Thanks to the recent arrival of Terminator: Genysis, there are now more bad Terminator movies than good ones. At their best (the two James Cameron ones) they are well-sustained chases peppered with interesting ideas on robotics and time travel delivered on the hoof. This underrated TV spin-off, which ran from 2008-09, has the time to explore the more fascinating aspects in some depth, while still delivering Terminator-style action sequences on a small-screen budget.
We rejoin Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son John (Thomas Dekker) four years after the events of Terminator 2. They are still on the run from killer robots from the future, except that now they’ve got a killbot on their side, the cheekily named Cameron (Summer Glau). Future-John apparently reprogrammed Cameron and sent her back through time to protect his teenage self – there’s a lot of brain-fuddling time travel in this show. In the first episode they escape from a terminator masquerading as a substitute teacher at John’s high school by leaping eight years into the future. This leaves them out of sorts with their surroundings and increases the urgency of their quest to halt the creation of Skynet, the supercomputer behind the rise of the terminators in the future. More help arrives in the form of another resistance fighter who has been sent back in time – John’s uncle-to-be Derek Reese (Brian Austin Greene).
Much of their time is taken up tracking down nascent artificial intelligence projects such as The Turk, a chess computer that they deduce forms the tech that Skynet will one day be based on.
The knives were out for this show from the off. When it aired, Headey had yet to deliver her standout performances in Game of Thrones and Dredd, and was best known for a role in the Spartan epic 300; few were prepared to give her a chance. Her Sarah Connor is not as intense or damaged as Linda Hamilton’s movie version, and has a nice line in dry, dark humour. “And somewhere in the city, a naked cop bleeds in an alleyway,” she deadpans when Cameron returns home dressed in a stolen police uniform. Another notable turn comes from Garret Dillahunt as a terminator body hooked up to a new experimental computer AI, dubbed John Henry, who we follow on a fast-tracking learning curve.
There’s a lot of smart stuff about the nature of intelligence and being. Computers and robots are even psychoanalysed, with a temporarily amnesiac Cameron ironically diagnosed as being on the spectrum. The mythos is expanded when rival factions from the future start appearing, and some of the machines are against the destruction of humanity. We learn how adaptable and practical these robotic infiltration units can be when one overshoots on his time travel and ends up in the 1920s. He bides his time running a construction business that pays its employees well and treats them all equally, thus beating the less fair-minded human builders of the era.
It’s not all talk either – there are distinctive fight scenes, such as the close-quarters combat in a lift between Cameron and another female terminator. Glau trained as a ballerina and the stuntwoman opposite her is a contortionist, so they basically try to tie each other into knots. It can be brutal, too, as when a major character is offed by a gunshot to the head and there isn’t time for the story to slow down: just bam! and they go down like a sack of spuds. Scenes where the action happens off screen also pay off, as when a Swat team foolishly takes on a terminator holed up in a motel. Thanks to an underwater camera, all we see are the bleeding bodies plopping into a swimming pool as Johnny Cash’s When The Man Comes Around plays on the soundtrack.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only lasted 31 episodes, bowing out with an ambiguous but workable finale. It adds a lot to the terminator lore, with much that the movies just don’t have the time, or recently the sense, to cover, often playing like a weird but enjoyably paranoid soap opera as we spend time with a dysfunctional, malfunctioning family unit; mother, son and robot.
