dj_ivocha on 17/6/2008 at 23:44

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When I first heard about the series, I thought it'd suck pretty badly. It turned out to be rather good, with decent amount of action and the beginnings of a nice fleshing out of the terminator universe. Plus it has Summer Glau and she was even all but naked a couple of times and uh, what was I talking about again? ;)


As for the rest - Painkiller Jane sucked so bad I couldn't even bring myself to watch it till the end and deleted the last couple of episodes. And considering my level of tolerance for bad TV/movies (I liked AvP for example), it should say quite a lot that I couldn't even finish watching PJ. The TV movie was fairly promising, too bad they decided to ignore it entirely...

Jericho is great but it got canceled again, this time for real apparently. So was the 4400. Other potentially good series from the 2000s - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_2.0) Jake 2.0 was promising, at least that's how I remember it from 5 years ago. Same with (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_%28TV_series%29) Threshold. At least (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_%28TV_series%29) Eureka is not canceled yet and with BSG about to end it looks like the SciFi channel might keep it for a while as one of their prime series. Also fairly decent (and canceled) are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_%28TV_series%29) Journeyman, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam_%28TV_series%29) New Amsterdam, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Break) Day Break, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_%28TV_series%29) Moonlight.


And yes, I watch a lot of TV series and the above were only the Sci-Fi ones. :(

The_Raven on 18/6/2008 at 03:22

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I shoehorned a post about the Sarah Connor Chronicles into the sex with robots thread awhile back, so I'll just repost it here.



Basically, I kept on watching the show hoping that it would get out of its growing pains and actually get better...it never happened. As has been previously mentioned, the timeline has been shot to shit, and the show has this really bipolar attitude when it comes to remaining faithful to the previously established canon from the first two movies. To be fair, though, there's even some very minor stuff in Terminator 2 that bothers me in terms of timeline and comments made in the first movie. Add in some really terrible special effects, and illogical shit that seems to happen for the sole reason of looking "cool," and you've pretty much have got my view on the series.

Here's my list of WTF moments from the series in no particular order:

-Time Travel seems to cure cancer now.
-Humans building time machines -Skynet built the one in the future, and I doubt the survivors from the death camps would be able to figure the whole thing out and built one themselves.
-Humans building time machines and plasma weapons from common materials in the 1960s.
-A metal head travels through the time portal with no organic covering seconds after they revisit the fact that only living tissue can go through.
-Kyle Reese being a kid before the war (Kyle states in the first movie that he was born after the nuclear war).
-Kyle's previously nonexistent brother. :rolleyes:
-The inconsistent use of laser/plasma weapons and contemporary, projectile pistols and grenade launchers in the future.
-The opening narration when they state that Skynet sent a protector from the future. :eww:
-Teenager decoding visual information off a microprocessor built some 30 years in the future on a common PC.
-Laser etched bar codes are the wrong color.
-Terminator vision doesn't have scrolling assembly code (I can't remember if Terminator 2 had this or not).
-Cromartie hiding a pistol in his leg for no reason, it would show up on metal detectors anyway. Not to mention that he cut himself up in order to get it out, compromising his cover. So much for an infiltration unit, huh?


The really sad thing is that this is just the stuff that I can remember months later off the top of my head. Some of them do probably have alternate timeline explanations, while others are just petty.

Angel Dust on 18/6/2008 at 04:45

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Was it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_5) this?

redrain85 on 19/6/2008 at 00:50

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While Sarah Connor Chronicles isn't perfect, it's better than T3 ever was. It gets more details right and is more respectful of the first two films, for the most part. If you resign yourself to the fact that T3 totally fucked up the timeline and the damage has already been done, then Chronicles shouldn't annoy you as much.

And can anyone honestly say that the future war episode was really bad? I thought it was all kinds of awesome. If you want another example of where the series gets something right, but the upcoming T4 film will further screw things up, look no further than this episode.

This ep introduces us to the T-600 for the first time. In fact: they trust the audience to know what it is, by not even explaining that fact at any time in the episode. It's just a given. The rubber/plastic skin is the giveaway.

The T-600 has a small build and is unassuming. At a distance, you could mistake it for an average human. It's only when you look more closely that you realize something is wrong.

Now (http://rss.warnerbros.com/terminatorsalvation/2008/06/one_possible_future.html) read what McG has to say about the T-600 appearing in T4.


What . . . the . . . fuck?

What's the point of even trying to conceal the T-600s' identity with rubber skin, if it's eight feet tall and carries a mini-gun? As if anyone could be fooled into thinking that was human. :rolleyes:


Regarding The_Raven's WTF moments, a number of them have explanations within the episodes themselves if you pay attention. So they really shouldn't make you go WTF at all.

