Category Archives: Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off

Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Results)

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As anyone who has read both of my Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! posts will realise, I’ve pretty much given away the results already thanks to my extended Torchwood post, but there’s a couple of other things I need to get off my chest about the two shows and the genre they represent, and besides, what’s a Face/Off! without an arbitrary and complicated scoring system?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Cast:
Lena Headey: +2
Thomas Dekker: +2
Summer Glau: +6
Dean Winters: +4
Richard T. Lewis: +2
Owain Yeoman: 0
Total: 14

I feel a little guilty about awarding a low score to Owain Yeoman, mostly for indulging in some very silly posing and chewing of lines. He’s not actually bad. Perhaps he had little to work with. Still, it turns out he won’t be in the rest of the series, and the main antagonist is going to none other than future character acting legend Garret Dillahunt. This blog supports that decision wholeheartedly. As for Headey, Dekker and Lewis, it’s early days yet, and those scores might be rendered defunct soon.

Plot elements specific to these shows:
Convincing reactions to getting shot: -5
Tight plot: +5
The Sexxy: +1
Potential: +5
Badassery: +4
Conviction: +5
Total: 15

Having Lena Headey take a bullet to the shoulder for very little narrative reason and then have her miraculously heal by the next scene drops the score way down. It’s slowly becoming a bugbear of mine, seeing people get shot (usually in the shoulder) and then moving on as if nothing has just happened. The Sexxy relates to the show’s ambition in furthering the mainstream acceptance of sexual relationships that are not usually accepted by the masses, and as a primetime network there is certainly nothing as daring as this Not Safe For Work Flickr demonstration of
Terminator – on – Terminator lovemaking, but John Connor has obviously got the hots for his robotic bodyguard, which shows a progressive attitude to human/cyborg relationships, and there is some uncomfortable nudity at the end, so I’ll give it a point for that. Even though, you know, eww.


Conviction refers to whether the show has a seriousness of purpose, which is something I think is important in sci-fi. I’m not talking about humourlessness, something T:TSCC has in spades. It’s more that the show takes the genre seriously and isn’t sticking two fingers up at the fanbase. While it’s easy to say that WB and Fox are cynically resurrecting an old sci-fi franchise and exploiting the fans by knocking out a cheap version of a fan favourite, Friedman has certainly given the show a lot of thought, and for the most part the cast play it straight. Points deducted for Chromey’s “Class dismissed” line, which is both a nice nod to Arnie’s catchphrase habit while being really lame joke at the same time. Badassery? Trying to kill yourself to make it slightly harder for Chromey to find your son is pretty convincing. Kudos also for using gun play to further the plot, and not just to be used as a pose. The action here, which is constantly life or death, is much more convincing than having the entire cast pretending they’re on a YouTube homage to T.J. Hooker. In short, it wasn’t ubiquitous, and it was exciting, as it should be.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: +2
Liveliness: +4
Enthusiasm for project: +4
Avoidance of cliche: -3
Unique Selling Points: +4
Production values: +5
Total: 16

While the show occasionally lapses into cliche, and borrows heavily from the movies, it still brings new ideas to the format. The time travel moment came from nowhere but even though it stretches credibility, it is still a great way to expand the format. Technically it’s got a lot going for it, and looks like time and effort was spent getting it right. Though seriously, an FBI agent hunting them down? In future episodes will he be doing a hard-target search of gas stations, residences, warehouses, farmhouses, henhouses, outhouses and doghouses? Maybe FBI Agent James Ellison will come alive in future episodes when he has more to do (I’m sure I read somewhere he becomes a kind of charming comedy relief, improbably enough), but for now, it’s pretty hackneyed.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles overall total = 45

The highest score in any Face/Off to date! Okay, so the score is out of 180, but still, that’s something to be proud of. In a way I feel kind of bad for getting so excited about Terminator: TSCC, because in the scheme of things it’s not the best TV show around. It’s not even the best premiere of the season. It doesn’t spend too long in each scene (which could be construed as a lack of faith in viewer attention spans), the performances and cast chemistry have yet to settle, light moments with Summer Glau learning human responses come off all wrong, and the current surprising level of invention might dwindle quickly.


But if it doesn’t hang around to smell the televisual roses, that’s because it’s keeping up the pace. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that it moves at a clip. This is an action show about fugitives, and the pacing serves the plot perfectly. The first two episodes contain more action than your average episode of 24, and more action than the entire run of Heroes so far, a show that could stand to learn a lesson from T:TSCC and pick up the pace.

And yes, it might not be a huge step forward for the genre, and it might smack of cynical exploitation of James Cameron’s loss of Terminator franchise rights, but the showrunners seem to like the concept enough to do it justice and do it right. With regards to the source material, it’s not too reverent, but it’s in the right spirit, and I love it for that. It probably won’t be as fondly remembered as the originals, and it won’t enter the mass consciousness to such a large extent, nor will it make sniffy critics think twice about treating the genre with such contempt, but for an hour a week, we’ll get some exciting, smart, competent sci-fi, and anyone even vaguely receptive to good TV will be rewarded. I wish the production team, cast, and writing staff (now including Veronica Mars ace John Enbom!) the best of luck.

Torchwood

Cast:
John Barrowman: +3
Eve Myles: -5
Burn Gorman: -5
Naoki Mori: 0
Gareth David-Lloyd: -3
James Marsters: +5

Total: -5

Boy, does the presence of Barrowman and Marsters help. Neither of them are great actors by any stretch of the imagination, but they pull this kind of stuff off with aplomb. Barrowman in particular is so likeable that I’m more than happy to ignore some really shaky choices. As for Marsters, the guy sure has charisma. I was lucky enough to see him and his band, Ghost of the Robot, in Highbury a few years back, and I’ve never seen a roomful of women react like that before. It was carnal carnage, half scary, half exhilarating. Plus, I’ve missed Spike. As for the rest of the cast, they fail, though I will give Naoki Mori a partial break. Her sorely underwritten character never gets to do enough to register onscreen. Hopefully soon she will be allowed to come into her own and show some acting chops.

As for the others, no mercy. Masticator has shaken his finger at me for dissing Burn Gorman in the past, maintaining he was excellent in Bleak House, and perhaps he was. He’s a man of good taste. Here, though, he’s not given a solid enough character to work with. His character arcs, in fact the arcs for everyone in the show, are randomly generated and inconsistent, so it’s not wonder the performances are shoddy. The woeful twitchy direction doesn’t help. I hope to see these guys in another context one day, to properly assess their abilities. Blame the show, not the actors, I say.

Plot elements specific to these shows:
Convincing reactions to getting shot: -5
Tight plot: -8
The Sexxy: +3
Potential: -3
Badassery: -8
Total = -21

Again with the speedy recovery from a GSW. I’m not expecting the show to replicate the actual bodily response to getting shot (vomiting, shock, unconsciousness), but having Owen operating as normal ten minutes after being wounded doesn’t make him look bad ass, it makes the show look like it’s not treating the event of getting shot as a serious event. And no, looped comments from him about needing some more painkillers are not good enough. As Torchwood borrows so liberally from Angel, perhaps it could rip off the season two episode by Shaun “The Shield” Ryan, where Wesley gets shot by a zombie policeman. He was off his feet for a few episodes, and was obviously emotionally affected by it. That was convincing. Owen’s (and Sarah Connor’s) quick recovery might be convenient in keeping the show moving, but if the episode cannot function without being derailed by the incapacitation of a major character, then they shouldn’t get shot. It’s a lazy way to create drama, and it drives me crazy.

