Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
My substitute teacher is a freakin’ terminator! Of course, we didn’t know that. Not right away. He could’ve fooled anybody. Yet we did sense a definite wrongness about him. He was a big guy, his suit and tie a little too small for him . . . almost like a suit our regular teacher used to wear. We tried joking about it, but got no reaction.
So without a shred of emotion, he sat, mechanically, and began roll call. I saw him grab a letter opener—the kind that looks more like a thin dagger—and he brought it beneath the teacher’s desk. He sounded like he was scraping something. Chewing gum, I thought, imagining little black spots of gum stuck to the teacher’s chair. And he’s scraping them like mad.
The names droned on. Finally he got to the new kid in class. John Connor, I think. Scruffy kid, kept his head down the whole time.
“John Connor,” said our sub, literally scanning the room. He saw John’s hand go up.
Two things happened simultaneously. The classroom list of our names fell away. And then our sub—the terminator—rose to his full stature. In the same fluid motion—as if he had done it a thousand times before—he drew a weapon unlike any I had ever seen. A laser gun, perhaps, streaked in blood.
Only too late did I realize where the gun came from, where he’d been hiding it. Our sick n’ twisted sub had scraped through his own leg—jagged flesh gaping—revealing the gun strapped against a shaft of artificial bone. Metal hydraulics hissed as if maintaining balance.
No way, I thought. Not in any sense of the word was this guy human.
Shots fired. John Connor threw himself to the ground. More shots ripped through walls, shattering windows.
The terminator charged in deadly pursuit.
This has been a dramatic reenactment of a scene from the TV show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I expected very little from it, having felt disappointed from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. There wasn’t much story left to tell, I thought. It’s going to be another lackluster rehash of the first two movies.
Not so! Although I’ve only seen two episodes, by far the TV show is way better than anything in Terminator 3. Here’s what we get:
- Sarah Conner’s gloomy yet prophetically hopeful narration.
- Resistance fighters and scientists who have traveled back in time to help the Connors.
- Lots of terminators ambushing our heroes in different and exciting ways.
- A good terminator that’s of a strange new make and model that none of the other terminators can identify.
- Great mystery surrounding the origins of Skynet, the network of evil robotics.
- And, most importantly, every character looks authentically cool and not the least bit annoying . . . so far.
