The Terminator

Over the weekend, we powered through the new Terminator series on Fox, and I am not sure if I enjoy it or not. It might be due to a lack of new episodes because of the writers' strike and I am driven to watch anything that is not a rerun.

Pluses for the show - Really, this picks up right where T2 left off and there are lots of references to what happened in T2 (i.e. Cyberdine) and I am glad to say that it forgets T3 ever happened (what a mess). Also, you kinda have that inkling that John Conner is going to hook-up with the female terminator - not sure how I feel about that, but we'll count it as a plus for now.

Problems - The time-travel inconsistencies are a mess. As the story line grows more complex and more robots and people have jumped to the past, historical record vs. current event contradictions begin to mount. This is the whole problem with time-travel: nothing could have happened in the past without it becoming part of the historical record. So Terminators searching for John Conner would never have happened - those in the Future have a historical record and attempts by John to evade the terminators would only amend the historical record for those in the future.

This is all rendered moot (vocab of the day....) since Terminators had the right idea in T1 - kill Sara Conner before John is born. Why would they choose to jump in later when John is a young man, the jig is up, and resistance is greater? Logic says they would continue to jump back in time to when Sarah Conner unaware of the Terminators, or was still pregnant, OR when she was just a baby, OR go even further back and destroy her parents, OR destroy Mankind in it's infancy.

This leads Susan to say "Just enjoy the show...you're thinking too hard". Agreed.

Other items - the action scenes are somewhat illogical - too much busting through walls - and why are the robots bound by human limitations? Example - they scale a fence just like humans (even when their cover is blown). Shouldn't they be able to jump 30 feet in the air with their mechanical legs?

Check out this quick article on the CEO of iRobot (you know, those vacuum cleaners) - he makes a great point that Sci-Fi says that robots need to look like humans, but in reality robots need to be built to carry out tasks that the human body is not naturally built for - if you can build a machine to take on a particularly grueling task, why would you choose the human form?