Haaaaaaate! Oh my god, how I hated that whole sequence from T2. I totally understand it from a story perspective, to establish T2 as father figure, but the sequence itself is torturously bad and awful.
A lot of time was spent in T2 (especially the special edition, or director’s cut, or whatever the long one is) having John, who had the authority to give the terminator orders, instruct it on how to act more human. Granted, “Hasta la vista” was kind of flashy, but it was logical in its own way.
This terminator should’ve been more like Arnold in T1. Interested in human interaction only as far as it needed to in order to fulfill its mission.
“Class dismissed” was just terrible.
This is true, but it’s still awkwardly imitating humans rather than acting human. Arnold actually pulled off pretty good acting as the terminator in both movies, IMO. He pulled off “trying to imitate human behavior, but still a machine” pretty well. He got a little too touchy feely in T2, but at least that was under orders. The only thing I really liked about T3 is that he got back to acting like a bad ass robot for most of it.
The way they did the scene with her imitating the girl leaning on the car was okay with me - she looked awkward doing it, and it was clear she was attempting to learn how to blend in. If we ever reach a point where she’s basically a human character who happens to have special abilities the series will be pretty much ruined.
Okay, I missed the pilot, but saw last nihgt’s episode. At first I didn’t like Glau, but then there was a tiny little thing: When they went to get their new IDs, one of the nameless background cast members was putting make-up on the Glauinator. The Glauinator’s face was completely dead and unmoving. Like a machine that was turned off, even thought this woman was brushing her face with dust. At that point I was sold on her as a machine and she started to grow on me.
I didn’t like Sara Connor because she was not nearly as gritty enough as Linda Hamilton. She was too soft. She grew on me a little bit, but I currently find her unconvincing. I hope she’ll get better.
Didn’t see much of the terminator that was in the junkyard except, so I don’t know what he was like in the pilot. I found it creepy as hell, that he had jammed some motorcyclists head on his neck stump in order to fit in while he went to retrieve his mechanical head. On the one hand, the whole headless horseman thing was really silly, on the other, the reveal when the guy looked under the motocycle helmet visor was creepy.
Still on the fence. I’ll have to see a few more eposides before I decide whether or not the show’s got real legs.
I know I should ignore stuff like this but it drives me crazy. They arrive in the future with no money, no IDs,* no clothes*. They’re hotwiring cars and jacking bikes to get around. And yet in three days the have managed to get cellphone service? C’mon!
And the kid whining about having to stay in the house? Please, you pussy punk. You’re the savior of humanity. Grow a pair.
When he went outside I turned it off.
OK, unfortunately i missed the premier. is it online somewhere to watch?
There’s nothing all that improbable about their obtaining pre-paid cell service. I had it in 2000 so it’s not like they wouldn’t have heard of such a thing in 1999.
Why would any such thing be needed. The head was only there to fill out the helmet. It wasn’t doing anything other than basically being a head-sized ball of flesh.
I was iffy about ep 1, and thought ep 2 was quite a bit worse. Nothing made any sense.
(1) Some super-cautious fake ID maker who is afraid of going to Gauntanamo isn’t going to assume that a customer, particularly one sent by his uncle, doesn’t speak Spanish
(2) as my roommate pointed out, you have the most important person in the world to protect. You also have an unstoppable killing machine who is on your side. So do you take her along with you to help you buy fake IDs, or do you leave her at home protecting the most important person in the world?
(3) John may be too stir crazy to stay in the house, but since when is he so dumb that he does web searches like that? Even ignoring the demo monitor…
(4) Worst of all, the headless Terminator. I mean, come ON. So, 7 years ago, there’s a mysterious explosion inside a bank vault where two extremely wanted fugitives are holed up. This is going to be investigated by an FBI agent who knows that Sarah has a think about giant robots, and who kinda almost wants to believe her. In the wreckage of the bank vault is found a giant robot skeleton. And… IT GETS THROWN INTO A JUNKYARD AND FORGOTTEN. (Or else they just scoop all the wreckage of a bank vault, including what was in safety deposit boxes, and throw it out without sifting through the rubble, which is even STUPIDer.) Where it sits for 7 years, still powered up, still in perfect working order, and with the wherewithal to intelligently plan a trip back to find its head, even though we know from T2 that the CPU is in the head. Oh. My. God. Why oh why couldn’t the entire evil terminator have made it through the time portal if they wanted it to still be around? Shee-eesh.
Nonetheless, I’ll give it a few more episodes and pray.
I didn’t think about that. I guess I’ll have to think of another reason not to watch. 
Wait, I missed the pilot. How did the terminator’s head end up separated from its body? It didn’t time travel did it? (Wouldn’t it have to be totally covered in living flesh? A neck stump would wreck that. Right?)
Sarah blowed its head clean off with a nuclear Tinker-Toy Death Ray that the cute Terminator built out of materials time-travelers had swiped from Cal Tech and stashed in safe deposit boxes in the vault.
The head then transported with them in the timebubble - leaving the wriggling decapitated body to be buried amongst the debris of the (later demolished) bank… or did the time bubble and tinker-toy death ray destroy the entire bank then? (only leaving the small group of 3 to be listed as dead and not the 20 or so people in the bank at the time?).
I think my biggest WTF moment of this episode was that of the terminators headless body coming out of the rubble - it should have been shown removing itself from a team of nerds attempting to study it.
Yeah, I noticed that. It’s a really quick shot, but it actually looked like Sarah’s gun had burned all of the flesh off the Terminator’s head before it bounced into the time bubble. If the head had still been covered in blood and head bits, maybe you could fanwank that it was enough to allow it to travel, but it looked totally clean when it went in.
Actually, the only thing I really liked about T3 is the way it effectively resolved the paradox created in T2 - Judgement Day is inevetable because otherwise there would be no Skynet, no Terminators, no Kyle Reece going back in time and thus no one to stop Skynet from being built.
Tough call. No one knows John is at that house. Sarah, OTOH, might need some muscle in her forey into the underworld to get fake IDs. If something happens to her, John is basically screwed.
:mad: Well, that sucks. So the Terminoggin made it, but lemme guess, not the Death Ray, right?
Nope, nor their clothes-- so it’s not like they just abandoned the whole only-living-tissue idea altogether.
Then again, that hasn’t been consistent since the liquid metal Terminator came back through a bubble in T2. So who knows.
Better yet, a team of nerds are studying the skeleton. Someone yells, “Hey nerds: Summer Glau is semi-nude!” Skeleton rises and walks out while nerds have backs turned.
Yeah, but he arrived in what looked like living tissue. For the sake of suspending my disbelief, I just assumed that his flesh-and-blood appearance when he arrived was his living tissue wrapper, even if it only lasted until his first liquid transformation. Bottom-line, I’ve always just told myself he had real skin for the time trip.
I’m still puzzling out the scene in the second hour of premiere when Cameron tells Sarah that the reason for the timejump was that John was killed in 2005. Is she lying or is it a plothole? Had he been killed, I don’t imagine anyone in the future would have cared: he’d just be a random kid at that time. No one in the future would know he was “destined” to be the savior of humankind. Once he dies it’s game over: there wouldn’t be any resistance to sent robots back to protect him.
I like the idea that Cameron’s lying: trying to manipulate Sarah for some yet-unseen advantage. But I worry that I’m just fanwanking a plothole away.
She told her that she died in 2005. Not John. I found the lines to be a bit mumbled and unclear the first time I watched it too.
Yes, it was Sarah with the cancer, that’s why she was getting checked out by a doctor later in the episode.