Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Season 1 (2008)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2008
	Creator: Josh Friedman
	Actors: Lena Headey (300, Dredd), Thomas Dekker, Summer Glau (Firefly TV-series, Serenity), Brian Austin Green (Beverly Hills, 90210 TV-series)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, SF
	Conditions of visioning: August 2015, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: After having apparently stopped the Skynet Artificial Intelligence from ever being created, Sarah Connor (Headley) and her son John (Dekker) face a new Terminator sent to eliminate them. Hopefully they are helped by another Cyborg named Cameron (Glau).
Review: This TV-series takes place shortly after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Only two seasons were made, the second much longer than the first, I bought them in Blu-ray some years ago but stopped watching early in the second season. I am now more motivated to dive back into that universe, especially after reading the excellent novel T2: Infiltrator (2001) by S.M. Stirling. I found it nice to meet again this universe created by James Cameron with The Terminator in 1984, but immediately noticed the cheapness of the TV-series, far from the standards the audience expects nowadays after getting used to the shows produced by HBO (Game of Thrones) or Netflix (Daredevil). The suspense is not really tense, the bad guys (Cromartie for example) not charismatic enough, the action soft, the pace too slow and the special effects disappointing. Even the Blu-ray image quality make it look like a DVD. A few good elements are the nice idea of time travel in the Pilot, the character of Cameron and Lena Headey playing a convincing Sarah Connor, although I don't like how her voice introduces and concludes the episodes with some philosophical remarks. A word about the episodes: The Turk and Queen's Gambit introduce the possible birth of Skynet, while Dungeons & Dragons shows flashbacks (flash-forwards?) of the life of a Resistance fighter. Heavy Metal tells us a bit more about Skynet's endgame, and The Hand of the Demon focuses on the character of the FBI agent Ellisson and sees the return of the T2 character Dr. Silberman. Finally the season Finale What He Beheld is very weak and ends with a poor cliffhanger, in spite of a nice scene played in slow motion on the soundtrack of Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around, reminding of how it is often done in Sons of Anarchy, which started the same year by the way. Some ideas seem to have been remotely inspired by the novel T2: Infiltrator that I already mentioned and have just finished reading. But in fact and in spite of the absence of images, the novel is much more powerful and I found that it immersed me back into the Terminator universe better than the series did. I hope for some improvements in the second season but as it was not extended into a third, I fear that I will be disappointed.
Rating: 3 /10