The Sexxy is the most interesting, and most frustrating, aspect of the show. While homophobes the world over rail against the engayening of Doctor Who, I fall over myself to applaud it, and bless Russell T. Davies for putting gay characters and themes in a primetime family TV show. You hear bigoted cretins like Garry Bushell frothing at the mouth about it pushing the shady-sounding Gay Agenda down our kid’s throats (usually in emotive and knee-jerk language like that), but it’s a commendable effort to normalise something sidelined and treated with such fear and hatred. Look at DC and Marvel’s terror over the idea of gay superheroes, and Marvel Editor-In-Chief’s edict that every Marvel comic starring a gay character has to be labelled For Mature Readers Only. The message that sends out horrifies me, and Doctor Who is a great way to redress that kind of sexual censorship. If it was porn spread all over the TV then the terror would make more sense, but we’re talking about people in relationships talking about said relationships and getting some kissing done, and not even that much of it, just a little here and there. That’s all. Get over it! It’s not some kind of evil force, or shadowy bunch of plotters trying to destroy the heterosexual tribe. It’s just people doing what comes naturally to them and trying to get on in the world. Embrace it, haters.


As ever, what Doctor Who does well, Torchwood screws up. While it has an admirably open attitude to omnisexuality, as Canyon called it this morning, it does it in an emotionally false manner. It’s great that Jack would hump, snog, seduce, and flirt with everything that moves within his vicinity, but whenever the show tries to add an emotional dimension to his urges, it falls short. I’ll be charitable and assume he’s meant to be someone who doesn’t know what he wants, and is scared of the options dwindling before him.

That’s the best we’re going to get out of this, but that’s the most sophisticated emotional writing on a show otherwise devoid of it. The couplings on the show mostly appear random and relentless. Yay for approaching these themes, but sometimes the show is overwhelmed by it all, which means the number of possible combinations of sexual partnerships is shrinking. If all of the characters hop from bed to bed, I give plus points for being bold, and minus points for doing it without a proper emotional underpinning, something that is impossible with such ill-defined characters. Seriously, Tosh’s character seems to be a mannequin with a post-it on her forehead saying, “I love Owen from afar”. Even after having alien lesbian sex for an entire episode, she still registered onscreen as a blank. Poor Naoki Mori.

You know, it just occured to be what this show actually is. Hollyoaks with aliens. I can’t think of a stronger criticism.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -6
Liveliness: -4
Enthusiasm for project: +4
Avoidance of cliche: -10
Unique Selling Points: +4
Production values: -2

Total = -14

Liveliness scores so low because yes, there is lots of whizzy photography and Avid fart editing, but the pace is so erratic it means nothing. You can whip the camera around as much as you like, but if the plot doesn’t progress properly, with ebbs and flows and escalation towards the end, you’re going to end up with a very dull and frustrating show. This episode was about 50 minutes long, but it felt like two hours, especially as it reached a natural conclusion ten minutes before the end. I’ll give it better marks for enthusiasm. The showrunners obviously enjoy what they’re doing, and there is some ambition here, but the relentless uses of old cliches and stock pulp sci-fi plots scupper the whole enterprise. Yes, having a group of Welsh space cops is a new one, and there is the odd touch of outside-the-box thinking, but the recycling of other, better, shows and books and films is lazy, offensive, and unforgivable. It’s an insult to the other creators working in the genre. And the -2 for production values? The set designs and effects are wonderful, but the photography, editing, and sound design are amateur. What I give with one hand, I take away with the other. Okay, so they’re not the most important things (which is why production values counts for only one mark out of 18), but if Doctor Who, a show on a similarly tight schedule, can appear to be made by competent professionals, why can’t this?

Torchwood overall total = -40

A commenter has mentioned that I wrote so much about the last episode that I can’t hate it as much as I say. While she missed the point of the Face/Off exercise (pick apart two vaguely similar thing and see where each of them succeeds or fails), there is some truth to that. We have enjoyed watching it for the sheer, “I can’t believe something this FAIL has appeared on TV,” value of it, but just like the hangover from a debauched night out, the aftermath is increasingly not worth the effort.

So why go on about it? Does the world need my rage? Should it care? On a cosmic level, of course not, but sci-fi fans shouldn’t let Torchwood get away with its plagiarism, its amateurishness, its ignorance of narrative rules, pacing, visual style, coherence, long-term story arcs, and a million other things. I love the sci-fi genre, and on British TV right now Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Primeval (which I’ve managed to miss by total accident) represent the only domestic examples with a large audience. Doctor Who has been rightly embraced, and though it has fallen flat a number of times, it is mostly wonderful, ambitious, imaginative, and challenging. I have no idea what people think of Primeval, other than, “That Hannah Spearitt’s no Billie Piper but she’ll do,” apparently.

Torchwood, on the other hand, has been derided by many UK critics, but some have defended it in a half-hearted manner usually along the lines of, “It’s better than last week, honest,” which gets funnier every time it’s trotted out. The worst kind of defence, though, is, “It’s alright for this kind of childish thing,” which makes me seethe. This was meant to be an adult show, and I’d foolishly misunderstood the meaning of that. I thought it meant it would be intelligent, and thought-provoking, and populated with multi-faceted characters who act like grown-ups. Instead, we get kids in old bodies messing about with toys and playing Cowboys and Indians (or Welsh People and Weevils), rehashing other people’s ideas, unable to generate an emotional response in the audience because the characters have not been created with enough thought. As an example of what the genre can do, it’s an embarrassment, and thanks to all of the pre-release promises that the show would address adult themes that Doctor Who couldn’t go near, it makes it seem like adult sci-fi is indistinguishable from cheap Sci-Fi Channel mid-afternoon TV movie tat, except with more LGBT content.


For crying out loud, this is the country of H.G. Wells, Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, Peter F. Hamilton, J.G. Ballard! This is the country of Quatermass, Sapphire and Steel, The Prisoner, Edge of Darkness! The UK knows how to create groundbreaking sci-fi, and yet Torchwood represents one third of the country’s visible sci-fi output. It only really succeeds as an indictment of the generally poor level of screenwriting on British TV, and the flaws of the drama commissioning process at the BBC. We get something as empty as this and yet Grant Morrison’s scripts for The Invisibles were refused by the BBC thanks to, according to Morrison, “a woman… who was connected with it that doesn’t even know what telepathy is and keeps complaining about the story.” It makes you weep.

