so pre-occupied that they aren't even paying attention whereas their little boy is just staring at the two female terminators who are just standing there. When the family gets off on a floor, again, the parents don't notice anything, but as the boy looks back and the elevator doors are almost closed, the two terminators are fighting again. Cameron eventually defeats the other terminator and brings the bent-up body back to the house. They discover that it's a new model of terminator, one with a chip that self-destructs, and John figures out that they've changed them so that he can't reprogram any more terminators.
Early in the episode, a gunshot is fired, which immediately puts Sarah, Cameron and Derek on alert, but it turns out that John was cleaning a gun and accidentally fired it, grazing himself with the powder burn. Both Cameron and Derek are concerned that John may have been giving off a sign of suicide, but Sarah refuses to believe it. Derek tells him the story of a rough soldier who went outside one day and almost killed himself just like that. Derek says that tough people can just break.
It's later revealed that the soldier he was talking about was actually himself, and Jesse was the one who inadvertently prevented his suicide. After sex, Jesse convinces Derek to go get her something to drink. I knew something was up. Why couldn't she go get it herself? And sure enough, as he walks away, she has a pile of photos of Derek and John et al which she shoves under the bed. OK, so is she really Jesse or is she a terminator? If she's really Jesse, why is she spying on John and Derek?
At the very end, Sarah is back in Dr. Sherman's office, and the end of the struggle with the intruders is revealed in the flashback. Andrew's comment on this blog post about that episode was dead on - it wasn't Sarah that killed the intruder. John did. John the teenager who still isn't really comfortable with having to be the saviour of the entire human race. That's why he's been so freaked out, and why he wants to just be a normal teenager going to the mall and interested in girls, not someone that machines keep trying to kill.
I did like the contrasting of Catherine and Sarah as mothers. Catherine doesn't know how because she's not a human, and while she can't ever feel the feelings, she can mimic the actions, like letting her daughter sit on her lap. Sarah would probably have been a good mother, very nurturing, but from before John was born, Sarah knew what she had to raise him to be, what skills she had to teach him that normal kids don't ever have to learn. She's never been able to be nurturing or loving or kind to him because she can't allow him to be soft and unguarded - that could get him killed. She tells John that he can talk to her about anything, but he needs more than she can give him, and he knows that she probably wouldn't want to hear that he's scared or that he doesn't want to be shoved in that role, because they both know he has no choice.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - October 6, 2008 episode
There's a new terminator in town, something called the "triple 8", who seems to be like the normal exo-skeleton terminator in the first movie. They didn't say more about how this is distinguished from something like Cromartie or what its special/different abilities might be.
Triple 8 is going around killing all the people named Martin Bedell in the phone book, kinda like how in the first movie, terminator was killing all the women named Sarah Connor. Martin helps John start the resistance in the future, so I guess since they can't get to John, they'll go after Martin.
The first Martin Bedell has already been killed, so the group moves to the other two. They figure out which Martin Bedell they really need to protect, and Sarah reluctantly lets John go off with Derek to protect him. Sarah wants to protect John and keep him safe, but she also has to learn to let him go, so that he can develop the skills and leadership and character to become the John Connor that he's going to need to be.
Derek and John head off to the military academy where the real Martin Bedell is currently located. Derek says that he wants John to be enrolled, and the head of the academy agrees to let him try for a few weeks, but he also enlists Derek's help to be on staff temporarily. As a cadet, John actually meets Martin, and they strike up a friendship. Derek is a little unnerved by certain aspects of being at the academy, and when he's in front of a group of the cadets, he doesn't have much to say. However, when one of the cadets asks about his experience in war and asks how many kills he got and pretty much treats battle like a game, Derek gives him a serious dressing-down, describing the horrible and fatal realities of war.
Meanwhile, Triple 8 has moved onto the second Martin Bedell, who is a young boy. Sarah manages to save him in time, and she and Cameron hide him. Sarah has to reign in Cameron when Cameron is blunt to Marty about the truth behind what Triple 8 is and wants, and Cameron is a bit too forceful with Marty when he tries to call his mother. After Sarah gets Cameron to go a little easier on him, it was funny that Cameron still had Marty lifted by the shirt off the ground, and in her softer-voiced inflection, Cameron asks him, "Would you like a bedtime story?" to which Marty terrifiedly nods his head.
