Spoilers for last night's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up just as soon as I make a Duran Duran/Styx/Pink Floyd playlist...I think I may need to write a macro for these reviews, because of late my thoughts are the same week after week: I don't really understand half the plot, am not sure how comfortable I am with the sheer number of time-travelers showing up in present-day LA, but the emotional side of the impending apocalypse is being handled so well that I've stopped worrying about plot logic. (Compare this, for the umpteenth time, to "Heroes," which makes even less sense and also has paper-thin characters I don't give a toss about.)
So while I'm somewhat puzzled about the revelation that Riley is a time traveler working with Jesse for some shady purpose, I thought the scene of Riley having to cope with the down-to-earth problems (or lack thereof) of her foster family was very nicely-done. If I understand the timeline correctly, she's too young to even remember the world before the machines rose, and I can imagine how much it would wear on her to be around relatively normal people. A lot of this stuff really reminds me of "12 Monkeys" and all the talk in that movie about how time travel does tremendous harm to your psyche, because people aren't meant to live in more than one era.
Similarly, I'm not sure what Shirley Manson's endgame is -- her desire to teach "John Henry" the computer about morality suggests that she might not be the bad guy here -- but scenes like Ellison interrogating the computer or Ellison discovering that Shirley has turned Cromartie's corpse into John Henry's voice were as creepy as intended. (And way to go on the Garret Dillahunt fakeout, people; I somehow remained unspoiled that he was still on the show.)
But really, the heart of "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point" was in Sarah slowly cracking up over her obsession with the three dots -- and in how well Lena Headey played this side of the character, so memorable from the second movie and so noticeably absent on the show. So it's not that Headey can't play a crazy Sarah, but that the writers for whatever reason (my money remains on a network note asking that Sarah be more "relateable") haven't given her the opportunity to play it. Good as The Notorious BAG has been at playing Derek's nuttier side, I think I'd like to have a stretch here where Sarah's the crazy one and Derek has to rein her in, instead of vice versa.
What did everybody else think?
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