-Time Travel seems to cure cancer now.
Did it? Sarah still went to see the doctor, and is doing everything possible to try and avert it. She doesn't believe she's off the hook yet. Just because she doesn't have it now, doesn't mean it still can't appear later.

-Humans building time machines
-Skynet built the one in the future, and I doubt the survivors from the death camps would be able to figure the whole thing out and built one themselves.
They didn't. They used reprogrammed Terminators to help capture a time machine. That episode implied that the one they captured was newly constructed by Skynet and hadn't been used yet, and that there was one more located directly within Skynet itself. I agree that this still doesn't quite fit with the first two films, but they did not build the time machine.

-Humans building time machines and plasma weapons from common materials in the 1960s.
I agree that this was stupid. This does indicate that humans learned how to make time machines, later on.

-A metal head travels through the time portal with no organic covering seconds after they revisit the fact that only living tissue can go through.
The producer of the show explained that the flesh burned away, as it passed through. And the reason that they did that, is because otherwise the censors would have cut the scene for being too horrific if we saw the flesh. Yeah, I don't buy it either.

-Kyle Reese being a kid before the war (Kyle states in the first movie that he was born after the nuclear war).
Yes, the timeline is screwed up now. We'll have to live with it, in order to try and enjoy any more of the Terminator "franchise".

-Kyle's previously nonexistent brother. :rolleyes:
Well, he never said he didn't have a brother. But naturally, it is rather convenient for this guy to appear out of the blue and be Kyle's brother.

-The inconsistent use of laser/plasma weapons and contemporary, projectile pistols and grenade launchers in the future.
I agree that this is also a bit of a problem.

-The opening narration when they state that Skynet sent a protector from the future. :eww:
Dumb, yes.

-Teenager decoding visual information off a microprocessor built some 30 years in the future on a common PC.
This really did bother me, as well.

-Laser etched bar codes are the wrong color.
That seems a bit nitpicky.

-Terminator vision doesn't have scrolling assembly code (I can't remember if Terminator 2 had this or not).
That's supposed to be because Cameron and the others are upgraded models. They're T-888s, not T-800s or T-850s. But I figure it was just because the people making the show wanted to be "different".

-Cromartie hiding a pistol in his leg for no reason, it would show up on metal detectors anyway. Not to mention that he cut himself up in order to get it out, compromising his cover. So much for an infiltration unit, huh?
That was also rather stupid. But if you switch off your brain during that scene, you might be able to overlook it and just enjoy.

Muzman on 19/6/2008 at 02:18

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One of the fundamental problems I have with the whole terminator franchise is that its always been enamoured with those glimpses of the war torn future where humans are guerilla fighters doing it for themselves and its all grim and desperate etc.
The only reason for the mighty skynet and its army to build such elaborate infiltration units is if the humans are actually doing rather well and bombing (dirty and otherwise), gassing, proper nuking, neutron bombing, electrofying and bioagents of the sort imaginable by super intelligent, non organic life out to exterminate a certain species of organic life... for some reason aren't working out. (Yes maybe they could say they made the infiltrators for time travel, but they didn't now did they). There's a lot of fleshing out they could do about that and I bet The Matrix series beat them to all the ideas that spring immediately to mind.
The books always assumed that if shit's going back in time, we've basically won and this is skynet's desperate last play. The series seems to be going a bit of a different route, one which it probably wouldn't have been able to do justice on its budget. The movie going there will kill the thing for sure. The future must be kept as a vague menace, no matter how cool every fanboy thinks it would be. Detail there will probably ensure the thing no longer makes any sense, I suspect.


'cause I just watched it, so nyahh. Where's you're more timely second rate sci-fi thread?
(I'm surprised there's another series. 9 eps of expensive stuff dumped in January, loose story threads dangling all over the place. It must have just scraped by)


They have skipped over the events of T3, but left a few bits that it introduced. So it's not quite like Highlander 2, for instance. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they considered having them shift back at the end of its run just to tie it all up. Although if they're scoping the net to see if they should bother they'll probably find people are happy for them to skip it, saving them one ungainly plot manouvre at least.


I only saw the pilot of PkJ (and if anyone wants another exemplar of the kind of cheesy female character I'm talking about up top, look no further. I think the show actually has several). It's actually pretty funny if you take it as totally cheesy nonsense. Tough talking DEA agent Jane wanders in to conspicuous secret government organisation hunting mutants who control people's minds, oh and it turns out she's also Wolverine. W. T. F. !.
The dialogue was hilarious, the delivery even more so. If it stuck to those comic book exploitation vibes it'd be potentially fun and like Utraviolet should have been.

The other thing is, those shows. I know it's not all of them but the preponderance of aliens and time travel themes (super powers seems third place by a bit of a distance). Geez people. I guess it means you don't need elaborate sets and so forth but, as they say, damn. Terminator I can live with, it's terminator after all, but I think things like Lost hit it big partly because it was it was quite different.