Trusting the Terminator, or Giving the Connors Another Chance
OK, I think I’m finally getting it. I consistently trashed the first season of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (Mondays at 8:00 pm on FOX) in this blog. I have, however, been watching the second season and its much better, but I haven’t said much about it.
I’m not even sure why I watched again this season, because if you read my blogs about the show for last season, I was pretty much never watching again. But then, somehow, as these things happen, when the show aired again this year I felt like giving it another chance. I’m glad I did. Somehow, the show has become one of my fave’s this year. It’s the show I actually wait all week to see.
I think I realize one of my main issues with last season. I wasn’t buying Lena Headey as Sarah or Thomas Dekker as John. I think it’s because when we left them at the end of T2, Sarah was strong and dominant, almost hard inside, and John was a snarky little kid, well able to take of himself and ordering a Terminator around. When we joined them on this show, Sarah was in love and vulnerable, and John was a whiny teenager, acting like a victim whose mommy had to wipe his nose for him.
This season they seem to have resolved a lot of the issues I didn’t like about last season. John is stepping up, for one thing. Thomas Dekker has proven to be a really amazing actor, and has shown a lot of range that I didn’t see last year. I still think Lena Headey is a little soft - not physically, just emotionally - for Sarah, but I also realize that in order for her to have anywhere to go with the role, she had to back down a little from where Linda Hamilton left off.
Another issue I had last year was what I perceived as a lack of actual direction, both in the episodes themselves and in the show as a whole. But now I think that might have been my inability to see the big picture or maybe just that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what was happening. After we hit about the fifth episode of season 2, I went back and re-watched all nine episodes of season 1. As a result, lots of stuff that I didn’t get the first time around made better sense the second time, because I knew where it was headed. Also, it has made me a little less jumpy about new storylines in this season. I guess maybe now I trust them and I’m willing to give them a chance.
So that’s the point. If you didn’t watch Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles this season cause you didn’t like it last season, give it another chance. All 22 eps have been ordered, so that’s a plus, too.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:20 am
[...] publicly apologizing to the producers, the writers and the actors. If you want to read about that, here’s a link to another blog I wrote explaining what my problems with the show were and how I feel that all that was changed in Season [...]