'Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' crashes a funeral
Trying to destroy a bunch of alien machines from the future means that you sometimes have to do unpleasant things. Beyond the usual death you have to deal out, you sometimes have to do things like crashing a huge funeral for a small factory town that lost most of its employees when a liquid metal machine from the future blew up said factory. Such was the lot of the gang tonight on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Attending the funeral and listening to all those boring stories from the townspeople, just hoping to get a little bit of insight into Skynet, must have been hard on our heroes, it was certainly hard to watch, and by "hard" I mean boring. It was spiced up a little by Weaver having sent a "Mr. Walsh" to the funeral to hunt for someone who ought to have been amongst the dead but possibly wasn't.
I guess the problem was that I just don't care to see Sarah mourning over the guy, Ed, who tried to kill her. She spent a lot of time making nice with the widow, getting herself all agitated, and for what? Well, for a set of keys to a storage locker apparently, a set of keys that the widow just handed to Sarah. I ask you, if your husband were dead and you had this mysterious set of storage locker keys that you knew nothing about, would you hand them over to a random stranger? The widow did, I don't get it, but she did.
It was all so odd, plus there were dead cows, lots of dead cows. Cameron and John learned about them from a couple of mourning teens. Dead cows are never a good sign. Dead cows mean bad things, very bad things, especially when cows have been dying on a regular basis.
Mourning Girl Teen was also a liar. She discussed how she had buried her dad in a gray suit, and then how her dad was a pile of ashes. John was quick enough to put together that you don't throw a pile of ashes in a gray suit (or a black one even), so he knew something was odd about Mourning Girl Teen. There was also something odd about Mourning Teen Mom (not the woman Sarah was chatting up). John figured that Mom and Girl knew that Dad wasn't so much deceased. They based that on the fact that Mom and Girl didn't look at Dad's picture at the wake.
Wow. See, to me that sounded awfully thin, and unlike John, I even knew that Walsh was there looking for a not so dead guy pretending to be dead guy. It was quite the leap of logic John took, but Mourning Girl Teen confirmed John's suspicions, and even tipped him off that her house was bugged. Actually, at about that moment, Sarah found a huge video surveillance room under the not so dead guy's house and realized that the whole town had been under surveillance. As the video clips later proved, Dad was something of a killer. Clearly he needed to be tracked down, and seeing a boot, John figured he knew where Dad may have been.
Thin again, and not far off the mark (but off the mark). John took the gang back out to the dead cows, where now there was a dead Mr. Walsh, and magically, as if on cue, one of those fancy-shmancy three dot flying machines came out of the pool of nearby water. It flew to a not too far away truck and got driven off by someone who looked kind of like the not dead Dad. Poor John, he was so close to nailing the whole thing tonight, if only he'd known that there would be a big truck parked not too far away they could have blown the case wide open rather than letting the flying machine be driven off into the night.
I know what you're going to tell me. You're going to tell me that while maybe this episode was a little slow, it revealed more of the overarching mystery, that Sarah was vindicated with her three dots, and that they're building to something. You're probably right on all of those counts, I'm not going to argue with that, what I am going to say is that I wish the story had focused more on Weaver and her trying to understand how she should be dealing with her little girl on the anniversary of the crash that killed the little one's dad. Or, John Henry, it could have used some John Henry.
Don't get me wrong, what we got was fine. I just would have liked more sandwiched in to it. I think it would have been possible to condense the funeral bits a little in order to expand the other plots.
Okay, hit me (but do remember I'm not a machine from the future and therefore feel pain), were you pleased with tonight, or were you hoping for something more?
The TV and Film Guy's Reviews - we always ask for more, even if it's just of porridge.
Thanks for the wrap-up. I could barely watch this episode. This series started out so good and is ending so badly, imo.
This specific show was as boring as one could get. Who wants to watch a funeral AND a wake that even the participants were not into?
