Kyle Reese: The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human… sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero on him.
Sarah Connor: Look… I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet.
Kyle Reese:Not yet. Not for about 40 years.
-The Ternimator
That was 1984 and while technology has made a few impressive strides, we don’t seem to be in the realm of humanoid robots or phased-plasma rifles just yet. Sci Fi seldom gets future events right.
It’s the logic of The Terminator that I always liked. The first Terminator movie was a closed system. Kyle Reese and The Terminator went through the time machine-a machine that could only send back living tissue. Kyle says that the machine was set to be destroyed as he made the jump. One of them, one of us. The future is made, Kyle is the John’s father and Sarah will teach John how to rule the world.
In T2 we discover that the parts left over from the crushed Terminator will be the basis of Skynet and that the Time Machine either wasn’t destroyed or Skynet had another one laying around. I always thought that if Skynet had a time machine he would just put it at the end of the Terminator assembly line and send an endless army of Terminator back in time to kill John, or just kill everyone.
Which seems to be what is going on in Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There are Terminators at every turn, most of which show up and are killed pretty much instantly. This reminds me of the way The Borg were treated in Star Trek Voyager. The Borg were The Bad Guys in Star Trek The Next Generation. One Borg ship destroyed all of Star Fleet. Yet Voyager was able to whip out an enter sector of space filled with Borg, thus turning one of the great villains into nothing to worry about. They have pretty much done the same thing with The Sarah Connor Chronciles.
I like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I am not all that happy about this nasty habit of everyone and their dog being time travels from the post Judgment Day world. Self Made Man was an interesting story and a baffling one. First off, we have our good Terminator visit a library where she apparently hangs out all night instead of protecting John. She goes in and asks about an antique firearm used in the Modoc Indian War-is she planning on a trip to the 1870s? After all, when we first met her she had both a Time Machine and a Phased-Plasma Rifle.
She is then distracted when she sees a face in an old photo she recognizes. It’s one of her old Terminator buddies, but he has landed in the 1920s. Over the past few episodes we have found Sarah Connor obsessed with three dots-we find out what those three dots are in this episode, but Sarah Connor does not. The Good Terminator leads a private live and goes about the business of fighting other Terminators without bothering to tell the Connors about it.
The Bad Terminator in this story was sent back to kill the Mayor or the Governor in 2010, only he ends up in the 1920s instead. He follows his mission by becoming wealthy and constructing the building where the Mayor will be speaking in 2010. His plan is to just hide and wait for 2010 to roll around. It’s the kind of single minded dedication that you have to love in a Terminator. Except, it doesn’t make any sense. This Terminator knows his target, why not kill the targets parents? Or grand parents? Why not find something better to do with it’s time than hide for ninety years? Why not take a break in 1980s and go see if he can kill Sarah Connor, then return to his hidey hole? Why not use his vast fortune to create a super computer?
Why was The Good Terminator interested in the weapons used during The Modoc Wars? How many bloody Terminators have traveled back into the past? This is why Skynet falls to John Connor, his entire army is hanging out in the past somewhere. But then, most of John Connor’s troops seem to be hanging out here too, so I guess it all evens out.
