Here’s a fascinating/hilarious article assessing the Ghostbusters‘ Risky Business Plan.  Those of you in finance, take note!  And, speaking of Ghostbusters, here’s a link to 50 Reasons Why Ghostbusters Just Might Be The Greatest Film of All Time.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles show-runner Josh Friedman has a lengthy, funny, and sort-of-sad assessment of the cancellation of his show that is worth checking out.

Here’s an interesting piece about the Seven Director’s Cuts That You Didn’t Realize That You Wanted.   I DEFINITELY would love to see an alternate cut of The Fountain!

I loved this article about the 10 Most Polarizing Films of the Last Decade.  I strongly disagree with some of his opinions (I really enjoyed both Watchmen and Fahrenheit 9/11, while I had absolutely no patience for Eyes Wide Shut), but I was THRILLED to find someone other than me who loves the criminally underrated Vanilla Sky!!  Follow the link and join the debate.

Here’s another great list: The fine folks at DVDActive.com (one of my favorite DVD-related web-sites) have put together their list of the 10 Franchises That Deserve Better.  It’s a great read, and I am in full agreement with most of their choices.

Did you happen to catch William Shatner’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien last month?  Check out the clip on Trekmovie.com.  It’s worth watching for the insanity of the last 30 seconds.

Have a great weekend, everyone!  See you back here on Monday!

Good news, everybody!  Futurama lives!!

So Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) is joining the cast of 24 next season?  Time for the Battlestar Galactica actors to learn what the members of the ensemble from The Wire have discovered: they’ll never again be in a TV show as good.

Did you see The Daily Show’s John Hodgman’s uproariously funny speech at the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner?  Not to be missed.

A nice farewell to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles can be found on Composer Bear McCreary’s excellent blog, as he lists his 15 favorite moments from the show.  (They are all excellent choices.)  This show had its flaws, to be sure, but I am really disappointed that we won’t be getting a third season.  (By the way, Bear was also the composer for the reinvented Battlestar Galactica throughout its run.)

Speaking of The Terminator, the fine folks over at filmschoolrejects.com have posted an interesting list of 20 Things We Didn’t Like and 10 Things We Did about Terminator: Salvation.

I don’t play videogames, but I must admit that this trailer for Lucasarts’ new Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer is ridiculously cool.  I wish we’d seen half that much bad-assery in the prequels…

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog has made his first appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien!  Watch him make fun of some hippies here.

Have a great weekend, everybody!  See you back here on Monday!

Bottom line on Terminator: Salvation — It’s not as good a Terminator movie as I would have hoped for, but don’t believe the reviews, it’s not nearly the catastrophe you’ve been lead to believe it is.

Ever since James Cameron’s original masterpiece The Terminator (made in 1984, can you believe it??), we’ve been teased by glimpses of the post-Judgment Day future war against the machines.  With Terminator: Salvation, we’re finally being given a movie that is set entirely (except for a short prologue) in this post-apocalyptic world.  

The year is 2018, and things are looking pretty grim for mankind.  Most surviving humans are just focused on their own survival, but several small, rag-tag groups of resistance fighters are attempting to fight back against the machines.  John Connor is amongst them, but while his mother’s messages to him have provided him with valuable guidance, this John Connor has not yet become the leader of the resistance (nor has he sent his buddy Kyle Reese back in time).  Reese, meanwhile, is not yet a member of the resistance — he’s just a tough teenager trying to survive.  While Connor and Reese get a lot of screen-time, surprisingly, neither one of them is really the main character of the film.  That would be death-row inmate Marcus Wright, who signs his body over to Cyberdyne systems in 2003 and then wakes up in 2018 in a Skynet lab.

The way I see it, the film has three major weaknesses:

1.  Clearly this is a film written with the intention of focusing on a new character (Marcus Wright).  But when Christian Bale signed on to play John Connor, his role was significantly expanded.  The result is a movie that is split rather unevenly between those two characters and their storylines.  The film aspires to be an epic war-movie, telling multiple interweaving stories… but instead winds up losing the audience’s focus by not giving us a clear character in whose story we can emotionally invest.  Similarly to the way I can watch J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie and see clearly the way the character of old Spock was shoe-horned into the movie (Imagine that movie’s plot without old Spock — it would be NO DIFFERENT.   Kirk gets ejected onto the ice planet, finds Scotty, and utilizes Scotty’s engineering expertise to get himself beamed back to the Enterprise), I can clearly see how this film was not originally intended to focus on John Connor.  That explains why, despite Connor being in a lot of action scenes, he doesn’t have any real story-line in the film.  This isn’t a movie about his rise to the leadership of the rebellion, or about him running away from or facing up to his destiny — those ideas are hinted at, but not focused on in any way (in contrast to the tremendous character growth of Sarah in the first Terminator film and young John in the second).  The split focus really hobbles the film.

