The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Dodgy Ideology Mars Cute Robot Story

The first series of the Sarah Connor Chronicles tells the story of the eponymous heroine (hero-person might be better) and her struggle to protect her son against the depredations of the future, in the shape of the vile terminator robots with superhuman powers most of the time and little in the sense of knowing self-irony. To assist her in this uneven struggle against the odds, a friendly terminator robot returns through time and, conveniently perhaps, this friendly robot comes in the form of a late teenaged girl (played by Summer Glau who looks very fetching most of the time but is, if I had to guess, probably no longer a teenager). So, each episode combines tension, action, chase scenes and the possibility that the young hero (John) might one day get it on with the young lady robot “that”s no lady, that’s my personal terminator bodyguard’).

So what could possibly go wrong with the series when this premise is so promising? The problem is with ideology. Firstly, there is a whole series of issues to do with the length of time between the time at which the action is dated and the time when the robot attack is due to take place – but let us put that aside. There is also the disgraceful scripting of the chess scenes which are infantile in nature and made me feel rather dirty just sitting through them. More important is the second issue which is the role of the individual in society. In addition to the central conceit that only young John is going to be able to lead the resistance against the vile robots of the future, there are several episodes which rely upon the idea that stopping one individual (i.e. by killing him, in one way or another) is equivalent to stopping what the future must bring, as if one person were able to change society. This is the purest Leninism and not to be accepted. The future is brought about by the confluence of various long-term and large-scale economic and political forces acting upon each other. The role of the individual is irrelevant to this. How much more entertaining (and indeed ideologically correct) it would be if Mrs Connor (who has a strange and rather disturbing tendency to display her cleavage to her teenaged son) ignored the siren call of eliminating the lone, rogue scientist and, instead, launched large-scale attacks on the military-industrial complex as a whole. Perhaps this would not suit a post-9/11 America but we must all make sacrifices in the name of light entertainment.