Review: "Sarah Connor," Episode 1.03
Review: "Sarah Connor," Episode 1.03
TSCC reaches an early high point in the underrated "Turk"
Season 1 - Episode 3: “The Turk”
Original Airdate: January 21, 2008
Written By: John Wirth
Directed by: Paul Edwards
Plot Summary: Using the information compiled by the resistance fighters, Sarah tracks down Andy Goode, whose chess-playing computer “The Turk” may very well be the predecessor to Skynet. John and Cameron begin their first day at a new high school. Cromartie kidnaps a scientist, who can help him get a new skin. Ellison investigates the deaths of Enrique and the resistance fighters.
Review:
When “The Turk” originally premiered on FOX in 2008, it was widely considered to be S1’s weakest episode. Critics, as far as I recall, found it boring as it was almost completely devoid of action sequences, but the main point of contention was the high school subplot. For some reason, the very idea of John going to school was found by some to be offensive or too implausible (one reviewer, I believe, literally wrote it off with “Why is this even a subplot?”), a factor that likely played into the writers eventually dropping this thread entirely at the start of the second season.*
*I never had any issues with it — it was clearly building to something, though we’ll likely never know precisely what that was. (Though there are enough clues and information in outside materials that allow for some educated guesses.)
By contrast, I always found “The Turk” to be one of the stronger hours of the show’s first season and an under-appreciated gem. There are three main reasons for this, and they all have to do with how well TSCC is written.
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Reason #1: “The Turk” reflects how economical the show is in its storytelling
Let’s talk about pacing. Imagine that Show A and Show B both receive 15 minutes to tell (roughly) the same story.
Show A breaks its story into about 7 scenes, meaning each scene will be on average a little over 2 minutes, resulting in quick, propulsive pacing. Things happen quickly in each scene, and sometimes an action occurs so fast, the viewer isn’t even sure what happened. There is no time to think about that, because the plot keeps going. Lots of exciting complications occur along the way to end. A lot of network shows, especially those with procedural elements, tend to fall into the A category, which we could also classify as “plot-oriented.”
Meanwhile, Show B breaks its story down into 3 scenes, allowing each scene to be about 5 minutes long. Things take their time to happen, and the viewer has the opportunity to soak in the details, the atmosphere of the episode, to wonder what a certain action or piece of dialogue might mean. There are no real complications along the way and the plot progresses in a straight line.
Their pace is slower, insofar as they focus less on plot and more on the telling, which occurs gradually. Nonetheless, the story arrives at the same point as Show A in the same amount of time as they tend to tell a story in the smallest possible number of beats necessary to tell it. These can be classified as “process-oriented.” Most series that exhibit this approach come from cable, a great example being Better Call Saul.
TSCC was the rare network series that strived to be process-oriented. And “The Turk” is the first episode to make this evident. On the surface, “The Turk” seems slow and ponderous — it is never in a hurry to get to the next big plot development, and it doesn’t really even have a single action sequence(unless you count Sarah’s nightmare and Cromartie throwing some guards around.) But “The Turk” also juggles 4–5 major plot threads in its running time and gives them all just the right amount of attention, so you can’t really imagine the episode missing a single scene.
None of them feel rushed or dragged out. So, to put it quite simply, the episode is really well paced, and succeeds at telling the stories it wants to tell in the most efficient way possible. In addition to directly building on the previous episode’s events, it also expands its scope. The high school plotline is just in its infancy, and does a good job developing John and Cameron outside of Sarah’s orbit as well as the larger Terminator-context. It also allows the series to continue grounding its fantastical events in something approaching everyday reality.
One thing that this thread throws into relief though is the inconsistency in Cameron’s characterization. In the Pilot, Cameron made a far more convincing high school student, so much so that neither John nor the audience had ample reason to suspect she was a machine. Here, however, John has to lecture her about “not being a freak” and, while the discrepancy does get some acknowledgment, it ultimately doesn’t receive any real explanation.
What is good though is that the new incarnation of Cameron allows for humor that naturally arises from her taking everything at face value. I really like the “metal plate” joke as a way of explaining Cameron’s activation of metal detectors.
What “The Turk” also does really well is to give a larger sense of purpose to James Ellison, even though his investigation into the resistance fighters’ and Enrique’s murders has no direct bearing yet on the Connors’ stories. TSCC seemed to initially be setting up a kind of “Terminator meets The Fugitive” scenario, where the Connors would be living on the run from Terminators and the FBI, with Ellison playing the role of Phillipe Gerard.
But then the Pilot nullified that set-up with its time jump. While “The Turk” picks the Gerard angle, it also clearly suggests that Ellison’s arc is really that of a skeptic becoming a believer. Moreover, by holding Ellison back from intersecting with the main trio, the series essentially promises to the viewer that something monumental will occur once he and the other main characters finally cross paths.
Reason #2: “The Turk” has a minimal amount of exposition
Television shows, especially serialized ones, are often required to have a lot of artificial exposition. Viewers ideally should be able to tune into an episode at any point of its running time. And so, writers often have to have the characters summarize or reiterate narrative information that they already know, as well as explain things the viewer could easily infer. What is great about “The Turk” is how the characters rarely bother to say anything just for the viewer’s sake.
