Having a blast with Sarah Connor

While Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles left off with a cliffhanger in the spring, I didn’t expect the resolution to be very interesting. After all, you blow up a Terminator, and they just keep going. Fortunately, Sarah Connor found an interesting way to do just that.

Turns out that the explosion shook up Cameron’s programming, so she just kept going with her earlier mission–to kill John Connor. That led to a big action opener like last year’s premiere, but a little better since it wasn’t certain whether Sarah and John were dealing with a comrade or a killer–and, as John mentions, she knows them and they know her. It made for a good sense of underlying paranoia, especially as John is forced to make a decision about whether to destroy the android.

What else happened? Agent Ellison took a stand, and a new Terminator turned up.

This time around, it looks like there’s more going on than a nice adrenaline rush, but Sarah Connor still feels like one long chase scene. The show’s producers ought to remember that feeling of paranoia and stress it a little bit more, especially since creating moods is a lot cheaper than creating explosions.

How did I remember all the plot twists over the summer? Well, I didn’t, except for that explosion at the end. It wasn’t hard to catch up, though.