2.  As with the other two big summer blockbusters I have seen so far this month (Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine), this movie is hobbled by its script.  I just addressed the major structural problem, but there are also a ton of major plot holes (for instance, I counted about 10 times in which any slightly-intelligent machine could have easily killed John or Kyle, thus ensuring Skynet’s victory), as well as lot of little scenes and moments that just don’t work (the “I want to cuddle” scene between Marcus and resistance pilot Blair Williams being particularly atrocious).  

3.  I cannot recall another movie in recent memory that was so spoiled by its marketing campaign.  What is supposed to be a major plot twist half-way through the film has been revealed in every single trailer for this film.  Now, granted, that plot twist wasn’t particularly twisty (I’d imagine that anyone who has ever seen a Terminator movie before would be able to guess what’s coming once Marcus wakes up in a Skynet facility in 2018), but still.  Any drama that MIGHT be found in Marcus’s story-line is totally gone because we all knew exactly what is really going on with him.

Wow, that all sounds pretty bad!  Didn’t I say that I rather liked this film?

Indeed I did!  Let’s focus on the positives:

1.  The action scenes are as good as you’d hope for.  There are several extended sequences (an assault on a Skynet facility at the beginning of the movie; Marcus and Kyle’s race from and battle with an enormous Harvester machine; and of course the climactic assault on Skynet) and they’re all pretty magnificent — energetic and in-your-face.  I’m sure there was a lot of CGI used, but the film’s action sequences have a gritty, real-world feel to them that is more reminiscent of Mad Max than, say, The Matrix.  And that is a very good thing/

2.  The Terminators look great and are dangerous and scary again.  (I sort of liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show, but after two years of that I was getting really frustrated by how easy-to-kill the Terminators on that show seemed to be.  The ones here really seem menacing.)  I also really liked the various different robot designs.  From the trailers that highlighted the enormous Harvester robot, I was worried that the robots in this film would all look too much like Transformers, but that wasn’t the case.  I was particularly pleased by all the great T-800 action in the film’s final half hour.  Great stuff.  (Though John Connor’s innards should have been pulped after getting punched by one of those things…)

3.  The cast was surprisingly solid.  They’re all short-changed by the script, but despite that I thought everyone acquitted themselves well.  No surprise, Christian Bale gives good bad-ass as the grizzled John Connor.  Newcomer Sam Worthington is also compelling and likable as Marcus Wright (making his scenes watchable despite the fact that, as noted above, I had almost zero interest in his character’s predictable story-line), and Anton Yelchin (Chekov in the new Star Trek film — the kid is having the summer of his life) absolutely knocks it out of the park as Kyle Reese.  

4.  I’ll be coy here just in case you managed to avoid being spoiled about the surprise CGI reprisal of an old character (news of which has been all over the internet and the mainstream press for months now), but I absolutely LOVED this.  Even knowing this was coming I was surprised and tickled by the appearance, and I thought the CGI looked dynamite.  

5.  I have bashed the heck out of the script, but let me pay the writers one compliment: they manage to do a great job of incorporating a lot of the classic Terminator lines into this film in fun, organic, and surprising ways.  This sort of thing can be painful and awkward if done wrong, but I was really pleased at the way these moments were woven into the film.

There are a lot of other things that I really liked, such as the inclusion of a familiar voice coming from John Connor’s tape recorders.  I also have plenty of other complaints, such as my disappointment that, with the exception of the opening credits, the film’s score didn’t really use any of Brad Fiedel’s classic Terminator music (in contrast to the way Bear McCreary has cleverly woven those themes into his scores for the Sarah Connor Chronicles).  But I’ve probably already devoted more words to this film than it really deserves.

