So, Frank Said...

...would I recommend The Sarah Connor Chronicles?

And I wouldn't want to set Frank up with anything less than something good.

The premise of the show is solid. It takes place after Terminator 2; the future is still there to fight for, Sarah Connor is alive, John is a teenager and another Terminator has been sent back to protect John from Skynet.

Good Things:

Lena Heady. She plays Sarah Connor and picks up the character notes from T2; Sarah is well on her way to becoming a machine, at least emotionally, in order to protect John. Lena does this very effectively, she's chilling and precise and ruthless. The character gets plenty of time to crack, too, and show the very human interior which is basically a mother doing anything and everything for her child.

Shirley Manson. She plays Catherine Weaver, head of a really advanced research company with an interest in AI. She's chilly, remote, she even looks forbidding and a bit sterile. Catherine Weaver has a daughter that is scared of her, and apparently very few social skills. Shirely Manson does much the same thing as Lena Heady, but is a mirror to her because Catherine Weaver is an advanced T-1001 and is learning a lot about being human, including how to parent.

Not, you understand, in a Star Trek "grasp the human factor" way. In calculating, let's be a perfectly disguised terminator way.

Summer Glau. She plays Cameron, a Terminator reprogrammed to protect John Connor. Summer Glau is a very physical actor; a lot of her performance is in body position and movement. In this case, she has "machine" down to something graceful and not quite beautiful. She also gets to emote from time to time, which is amusing to see in some respects and worrying in others.

Time Travel. Like I said in a recent post, this show could possibly be exploring paradox and free will, and doing so in quite a sly and clever way.

Bad Things

Time Travel. The biggest issue I have with the show is that it treats time travel like Star Trek treats the Transporter - as a way of introducing new characters or situations. No bad thing, but there are a number of plot problems here.

First - how does Skynet know when a plan has failed?
Typically, a circumstances arises and Skynet responds to this by sending a Terminator into the past in order to undo or prevent it. This immediately creates a paradox, right? And the only way to resolve the paradox is for everything to stay just as it was. No matter what happens, Skynet will be born, Judgement Day will happen, John Connor will unite humanity - what's left of it - against the machines and the events of Terminator and T2 will happen. Sarah Connor's mantra "No fate but what we make" is just a lie she tells herself to stop feeling out of control.

The other issue is how fractious and divided and annoying some of the humans are. You'd think that facing extinction would be the one thing that stops humans being bitchy and political, but apparently not. Granted, having the humans be less than the full on shaved ape would be making the whole thing too black and white, too easy to understand: meat good, machine bad. Even so, does everyone from the future need to have an agenda? A good example is a character who presents herself as essentially being a refugee from the war, a soldier who ran away to the years before Judgement Day, and who seems intent on enjoying some actual life. While this is an engaging character point, and while stories can certainly be woven around this, the writers instead opted to tell us that really there is a plot by the humans to manipulate John Connor so he doesn't have such warm fuzzy feelings towards certain types of terminator. It's all a bit Machiavellian; perhaps it doesn't need to be, perhaps there's plenty going on?

Or perhaps this is just the writers attempting to steer the show away from the "terminator of the week" syndrome that looms, or allows them to give Sarah Connor a home to defend and a single location for us to get used to?

Do I recommend it? Not sure.

It's not the most innovative or deep show on TV at the moment, but it's worth watching on something like Hulu. It's taken a couple of pages out of BSG's book, it works and it has some engaging performances and interesting stories. I make room for it on a weekly basis, because it does do things that BSG doesn't do. It has a sense of humour. It answers questions. It gives the villains a human face without making them human or wannabe human.

Yeah. I like it. Are there better things a person with a packed schedule could be watching?

Almost certainly. But it's sufficiently different to other prime time shows for me to say "Check out a couple of episodes, and see whether it makes you want to watch more". I have the strong feeling this is a marmite show.