Anyone watching the Sarah Connor Chronicles? I think it's not bad at all. It has some of the shotgun, engine grease and dirty appartment feel of the first one. The chick from Firefly is doing a good job of being a little robot girl. The cyborg on cyborg fight scenes are cool, all brute force and stuff. Sarah Connor is not as hardcore as in T2 (which actually made me realise Sarah Connor does not get enough credit about being a strong leading lady, it's always all about Ripley...) but she does an Ok job. Considering it's for network TV, I think it's well done. I thought it was going waaay more dumbed down than this.

I have serious issues with the time travel logic, but whatever. I try not to focus on it too much.

All my friends are scared to watch it, because its on Fox. Something about Fox's tendency to cancel good shows.

I just watched the first two episodes (two-part pilot) last night. I enjoyed it. The Sarah Connor character is pretty good. I agree with Backgammon, she's not as hard-core as in T2, but she's good nonetheless. John Connor's character is somewhat undeveloped as yet, but there's promise. (It's not called the John Connor Chronicles, after all)
Summer Glau really steals the show, though. Her extensive dance background gives her impressive body control, and so she frequently makes her movements not-quite-right so that she hits that "uncanny valley" and convey the feel of a robot impersonating a human. Excellent casting choice for the cyborg.
I don't expect Fox will ruin this one. With the writer's strike on there's not much else to watch, so it should get plenty of viewers. And being a miniseries, there's only 12 episodes, and it's already been written and made. Right? Somebody jump in if I'm wrong on this.

Dont worry about the time travel problems. Because of the movies actually the timestream has been changed up quite a bit. Leading to the events in the series. (Seems a lot of people are having trouble understanding this from what I have seem on the net.)

Seems the humans and skynet are in a sort of time cold war now. both sides sending proxies back into the past.

I think this show has a lot of potential. Sarah's character is my favorite. (She was Leo's wife in the movie 300 I think.) Always good to see Firefly crew get work on TV so I'm hoping for some success to Summer. Not too sure about John but we'll see.

You had me wondering there. It hasn't started here yet, and is just being advertised heavily, and there is no mention of being a mini-series (not that that means anything on Oz-TV ).

I thought it was really good, definitely gonna keep watching it!

I'll reserve judgement & wait & see. The only two real problems I have are:

The 'time-jump' part in the bank-- they established in both T1 & T2 that you can only go 'downstream' (into the past), not upstream (into the future), even if you're from the future. It's a one-way trip. No going back. WTH?

The damaged Terminator: it's decapitated head reactivated, then it's STILL INTACT body also reactivated, accurately hunted down it's own head & reattached it.
Now, according to all my sources (the novels, the comics & the movies), a decapitated T-800 will stop, just like a decapitated human will. The head does NOT contain it's own powersource (NO ROOM!), and the body does not contain any sensors nor back-up systems to function autonomically. WTH?

But I am expecting more diverse Terminators in this series. I've seen female & other ethnic types in the T-800 series, thanks to the Dark Horse comics.

Hmm, I didn't remember the part about only being able to go backwards in time from the movies, was it firmly established as law or something that could be past off as a character simply getting it wrong?

Completely agree on the T-800's head activating, but all in all so far I like the series, but wish they had left it unclear whether or not John's pet made the right call by shooting the old dude.

Watched the pilot three days ago - turned out better then I expected, with a lot of dark and gritty feeling.

The part in the bank confused me, but I'm having troubles with the whole time travel stuff in the T-movies anyway.

This is what I mean by I try not to focus on the time travel thing -

1) It is possible to time travel a machine (terminator) back in time. So you can send inanimate matter back. Why not send a nuclear device to take out Sarah Connor?

2) Assuming you don't want to send a nuke. You send Ahnold back in time to kill Sarah. He fails. Ok. Why not send a second Terminator set to arrive at the same day the first Terminator arrived. Maybe a little help will do the trick, you know. Then send another, and another. And another.

3) If you don't want to send an army of Terminators to do the job, why not send one to kill Sarah's great grandma while she's still a child? Sarah Connor is a tough cookie. Maybe great grandma isn't.

On travelling back and forth.
actually Kyle never specified in Terminator that the no going back was a limitation of time travel its self, just that HE cannot go back, so its not unreasonable that in an alternate 'stream' and time that the resistance could implement another time machine to go back and forth.

On meat, metal and time travel.
Why can they wrap a robot in flesh and ditch it in the past but not do the same with a gun, I'm sure they could knock up a doodah that attaches to the hightech plasma rifle that keeps meat alive while wrapped around a gun, then send that back ala a huge robot, peel it remove the gizmo and tada! high tech gun in the past, no reason you couldn't have a hunterkiller wrapped in leather imo

I'm going to guess they can only send one object at a time, so if they sent a gun and a man, the gun would end up some distance or time later, and is very liable to be picked up by the wrong person and cause a lot of trouble. I did however wonder why they didn't put some useful technological doodads inside of Kyle. I guess they just didn't feel comfortable explaining how Kyle had to poop out his nifty raygun.

Ah ha. I was reading up on Terminator lore on wikipedia when I spotted that the series is a prop-up for the upcoming T4 movie. Makes sense. I was wondering why they'd do a tv series for a dead franchise. Turns out it's not dead.

Now all skynet has to do is use cow skin and 'port them into low earth orbit.

