TV Review: Terminator: SCC – Ourselves Alone

Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 7, 2009

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, FOX, Airs Friday 8/7c

Episode: “Ourselves Alone” (Season Two, Episode 17)

Synopsis: Riley comes back to seek help from John and his family, but she finds that Cameron is increasingly suspicious of her motives. And that suspicion is well founded, considering that the BSG Sexpot is manipulating things behind the scenes, calling social services on the Connors and impersonating the school guidance counselor. John tries to smooth things over with Cameron and Riley whilst keeping his mother at bay, but things don’t go very smoothly at all.

Review: For the die-hard fans of this show, you can breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not going to send you into a furor like I did last week with my lengthy diatribe about this series. That doesn’t mean I loved this episode, but it is a marked improvement over last week. Although I though Riley was out of the picture several episodes ago, she comes back into focus, showing off her ever-increasing unbalanced nature.

It’s sad to say that what makes this episode better is that the focus is pulled from the title character of Sarah, and to a lesser degree John. Instead, we are given a glimpse at the BSG Sexpot’s end game (which really isn’t fully clear until you watch the preview for next week), and finally Cameron is back in the spotlight. She hasn’t fully recovered from the explosion at the beginning of the season that caused her programming to reinitiate, so we now know there’s a ticking time bomb with her character. That tension at least makes up for the lack of decent action in the series, and the final decision from Cameron is pretty interesting as well.

Still, I have a sinking feeling that this storyline is extraneous to the overall plot of the series, which is for the Connors to take down SkyNet. They do seem to be lollygaging along with that order.

And, there were other parts of the episode that were silly, including Derek’s rogue mission to track down the lawyer for SkyNet (which resulted in nothing more than him thwarting the advances of a barfly and crouching in the bushes all night). Hopefully the BSG Sexpot kills him soon. I’m getting tired of Derek.

Finally, the show stumbled into its own bad writing again with the “Today is the day you tell me whatever it is you might want to tell me… today” scene, which was hilariously bad and sounded like a wordy SNL sketch.

Still, like I said before, at least we’ve taken a step up from previous episodes.

Up Next: The BSG Sexpot’s endgame is partially revealed as the fate of Riley comes back to haunt the Connors.

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Did you watch The Sarah Connor Chroniclesthis week? If so, feel free to discuss below.

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