It looks like she changed her nose 
.
Really liked the show - definitely a cut above.
I think it’s been too long since I’ve seen the movies, though. I had this sense of continual confusion, but then I just decided to stop trying to figure out the logic and timelines and just watched all the awesome ass kicking.
Bah, I’ll take The Boss.
I read in another thread that the movie sucked, and I’m not surprised at all.
No, I think that’s just the glamour lighting (and possibly digital retouching). Her nose appears to be unchanged.
Unspoilering since the episode has aired. I’ve built robots and they invariably make sounds when they move. Gears and servos and pistons will make distinct sounds and their weight will cause heavy thudding footsteps. It’s the stereotypical *biological *action movie bad guys that don’t make robot sounds when moving.
By the way, loved the pilot and am looking forward to Monday’s episode.
They’re cyborgs because it’s suppose to make it easier to infiltrate human societies. That’s tough to do when you’re walking around and sounding like a robot.
Marc
I was iffy on it.
Good points: Summer Glau, the effects and production values, the premise, and the overall plot
Weak points: The dialog, some of the acting, the wisecracking terminator (as mentioned by SenorBeef)
I think there’s a lot of potential in a plot where she is being chased by:
-evil terminators from the future
-cops from the present who don’t believe her
-cops from the present who DO believe her, maybe, or are at least curious
and
-her former fiance
Meanwhile, there’s a minor vein of 1999-to-2007 time travel fish out of water humor that could be exploited, and, as mentioned above, Summer Glau. Who is really getting typecast as not-quite-all-there martial-arts superhuman who sometimes materialize naked.
As for how people tracked them down, I don’t think it’s necessary that every last bit of police work be shown. Maybe someone went around asking people at the bus station, or their car was photographed by a traffic camera, or something. And the evil terminator presumably scans and hacks police bands. And the easiest explanation for how the fembot found them is that in the future, John said “go to this city at this time, wait for a guy with this alias”. Although note that she was cagey about revealing her model number, I wonder if there’s going to end up being some mystery about who sent her… some as-yet unknown future third party?
My favorite moment: Sarah is hiding behind the chair, the Terminator unloads into it, she’s unhurt. I’m like “yeah, good thing the chair is bulletproof (rolleyes)”. Then later they mention that it was full of Kevlar. I guess if you are paranoid, a kevlar-filled chair is a good thing to have.
I think the conceit is that when they are full functioning and undamaged, they make no identifying sounds, or the ones that they do make are muted by all the flesh. Once they take a shotgun blast to the leg (or whatever), then the mechanism is (a) exposed and (b) potentially somewhat bent or warped. Presto, robot noises.
I always though the original Terminator could just as plausibly have been called the Sperminator. Now that there’s a hot terminator (who we learn is “different” (?) from other cyborgs we just might have to come to grips with human/machine “relations”.
I liked it, and I normally don’t watch tv sci-fi.
I thought that they were covered in flesh because only living tissue could time travel.
Which, of course, lead me to the question of why they don’t build a fat looking terminator with a ‘trunk’ for weapons storage in its gut.
They were initially designed for infiltration but the first models had rubber skin and were easy to spot. Which is why Skynet developed the fleshapoids. The ability of the meatsacks to time-travel is secondary.
Ah, thanks Otto. It has been awhile since I’ve seen the first Terminator - but IIRC, that line is quoted pretty much word for word.
I like this explanation. It would also explain why dogs pick up on the terminators. Perhaps dogs hear something, since the movies revealed the terminators sweat and have body odor.
Oh, and does anyone else think the male terminator looks like Jay Mohr?
I liked it and will definitely check out tonight’s episode. I think it fits well into the existing franchise (though as one of its apparently few big fans, I’m kind of bummed that they retconned T3 out of existence), and I’m intrigued to see where they’re going with some of the new elements.
Anyone know the name of the actor who played Sarah’s fiance? I recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t find his credit on IMDB or Wikipedia.
