I thought it was at least as good as The Bionic Woman, which I still watch. The bionic woman can have lots of different missions to perform each week though, and about all Sarah & John can do each week is run.
It didn’t bother me at all when mom, son & new girlfriend appeared naked on the freeway. I’d have been pissed if they hadn’t. You know what bugged me? When John was in bed and put his arm up behind his head and I could see his pit hair. For some reason, that seemed unnecessary.
I don’t like how the bad Terminator jerks his head slightly to show us he’s artificial. Too cliche.
Anyway, I liked it enough I know I’ll keep watching.
This was my main problem with the episode. In T2, John Connor cried a lot, but he was only a 12 or 13 year old kid going through an amazingly trying ordeal. He was still quite a badass in his own way. In the show, I assume he’s supposed to be around 17 (I assume), and he’s crying on his mom’s shoulder? “Please mom, you have to stop it”? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
That was quite possibly the shortest, funniest, and most direct fighting of ignorance that I’ve seen on this board.
We liked it enough to watch again tonight. I did like how they explained the bullet-proof chair. John and Sarah definitely had a code word or phrase. John knew something was up.
Actually, it sort of restores the timeline from the first film (John presumably was born in 1985 so he would be about 15 in 1999). T2 took place in the early '90s with a way-too-old John, as iamthewalrus mentioned. (I don’t know if they ever specify the year, but Judgment day in 1997 is still a ways off.)
I think they mentioned in Chronicles that it had been two years since the Cyberdyne incident. If they are retconning the events of T2 to have taken place in 1997, that makes John’s age in the second movie make more sense. But it also means that couldn’t have stopped Judgment Day in 1997, because it would already have happened.
You can’t think too hard about Terminator continuity; the series has never been especially tight about its timeline.
cochrane: I think Sarah Connor was supposed to be in her early twenties in the first movie-- say 21 or 22. So by 1999 she should be 36 or 37. 33 is a bit of a fudge but still not as bad as T2 portraying John as a 13 year old in 1991.
I did get through 45 minutes of it, but I didn’t enjoy it. I might tune in again to see if they’re going anywhere with it, but if it’s just going to be an endless stream of terminators shrugging off gunfire, and people hiding behind objects that get ripped apart by bullets (doors, desks, cars, chairs), count me out.
[spoiler] Well, the tech went back to 1963 in order to work on the bank vault as it was being constructed and secure the boxes. He may not have actually built and installed the time machine until much later. I mean, he had several decades until it was needed anyway.
You’d think he’d toss some 1982 Microsoft stock in a box for them, so as to have to have some easily transported cash available.
[/spoiler]
One article I read is that it’s definitely not going to be “Terminator of the Week” syndrome. They should be facing threats from all over, stemming from the fact that they are naked cashless ID-less fugitives from the past. They’ve got more problems than just killer robots.
Well, you can blame it on Hero Factor, or you can blame it on the fact that John Connor is invulnerable because he’s one of those focal points of history.
That’s maybe one of the few things that’s realistic about the Terminator movies. There’s no reason to think a robot would be better at everything than a human. The whole “identifying and tracking moving objects” is very difficult from an artificial intelligence point of view. The human brain has had millions of years of evolution to get it sort of right. The Terminators might very well be comparatively clunky, slow, and even stupid. The Terminator advantage is that they’re pretty much indestructible and incredibly strong, but they don’t seem particularly fast or coordinated. And we know from the first film that they’re probably programmed in Basic. (At this point someone will point out a scene where Arnie shot a mosquito out of the air at a range of a 100 yards in the first or second film. Don’t care.)
My SO and I thought the “I call shotgun/I call 9mm” line from the preview was lame, but we gave the show a 10-minute chance anyway, since we were fans of the movies.
Then we got to the part where Sarah dives for cover from gunshots behind an upholstered chair. We laughed our asses off and changed the channel.
Heh. Then you missed the explanation. Later, when the FBI guy and the local police were checking out the house, someone says “…and did you notice? a kevlar vest stuffed in the chair back.”
I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember the exact words, but that was the gist of it. Just part of Sarah’s SOP I guess, like hiding weapons behind the drywall.
I liked it. But then again I have a knack for liking SciFi shows that get canceled - Jake 2.0, The Lone Gunmen, Enterprise, that one on Fox that was sorta Matrix-like, with a real and virtual reality world with some bad guys in it…actually, most shows I watch get canceled (i.e. Arrested Development) so I’m probably a horrible indicator of what shows will make it.
Of course, I don’t expect tons from TV these days, but a show with futuristic robots is enjoyable to me. Sure the plot was predictable but to be fair we do know the outcome of all of this (Judgement Day, evil robots killing all mankind etc) so there’s not exactly a lot they can do.
I’ll be curious to see if they end up essentially ignoring T3 (which I liked as well) or still plan on somehow leading into it when all is said and done.
