Terminator Rebooted

It was sort of inevitable. "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" was a rebooting of the Terminator franchise actually made sense. A teenaged 'chosen one' fighting bad guys to save the future. Where had I heard this one before? Oh right. That would have been "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Each a sort of adolescence is hell story. In each case, a big bad is out to kill our stand-in hero. After a nine episode "season" (because of the writers' strike), how does it hold up?

Well the ratings fizzled after the pilot. I don't think the audience knew what to make of this post-Sept. 11, 2001, bildungsroman. John Conner (or, rather, the actor playing him) is having a bit of difficulty holding his own against his female leads. On the one hand, yes it's called the Sarah Conner Chronicles. On the other hand, it's also about him coming into his manhood. Summer Glau has a part that may be more physical than the one she had in "Firefly" and she certainly pulls off the amoral robotic part of the terminator Cameron. One wonders if, like Commander Data, she's a fully-functional android. Unlike Data, while she seems rather curious about human nature her robotic curiousity lends itself to a lot of black humor. But Cameron hasn't yet learned that it's not a soul that makes a human but the capacity for compassion. In one scene, she walks right by a pair of gunmen who immediately kill a pair of Russians she's just finished interrogating. When she reports later that the two are dead, she's asked if she killed them, to which she replies "No. It wasn't my mission."

There's no decision yet on whether there'll be a second season. There are three themes dominant in contemporary science fiction: fear of the technology we've created, fear of the future, and a gritty feel that won't wash out. The Terminators really aren't so different from the Cylons in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. The future in Torchwood is "arming the human race against the future." While this story has promise and deserves to be told, the greater themes need to give pause for concern. While the Gernsbackian future has been repudiated, what is needed is what J. Michael Straczynski with Babylon 5 tried to provide: a new vision. Otherwise, ultimately, television science fiction may find itself terminated.