Review: "Sarah Connor," Episode 1.01
TSCC starts things off with a well-made premise "Pilot."
Season 1 - Episode 1: “Pilot“Original Airdate: January 13, 2008
Written By: Josh Friedman
Directed by: David Nutter
Plot Summary: In 1999, Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her 15-year-old son John (Thomas Dekker) are living under assumed identities. After Sarah decides to leave her fiancée, Charley (Dean Winters), and go on the run again, FBI agent James Ellison and a new Terminator named Cromartie (Owain Yeoman) are alerted to their presence. At a new school, John meets a girl named Cameron (Summer Glau), who turns out to be another Terminator sent from the future to protect him. Cromartie begins pursuing John, forcing the Connors and Cameron to time jump seven years into the future.
Review:
As of this time of writing, it’s been over 14 years since Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) premiered on the FOX network. TSCC’s reputation preceded it. It was a TV sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), one of the most popular — and at the time of its release, most expensive — blockbuster sci-fi action movies ever made, as well as arguably the best film in the career of James Cameron, not to mention a groundbreaking picture in the history of digital computer graphics.
That association was both a blessing and a curse. The series received some pretty big ratings when it premiered, but it was doomed to be compared unfavorably to its cinematic predecessor. T2 had James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a nearly limitless budget to pull off crazy action sequences on large scale. TSCC had none of those attributes, but it carried a lot of expectations.
So, it’s not really surprising that ratings trailed off pretty quickly after the pilot. That the series made it to a second season at all on the cancellation-prone FOX network was a bit of a surprise. That it later got a full 22-episode Season 2 was likely a Hail Mary pass courtesy of then Fox president Kevin Reilly.
TSCC unfortunately arrived at a bad time.
Broadcast networks were only now beginning to transition to the period, when low-rated shows could survive for multiple seasons thanks to streaming deals, home video, etc. Had it premiered a couple of years later perhaps, it might’ve stood a good chance to get to Season 3. Moreover, its launch was hampered by the 2007–08 WGA Strike, which led to the 13-episode first season getting cut down to 9 episodes and effectively losing the third act of its story arc.
TSCC also didn’t really belong on FOX.
The network execs kept trying to sell it as a fun, action-heavy, pulpy series that would appeal to the masses, but TSCC wound up being a serious character-heavy serial drama that took cues from The Wire in terms of its writing and narrative complexity. It had action scenes, for sure, but it was never an action show in the way that, say, 24 or Person of Interest were.
Finally, TSCC was surprisingly devoid of the self-disparaging metatextual humor that defined most popular genres shows since 1997.
Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams-related productions were the golden standard of genre television in the mid-aughts, and they normalized the idea that a fantasy or sci-fi-esque show had to acknowledge its own absurdity with self-referential, pop culture-savvy dialogue, “wink, wink” nods at the audience, and a parodic tone that let viewers know that they shouldn’t take everything that’s happening too seriously.
TSCC was an outlier, tackling its premise about killer robots from the future with the utmost seriousness and gravity, perhaps even to a greater extent than its source material.* Many TV critics didn’t really know what to make of it, and so the show was, for the most part, left under-appreciated and under-examined, while overrated programs like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica received way more coverage and considerably longer runs. With the passage of time, though, the series has gotten a bit more recognition, especially since pretty much every other attempt at a sequel to T2 has been a critical and/or commercial failure.
*In an interview I can no longer locate, showrunner Josh Friedman had described TSCC as “The Wire with robots,“ which is, imo, a very accurate description.
With yet another new Terminator installment having come out in November 2019, the time is right to revisit the seldom seen television spin-off from showrunner Josh Friedman. And that brings us back to the Pilot episode, where it all began.
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Now, pilots are tricky to review. They are often not representative of what a given TV show will ultimately be, as they are created long before the writers, cast, crew, etc. have a firm grasp of what works and what doesn’t work for a program, be it in terms of plot, tone, character dynamics, etc. They reflect a series still figuring out its strengths and weaknesses, a rough draft if you will. In essence , they let you see what the show initially started out as and how it transformed into what you see today.
At the same time, they have a few basic tasks: introduce the premise of the show, set up its characters, delineate the general structure or formula of a given episode (that is, what viewers might expect to see week-by-week), and entice the audience to come back for more. That is a lot to accomplish, and most shows are forced to do so within the span of just one hour of television. With all this happening, it’s not surprising that some Pilots are among the worst episodes of a series.* So, with all this in mind, how does the TSCC pilot ultimately rank?
*For no better example of this, look at the Starz series Spartacus, which would go on to become a legitimately great show after a terrible premiere episode.
Good, but not great.
As a self-contained hour of television, the episode is a success. It’s energetic, well-paced, and doesn’t try to cram too much story into its running time. That is a compliment — many genre shows overload their pilots with incident to provide a breathless experience, but TSCC makes room to breathe between all the action.
The Pilot also illustrates a strength of the show’s writing — unlike numerous network shows that shove unrealistic dialogue into characters’ mouths that is only there for the benefit of the audience, TSCC has little artificial exposition. The Pilot does have to explain and summarize some things, but the information is relatively sparse — and the series would subsequently grow bolder about leaving things unsaid, becoming all the better for it.