That wasn’t half bad. I liked all the actors and the show surprised me in a couple of spots - the Kevlar in the chair, and the fact that the fiancee survived. After the early bedroom scene I had assumed he wasn’t long for the world.
Looking forward to tonight’s episode.
so, they ‘killed’ a terminator in 1999 - and left the body behind - isnt that exactly how they got started in the second movie - they found the hand of the original one (that was sent back) and started reverse engineering it?
This looks like it could be good - I ‘like’ that they sent back someone to an earlier timeperiod to leave behind what they would need to escape - I hope they don’t use that too much.
(should this stuff be spoilered? it has aired…)
I liked the look of the tech. Time machines built out of what looked like key punch machines.
Of course the idea that one or more Terminators has been around since 1963 or earlier rather blows the entire conceit of the film. Future-JC knows when and where he was attacked as a teenager. So why not have the Terminator with the big-ass blow up gun standing at the site where the Robert Patrick Terminator appears and take him out with it?
It’s Dean Winters, evidently best known for working on Oz, but I remember him as Carrie’s fuck buddy on Sex & the City.
I’m glad to see the chair had Kevlar - I missed that while watching and it was the biggest :rolleyes: moment. The other thing that bugged me is how stupid Sarah was in leaving her fiance - just disappearing instead of telling him she fell in love with someone else or something, practically guaranteeing he’d go to the police. And then using the same alias in the new town - that was the dumbest thing in the show, other than “Class dismissed.”
However, I can forgive that, because generally it was much better than I’d dared hope. I also loved this line, “You have 30 minutes: bring one bag, and the guns. I’ll make pancakes.”
I have no problem with Summer being all willowy and kicking ass, but I am a little disappointed that Sarah looks like a bag of toothpicks compared to Linda Hamilton’s utter bad-assery in T2. However, the actress is good and I can overlook it. Plus, all the cool stuff the others mentioned - decent writing and acting overall, a cop who’s not dumb, the fiance remaining a player, and so on.
Short answer, there’d be no show. Longer answers, there’s the law of “viewer time” which remains inviolate so long as the previous canon “doesn’t suck”. Hence, events in T2 are largely preserved, but T3 can safely be ignored. Fanwank answer: They can’t “risk” changing too much of the timeline, therefore they can only make selective time jumps. Or maybe you can’t pick and choose any time and location, maybe only jumps that line up spatially, taking into account planetary and cosmic shift. Note that they left on 9/10/1999, 9AMish and arrived sometime at night in Sept 2007) Lawless answer: A wizard did it. Take your pick.
As for the 1963 jump, they didn’t send a Terminator, they sent a human resistance member who scrounged the parts. Again, limited jump windows could explain why they don’t send the parts embedded in multiple terminators and why time travel doesn’t break the plot all the time.
I like the idea of sending an overweight Terminator. The jump bubble certainly has enough room for that, and beaming 3 people suggests there’s no mass restriction. But then they could shove a Phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range up the ass end of a cow and beam it, but I suspect a new fanwank explanation is that there’s no cows or morbidly obese people in the future thanks to Skynet. And making an obese Terminator doesn’t fit with the whole infiltration purpose.
Eh, not a horrible storyline, but except for Ms. Glau, the actors so far are just awful. The woman playing Sarah, the kid playing John, and the FBI agent are sooo TV…some sort of generic CSI/24/Law & Order hybrids. They’re almost more mechanized than the robots.
I did like some of the more subtle references to the original series. That weapon Sarah used in the bank vault, that was a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range, wasn’t it?
I’ll watch the follow-up ep tonight, but if the main characters don’t come off a bit more interesting, I don’t think I’m gonna stick with it.
I forgive the actors being a bit wooden in the pilots. It happens in nearly every TV pilot - the actors, directors, writers, and producers are still searching for the ‘voice’ of each of the characters. It generally takes 1/3rd to 1/2 a season for the actors to start getting comfortable in their roles.
That said, Summer Glau does nothing for me. Yet another “someone give that girl a sammich” TV girl. Yawn.