And they did something similar in one of the Dark Horse Terminator mini-series: three T-800's jumped with a captured human resistance tech, having placed a hand-held e-pistol inside his out-of-shape body, then rather messily retrieved it (you'll have to find & read the issue).

well. they did mention close to the end with their new identites, i think they said they were from lawrence kansas? at the very least the made up date is, tough that should be kinda suspect, since i left there right before the turn of the milennia no cop that i remember got shot in the line of duty....though I am old and memory comes and goes.


it was ok. the terminator chick is hot, 2:1 the guy at least cops a feel from her.

i liked the first two eps, but with the third ep, the series seems to be slowing down and getting kinda cliche.

In the premier episode, the fem-terminator said her name was Cameron (no doubt a nod or dig to James Cameron)

My vote's on both a nod and a dig.

Decent series though. It's going to have to get really weird though. Time travel does that to a series.

i dunno, thus far it just feels like it's going through the motions. Lena and Summer are appropriately hot, Summer is appropriately quirky and badass, Skynet is doing appropriately bad things--it's all really predictable. the few interesting elements--John pushing to become the badass he's supposed to become, the mystery of what's so different about Cameron--have, so far, just been kinda folded in as plot elements.

mfb: Glad I'm not the only one who noticed the oddball shift in behavior on behalf of 'Cameron'... though I did miss ep 3... arg!

I've watched this and liked it. The shift in Cameron's behavior both was kinda predicted (inconsistencies in earlier behavior) and is kinda lessening the impact of the show for me.

I'll still continue to watch it though. Summer Glau is quite cute.

http://www.fox.com/fod/player.htm?show=tscc

That said, I can't understand why these people know how to hotwire cars, but not how to pick locks.

Watch "Firefly" and the movie that came out for the series "Serenity." Summer Glau plays another interesting role, but the show is dynamite... Only it was canceled after the 13th episode, first season. So don't watch it if you like Fox as a channel.

It happened in the Pilot too.

Cameron is every bit the typical teenager until Cromartie pull the pistol. Then two full episodes of "Ahhhnold".

All they have to do is have her say that she has advanced personality simulation code, but she can't run it and her tactical code at the same time. So, she either flirts and gossips, or kills people, not both at the same time.

i didn't get to watch all of it. my wife was switching back and forth between 3 shows. So on terminator looks like an actor or something? i'm getting lost.

I don't know, other then when she was first introdiced I didn't think she was really that "human-like" in any of the episodes, but I might be missing something.

You aren't. There was about 90 sec of "real girl", then utter deadpan from then on.

It is still very early in the series to comment on character interaction.

Cameron has already lasted longer as a plot object than any other terminator. All 3 Arnies were destroyed after just a few days. Ditto the Lokken and Patrick terminators. Perhaps with extended human contact, she will become human-like, not just act human-like.

I could teach someone off the street how to hotwire most cars and explain why and how it works in about five minutes. Picking locks is a fiddly finger skill that takes a while to learn.

It's worth noting that when you're hotwiring a car, you're bypassing the part that involves a key... which you could, in theory, pick.

After last show's foreshadowing, I will bet you anything John and Cameron end up accidentaly buildin skynet. Appropriately ironic, in a "Fox Network no imagination" sort of way.

That depends on the lock. A tubular lock, such as that found on drink machines and arcade games, can be picked by taking a Bic pen apart, shoving the body into the lock, and turning it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9bN0zfMFW4

Not in any car newer than about... 1992. Since then they've changed the electronics because, well anyone off the street can hotwire a car. Now to hotwire it you have to be able to move the engine block. Since I don't generally see a lot of cars around that are older than 15 years, there's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

A car lock is a double-sided wafer lock. I've never picked one myself, but I understand it's reasonably difficult (which is why if you call a lock-out, the person who responds will almost never use that option). This is compounded by the fact that most medium to high-end new cars use the car transponders, which require the appropriate, encoded RFID chip in addition to the key to open. It is possible to spoof that, but not with a set of lock picks.

However, the lock that John used on the bunker appeared to be a standard, low-grade wafer lock (I'm a little surprised myself, I would have figured that a lock on a nuclear bunker would, at minimum, use a high-end medecco with the side-bar. Now that is a sucker to pick.)




Not any more. Most vending machine owners realized 'hey, people can pick these locks with a bic pen!' and have since upgraded. The vending machines at my office both have the tri-lock (I know I misquoted the company name) which are pretty tough to pick. I haven't tried it for obvious reasons, however. I picked the circular lock on my computer fairly easily (although since I winged it and don't actually have a circular pick, it was not as fun when I realized I had to pick it again to close it and be able to insert it in my computer). The standard ones, including what you see on steering wheel locks, are great fun and I highly recommend them for any starting lock-picker, since they illustrate how tumblers work very well, but the ones beyond anything holding money is almost always going to be far more secure and a serious pain to pick. Of course, if your machine is ten years old though...

I'm thinking that she may not just be "human-like" but actually incorporate more actual human organs and such. I mean other than just the artificial skin that they need to time travel. That's my guess on the whole "eating a potato chip" thing in the pilot episode. I do wish she would shift back into "real girl emulation" mode. She's a lot cuter that way.

You certainly could be right, but from the POV of designing a more convincing infiltration droid, it is mechanically much simpler to just store food, compress it then excrete it. That gives you two more convincing human behaviors.

Sure, it's poo would still look and smell like food, but who actually checks poo?

Food would be necessary to maintain the living skin.

Cameron builds skynet. Called it. You'll see.

ep5 is definitely an improvement over the last few eps.