Triple 8 finally figures that he's at a dead end with Marty and heads to the third Martin Bedell. Derek and John set up a trap for him at the academy, and it was cool that while Sarah is playing mom to Marty and they're reading "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" together, the voice-over is done over the scenes of Triple 8 at the academy and the attacks on him. Oh, and Derek's and John's assumed last name at the academy was Baum. Triple 8 hones in on his target, Martin Bedell, but John gives him an even bigger target by presenting himself, distracting Triple 8 from killing Martin since killing John is a higher-priority directive. John manages to lure Triple 8 into a trap where John and Derek are able to disable and dispose of him in tar. John is later crushed when Derek reveals that in the future, Martin gave his life to save a truckful of prisoners which included John himself.
On a separate front, Ellison is still working for Catherine, and he is investigating the problem at the nuclear plant. He figures out that there are actually two machines and that they were fighting each other, and he also discovers that Sarah was involved somehow when he sees her in a picture taken at the local bar where the employees hung out. I'm not sure where this story is going, and I'm not all that interested at the moment. There was a side story about there being another person investigating, and Catherine needed to get rid of him. Yeah, I figured out pretty immediately that the hot girl hitting on him was actually her in disguise and that he was going to buy it.
Triple 8 is going around killing all the people named Martin Bedell in the phone book, kinda like how in the first movie, terminator was killing all the women named Sarah Connor. Martin helps John start the resistance in the future, so I guess since they can't get to John, they'll go after Martin.
The first Martin Bedell has already been killed, so the group moves to the other two. They figure out which Martin Bedell they really need to protect, and Sarah reluctantly lets John go off with Derek to protect him. Sarah wants to protect John and keep him safe, but she also has to learn to let him go, so that he can develop the skills and leadership and character to become the John Connor that he's going to need to be.
Derek and John head off to the military academy where the real Martin Bedell is currently located. Derek says that he wants John to be enrolled, and the head of the academy agrees to let him try for a few weeks, but he also enlists Derek's help to be on staff temporarily. As a cadet, John actually meets Martin, and they strike up a friendship. Derek is a little unnerved by certain aspects of being at the academy, and when he's in front of a group of the cadets, he doesn't have much to say. However, when one of the cadets asks about his experience in war and asks how many kills he got and pretty much treats battle like a game, Derek gives him a serious dressing-down, describing the horrible and fatal realities of war.
Meanwhile, Triple 8 has moved onto the second Martin Bedell, who is a young boy. Sarah manages to save him in time, and she and Cameron hide him. Sarah has to reign in Cameron when Cameron is blunt to Marty about the truth behind what Triple 8 is and wants, and Cameron is a bit too forceful with Marty when he tries to call his mother. After Sarah gets Cameron to go a little easier on him, it was funny that Cameron still had Marty lifted by the shirt off the ground, and in her softer-voiced inflection, Cameron asks him, "Would you like a bedtime story?" to which Marty terrifiedly nods his head.
Triple 8 finally figures that he's at a dead end with Marty and heads to the third Martin Bedell. Derek and John set up a trap for him at the academy, and it was cool that while Sarah is playing mom to Marty and they're reading "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" together, the voice-over is done over the scenes of Triple 8 at the academy and the attacks on him. Oh, and Derek's and John's assumed last name at the academy was Baum. Triple 8 hones in on his target, Martin Bedell, but John gives him an even bigger target by presenting himself, distracting Triple 8 from killing Martin since killing John is a higher-priority directive. John manages to lure Triple 8 into a trap where John and Derek are able to disable and dispose of him in tar. John is later crushed when Derek reveals that in the future, Martin gave his life to save a truckful of prisoners which included John himself.
On a separate front, Ellison is still working for Catherine, and he is investigating the problem at the nuclear plant. He figures out that there are actually two machines and that they were fighting each other, and he also discovers that Sarah was involved somehow when he sees her in a picture taken at the local bar where the employees hung out. I'm not sure where this story is going, and I'm not all that interested at the moment. There was a side story about there being another person investigating, and Catherine needed to get rid of him. Yeah, I figured out pretty immediately that the hot girl hitting on him was actually her in disguise and that he was going to buy it.
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