The UK has to begin to do better. Watching multiple episodes of The X-Files or the trio of Mutant Enemy shows and then recycling the plots is not good enough. British TV is in the doldrums compared to the amazing stuff coming out of the US right now, and while we do have some world-beating stuff popping up here and there, and while I accept that there is an awful lot of shit on American TV, the disparity between the two industries is vast. And yes, there are differences in how the shows are made and funded and sold. I know that the commissioning system is very different here, and I know that UK shows can’t expect to have budgets on the scale of Lost or even Bionical Woman. I’m not saying good TV needs a big budget. Battlestar Galactica is made on the “cheap” (relatively speaking), but as much as I love the big FX blowouts, it’s the smart writing, well-defined and consistently realised characters, and challenging ideas that keep me coming back. Seriously, it’s not just the pretty splodey.


Torchwood lacks ideas of its own, and as a highly visible sci-fi show, it needs to have something special to show off the possibilities of the genre. Perhaps all it has going for it is being a very bold piece of queer sci-fi, but as Canyon said while we endured last week’s episode, LGBT sci-fi fans deserve better than a bunch of randomly sexed-up dorks acting out plots from better shows in the middle of Cardiff. Okay, I doubt BBC writers would be able to emulate the complex, language-distorting genius of Samuel Delaney, or even the progressive, sexually bold Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, but they could at least come up with some original plots, or even just create characters that act like real people, instead of caricatures that fail to resonate with the viewers as they do nothing recognisably human.

And yet I keep watching, even though I consider the show an insult to my favourite genre and the cultural equivalent of the embarrassing family member who smells of wee. Partially because last season there was one bright spot; an episode written by Sapphire and Steel creator P.J. Hammond. More scripts from him, or established sci-fi authors, or even Doctor Who star writers Stephen Moffat and Paul Cornell, and the show would begin to crawl back into my good graces. There has been some good news recently. According to Comic Book Resources gossip columnist Rich Johnston…

Chris Chibnall, “Torchwood” showrunner, writer of “Doctor Who” episode “42″, “Torchwood” episodes “Day One,” “Cyberwoman,” “Countrycide” and “End Of Days,” has been appointed showrunner for “Law & Order: London.” I don’t think “Doctor Who” fans have heard better news for a good while. There were rumours he was succeeding Russell T Davies as showrunner. I guess those rumours have now been scotched.

Hells yeah. It’s not over for the show. It can do better. It must do better. I’m sure sci-fi can survive one crappy TV show (it survived years of cheap Star Wars rip-offs, after all), but that doesn’t mean we should praise a show just for being British, or let such weak showmaking go without pointing it out. We TV watchers, and sci-fi fans, deserve better.


Like Lost. Which is coming back soon. More on that later this week.

Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Torchwood)

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I’ll come right out and admit this to get it out of the way. I cannot stand Torchwood. It’s silly to get actively annoyed by something as innocuous as a TV show, but I reserve the right to be pissed at a spin-off from a very good show that not only fails to live up to the standards of the original, but fails at being competent entertainment with such a capital FAIL that it insults its “parent” and makes the entire genre look like a muddy-faced schoolboy pooing his pants and laughing like a drunken donkey. It galls me that people consider this a great example of the genre and of British TV, that this is as good as it gets. It’s an insult to anyone who tries to make anything of lasting value within the mostly ignored and derided sci-fi ghetto, and knowing that Russell T. Davies has said that it is Angel to Doctor Who‘s Buffy makes me even angrier. If Doctor Who is Buffy, Torchwood is Angel fanfic written by the 8 year old lovechild of Jilly Cooper and Harry Knowles. As I’ve said before in other venues, it’s the Welsh CSI: Miami. And that’s why my hatred is so tied up with my urge to never stop watching, even as it metaphorically shits where it eats.

It’s bad. It’s an insult to the genre. It’s also unintentionally hilarious, and it could conceivably work if it is overhauled extensively. The first season was galactically dire, but coming from a background of such imagination and intelligence, it could surely absorb some of that quality. Knowing that shows have often improved in their second season gave me hope, as did the news that not only would James “Spike” Marsters be featured but also we would see the triumphant return of the magnificent, the wondrous, the astonishing MARTHA JONES! She’s got class, she’s got sass, she’s got a lovely playfulness about her. So can this second season pull out of the nosedive that started very soon into the original?


In a word, don’t bet on it. Scripted not by series creator Russell T. Davies but by showrunner Chris Chibnall, within five minutes of beginning it was evident that rumours of an improvement were way way off (I’m looking at you, resident Guardian Guide nerd Phelim O’Neill). Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman with lovable gusto on Doctor Who, and with tedious earnestness and random explosions of camp on Torchwood, is missing at the beginning of the series, which starts with a fish alien driving a sports car around Cardiff suburbs. In lukewarm pursuit are our witless sex-crazed adolescent heroes, Gwen, Tosh, Owen, and the risible Ianto, all bickering in an expositional stylee about the lack of Jack. Some of this is played for laughs, and it almost comes off for the first time, though there are some peculiar moments from Gwen, introduced in the first season as an audience surrogate taken from her boring life and thrust into a world of intergalactic absurdity. In this first scene Owen is all grumpy, tightly-wound machismo, and she tells a couple of jokes to keep the tone “light”. Instead, because of a weird lighting choice, Gwen looks demonic.


One of the things that makes it hard to watch BBC sci-fi without cringing is the bizarre insistence on macho posing that runs through it all like gristle through a nice steak. This embarrassing fixation on the gun-fetishism that plagued James Cameron’s Aliens is one of the many reasons I hated Red Dwarf (the main one being that it wasn’t even slightly funny). Now, Aliens is one of my favourite movies, but the monster it created, this fanboy obsession with “cool” aggressive sci-fi, almost makes me hate it. Other genres manage to pull off the cool thing really well, usually by playing it much calmer, but British (and some US) sci-fi cannot get past the idea of the heroes being gun-toting badasses with legs akimbo, doing the two-handed gun grip and jumping out from behind walls, shouting “Freeze, motherfucker!” like kids playing cops and robbers. Sadly, it never looks right.

In the first season of Torchwood, they were particularly bad, but this time it seemed like the cast had been sent to gun training or something. Owen (played with his usual brand of oily sneering menace by Burn Gorman) leans out of the window of the Torchwoodmobile (complete with redundant flashing lights that the cameras can’t pick up properly) and blasts the tyres out from under the fish alien’s sports car. Except for a silly manoeuvre where he aims like a parody of a tough guy, he looks convincing as a dead-shot but then he ruins it by arrogantly blowing the “smoke” from his gun. Dick.


Still, despite his obnoxious display he does indeed get Mr. Fish to stop his car, in a suburban cul-de-sac, where he rushes out, breaks into a house, shoots some poor innocent bloke and takes a girl hostage. This is the modus operandi of Torchwood; make a bad situation infinitely worse and then when things have calmed down chalk it up as a victory. They rush into the room with all the grace and skill of the characters from the old Viz comic strip S.W.A.N.T. (Special Weapons and No Tactics), with Owen bellowing absurdly complicated instructions to the team. Tosh then scans Mr. Fish using a gizmo dotted with the same blue lights that looked so wrong on the Torchwoodmobile, sees he’s on coke, and very seriously says, “This fish is wired!” An early contender for stupidest anti-comedy line of the year.