In the end, I feel almost exactly the same about this film as I did about the last installment, 2003’s Terminator 3.  It’s not anywhere close to the masterpieces that James Cameron’s first two films were, nor is it a franchise-ruining mess.  After reading all the dreadful reviews of this latest film, that almost feels like a win to me.  Still, I hope to someday be able to walk out of the screening of a new Terminator movie having once again recaptured the “Oh my god that was AWESOME!!” feeling of the first two films.

Maybe someday.

In my review of season one of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as well as my review of the season two premiere, I indicated that while there was a lot that I enjoyed about the show, I also felt that it was far from living up to its potential.

Now that season two has drawn to a close with the airing of “Born to Run” this past Friday (which just might turn out to be a SERIES finale, not just a season finale, as the Fox has not yet announced whether it will renew this ratings-challenged show), do I still feel the same way?

There is so much to enjoy about this exploration of the Terminator franchise.  The acting is solid, both amongst the main cast (particularly, to my great surprise, 90210’s Brian Austin Green as Derek Reese, brother to the ill-fated Kyle Reese from the first Terminator film) and a high caliber group of guest actors that includes Richard Schiff (Toby from The West Wing), Dean Winters (Oz, 30 Rock) Stephanie Jacobsen (Battlestar Galactica: Razor) and, in the finale, Joshua Malina (Sports Night, 30 Rock).  The action and special effects are terrific, quite consistently impressive for a weekly television series.  We got to see a lot of great Terminator-on-Terminator combat, and some exciting peeks into the post-Judgment Day devastated future.  

The writers were ambitious in their story-lines, bringing back all sorts of characters and story-threads from the first two Terminator films (the show’s continuity ignores the third one), and taking viewers along on some fascinating explorations of the Terminator world and mythos.  I was overjoyed when the very first episode of season two introduced a new liquid metal T-1000 (like Robert Patrick’s fearsome character in T2).  That was a development I never expected to see.  One of my favorite episodes of the season also had one of the show’s most direct ties to the Terminator films — “The Good Wound,” in which a grievously wounded Sarah Connor hallucinates visions of the long-dead Kyle Reese. I mentioned above that we got some fascinating looks at the post-apocalyptic future that was briefly glimpsed in the two Terminator films, and I loved that the show wasn’t afraid to explore that time-line along with Sarah and John Connor’s adventures in present-day.  Stand-outs in this respect would be the episodes “Allison from Palmdale” in which we learned some of the background of Cameron, the female Terminator played by Summer Glau, as well as the really excellent two-part “Today is the Day,” which depicted an ill-fated submarine expedition lead by a Terminator that had been reprogramed by John Connor.  Or so everyone thought.

What was neat about the show was its central conceit that Skynet’s mission of eliminating Sarah and John Connor (which was the focus of the first two Terminator films) was but a small piece of a much larger puzzle, with lots of machines and humans traveling to various periods of time with all sorts of competing agendas.  I find formulaic, everything-resolved-at-the-end-of-the-hour shows to be pretty boring, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was anything but a show like that.  Yes, most episodes did have a central theme or focus to that week’s story that would come to some sort of resolution by the episode’s end, but each episode also seemed to fit into a much larger mosaic (with only a few exceptions, such as the terrible waste-of-time Sarah-goes-to-a-sleep-clinic episode “Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep”).  That is very cool, and gave the show great momentum throughout the 22-episode season.

But this is also the show’s greatest weakness.  As season two (and, if the show is not renewed, the entire series) drew to a close last week, I found myself left with a frustratingly lengthy list of unanswered questions.  Just whose side was the mysterious Weaver (Shirley Manson) really on?  What was she hoping to accomplish with John Henry (Garret Dillahunt)?  Was she the same T-1000 that turned down John Connor’s offer on the submarine in the future (as seen in “Today is the Day”)?  What exactly was John Connor’s offer to her/it?  Who was the entity that hacked John Henry’s systems?  Was it the missing son of Miles Dyson (who was mentioned briefly in the finale)?  Is that mysterious individual (or group) the one responsible for the ultimate creation of Skynet, or is it Weaver?  Will John  Henry become Skynet, or will he become the key to its ultimately defeat?  How exactly did Derek’s girlfriend Jessie manage to access a time machine to travel back in time?  We were given glimpses, over the show’s two seasons, of the machines in the future working on some sort of project — was it just stuff that we already knew about from the films (the creation of Terminators that can masquerade as human beings; the creation of a time machine that John Connor and the resistance will ultimately capture), or was something more going on?

