Superman is boring: let me tell you why. He's invincible, possessed of evidently limitless strength, he has x-ray vision and shoots heat rays from his eyes, plus he can fly. The only way to combat Superman is to threaten a hostage or hostages, preferably someone in his retinue (the role fulfilled by "girl reporter" Lois Lane, though Jimmy Olsen and old flame Lana Lang occasionally fit the bill), or, you can get your hands on some kryptonite, the only known substance to which Superman is vulnerable. 99% of Superman stories are a variation on these themes.
I relay this blunt assessment to you because I think that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which premiered on Fox last night, is going to fall prey to a similar problem. In fact, I know it, because it's already happened to the cinematic franchise that is the show's gospel.
The plot of the three Terminator films is as follows:
- Evil omniscient computer Skynet unleashed nuclear armageddon (dates vary depending on the film), killing 3 billion people. Proceeds to construct and control army of evil cyborgs, with purpose of eradicating surviving human population.
- John Connor, who we meet at various ages depending upon the film, is the leader of the human resistance. Skynet reasons that by eliminating Connor, it can eliminate said resistance.
- Skynet sends a robot disguised as a human - referred to as a Terminator - back through time to kill Connor (or his mother, pre-preggers), deducting that this might prove simpler than offing present-day Connor as no-one circa 1984 (or 1991, or 2003) will be equipped to evade or destroy a tenacious killer cyborg. In the first film, the Terminator is a simple skeleton-shaped robot covered in human flesh, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger: it's basically super-strong and hard to destroy. In T2, it's a so-called T-1000, a "liquid metal" shape-shifter personified most of the time by the less-adenoidal Robert Patrick. In T3, we get our first Terminatrix, which basically has the same attributes as the T-1000, but also has a laser cannon.
- The human resistance, however, gets wind of Skynet's nefarious plan, and sends guardian back through time to protect Connor and/or his mother. In the first film, the protector is Reese, a human being who is one of future Connor's most trusted lieutenants; in subsequent films the good guy is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been reprogrammed and sent back through time to play bodyguard in T2 and T3.
- From here the formula varies: in T1, we basically stick to "run from the Terminator." In T2, Sarah Connor (played by a jacked Linda Hamilton) decides to turn the tables and take out Skynet at the root by destroying Cyberdyne Systems, the corporation responsible for its invention. In T3, we learn that John Connor has a wife who is instrumental to the resistance and must also be protected. Blah blah blah.
- Terminator is invariably lured into some industrial setting where Connor(s)/protector outwit it and use some environmental advantage to destroy it (liquid nitrogen, molten metal, giant metal door that descends from the ceiling, machine press).
The problem is really the time travel element, 1) because it's mechanically flawed, and 2) because time travel is inherently paradoxical. The first complaint is the simplest: according to the Terminator mythology, only organic material can go back (or forward, evidently) in time. Hence no clothes (played to hilllllarious effect in all three films and the TV series), and more importantly, no super weapons from the future. Yet, despite these edicts, you can send Terminators - robots - back in time because they are wrapped in, or can produce a simulacrum of, human skin. Which begs the question: why not just super weapons back in time wrapped in flesh-bags or something? Surely Skynet could figure this out. This isn't a deal breaker, but it is remarkably stupid.
The paradox issue is, however, a deal breaker. Let's face it, if your strategy is to send assassins back through time to whack out John Connor pre-or-post-natal, then why not, I don't know, send multiple Terminators to separate points on his timeline? After all, we're under the impression that the resistance is some kind of rag-tag militia just hanging on by the skin of their teeth - they couldn't possibly send back enough protectors back to counter a deluge of killer cyborgs. Furthermore, the TV series makes a point in the first episode that, while you can send any cool gadgets back into the past, you can send someone to build them for you (without instructions, I guess, but that's another matter). Hence the time machine in the bank vault, and the cache of super cool nuclear future death rays stashed in safe-deposit boxes. But if you could send someone to the past to do all this, why doesn't Skynet just send an army of Terminators to, I don't know, the 18th century to whack out pre-industrial, pre-guerrilla warfare humanity and establish a cybernetic imperium back then? Presumably Skynet could send some Terminators back with blueprints on how to construct another Skynet, and given the fact that Terminators can go for about 120 years on their batteries, they could even build the infrastructure required to support this technological society.
Furthermore, even if Skynet was worried about accidentally whacking itself out by terminating the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the guy who invents the silicon microchip or something, it has the lesson of the previous two films, in which some key element of Skynet's creation is removed, and yet an alternate history quickly develops that allows Skynet to be built and destroy humanity anyway (more importantly, it also lets the guys who own the rights to crank out another movie or TV show). In fact, the end of the third film is pretty explicit that Skynet's creation is fated (an assertion that pretty much flies in the face of T2's anti-destiny stance). Furthermore, the series has openly embraced "snake swallowing its tale" paradoxes before, most famously in which Reese, the human protector in the first film, ends up knocking up Sarah Connor and ergo fathering John; either this is a mighty powerful argument in favor of nurture-over-nature going on here (i.e. any male child Sarah has would end up leading human resistance), or we have a big time continuity issue. Additionally the foreknowledge that her child would be humanity's savior leads Sarah to prep him for his future vocation, including survival and weapons training; assuming that these key formative experiences are essential to John's leadership, we either embrace that the Terminator timeline is the only possible chain of events (a difficult assertion in a time travel-friendly environment), or that there was a different chain of events that led John to be a great leader in some Terminator-free timeline. Additionally, we are given no indication at all that, despite engaging in activities that would definitely cause a "butterfly effect"-style clusterfuck in the future, that the temporal mucking about taking place is having any determinate effect of future events, which would then effect events in the past, as presumably time would be continually resetting itself, creating a blank, or different, slate each time. So, bearing in mind all of these circumstances, there ought to be no problem with Skynet being its own inventor, despite the fact that such a development would require intelligent design-levels of benightedness for someone to embrace.
As for the show itself, it's not all that bad: Lena Headey won't make you forget Linda Hamilton, but she hits all the right ferocious/paranoid notes; the show continues with the film's odd embrace of feminism - i.e. Sarah Connor-as-lioness/partner of equals in T2 - here we get our first good (as in not evil) lady Terminator, with stereotypical male savior figure being tended to by two strong female role models. The kid, played by Thomas Dekker, is pretty much standard teen-beat fare, and it's a lot easier to see him turning into Nick Stahl (John circa T3) than Edward Furlong (still the best John, circa T2). The direction embraces the Fox/MTV hybrid of jumpy editing with healthy doses of slow mo to convey excitement and energy, despite the fact that since we're constantly watching people flee murderous super robots, the tension and suspense ought to be pretty self-evident. I'll probably check out another episode or two before rendering final judgment: after all that ought to be enough of a sample to figure out whether we're going someplace new or this is just another run on the treadmill.
