Things heat up very nicely with the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles--which, unfortunately, wound up being the final season of this dynamically dark action series about a band of rebels who’re fighting to prevent a forthcoming apocalypse created by machines. Based on the popular James Cameron-directed Terminator films, the new season begins with a shocking twist when a car bomb explosion damages the chip inside Cameron (Summer Glau), and reverts her back into a lethal terminator who’s out to kill John Connor (Thomas Dekker). Having just barely survived a home invasion by thugs looking for the Turk, a computer that will become the basis for the evil Skynet, John and his mother Sarah (the always great Lena Headly) are now on the run in the streets of LA from their former ally.
But even after this crisis is dealt with, the tension and the drama never let up as John falls for an unconventional girl at school named Riley (Leven Rambin). And Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green) gets a surprise visit from Jesse (Stephanie Jacobsen), his lover and fellow soldier from the human resistance movement in the future. Derek is shocked to discover that Jesse has gone AWOL from her robot-fighting duties by escaping into the past. But the biggest surprise here is Shirley Manson, the singer of the rock group Garbage, who joins the cast as Catherine Weaver, the owner of a large computer research company. It’s quickly revealed that Weaver is also an advanced terminator in the liquid metal design, the same type that Robert Patrick played in Terminator 2.
In additon to being a dangerous new threat, Manson’s character also provides an interesting subplot for James Ellison
(Richard T. Jones), who quits the FBI to go work at her firm. Ellison winds up
helping Weaver with a sophisticated artificial intelligence that’s named John
Henry. Every episode in the second season is a stand out, and--as with the first
season--they all fit together to form a cohesive whole, much like an extended
movie. Self Made Man deals with what Cameron, who doesn’t sleep, does at night,
and it’s a fascinating premise. The Good Wound and Desert Cantos deal with the
fact that the tough as nails Sarah has never actually killed anyone. And Today
Is The Day Parts 1 & 2 wraps up a major storyline with intelligence and poignancy.
The DVD set is highly recommended for not just the great collection of episodes,
but for some pretty decent special features, as well. These include commentaries
from the cast and crew on selected episodes, deleted scenes and "The Continuing
Chronicles: Terminator--8 Part Featurette Gallery," which looks at the making of
the series. But it’s a series whose dark flights of fancy are no longer
continuing, thanks to being cancelled at the end of this season. Perhaps it was
too dark, perhaps it was just too much to handle for some people. But
while we may have been denied further adventures of Sarah and her son John, we
at least have 32 episodes of this magnificently done wild ride that shows a small band
of people who were fighting a desperate battle against the odds while living on
the one thing that always kept them going: hope.
--SF
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