I could go on and on.  So many questions remain, and so many of the characters on the show had motives that are still unclear.

While I have been thrilled by the way that a number of great dramas of the last few year have really broken away from the old-school style of formulaic, episodic story-telling to embrace longer-running, serial stories (shows like Lost, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) I wonder if shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles aren’t showing us a bit of the dark side to that sort of serialized TV writing.  I love a good long-running, inter-connected tale, but I found myself getting frustrated, all season long, by the many questions that this show would pose and then never answer.  (These are problems that I must admit to having with Lost, and with season 4 of BSG, as well, and those are shows which I otherwise adored.)  It’s one thing to have story-lines continue from episode to episode, so that viewers feel like we’re watching adventures that could happen in someone’s real life, with events one week having repercussions in the weeks to come.  But it’s quite another thing to be so obtuse and obscure with one’s story-telling that a viewer seldom really understands why any particular character is doing what he/she is doing.  And that, I think, has been the biggest problem with The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The season ended with a bang, no question, in these last few episodes.  A lot of the season’s story-lines came together, several characters that I didn’t expect to see again re-appeared, one character met with a SHOCKING demise (and high praise to the show, by the way, for catching me totally off guard with that particular twist), and there were a lot of really exciting moments.  And the finale’s cliffhanger ending was a stunner, providing what would be a fine oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-that’s-the-end conclusion to the show, but also presenting a delicious amount of story-telling possibilities should we get to see a third season.  But if this is the end, I will admit to being, on the whole, a bit disappointed with this enterprise.  With so many questions still hanging, these first two seasons of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles don’t feel like a complete story — they feel like the first acts of a much longer tale.  I hope that, should Fox choose to renew the show, the writers take advantage of the opportunity to bring some closure to the show’s many hanging story-lines.  If they can do so while continuing to give us some great Terminator future-war action, then I’ll definitely be along for the ride.

Since I decided to write an in-depth dissertation on Season 1 of Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles a couple of weeks ago (back on August 29th), it seems like I also should weigh in on the season premiere that aired this past Monday.

Over-all, it was a lot of fun — although since so much of the episode was SO good, the few parts of the show that were dumb were VERY annoying.

What did I enjoy?  The episode was INTENSE — right from the terrific opening sequence, picking up seconds after the end of season one’s finale, the show never stopped until the final moments.  Cameron, the Terminator protector played by Summer Glau, has had her control chip damaged, and she reverts to her primary programming: kill John Connor.  That was a great twist, turning the dynamic of the show on its ear.  There was some great action — several sequences with various cars and trucks getting mangled really were exciting.  Most of all, I really liked the DESPERATION of Sarah and John in this episode.  They were alone, injured, and on the run from an unstoppable Terminator for almost the entire hour.   I liked how everything they tried, until the end, failed to work.  About half-way through the show they’re able to knock Cameron out with an electrical surge, and John tries to pry open the panel in her head to remove her chip which, as we saw in other first season episodes (and in the extended version of T2), would shut her down.  Watching that, I thought — oh, so that’s how they’ll make Cameron a good guy again, that’s sort of lame — but IT DIDN’T WORK, and Cameron gets right back up and begins chasing John again.  That was a nice surprise.

Props to Summer Glau.  In some respects, as enjoyable as I’ve always found her to be, she has sort of played variations on the same not-quite-human character in Firefly, The 4400, and now in Terminator.  But her protrayal of the now-evil, damaged Terminator in this episode was really impressive.  Watch the way she moves — so different from the stealthy, lithe model she had been portraying in season one.  She really created a different character.  And she was scary.  Very impressive.

I should also add that I was really excited to see a new, somewhat familiar character be introduced in the closing moments of the show.  A GREAT introductory scene.  I really can’t wait to see where that goes.  

So what didn’t I like?  Well, I mentioned above that I enjoyed Sarah and John’s desperation in this episode — alone and on the run.  Part of what contributed to that was their being separated from Derek Reese (the robot-fighter from the future).  But at the end of the episode, when they’re finally all reunited, Derek says, “why didn’t you call me?”  Huh?  You mean Sarah could have called him all along on a cell-phone or something?  Well WHY DIDN’T SHE??  Lame.  

