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| Tuesday, October 14, 2008 10:25 PM |
| On the Viewer - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Season 2, Episodes 4 & 5) |
 by Fëanor |
Have I mentioned lately how much I love this show? It is so, so, so, so good. If you are not watching it, you absolutely should be.
Anyway, let's get to the episodes! As usual, tons of spoilers follow. First up is "Allison from Palmdale." When I read the description of this episode and realized it was an amnesia episode, I was afraid the show had already jumped the shark. Usually a series only resorts to the amnesia cliche when it's run out of all original ideas. But the episode turned out to be really interesting and powerful. It's structured, as many episodes are, with a story in the present intercut with a story in the future (which is actually a flashback). The first flashback/flashforward shows someone who appears to be Cameron running and then being trapped by the machines. She is questioned by a Terminator, who remains in shadow. In the present, Cameron loses it in a supermarket and is taken to a prison where she meets another young woman named Jody. Something has gone wrong with Cameron's chip and now she remembers nothing of her past except the information she's getting from her flashforwards; in those, her name was apparently Allison, so that's the name she gives. Oddly enough, without her memories of who she is, Cameron gives a good approximation of human emotion. That's... a little confusing. But I'm willing to go with it. Jody latches onto "Allison" when she realizes the girl has a big wad of money. They go and hang out at a halfway house where John eventually finds them, but Cameron pushes him away, as she has no memory of him and what he says upsets her. From what she's been able to piece together of her future memories, Cameron manages to dig up the phone number for a house and calls the woman there, claiming to be that woman's daughter. But the woman has no daughter yet, although she is pregnant. So creepy! When Cameron's sequence of flashforwards comes to an end, Cameron and we ourselves realize that the girl who looks like Cameron is actually Allison, a human, and that Cameron is the Terminator who has been questioning Allison all along. Not a huge surprise (as the only other option is that the person saying she was Allison was really Cameron all along, pretending to be human and pretending to be captured by Terminators to gain the trust of the humans), but still pretty creepy and cool. In the future Cameron apparently impersonated Allison and used her to infiltrate John's camp. All of which makes the scene where she calls Allison's mother-to-be even creepier in retrospect. Also really creepy and excellent is the way, in the flashforward, Cameron mimics Allison's movements and gestures, trying to copy her. Summer Glau really does a great job here. There are some interesting lines in that final interrogation scene, too, where Cameron suggests there's a third faction in the future war - machines who want peace with humans, and don't want to kill all of them. That's a really interesting idea.
After she comes back to herself, Cameron tells the counselor at the halfway house some seriously disturbing things in a totally cold and emotionless voice (have I mentioned that it's creepy?). At the very end, Cameron nearly kills Jody, and in the car afterwards when John asks her where she got the necklace she's wearing (a necklace which Jody gave her when she said she liked it), she tells him the same lie Jody told her about where she got it. It's a very powerful scene, and very disturbing - the way the machine just calmly and coolly lies to him.
There are a couple of other interesting subplots in the episode, wherein Sarah gets to know Kacy (the pregnant neighbor) and her baby Daddy a little better, and Catherine and Ellison also get to know each other better. Wow, Catherine has a daughter! Is it a human that the machine has tricked into believing she's still her mother, or a tiny little girl Terminator? Either way, it's horrifying!
The next episode, "Goodbye to All That," is even better. This one starts with some poor innocent bastard getting killed by a Terminator while he's in his backyard barbecuing. Turns out he happens to be the first Martin Bedell in the phone book. Yep, the Terminators are doing that whole thing again. Turns out Martin Bedell is important to the resistance fight in the future, and they've come back to eliminate him. Using the information that the poor dead guy from the future left them on the basement walls in his own blood (which is a great little plot device, btw), John and friends determine that the "true" Martin Bedell is in a military school a few hours away. Sarah and Cameron go to protect the third and final Martin Bedell (who's only a little kid), while Derek and John go to save the real one. Derek tells Sarah they'll just throw Bedell in a hole and wait it out, which I thought was a bad plan - how can he become the Bedell he needs to be sitting in a hole? But it turns out Derek has thought that through, too, and that's not his plan at all. Instead, he and John manage to get themselves inserted into the school (John as a trial student, Derek as a fill-in instructor) so they can stick close to Bedell and keep an eye on him while preparing defenses around the school's perimeter. As John gets to know the present Bedell better, we get to see Derek's flashforwards/flashbacks that fill us in on the Bedell of the future. Meanwhile, Sarah and Cameron grab the other Bedell just in time (shooting the Terminator a couple of times to hold him off) and lock the kid up in their house to keep him safe. There are some really sweet, moving scenes between Sarah and the kid, as he seeks comfort and she clumsily tries to be a parent to him. There's also a really cool thing where they parallel the story of The Wizard of Oz (which the kid picks to read for a book report he's oddly panicked about missing) with the action at the school. There's a great action sequence where they take down the Terminator, but the most powerful and deeply moving scene in the episode is one near the very end, in which Derek flashes forward for the last time and tells John the end of the future Bedell's story. "He died. He died for you, John. We all died for you." It's a really amazing scene, and both Thomas Dekker (John) and Brian Austin Green (Derek) do some great acting in it.
The Ellison/Catherine subplot in this episode sees Ellison looking into the "accident" at the nuclear plant from an earlier episode, and discovering that two Terminators were almost certainly involved. He also finds that the manager of the plant is planning to start an investigation. Catherine says this would complicate their respective goals. Ellison wonders what those are and she says she wants to lead her company to the next century, and he's an avenging angel. Then she tells him to keep looking, before the nightmare begins. Wow! In the next sequence, she shows up to take care of the plant manager, disposing of him in a truly unique and nasty way.
It's excellent, excellent stuff! My only problem with this episode is that it was a little hard to believe that the guy at the military school would ask Derek to fill in as an instructor. I mean, he knows almost nothing about the guy, and as far as I can tell has only his word that the story he's telling is true. And he trusts him to look after a bunch of kids?? Messed up. Still, that small issue is easily overshadowed by the incredible high quality of this episode. This show just keeps blowing me away over and over again. I really hope it stays on the air somehow. |
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