It’s immediately superceded by the following expositional monologue from Mr. Fish, included in the show as Chris Chibnall obviously feels that getting the information out quickly and early is better than getting it out slowly and elegantly.

So, this is Team Torchwood, the teacher’s pets. But teacher’s gone, hasn’t he, leaving the kiddie kids all alone. And look at you, trying so hard to be all grown up. The doctor, with his hands full of blood [cut to shot of Owen with his hands full of blood]. The carer, with her oh so beating heart. The technician, with her cold devices [cut to shot of Tosh holding a cold device]. Which leaves me with the office boy, promoted beyond his measure. All of you, lost without your master. All of you, pretending to be brave. All of you, so scared. [evil laugh] So, what about it, minion? Can you do it? How good are you? How sharp is your aim? What if you kill her? What if I kill her first? Can you shoot before I do? Can you? Dare you? Would you? Won’t you?

That is apocalyptically bad writing, and even the best acting and directing couldn’t salvage it. Just to make things worse, this show does not even feature competent acting or directing, and so it approaches toxic levels of wretchedness. I’m serious, it’s this kind of inept and shitty sci-fi that dooms the entire genre. Thankfully Jack arrives (with no explanation of how he found them all) and shoots Mr. Fish (even though he is standing directly behind useless Ianto and therefore has no line of sight), before grinning his goddamn handsome face off. Wow, John Barrowman might not be the best actor on earth, but he has infinitely more charisma than the amateurish replicants around him. Look at him. You would, wouldn’t you.


Back at Torchwood HQ (a waterlogged sewer complex with a couple of computers, a fancy door stolen from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and a pet pterodactyl) Gwen whines and moans at Jack for leaving them all, as if he’s her property. Goddamn, get over yourself, woman. Which one is the boss here? Jack soppily admits he was in the wrong, and gets all gooey-eyed when he talks about finding the Doctor, as shown in the last three episodes of Doctor Who season three. Owen’s line reading of, “Did he fix you?”, is straight out of a Mills and Boon adaptation. To be honest, considering how obsessed Jack is with his dick, getting fixed might not have been that bad an idea. Here’s Owen looking pompous and dreamy.


I really do not like Owen and his silly expressions, his seething “intensity” which comes across as dyspepsia, and his supposed animal magnetism. Definitely the Torchwood Gupta, despite stiff competition from Gwen. Anyway, while Jack’s getting a hard time for leaving (::cough:: Angelseasontwo ::cough::), in a car park across town a burst of glowy light heralds the arrival of guest star James Marsters, fresh from a Buffy convention.


He arrives through the rift that sits under Cardiff (::cough:: Hellmouth ::cough::), and is an Adam-Ant-esque dandy. Actually, he looks like he’s wearing a Harry Flashman fancy dress costume, but whatever the idea was, he looks dashing. As soon as he starts talking in his “English” accent, I was incredibly pleased. Spike had some bad moments, but overall I luffed him, especially towards the end of season 5 Angel, where his banter with the eponymous hero was at its best. Within two seconds of arriving he has thrown someone off the roof of the car park, and then gone to a nightclub to order various carousers around and then scare everyone off with his guns. His dialogue (“Go. Stay. Go. Go. Go. Go. Stay. Go. Go. Ooooh, stay stay stay! Go. Go. The rest of you, go.”) leaves a lot to be desired, but who cares? It’s James Marsters! The only actor on the show who knows how to hold a gun.


Meanwhile, our band of horseasses investigate the death of the car park guy, even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason for them to be there, just as Jack’s wriststrap goes off. A hologram of Marsters appears, asking Jack to come and find him, before signing off with, “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” You know what? I’m declaring a goddamn moratorium on the use of that phrase. It’s. Not. Funny. Anymore. The only time I’ve seen it used well over the past year or so was when Carrie Fisher said, “Help me Liz Lemon, you’re my only hope!” in 30 Rock, but that’s because it was Carrie Fisher saying it. It’s been used too goddamn often, and especially on Torchwood, it invites comparisons between the show and Star Wars that really aren’t in their best interests.


Jack departs hurriedly, telling the team not to follow him, which they do immediately, all the time whining about what an asshole he is for leaving them behind (::cough cough cough:: Angelseasontwo ::cough cough cough::). While they piss and moan like a bunch of aggrieved kids, Jack arrives at the club and gets some full-on facetime with Marsters, kissing him with admirable gusto. And then they fight a lot. It’s one of the few scenes in the show that has been choreographed and filmed with some effort, so kudos for that, I guess, but dear God, I declare another moratorium, this time on the use of Song Two by Blur, which woo-hoos in the background throughout. Has anyone involved in this show got any new ideas? At all? That shit was tired one summer after the song came out and it got used on Match of the Day 68 trillion times, so imagine how tired it must be now.


After kissing and fighting and pointing their guns at each other and making daft jokes about Jack working his way up the ranks and how grateful the ranks must have been (an allusion to sex, I’ll wager, what with this being an adult show), they pretend to drink a lot of alcohol and bond over their past as time agents, a plot thread that I thought would have been explored in the previous season but was ignored in favour of gaseous sex aliens, ill-thought-out time travel plots, and Fight Club rip-offs, much to my disgust. After announcing his name is now Captain John Hart (adopting other identities appears to be de riguer for these chaps), Marsters/Hart reveals that the agency that runs the time agents (which, Canyon pointed out, is imaginatively called The Time Agency) has been shut down, meaning there are only seven time agents left altogether. I look forward to future appearances by Captain Judah Hogwonk, Captain Jeff Hepatitis, Captain Joe Hoho, Captain Jerry Heinousface, and Captain Jasper Humperdinck.


Eventually the rest of the team arrive and pose with their guns (by this point almost every scene appears to feature some gun posing), and Jack explains at length who everyone is and what they do, and for five minutes we get a solid, unbreakable and tedious wall of exposition either about the team or Hart’s reason for being in Cardiff, which seems to be something about radiation bombs hidden around Cardiff by a woman Hart knew who is now dead. There is also some horseplay about the size of their wriststraps, which I suspect might be a joke about the length and strength of their penises. Jack has spent the scene hinting that Hart is completely untrustworthy, but the thought of Earth getting destroyed by these bombs forces his hand, and offers to help Hart back at Torchwood HQ, located under the Millennium Centre. And yes, he pointlessly enters the complex using the superfluous paving stone lift. Though I’m no fan of the show, the effects work by The Mill is almost always exemplary, and something for everyone involved to be proud of. Here, though, is one of their rare missteps, a terribly shaky greenscreen shot. I know the budget of the show has been cut (this episode features a lot less flashy moments than last season), but still, it’s a shame it looks so wrong.


Upon reaching the bottom, Jack asks Hart to hand over his guns, and after he hands over his large pistols and his sword, he asks him to hand over all of his other weapons, which Hart denies having (::cough:: everyTVshowandfilmevermade ::cough::). Gwen ruins his subterfuge with her blue-light scanner, revealing that, of course, he has a lot of guns, and a “laser knife”, that looks like, well, a knife. Perhaps “Laser” is the brand name. Like Ginsu, only futuristical.

