Saturday, September 20, 2008

No Scoobies?

I finally got around to watching the first two episodes of the new season of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on Hulu. I watched the first one last night and the second one this afternoon. About five minutes into it, Sarah tells John he needs to go back to school.

So John goes to school and there's a scene where he's standing in the hallway, with scabs on his cheek and forehead from last episode's mayhem, looking at the chattering teenagers all around him, and it's obvious he feels completely isolated. And at that point, I paused the program to make a sandwich and muse on my happiness with the fact that this show has developed so much better than it could have.

I mean, it's not perfect; the time travel/parallel universes stuff is enough to make narrative hash out of any show (witness the second season of Heroes; the third season looks good, but I fear that there will be more time travel nonsense to muck it all up).

But for a show that features a high schooler on a mission to save the world, it could have been so much worse. That is to say, I love Joss, but it would have absolutely destroyed this show to go the Buffy route, with John just happening to befriend a group of high school students who are improbably good at armed and unarmed combat and computer hacking and all the rest.

So I sit down, thinking warm, fuzzy un-Scooby thoughts while eating my sandwich and watching the show, and of course, what do they do? They introduce a high school girlfriend for John who is almost certainly more than she appears. And I find that, although I like the actress (she's hot), and I'm all for John getting some and lightening up a little, I'm not thrilled with any of the most likely directions the writers will take this. Three possibilities:

1) She's a Terminator sent to get close to John and kill him. Not likely, since John slept in the same room with her and wasn't touched.

2) She's a human spy from the future, either sent by John himself to protect him, or maybe some kind of turncoat sent by the robots to seduce him into giving up his mission or something.

3) She's just a normal human, which gives three options: she gets killed, leaving John heartbroken but vengeful; she freaks out and leaves him, leaving John confused; she becomes a Scooby.

Don't let her be a Scooby, please.

2 comments:

Jeremy F. Lewis said...

What did you think of Shirley Manson's version of Samson & Delilah from the first seven minutes of the season premiere? Good grief! I loved that song!

:)

TheyStoleFrazier'sBrain said...

It was pretty good, I thought, although watching it again, I get a little frustrated. They obviously wanted to use the whole song and have certain stuff happen at certain points in the song, which means they had to do a bunch slo-mo style step-framing, which gets tiresome to me after a while.

Funny thing is, I tend to bleep this stuff out of my head. Musical montages rarely stick with me. I remember the events or the sometimes the emotional resonance, but rarely the song.