Oh my. I just watched the pilot episode for The Sarah Connor Chronicles — or at least, a version of it dated April 23 — and I am now more interested in this series than I expected to be.
For one thing, it occurs to me now that this series could give Sarah Connor and her son John a chance to bond properly as mother and son, which is something the movies never really allowed them to do: John didn’t exist yet in T1, Sarah was dead before T3 even began, and John’s primary relationship was with the Terminator rather than his mother in T2 — and once the three characters got together in that film, they spent all their time running and shooting and plotting and fighting, etc. In the pilot, on the other hand, we see Sarah ask John if he’s met any cute girls at his new school, etc. — and little details like that are a nice touch.
For another thing, this series is definitely pretending Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) never happened, and it will presumably ignore any other sequels that might be in the works, too. And I’m fine with that. The future remains as open as ever.
On a more trivial note, the pilot includes a scene of a Terminator ripping a gun out of its leg — and while it’s nowhere near as smooth or graceful as the holster-in-the-leg shots in Robocop (1987), I still dig that sort of thing, for the reasons I alluded to here.
As for the timeline issues… Actually, this pilot sticks relatively close to the continuity established in the first two films.
In the first two films, John Connor is conceived in 1984, born in 1985, and then he and his mother destroy Cyberdyne in 1995, two years before Skynet would have nuked the world in 1997.
The pilot modifies this just a little. It takes place in 1999, and while no one says so in the pilot itself, all the bumpf on this series has said that John Connor is 15 when it takes place — so it would seem that, as far as this series is concerned, John was born, rather than conceived, in 1984. In addition, the events of T2 are repeatedly said to have taken place “two years ago” — i.e. in 1997 — but I assume this is because the actor who played John Connor in that film was 13 at the time, and not 10 years old like the character was supposed to be. In any case, these are minor, minor revisions.
Beyond that… I can’t say anything. Not without giving away some spoilers that I think I, as a fan, would want to be protected from. But if you read this preview at ComingSoon.net — paragraph eight, in particular — you might get a sense of what I’m avoiding here.
Meanwhile, in related news, ComingSoon.net reported three weeks ago that Fox is going to revise a key segment in the show where a Terminator attacks the school that John Connor is attending — and the network is doing this because of the Virginia Tech massacre, which, coincidentally, took place in April, exactly one week before the finalization of the version of the series pilot that I just saw.
The school scene is nowhere near as bad as it could have been, and I personally don’t think the network has anything to worry about. Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori reportedly told the AP the scene is essential to the show’s themes (“This woman is charged with protecting and preparing her son to be the future leader of the resistance. The one single place a parent has to give up control of their child is school”), and I for one hope they leave it as is.
In any case, I think this pilot sets things up quite well, and there is potential for all sorts of things down the road. Yeah, I could nit-pick any number of plot points, but I’ll save that for later!
AUG 12 UPDATE: One extra spoiler-free point of continuity does occur to me. In the films, all the Terminators are sent back in time from 2029 or some point after that — but in this pilot, the “good” Terminator played by Summer Glau says she came back in time from 2027. So she would seem to be an earlier model.
The thing is, she has a more advanced personality — she blends in with humans better — than any of the other Terminators we have seen so far. The Glau character is so appealing, in fact, that you almost forget that she, like the other “good” Terminators we have seen, is almost certainly a villainous machine that has been captured and forcibly reprogrammed to serve the humans. (Will we see “bad” versions of the Glau model in future episodes?)
Anyway, perhaps this discrepancy — between the more-advanced robot from 2027 and the less-advanced robots from 2029 — can be explained on the basis that the future has turned out different now, following the events of T2. But in that case, how plausible is it that the life or death of John Connor would matter any more?
UPPERDATE: In this IGN.com interview, producer Josh Friedman says John Connor was 14 in T2 and may now be 16 in this pilot.
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