Gwen takes Jack to one side, because even if you thought she had already nagged at Jack a lot about him leaving, she hasn’t even started yet, mister. She pointedly tells him that leaving them all behind was a dick move, and he swallows what must be a natural impulse to shout, “You’re not the boss of me, you big-eyed control freak!” to explain that he really missed her and came back because hey, Cardiff? Place to be! Then he realises she is wearing a wedding ring, and when he points this out, Gwen looks astonished.


Turns out, in a weird passive/aggressive response to Jack’s departure at the end of season one, she got engaged to drab boyfriend Rhys, and when imparting this information to her boss, Gwen looks startled.


Jack congratulates her with some kind of confusing sadness stone stuck in his throat, and asks if Rhys got down on one knee, and she says he tried, but his back gave out. Ha ha ha! Stupid Rhys! What a prosaic loser, unlike her sexy colleagues. While recounting this story, and commenting that no one else would have her, Gwen looks self-pitying.


Finally, they reconcile and hug, and Gwen looks pretty damn well orgasmic.


That’s some range Eve Myles is showing there, not unlike the range exhibited by Sonya Walger. The worst thing about this scene is that some viewers will end up hoping these two get together. Why would Jack, who has had sex with the majority of the universe, be upset about not getting a chance with dreary old Gwen? It would boggle the mind, if I hadn’t already come to the conclusion that it’s just a load of contrivance to generate some emotional frisson in a show as shallow, juvenile, and exploitative as this one.

After the deeply touching moment, the team meets in a conference room to debate tactics, and Gwen suggests they split into teams to cover Cardiff more efficiently. She offers to go with Hart and begins flirting with him, setting Jack off on a new convulsion of snitty attitude, which Gwen subdues by explaining she is flirting with Hart to gain his trust and find out what he is really up to. Jack warns her not to kiss him, but this being Torchwood, that’s how most of the characters communicate with each other, so it’s silly advice.

Gwen and Hart travel to some loading area filled with shipping containers, and begin looking for the first radiation bomb. It’s night-time, and as ever, the director has chosen to film things with as little light as possible. For the next three or four minutes of screentime either one or the other character is obscured by shadows. It’s a baffling directorial decision. The screenshot below is not a fluke capture; that’s what the scene looks like.


While randomly opening shipping containers, hiding in shadows, and talking about this mysterious dead woman with the bombs, Gwen’s phone goes off. It’s Rhys, with the great news that he has a new job as manager of something called Harwoods, which is probably to DIY what Torchwood is to gunplay and alien investigation. Daisyhellcakes said she would rather hear more about the job interview than watch the rest of the show, and she has a good point, but sadly we have to stick with Gwen and her exciting glamorous life hanging out with nerd-fave actors and getting off with her scary looking colleagues.

This is obviously meant to play as a comment on how mundane Rhys’ life is, but if the intention is to play up the contrast between them, it fails miserably, serving only to make poor cuckolded Rhys look like a pathetic, oblivious idiot. When she gets off the phone Hart has disappeared. What could he be doing? Where is he? Turns out he is still hanging around, but hey, another minute of screentime is filled up by Gwen flitting around with her gun drawn in a weak attempt to conjure up some suspense, so kudos for that.


Upon finding the correct container, Hart grabs Gwen and kisses her. The perpetually horny cad! Turns out he was actually poisoning her with paralysing lip gloss, which might account for his disappearance in the previous scene, but I’m not convinced. As Gwen slumps to the floor he gloats that she has two hours to live, and as he leaves the container he bleats on about Jack, saying, “He won’t stay with you! He and I shared something.” Considering he’s just sentenced her to a horrible death, that’s just unneccessary. He shuts the container door and throws her phone away, and as if the shitty lighting wasn’t amateurish enough, the mic picks up the sound of it clanging against a container and then clattering across the floor as Hart ambles away. It’s like something made by the Children’s Film Foundation, only clumsier.

Across town, and Owen and Tosh are doing their stupid gun/flashlight thing in a warehouse somewhere. It’s big and messy, prompting Owen to complain, “How are we gonna find anything in all of this tut?” What the hell is tut? Is it the Welsh version of tat? While wandering aimlessly around, Tosh whines about not being out on the town, and Owen admits he’s given up his womanising ways, and says he looking for a good woman he has a lot in common with. Tosh’s “subtle” reaction (i.e. eye-rolling and practically passing out) “hints” at her lust for his scrawny “body”.


Despite the daunting task ahead of them, they find the bomb a couple of minutes later even though they only have tiny flashlights, and right on time the newly-revealed EvilHart appears and headbutts Tosh. Maybe a bonk on the head will cure her of her ill-advised crush on Owen, who probably has lots of space diseases what with his rampant and credibility-straining womanising. Owen gets his tough guy on and threatens to kill Hart if he hurts Tosh. This is so threatening that Hart shoots Owen, but before we can delight in the sight of him blown backwards as if hit by an exploding cannonball, we cut away. Tease!

While several million viewers chew their nails off over this turn of events, Jack and Ianto arrive at an office building to look for another bomb, where Jack gives an unconvincing soliloquy about the allure of office work (it’s a place for disastrous office romances and photocopying your genitals, because, you know, adult), Ianto’s grumpy responses clue Jack in on yet more sulking about his departure. Dude, you can never go home, especially if home is a wet sewer complex filled with ungrateful jerks. Jack dances around the fact that if he came back for a specific reason, it probably wasn’t the pity-sex he was having with sad-sack Ianto, but when he pouts Jack tries to defuse the situation by asking Ianto for a date. He even manages to smile while doing it, knowing that it will probably end up being a disaster, with Ianto crying over his dead cyber-girlfriend Lisa from the first season. How do you like that office romance, you dashing fool?


They split up, with Jack heading to the roof, giving Hart the chance to lure Ianto over to the lifts, where he threatens him with a gun, repeatedly refers to him as “Eye candy”, (which made both of us WTF for a few minutes), and brags about putting the rest of the team out of commission.


Ordering him to go and find them before they die, the lift doors shut, and a tannoy says, “Going down”, to which Hart responds, apropos of nothing, “Going down, yes please.” Again, I have a suspicion there is a double meaning here. Hart goes after Jack, who has just found the “bomb”, which is by now, obviously not a bomb. Hart says Jack should be in space among the stars, which is a heinous diss against the glories of Cardiff. But no, Jack is not to be swayed, and slags off Hart for getting old and not growing up. Then he childishly throws the canister / bomb / MacGuffin off the roof, and mid-gloat gets pushed off himself.


Hopefully the drop gives Jack time to rue his decision to help Hart, who has been blatantly evil from the moment he appeared onscreen. Jokes about attending murder rehab might have been a clue. Perhaps this is Chibnall and co.’s way of making the Torchwoodiverse seem dangerous and morally grey and filled with threatening yet seductive characters, but actually it just makes our protagonists look like slack-jawed halfwits.