Who is writing this ACTION-packed franchise at this point? The stories crawl each week at a snail's pace, nothing seems to happen, there is a TON of dialogue, and the best character pouts and does not fight anyone anymore.
I think I will skip further episodes of this series even though I do like the actors. This show is just not happening for me anymore.
Tonights episode sucked.
Wow, that's some harsh criticism. I thought tonites episode gave some really great human emotion to the characters. The fact that there was more connection and chemistry between John and Zoe, as compared to the completely lame Riley story line was captivating. The fact that no one knew exactly how far involved any one was in the whole "warehouse" scenario was also interesting.
The reveal of the secretly monitored SkyNet town and it's usual suspects, including the flying ship of lights (that apparently was the last thing that Sarah saw after being shot) was very telling. Not to mention the connection between Catherine Weaver and her daughter was a complete turn around from where they were heading. It did a whole lot in explaining how far they were willing to go to make it as real as it could be. I felt it was a fantastic step toward making you actually feel connected to these characters and want to care what happened to them. I've been engaged since the beginning and have a very vested interest in how it will resolve. Kudos to the writers in keeping me 'involved'.
During the last two weeks we've confirmed our main character Sarah is a ruthless *****. Last week she helped turn the doctor into a murderer. This week she thrashes the memories and/or ruins the plans of mourners at a funeral. A nice dichotomy was presented explaining how SHE KEEPS ASKING QUESTIONS but turns around a moment later to tell a widow that sometimes it's best to not ask questions.
I've been wondering, now that Ellison is no longer at the bureau, wasn't anyone else set to continue the pursuit of the Connors? The writers have abandoned his investigative drive for the answers. Certainly one of the mourners must've thought to contact the authorities. The writers took away a tie-in to realism.
Speaking of Ellison, his role has diminished to that of a behavioral therapist explaining good, evil, social mores and conduct. I thought he had a more meaty role.
Who killed Walsh? Doesn't appear the viewer can know with any certainty. At least we were let in on what was going on at the plant apparently. ***uming the cattle were killed by the flying hunter killer robot, does it possess any autonomous operation at this point in the timeline?
So many questions, so little time.
i've been a staunch fan of this show since season 1. i love this show and the characters. but i have to say tonight's show ranks as the worst epi ever. not much interesting going on storywise. and really just boring. i am with the recapper here, i kept thinking this funeral is so boring. and why is that lady giving sarah the keys? and then the cows? and then they're snooping around in that house? and then the 3-dots flying thing? wtf? even weaver's and ellison's scenes were pretty boring. yeah where's john henry when you need him! :)
i am gonna chalk this epi up to an off week and hope it's an aberration. and hopefully not a sign of things to come.
I agree with the recapper and with dl's post. I could barely sit through this episode. It feels like even the writers have given up on this show.
They need to pick up on the action, did we really have to sit through almost 39 minutes just to see the "Machine" at the end...
Count me out, man. Game over. Let's hope Christian Bale has more luck.
i didnt get who Weaver was trying to track down - if its Zoe's dad the truck driver does that mean he is not working for her and is some sort of rebel? Or was Walsh the missing guy who Zoe's dad caught up to at the cow pit?
No Cameron = No Fun
I'm a fan of this show. But unfortunately it feels as if show runner Josh Friedman actually knows he has two or three more seasons to tell his story based on the slow pacing, the rather dull winter cliffhanger (compared to the 'Cameron in the Jeep explosion' episode that closed out the first season) followed by two somewhat lackluster eps that aren't really moving the plot forward. At least not with any speed.
I've read there IS going to be a lot of action, explosions and gunplay coming up in future episodes, but I fear Friedman will have lost most of his audience by then, along with any chance of another season.
Given that T:TSCC is one of the least watched shows on FOX, it would have been wiser to close out the fall/early winter run with a larger budgeted, action-oriented 2-part cliffhanger. At least the show would have come back with a bang rather than a whimper and perhaps brought in some new viewers that couldn't watch the show in that competitive Monday 8pm timeslot.