Come With Me If You Want To Live
Despite their strong female characters, I’ve never been enamored of the Terminator movies. They were too comfortable with their violence, too pleased with Arnold’s sarcasm. To my mind they were complicit in the brainwashing that Rambo, the later Rocky movies, and other action franchises of the 1980s-90s worked on the American psyche. I think you can argue that certain casually bellicose foreign policies seemed a lot more reasonable because we needed to look no further than living room entertainment centers for compelling examples of our invincible bad-ass-ery.
So I was surprised to find myself relishing—despite its gargle-worthy title—the late Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Not just because of the hotness of Summer Glau and (so, shoot me) Brian Austin Green or the acting of Richard T. Jones and Garret Dillahunt (not to diminish Glau or Green’s acting. It’s just, you know: hotness). There was how respectfully the series handled its violence, and there were its just-right flashes of humor:
Cameron: You’ve been distracted.
Sarah: I was kidnapped.
Cameron: Which is distracting.
With a few cringe-inducing exceptions, the writing was simply really, really good—a primer on dialogue good. (Interestingly, the writers eschewed the movies’ “I’ll/she’ll be back” but picked up “Come with me if you want to live.”) The series is short enough, 31 episodes, that it’s worth nabbing from iTunes, and it’s substantially arc-based, so it benefits from commercial-free marathon watching… not that I would know first-hand.
Yesterday io9 ran a post by T:SCC showrunner (and io9 guest-blogger) Josh Friedman. It’s a great post, replete with insider-y nuggets and close readings of T:SCC scenes.
And he confirms what I always felt was the show’s creative strength, and what may have been its downfall. It always held back. It trafficked in ambiguous dialogue, multiple motivations left unresolved, and lines from unexpected speakers left unexplained. It resisted big, blow-up-the Death Star endings (which then leave you with no choice but to create another Death Star to blow up); its writers seemed to understand that the most resonant parts of whip-smart action movies, whether we’re rooting for James Bond or Indiana Jones, are the enigmatic scenes where anything might come of what’s going down around the poker table or in the sinister underground club, the scenes when we don’t know whether Bourne is going to snap into violence, the resolutions that beget new mysteries. As Trinity tells Neo, “It’s the question that drives us.”
Always withholding. You could say, if you lacked the taste and restraint of sarahwrotethat.com, that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a c**k tease.
If this, more than Fox tinkering with its schedule, was what brought the series low ratings and eventually its demise, that says something sad about the contemporary ability to recognize and respond to good storytelling. But few series sustain a high level of writing over a long run. At least Fox saw T:SCC through to its second season finale, and the writers saw the end looming and wrote for it beautifully. Buy the full run of the series on iTunes, bear with episodes 15 and 16 of the second season, and relish one of the subtlest, most moving finales in American television.