Speaking of which, Ianto finds Tosh patching Owen up with some bandages, and even though he’s obviously lost a lot of blood and might be suffering a grievous internal injury, they rush out to find Gwen. In the meantime, Hart gets all maudlin over Jack’s death, probably not helped by the very extensive groin thrust adopted by Jack’s corpse.


Thankfully Chibnall resists the temptation to have Hart make some lewd comment about this, which means we actually get about four minutes of screentime without a double entendre or feeble come-on. Back in Containerville the Three Stooges are looking for Gwen, which involves lots of dull running around and improbable detective work involving the blue-light doohickey used throughout the show, before they locate her dying body. At this point, with probably milliseconds left to live, Gwen looks stiff. And badly lit.


As she still has a pulse but can’t move, they figure she has been poisoned, but without any other information about what has happened to her, they promptly swab her lips and test it for toxins. How did they know she was poisoned like that? Hart never mentioned it. It could have been a needle, or a gas, or a deadly suppository, but no, they go straight to the lips. It could very well be the shoddiest plotting I’ve ever seen in a modern TV show that isn’t Chuck or CSI: Miami. To make things even more improbable, they have the exact antidote. Pretty smart stuff, considering how dense they appear from Gwen’s point of view.


Hart goes back to Torchwood HQ, and ransacks the corpse of Mr. Fish, who has another part of the MacGuffin in his pocket. So the pre-credits “action” scene was connected to the rest of the show after all! Before he can put all the pieces back together our heroes appear and cock their plastic guns threateningly. Again, where the hell is the sound department? Oddly worried that one of the water pistols will go off and get his nice tunic wet, Hart musters one last gloat over Jack’s death, only to go limp-faced with shock as Jack walks in, unharmed, and cocks his leg up for a big fart. At least, that’s what it looks like.


Turns out, under cross-examination, Hart killed the woman who owned the MacGuffin (which he thinks is a space diamond of some worth), because he is a low down dirty son of a bitch, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched any fiction within the last 150 years. Under the supervision of the team, he puts the pieces together and a hologram of the dead woman appears. I can’t help but imagine someone had to forcibly stop Chibnall from making the hologram say, “Help me Obi Wan you’re my only hope!”.


Turns out she’s a smart cookie, and the MacGuffin is actually a bomb that is attracted to the DNA of the person who killed her. Of course, how it has access to this DNA in the first place is not explained, but we were more annoyed by the stretching out of an episode that really should have been done and dusted by now. The bomb zips across the room and sticks to Hart’s chest, not unlike the Scarab machine in Guillermo Del Toro’s creepy vampire film Cronos.


Space crime never pays, you dandy! When the team appear uninterested in helping him and instead intend to throw him back into the rift, he grabs Gwen and handcuffs himself to her. I love the sci-fi touch that the cuffs are made of “hypersteel”, but this is undercut by the annoyance caused by Tosh’s declaration that the rift has a crack in it. A rift is a crack. How can a crack have a crack in it? Does Chibnall understand English?

Owen comes up with a great plan to save Gwen. While the others drive Gwen and Hart him to the (crack in the) rift in their SUV, Jack and Owen get blood samples of the entire team (lucky they had them just lying around) and make a blood cocktail using a centrifuge prop so cheap that they have to swish it around by hand. Editing tries to obscure this cheapness, but it’s obvious it’s just being pushed.


Even though the SUV leaves minutes before them, Jack and Owen still catch up as they use Mr. Fish’s sports car. Is it jet-powered? With just seconds to go before the bomb explodes, Jack injects him in the heart with the blood cocktail, which confuses the bomb. How? Does it alter his DNA? If that’s the case, then blood transfusions should lead to the recipient’s hair and eyes changing colour. Or it’s just terrible terrible science from someone who seems to have only had a primary school education followed by years of watching and absorbing bad TV. Despite making a nonsense of the rules just laid down a couple of minutes before, this ridiculous plan works, making the bomb fall off. Jack heroically flings it into the rift, creating a big explosion effect.


For no narrative reason, this sends them back in time to the moment when Hart arrived. As the science of the rift (and the crack in the rift) has never been clearly explained, this is potentially possible with a bit of exposition, but what’s the point of it? And was the only narrative reason for the blood injection so Hart could make a comment about a part of them being in him? Hopefully this leads to something later on in the series, because otherwise it’s unforgivably silly. No matter. For his terrible skullduggery, he gets a smack in the chops from Gwen. She looks pissed.


Finally he leaves, with much glowy effects, but not before kissing on Jack with some verve, making more comments about wriststrap size (Jack’s reaction really strengthens my “penis metaphor” theory) and offhandedly mentioning that he has found someone called Grey, which triggers an explosion of facial acting and heavy breathing from Jack, which suggests that maybe this is big news for him. Luckily, the team are too stupid to notice this, and the fifteen hour long episode finally ends. But! First we get a preview of the rest of the season. Explosions, gun posing, Alan Dale as what seems to be an evil scientist, more James Marsters, yet more jokes about having sex with each other, and OH YEAH! MARTHA JONES! Coming to bring some class to the proceedings, unless she has her post-Who awesomeness polluted by the transfer to this risible show.


So, in conclusion, not the worst episode yet. Almost an improvement, in fact.

Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Terminator: TSCC)

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Until the hopefully triumphant return of my favourite sci-fi TV show ever (and no, it’s not Sci-Fi Channel’s Flash Gordon), I’ve had to forgo experiencing that genre in a TV format. Well, I could have watched Stargate: Atlantis, but I have no love of either that show or its progenitor. I also could have watched Bionical Woman, and did for a while, but I just couldn’t face its relentless idiocy after the first few weeks. It really was a disaster from conception onwards, and I can’t imagine how even an infusion of talent could have made it work. As for Battlestar Galactica, all we’ve had since the silly season finale is the Razor TV movie, and we tried to watch it a couple of weeks ago but got so distracted by our cats jumping around trying to catch toy mice that we didn’t finish it. We will, though. I did get to see ace FX unit Zoic go mental with much wobbly-camera space destruction, and no one started singing Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, so I’m going back there soon, with bells on.

This week, though, saw the season premieres of two sci-fi shows, spinning off from other established concepts. Torchwood, the “adult” spin-off of BBC’s newly enwonderfulised Doctor Who, is now on its second season, attempting to prove that it has learned from the mistakes of the first season (which were legion). On Fox in the US, War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman has developed a non-James-Cameron-sanctioned spin-off from the first two Terminator movies, with the cumbersome title Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (or as Masticator and Masticatrix have abbreviated it, The Sarah Conicles). Chances are I will watch both until the end of the season, but which one am I excited about, and which one is a mistake? FACE/OFF TIME!


When I heard that the Terminator movies were being picked apart for scraps yet again, my heart sank. The first two movies are kind of perfect, and while I prefer the original (and remember my childhood adoration of it as clearly as if it were yesterday), I love that the second is more than just an action film. It’s a pacifist, pro-disarmament action movie containing lots of destruction and mayhem, and yet there is no contradiction between the two halves of its whole. Plus, it features Arnie’s one great performance. His scenes with Edward Furlong are superbly done, quiet and naturalistic and devoid of his usual distracting gurning. I often distrust director’s cuts, but the longer version of T2 meant we got to see more of those scenes, and they were all superb. James Cameron doesn’t get enough credit for getting that performance out of him.