Also bothersome:  Cameron gets knocked out by the spark from a clock-radio in water?  Um, I would have thought it’d take a MUCH larger electrical surge to over-load and incapacitate a Terminator.  Later, Cameron catches up to Sarah and, stepping on her wound to cause her agony, she demands that she call out to John.  But doesn’t even a casual fan of the Terminator movies know that Terminators can mimic anyone’s voice?  (This show has even used that trick in prior episodes.)  So why suddenly can’t Cameron do that here?  Very inconsistent.  Then there’s the scene when a bloodied Sarah and John show up in a church, clearly on the run, and request sanctuary.  Does the priest call the police?  NO!  He says OK, sure, and hustles the OTHER people out of the church.  Huh??  And then, at the end of the episode, it seems that Sarah, Derek, John, etc. are now LIVING in that church.  Double huh??  I was also a little bummed that, by the end of the episode, everything was pretty much back to normal.  I don’t want to see this show become too episodic, with everything getting wrapped up neatly by the end of each episode.  I would’ve really loved to see Cameron stay evil for several episodes.  

The above lapses and inconsistencies are particularly annoying because the rest of the episode is so good that I wish I could recommend it whole-heartedly.  Instead, I still feel pretty much the way I did about Season One.  It’s definitely entertaining enough for me to keep watching, but I wish there could be a bit more attention to detail, and that some of the sillier elements of the show’s narrative can be curbed.

Most of the sci-fi franchises that I grew up loving haven’t been doing too hot this past decade.  The lame AvP movies.  The disappointing Star Wars prequels.  And there hasn’t been any truly great Star Trek around since Deep Space Nine (by far the best series of the franchise) went off the air back in 1999.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  I caught a bunch of the episodes last spring, and this week watched (in pretty short order), all nine episodes now available on DVD.  My reaction?  Well….sort of middle-of-the-road.  Actually, I feel about this series almost exactly the same way that I felt about the third, James Cameron-free Terminator film: there’s a lot to enjoy, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared, although its still a long way from the brilliance of the first two films.

The series starts off with a bang, with a cool apocalyptic vision of what will happen if Sarah and John fail to stop all the robots — nuclear armageddon, with a metallic Terminator robot, wreathed in flames, choking the life out of Sarah after having just shot John.  Of course, its just a dream — but its a pretty great way to kick off the series.  Not only does the sequence clearly remind the audience of what the stakes are, but its also a chance for the show to showcase some pretty snazzy effects.  I was rather impressed with the visuals throughout the first season — there’s a lot of great action stunt work (car chases, Terminator battles, etc.), and the show is able to show the fully robotic Terminators (as opposed to the ones clothed in flesh that can be played by an actor without special effects) a lot more often, and more convincingly, than I’d expected.  (I have no way of knowing, but I wonder if the show’s effects artists haven’t been able to capitalize on the groundbreaking work in this area done by the folks over at Battlestar Galactica.  They’ve been able to beautifully incorporate the full metal “toasters” into their live action shots for years now.)

Unfortunately, after the kick-off, things slowed down for the next several episodes.  We spend time with a computer programmer Andy Goode, whose chess-playing computer nicknamed “the Turk” may or may not be a first step on the road to Skynet…and with John and Cameron (his female Terminator protector, played by Summer Glau from Firefly) in school…and none of that really held my interest.  While there was some interesting serialization beginning to happen (Andy and the Turk’s storyline played out over several episodes, for example), there was also a paint-by numbers “adventure of the week” vibe starting (this week our heroes need to deal with a sketchy con-man in order to obtain new documentation for their new fake identities…this week our heroes need to stop a Terminator trying to stockpile metal that will be used by Skynet in the future to build mroe Terminators…etc.).  There were some nice connections to the Terminator movies (I was pleasantly surprised to hear the familiar drumming music whenever a Terminator is on the hunt), but also some pretty on-the-nose obvious references that didn’t really endear the show to me.  (Hey!  The new Terminator character is named Cameron!  Like James Cameron!  Get it?)