It also does a good job at introducing likable and interesting characters. People’s mileage might vary on Dekker’s John Connor, but I never saw him an annoying teen stereotype. He is a teen and can be whiny, but in a way that makes sense. Lena Headey (prior to her stint as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones) also makes a good first impression as a warmer, more grounded, and less theatrical incarnation of Sarah Connor than the one from the Terminator 2 film. Nothing against Linda Hamilton, but I always liked Headey’s more human and relatable Sarah.
Summer Glau is a real standout here, as Cameron Phillips is quite far from what one would imagine a Terminator to be. But I especially appreciate Richard T. Jones’ James Ellison. He doesn’t have much to do plot-wise just yet, but he provides an outsider’s perspective on the sheer insanity of the Terminator mythos, and helps to ground the heightened operatic lives of the Connors in mundane reality.
Where the Pilot falters is in providing a clear idea of what the show will look like on a week-to-week basis, and defining a larger macro-story that invites you to keep watching. This is very much a “premise pilot”, a kind of prologue that exists to get us to the real show. That becomes evident in the final act, when the Connors jump into the future of 2007, where most the series will then take place.
Prior to that, the Pilot seems to be setting up a scenario, where the Connors will be constantly on the run from Terminators, which probably wouldn’t be a very sustainable long-term premise. The shift itself is a little wonky but welcome.
The final bank sequence is filled with tension, as Cromartie makes his way inside the vault, while the Connors scramble to activate the time machine. Still, the show would’ve arguably been better off with the Connors and Cameron already having time jumped, allowing it to develop actual ongoing plot threads.
A bigger issue perhaps is that the series isn’t entirely sure of whether it wants to be a serious introspective drama with deliberate storytelling or a fun action-oriented series filled with the types of quips and one-liners you’d expect to see in a blockbuster movie. The former elements that would ultimately define the series are here, but they are closer to the margins of the Pilot, than its center.
And there are evident tonal and character inconsistencies. Right after shooting up a classroom, Cromartie inexplicably pauses in his pursuit of John Connor to say “Class Dismissed” to the shocked students with a half-smile on his face. Then you have Cameron acting very much like a human and saying lines like “Same where, different when” at some points, while being an aloof machine at others. These actions not only seem out-of-place here, they don’t at all square with the post-Pilot incarnations of the characters. Cameron in particular will have been later depicted as far more robotic than she is here, as well as incapable of understanding metaphors and allusions.
So, not everything here works, but what does works well. The Pilot, if anything, shows that TSCC has promise and a potential for greatness.
Grade: BNotes and Annotations:
I will be referring in the titles to this series as “Sarah Connor.” This is a personal preference to avoid simply calling it “Terminator” or using the complete title, which is a little long-winded.
Since a show is still in its formative stage, it’s not uncommon for a Pilot to undergo some retooling before it ever hits the air. Characters can be recast, entire plot points jettisoned, new scenes are shot, while old ones are reshot or completely abandoned. TSCC is not an exception. I did catch an earlier version of the Pilot that had apparently leaked onto the web, which included a different character named Burke Daniels (Tim Guinee) as Sarah’s fiancée. The shootout in the school was a longer sequence, deleted footage of which appears on DVD. The original pilot ended with Sarah hiding another shotgun in the wall, and I will say that I prefer this ending to that of the aired version. Also, alternate voiceover and music. The unaired pilot scenes have occasionally shown up on YouTube but have never had an official release.
A lot of critics at the time really didn’t like the voiceovers. In general, I don’t mind them. They aren’t badly written, though they can come off as pretentious sometimes. My bigger gripe is that the voiceovers do sometimes over-explain things and undermine the effects of the visual storytelling. That doesn’t happen in the Pilot, but it would occur in later episodes.
I’m surprised some of the wittier Terminator dialogues weren’t cut before the show aired though.
The script for the Pilot actually made absolutely clear that, yes, Cromartie killed Mr. Ferguson. His body is later found. This point is never elaborated on in the actual filmed pilot.
It’s funny that the characters never discuss the awkwardness of John seeing his mom naked following the time jump.
The TSCC writing staff had, according to showrunner Josh Friedman, considered bringing The Engineer into the show at some point. Notably, Cameron never again mentions Engineers or potentially building futuristic weapons.
I wonder what happened to that Futuristic gun. I mean, it’s hard to believe that it hasn’t been found in 7 years under all that rubble.
Style-wise, there are some interesting flourishes here, like those quick flash and zoom shots of terminators that would largely vanish in subsequent episodes.
Like pretty much every Terminator movie ever, TSCC does present some timeline issues, especially when it comes to John’s age. Terminator 2 was set in either 1994 or 1995 — the movie gave conflicting references — and John was established at being 10 years old at the time. Now, the Pilot of TSCC explicitly opens in 1999, and John at this point is 15 years old. This is largely consistent with the 94–95 setting of T2. HOWEVER, the references it makes to T2 position that movie’s story “2 years ago,” which would place it in 1997.
But what did you think? Any thoughts on the episode or the series in general? Did you like it, love it, hate it? Please,
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Or check it out reviews of the other episodes at the TSCC Review Index.
I was a fan of the Sarah Connor Chronicles when it originally aired although I didn't get this in depth into it. They definitely gave a depth to both Sarah and John in a way that didn't happen in the original movies, having looked back at those recently. It was very solid.