T2 is a brilliant sequel, and the final shot is so wonderfully uplifting and moving and final, that when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines came out, I was incensed. The story was so completely over that any resurrection of the franchise smacked of pure cynicism. Also, it came out at the wrong time; not close enough to keep up the momentum of the other films, and not far enough away that people would have a nostalgic wish to see more of that story (see also Ghostbusters 2, which came out five years after the original and did poorly at the box office). It did okay, but I was more concerned with its effect on the other two movies. Would it invalidate that wonderful finale, where Sarah and John go through hell in order to change the future?

Turns out it didn’t seem to care about that. Whereas in T2 the chronology and genesis of Cyberdyne, SkyNet, Miles Dyson and Judgement Day are all worked out rigorously, in T3 SkyNet comes back just because that shit is inevitable and that’s that. Perhaps I’m remembering it wrong, and if so someone correct me, but that’s the sum of it. It’s a horrible cheat after all of the work Cameron did on the first two. I get riled by badly thought-out time travel stories. I’ll grant that they’re incredibly hard to do, but they can be done right. Back to The Future 2, Primer, Gregory Benford’s Timescape; they do exist.


Other than that, T3 is visually flat (thanks for that, Jonathan Mostow), undercut with cringeworthy comedy moments, horribly designed, pointless, and cast in a distracting way (having Nick Stahl and Claire Danes running around firing guns was perhaps a bold choice, but a disastrous one for suspension of disbelief). That said, what an ending. It wasn’t quite worth all of the nasty scenes featuring plastic toy Hunter-Killers and T-1s to get to that, but still, kudos where necessary. It was very clever and quite affecting.


But why go back again? Surely the moment has more than passed, right? And wouldn’t continuing the story after T3 (apocalypse on a grand scale) cost billions of dollars? Ah, but there is always a way, and Josh Friedman came up with one. Set in a timeline separate from that of T3, and following on a couple of years after T2, Sarah Connor is still on the run from the FBI, having been accused of the murder of poor Miles Dyson. She’s also predictably plagued by dreams, which means we get an action blowout in the first scene, filled with apocalyptic imagery of Terminators and mushroom clouds, which is all borrowed from the films.


So it has got some strikes against it from the get-go; starting with a frigging dream sequence presented as reality, following the visual template of the films too slavishly, and recasting Sarah Connor with Lena Headey, an actress I’ve never been too keen on, and who committed one of the many crimes against acting perpetrated in 300, a film that, as I have said elsewhere in the past, is the worst acted mainstream movie I think I’ve ever seen. I really didn’t like the idea of casting her in such an iconic role, and was prepared to be very annoyed.

I was wrong, at least to a certain extent. In the middle of the scene (which, credit to director David Nutter, is exciting and well-edited), John gets shot in the back by the not-Arnie Terminator, and Sarah reacts by begging it to kill her too as she has no reason to live now her son is dead. Her reaction is believably overwrought, and I warmed to her quickly. During the episode she perhaps goes too far now and again, but over the course of the season perhaps she will get the tone right. I could also do with less of the voiceovers at the beginning and end, but that’s as much Friedman’s fault as hers.

It matters little. The opening worked brilliantly for one very important reason. Right there Friedman sets out her character elegantly, and from here I can imagine there are places to go with her. It’s not called The Sarah Connor Chronicles for no reason. The first movie was all about her, and the second took the focus off her a bit (by making her borderline insane) but it made sure to keep her as a major protagonist, and we got to follow her on her sad journey. The original concept was to have an ordinary woman transformed by circumstances beyond her control, and T2 took that to the logical conclusion. T3‘s major flaw was to get rid of her altogether, with the excuse that she had died of leukemia, off camera, which was an appallingly lazy and dismissive way to go about it. Here Friedman convinced me he was going to do right by her, and immediately the barriers of distrust fell. I knew there would be no Arnie, no huge battle scenes, and possibly no adherence to canon, but he was trying to do right by one of my favourite movie characters ever, and for that I was grateful.


Since we last saw her, she has become involved with an EMT tech called Charley, played by Dean Winters, who was so memorable as Liz Lemon’s feckless boyfriend Dennis in 30 Rock. Whereas there he was the worst partner ever, here he is besotted and devoted, proposing marriage to Sarah (in bed after just waking up, which is one of the few missteps and sillinesses of the episode). This freaks her out, and so she gathers up future saviour of mankind John and drags him out of there. John (played by Thomas Dekker, formerly the almost-gay friend of Claire Bennett in half a season of Heroes) is miffed, having bonded with Charley, and correctly blaming his mother’s commitment-phobia for her departure and not her paranoid belief that they will get caught, which is another bit of writing I liked.

Unfortunately for them both, Charley loves Sarah enough to report her disappearance to the police, and there just happens to be an FBI agent, James Ellison, hanging around with a ton of information about Sarah, now hiding under the alias Sarah Reese. It’s been pointed out on AICN that it may not be the best name to hide under, but is a touch that made me beam with nerd-glee, and a tantrum later on in the episode shows she’s keeping it out of an obsessive need to keep the name of her future lover alive, so it works. Ellison (played, so far, with some anonymity by Richard T. Lewis) tells Charley about Sarah’s crazy past (in a quick bit of exposition that doesn’t slow the show down too much), and even whips out a photo of Dyson. Note that he is not played by Brother From Another Planet Joe Morton, but by Phil “Jackie Chiles” Morris, thus keeping the Dyson-casting awesomeness going strong.


Cleverly, not only does this quick scene give a bunch of information about the first two movies and the events that have happened since, as well as setting up the relationships between all four of these characters, it allows Sarah’s identity to be compromised and placed in the FBI database, which is being monitored by a Terminator sleeper agent, who then goes on the rampage and chases our heroes. It’s not the best writing in the history of storytelling, but it is excellent exposition conveyed between characters who have been purposely kept in the dark as well as advancing the plot. I’ll be getting to an example of bad exposition in the next part of this Face/Off.

John and Sarah head off to a new town to try to avoid all of the guys trying to make Sarah fall in love with them, apparently, and while at school John ends up getting stalked by none other than River Tam, aka Summer Glau. Now, I’ve often thought of River as one of the weakest links in the Fireflyniverse, mostly because the one writing tic Whedon has that I don’t like is the crazy talking, which was passably funny with Drusilla, annoying with Buffy season 7 Spike, and just flat out horrible with River. For almost all of Glau’s time on that show she had to put up with a bunch of nonsensical and frustrating madness chatter that added up to very little. Only at the end of Serenity did I warm to her at all, but that was the end of that, sadly. Also, when on Angel, she was a spell-addled ghost-thing that had to talk with a Russian accent, so I had no idea what she could be like talking like a human. Weirdly, the first time you see her, even though you will probably already know she is a new kind of Terminator, she gives what might be her first approximation of a non-quirky humanity.