But then a terrific one-two punch of episodes 6 and 7 made me sit up and re-evaluate the show a bit.  Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons, delves into the character of Derek Reese — brother of Kyle Reese, who in the first Terminator movie came back in time, fell in love with Sarah Connor and fathered John.  The character of Derek could have come off as a somewhat desperate attempt to add to the Terminator mythology (Hey, remember that beloved character?  Well he actually had a brother no one’s ever mentioned before!), but as executed he wound up being a terrific addition to the dynamic of the show.  This episode spends a great deal of its run-time in the future, as we see some of Derek’s background and find out how he wound up traveling to the past.  Its a risky gambit, trying to show us some of the much hinted-at future war on a TV budget, but they manage to pull it off pretty well through some great CGI and practical effects.  But more importantly, this vision of the future war really amped up the narrative intensity of the show…AND it gave us some good character back-story for Derek… as well as, surprisingly, for the Terminator Cameron.  

That episode was followed by The Demon Hand.  I mentioned above that the early episodes contained some halting references to the Terminator films, but here the show jumps into the Terminator continuity with both feet.  Agent Ellison, the FBI agent tracking Sarah and John, gets ahold of the tapes from Sarah’s psychiatric incarceration, depicted in T2.  The show marvelously recreates the look of the psychiatric facility, and Lena Headey, who plays Sarah, has some great moments playing the desperation of the caged Sarah that Linda Hamilton so iconicly portrayed.  Then, Ellison goes to visit Sarah’s psychiatrist, Dr. Silberman.  Silberman was a very memorable character in the first two Terminator movies (and he has a cameo in the third), played by Earl Boen (thank you, imdb).  Here, the role is re-cast, and filled by Bruce Davison (Senator Kelly from the first two X-Men films).  Davison does a marvelous job inhabiting the role, and there are some real dramatic sparks between Silberman and Ellison as Ellison tries to find out what Silberman knows about just what the hell is going on with all the robots and freedom-fighters from the future, and Silberman tries to do whatever he can to prevent the nightmarish things he’s seen in the first two Terminator films from coming to be.  Not only was this a great, dramatic, involving episode, but I was really impressed by the way the show utilized all the interesting back-story and continuity from the films (not ignoring Sarah’s time locked up in the psych ward, not ignoring the character of Dr. Silberman) but was also unafraid to run in different directions with those story-lines (re-casting the role of Dr. Silberman, and changing him from a disbeliever into someone absolutely terrified that everything Sarah used to rant to him about is actually true).

The last two episodes of the season were a bit of a let-down after those two terrific episodes…in particular, the season-ending cliffhanger was a bit lame.  I’m not concerned about Cameron’s surviving that car-bomb, and the “revelation” that the mysterious Sarkissian is — gasp! — someone else we’ve never seen or heard of before didn’t exactly blow my skirt up.  

So — overall?  I’m sort of middle-of-the-road on this series, as I wrote at the beginning.  I love continuity and serialized storytelling, which this show already seems to have in spades.  The action is great, and while I don’t think there are any particular stand-outs amongst the cast, everyone does a solid job inhabiting their roles — both the ones we’re familiar with (Sarah and John Connor), and the new inventions of this series (Cameron, Agent Ellison, Derek Reese, Dean Winters as Charlie Dixon, etc.)  My biggest fear is that the show has already started to get a little crowded with time-traveling Terminators and freedom-fighters.  Just how many people did future-John Connor and Skynet send back in time, anyways?  On the one hand, I’m sort of intrigued at the idea that the Terminator films only gave us a glimpse of a much-larger time-travel war going on, between Skynet and John Connor’s future freedom-fighters.  On the other hand, all these visitors from the future are already starting to get a bit silly, and we’re only 9 episodes in.  My other fear concerns how to keep the Terminators dangerous, when Sarah and John have to, obviously, keep beating them or at least escaping from them every week.  The show did a decent job of this in the first season, with one Terminator (inexplicably named Cromartie) menacing them throughout the season, and still at large by the end of the finale.  On the other hand, there were a few others that appeared that were beaten pretty easily (such as the one they trap in the episode Heavy Metal, and the one whose control chip Cameron removes in Vick’s Chip).  The lame Star Trek: Voyager took the great villains of the Borg and made them look stupid by having the crew of Voyager keep beating them over and over again.  I hope that doesn’t happen here.

Bottom line:  There’s enough that I enjoyed about this short first season that I’ll definitely be tuning in for season two.  Let’s see where the show goes.  And hey, I hear there’s this fourth Terminator movie happening…