TV Review: Terminator: SCC – Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep

Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on February 28, 2009

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

Episode: “Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep” (Season Two, Episode 16)

Synopsis: Sarah is having trouble sleeping after killing the man at the warehouse. She checks into a sleep clinic to help her cope, but soon she fears that she is the center of an experiment by Skynet to map her brain.

Review: There are two things that occur often in movies that I find indicative of poor writing: unnecessary narration and dream sequences. Over the past few years, narration has been a huge crutch for television, propelled by the success of shows like Scrubs, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve come to accept the crutch of narration in some shows, but it’s generally a bad sign when a show starts to utilize narration when it hasn’t always done so in the past.

The use of pretentious narration in this week’s episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles was the first indication that this episode was going to suck. The next indicator was the fact that not only did it use dream sequences, which are often used when lazy writers want to do something surreal and cool but don’t know how to do it in the story itself, but this show made the dream sequences a focus of the episode.

There’s a twist, but I saw it coming before the first commercial. Even then, the rules of writing were violated throughout the show, cobbling together an episode that cheats the viewer just to do something that might end up cool… but wasn’t.

We are left with an episode that centers on Sarah Connor not being able to cope with her life, which makes her one of the worst heroes I’ve seen in a long time. Sarah Connor in the films was such a strong, powerful character. She faced terrible things and overcame them. In the television reality, Sarah Connor spends more time going nuts or whining about her situation. What a loss of a great characters. This show would be more appropriately called The Sarah Connor Mopings. Pull it together, lady!

Once again, we’re left with a long-winded, completely irrelevant episode that furthers nothing. This show is really starting to annoy me.

But at least we got to see Cameron in her bra. That was a plus.

Up Next: Riley returns to get with John, but both Sarah and Cameron are suspicious of her knowledge of an apocalyptic future.

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

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