Her responses, such as laughing too hard at John’s lame jokes, are ever-so-slightly heightened. It works well, as if her emotional programming (which, I assume, is the thing that she hints makes her different from other Terminators) is not quite right, but it’s her curiousness and ability to evoke confusion that work best. She looks perpetually befuddled by things around her (other than combat situations), and while this is not a new concept, it’s pulled off with some charm. She’s pretty goddamn great in this, and I’m thrilled that Friedman had her cast in the role. Her physicality works well too, and she puts that to use in an early scene where an evil Terminator shows up at school and tries to kill John.


Herc, from AICN, has railed against this scene, but he neglects to mention the new habit of naming the Terminators. Glau plays Cameron, a weird nod to the creator of the Terminator franchise, considering he has nothing to do with it any more now that ex-wife Linda Hamilton has sold the rights to Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar. Even stupider, the evil Terminator (played by Owain Yeoman) is called Cromartie. Is this because his endoskeleton is covered with chrome? In that case, is his actual name Marty?

Whatever. He reveals himself while trying to kill John (using a gun he had ickily hidden in his thigh, under his skin), at which point both he and Cameron start talking and moving like robots, which they didn’t do before. It looks stupid, but thankfully they also tend to throw each other around, demolish walls, get hit by cars, and take a bullet hit to the chest like a champ, which is what you want from a couple of Terminators. Cameron saves John using a truck (which has been done to death, but what else was she going to use?), and then says the second thing that made me drop my critical defences, and if you have seen the other movies, you know the line she says.


With a new robotic bodyguard in charge, John drives off to find his mom, who has turned up at the school to find him, instead encountering Cromartie (dang, that name never gets any less stupid), who kicks her around a bit. Realising he has no idea where John is, Sarah does the third thing I loved in this episode; pulls out a gun and tries to kill herself so that she can’t be used as leverage against her son. It’s a badass moment, all right.


Of course, she doesn’t get to go through with it, but Chromey talks to John on the phone, imitates Sarah using his cyber-throat, and gets him to go back to the house. Yes yes, just like in the movies. So not only has this show borrowed the format and look of the movies, but it’s reusing the old tricks. A strike against it, I thought, until John arrives at the house in a face-obscuring hoodie, only to get shot in the head by Chromey, and yet no! It was Cameron pretending to be John using her own cyber-throat to fool him! A nice touch. There follows a big fight scene with robots pushing each other through walls and floors, shotguns, a weapons cache hidden in a wall, electrification and, if the exposition a few scenes later is anything to be believed, a chair lined with kevlar just in case a Terminator shows up. A lot of viewers appear to have hated that, but I thought it was in keeping with Sarah’s way of thinking. Anyway, it’s a tight little scene, and quite thrilling.

After that we get some exposition between Sarah and Cameron as she gets to almost show some robo-boobies while pulling bullets out of her clavicle, and we find out that Skynet still gets built despite the events of T2. Pretty obvious, what with all the robots walking around, but whereas in T3 it’s not explained how the Air Force (who build Skynet after the destruction of Cyberdyne) develop the technology, and we had to just like it or lump it, here Cameron admits she doesn’t know how it happened, but as the episode rolls on, it becomes clear that the whole point of the show is finding out who builds Skynet. We’re going to spend the rest of the series finding out what’s going on, which is a far more promising approach.

Hopefully the real reason will not be a disappointment as in T3, though considering T3 seemed uninterested in a lot of what happened in the first two movies, this show earns many kudos for having Sarah take John and Cameron back to see Miles Dyson’s widow, where she reveals there is no way his work still exists anywhere in the world. It’s nice that they felt the need to revisit that character, especially as we get to see her sadness. Dyson’s death in the movie is already memorable, and it’s great to see that pathos carry forward into the series. Again, I am impressed. There then follows some more action, and the ‘splodey. Eat flame, you doucheinator!


At this point I was enjoying myself, but the next scenes feature a big plothole, with Sarah shot in the shoulder and getting maudlin over the possible loss of her son. I wonder if I watched the wrong version of this pilot, because the scene seems out of place, what with Sarah walking around next day as if nothing happened, and not having a wound on her arm at the end of the episode. Whatever is the reason, the scene serves very little purpose. We know she’s a badass who is good at dealing with pain and blood loss, and that she’s scared of John leaving her, though perhaps this is the first time she’s voiced the worry that he’ll just choose to leave instead of getting killed by a Terminator. Still, it’s the one bit of flab in the whole episode, and as such is annoying.

Also worrying me at this point was the feeling that the show was going to just be The Fugitive with robots, which works fine in a movie format, but has been overdone as a concept on TV. Though I liked this so far, would I eventually just get tired? How much could they do with the concept of the three saviours of mankind trying to destroy and electronics firm? Thankfully, Friedman must have had the same concerns, and throws an outrageous twist in right at the end. Cameron takes John and Sarah to a bank built in 1963, and stages a robbery that gets them into a vault tricked out with lots of sciencey stuff. There’s a gun that looks like a copper-wired, nuclear-powered tommy gun that kills Terminators, and a time machine made from 1960s parts that was built by someone sent back from the future by John Connor (we assume). It’s such a bizarre moment that the viewer can either go, “Screw this, I’m gonna watch American Gladiators instead,” or, “I’m sticking with this because that is some crazy shit!” I chose the latter option.


The show ends with our naked trio turning up in 2007, where they are assumed to be dead, on a search for Skynet, with Cameron learning about humanity, and John and Sarah dealing with the weirdness of the future (the second episode, which is also very good, shows John confused by the new technology that has sprung up in eight years, and Sarah learning about 9/11). Plus, Chromey is still running around despite his head getting blown off his robotic shoulders by Sarah’s tommy gun, James Ellison is looking for Sarah, and John is trying to reestablish contact with Charley even though he is now married to Lost and Tell Me You Love Me And Not The Mother Of The Saviour of All Mankind veteran, Sonya Walger, of all people. It’s a very very promising set-up.

It didn’t all work. Mostly the performances were okay, but it was touch and go every now and then. Thomas Dekker appears to be both less obnoxious and less likeable than Edward Furlong, and needs to stop with the frigging whining. One or two scenes were superfluous, some of the actors look a little unsure with the guns, the Terminators often seemed very stupid, and the dialogue was a little rough at times, but the homages to the original movies show an affection for them, which counts for a lot. For instance, the next episode also acknowledges Sarah’s cancer from T3 and weaves it into the plot, which is a great touch even though I hated that it ever happened in the first place. It’s not just following that format, though. So far the little quirks and twists display an urge to come up with new ideas, or to push the old ideas as far as they can go.

Plus, I loved the hints that Cameron is a different kind of Terminator whose behaviour, while still recognisably not human, has enough humanity to it to confuse poor hormonal John, who obviously has the hots for her. This is brilliantly shown in the second episode, where she touches him to assess his mental and physical state through an analysis of his body and sweat, and he interprets it as a sign of affection. all that and a soundtrack that has nods to Brad Feidel’s original iconic theme. It has real potential, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.