No scene illustrates this better than the one, where Sarah meets up with Tarissa Dyson. Consider just how terse their opening exchange is. At no point does the show drop in a reminder of who Tarissa is, nor do Sarah and Tarissa elaborate on what they are referring to. They don’t have to, because each knows what the other means. In fact, Sarah doesn’t even refer to Tarissa by name. This is a sign of a show that is confident enough that its audience will be able to keep up and makes no attempt to hold the viewer’s hands in regard to the events of the previous episodes. It’s a great, short scene that respects the viewer’s intelligence.
Reason #3: A central theme
John’s visit to the Apple Store last week demonstrated just how much of a double-edged sword technological and scientific advancements can be. The Internet, after all, empowers us by allowing communication across vast distances and providing access to massive amounts of information, while simultaneously placing us at the mercy of higher forces that can monitor our every move and control what we think and believe.
The notion that constantly breaking barriers may very well doom us comes to the forefront in “The Turk.” It’s not for nothing that “The Turk” opens with a dream sequence, where Sarah attempts to assassinate the scientists developing the nuclear bomb, only for all of them to resurrect as Terminators. It underlines the idea that killing terminators and killing human beings is not the same thing, tying into Sarah’s continued dilemma in regard to programmer/cellphone salesman Andy Goode.
A brilliant if naïve young man, Andy never once stops to think of what an advanced AI that can have “moods” may become in the future and can barely contain his excitement at the prospect of telling Sarah about his vision. What the episode establishes, without belaboring the point, is that Sarah has never actually killed anyone before, so committing cold-blooded murder would mean sacrificing her humanity and becoming no different from a Terminator.
In many ways, the episode revisits Sarah’s arc from Terminator 2, but the show wisely inverts the film’s traditional dynamic — in this case, it is John who, though perhaps inadvertently, edges Sarah towards killing the human inventor of Skynet. She hasn’t reached the point where she can cross that line into anti-hero territory though, and so instead burns down Andy’s home and his computer with it.
This directly parallels the subplot focused on Cromartie and the British scientist Fleming (Adam Godley). Now, Fleming isn’t someone that we learn much about. But we do get a sense that he is an idealistic scientist, who strives to accomplish a great technological breakthrough without considering the potential consequences.
The show never explicitly spells this out, but Fleming evidently is developing a cellular regeneration mixture that could help those with grievous bodily injuries, like war veterans, restore lost skin and muscle tissue but will one day allow Terminators to disguise themselves as humans. Cromartie cannot create the mixture himself, so he needs Fleming to help him literally grow a new skin.
And what is great about the subplot is that Cromartie doesn’t even have to force Fleming to cooperate — after he presents the scientist with the futuristic skin growth formula, Fleming stares at the wall in awe as though he had received proof that God is real. He then disturbingly becomes all too willing to go along with Cromartie’s plans, even after witnessing the Terminator’s true robotic form.
All this leads to the episode’s excellent wordless ending, where Cromartie — now, with his new flesh — rises out of a bathtub literally filled with blood. His “rebirth” calls to mind both old-school movies replete with mad scientists that raise the dead and the body horror imagery of David Cronenberg.
Fleming — who we know will soon die — cuts Cromartie’s “slits” open, leaving the audience with a haunting final image of his glowing red eyes before the episode cuts to black. Sarah’s voiceover arguably intrudes here but it doesn’t take away from the combined power of the visuals and music, which aptly convey the message that if those like Fleming bring about scientific breakthroughs, then humanity is doomed.
Grade: A-Notes and Annotations:
Interestingly, “The Turk” begins a stylistic pattern that recurs throughout S1 — the episode leaves a pivotal event off-screen, only to flash back to it towards the very end. In this case, Cromartie murders Fleming after he has served his purpose. We never see this on-screen, however. “The Turk” skips past Fleming’s death, with Ellison finding his body and discovering that Cromartie has taken the scientist’s eyes, before flashing back to the moment of Cromartie’s birth at the end.
Adam Godley, a British actor who I’ve most recently spotted on Lodge 49, makes for a memorable side character in Fleming, convincingly selling a combination of astonishment, excitement, and fear all in the same scene.
So, what exactly is going on here with the high school frescoes? The simple explanation is that Jordan (played by Allesandra Torresani who would go on to become the main star of Caprica) had an affair with a teacher and decided to commit suicide when someone started painting mysterious frescoes as a way of exposing/blackmailing her.
The one plot point that is legitimately confusing: why does Ellison claim that the same gun that killed the resistance fighters was the one that killed Enrique? After all, we know that Cameron is Enrique’s murderer, while Vick killed the fighters. Here’s what’s apparently going on: Vick dropped his gun during his fight with Cameron in the last episode. Sarah then picked up this gun and brought it home. Cameron then used this gun to kill Enrique, so the Connors still have the murder weapon. The problem is that “Gnothi Seauton” never really connected the dots between these events.
When Andy Goode claims that the idea for some of the Turk’s code “came to me in a dream,” I can’t help but chuckle. This is a little inside joke about James Cameron’s original claim that the idea for The Terminator came to him in a dream, when it later turned out he may have gotten the inspiration from a story by Harlan Ellison.
I love the short scene between Ellison and Carlos, which helps establish that Carlos isn’t just a one-off character. The dialogue here is really good, with Carlos making a subtle threat to Ellison without ever saying explicitly anything that could incriminate him.
I distinctly recall reading an article penned by Josh Friedman on the show’s world-building, where he discussed how the writing on the wall in this episode was changed a few times, as the producers wondered what specific font and style a Terminator would use. At least one approach was not “Terminatory” enough.
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