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Mama Don’t Take My Robot Girl Away September 14, 2008

Posted by tvcrawlspace in : Reviews, Sci-Fi, Terminator: tSCC , 2comments

 

 

So what if she tried to kill us and set our house on fire? It’s probably just a bad transistor. I’ll fix her. I know I can!

That was the plot of the 2nd season premiere episode of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles on the Fox network. T:tSSC is a continuation of the events after the second Terminator movie (or T2, as it was fondly known to every man, woman, and child in 1991). It tells the story of evil time traveling robots (called “terminators”) from the future who are hunting Sarah Connor and her teenage son John. They are doing this to prevent John from fulfilling his destiny as the leader of the resistance moment against the evil robots in the future. The leader of these marauding tinkertoys is a highly advanced computer program known as “Skynet”, which is rumored in certain silicon valley coffee houses to be a future edition of Windows (Bill Gates was unavailable for comment). The ultimate goal of Skynet is, what else, the destruction of the human race. I’m scared!

The resistance movement, being no slouches themselves, have sent agents of their own back in time to assist our protagonists in their struggle. This includes a benevolent terminatress named Cameron (aka the robot girl, portrayed by the alluring Summer Glau) who is committed to protecting Sarah and John at all costs. She is super strong, rust resistant, and says cute things like, “I am not programmed to feel emotion” and “Sometimes you seem inefficient.”

The final episode of season 1 ended with Cameron caught in an exploding SUV, which caused many of us to be concerned with her safety as we awaited the show’s new season. In the premiere episode for season 2, she emerged slightly damaged from the wreckage but seemed to still be in possession of her robot senses. The only problem was that something had gone wrong with her software and suddenly she was trying to kill Sarah and John instead of protecting them. She limped into a convenience store and stapled her ripped face covering back together with a borrowed staple gun. Then she spent most of the episode tracking down her human subjects until they were able to sandwich her between the front bumpers of two semi trucks and remove the CPU (which looks suspiciously like a car cigarette lighter ) from her head. John reactivated her later, against mom’s wishes, but Cameron promised that she wouldn’t try to kill them anymore. Stay tuned for future developments.

I’m proud to say that I never saw any of the Terminator movies. But I was willing to give this TV series a chance. I watched a couple of episodes during the first season, and was less than thrilled. The problem I have is that the tone of the show is too overly serious for a such a silly sci-fi storyline. Nobody ever smiles in the universe of the Terminator franchise. Instead of interesting characters, we get the usual good-guy/bad-guy paint by numbers routine, along with plenty of explosions and car chases. Sarah seems to have no purpose in life except to protect her son John, and to save humanity from impending robot doom. John is totally unlikable, and seems incapable of any emotion beyond self absorption. I guess it’s asking too much to expect good writing in a TV spin-off of an old Schwarzenegger flick. Of course, Arnold went on to become the Governator, so maybe there’s still hope for The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Candy Wrapper Revelations September 6, 2008

Posted by tvcrawlspace in : General, Inspirational, Satire, Snacks , 2comments

 

 

As you know, here at TV Crawlspace we consider snacks to be a necessary ingredient in the TV watching experience. After sampling a pack of M&M’s the other night I thought I spotted a typo on the wrapper. What seemed to be the problem was the apostrophe between the second M and the s. Was it possible that the package designers fell prey to the old pitfall of using an inappropriate apostrophe before the ‘s’ in a plural noun? My inner punctuation zealot jumped for joy at this thought. “The inclusion of the apostrophe implies ownership,” I proudly proclaimed. “In order for it to be valid, the word M&M’s would have to be followed with a second noun.” That’s when I noticed the tiny words at the bottom of the logo, “Chocolate Candies”. There they were. Two little words that meant so much. All was right on my candy wrapper.

This question of who owns the candies prompted me to do a little internet research. It turns out that M&M’s were named after the first owners of the candy’s patent, Forrest Mars Sr. and R. Bruce Murrie, who purchased the rights in 1929. The full name of the product, hypothetically, would read “Mars and Murrie’s Chocolate Candies”. Mr. Mars went on to amass a personal fortune of four billion dollars from the sale his little colorful creations. Kind of adds new meaning to the phrase “living the sweet life”.

After solving that mystery, something else caught my attention. Standing over on the right side of the wrapper was the jaded looking spokescandy known to M&M-o-philes as Red. Like a carnival booth attendant, he pointed a solicitous finger and seemed to urge passersby to partake in the contents of the little brown package. I tried to imagine what he might be saying:

“What’s the matter kid, life got you down? I got just the thing you need. Nothing like a sugar fix to make you forget about your problems. For a while at least. Then you’ll be back for more. Old man Mars got filthy rich off of desperate little kids like you. So what’s got you down, exactly? Let me take a guess. Your playstation game doesn’t work anymore? Your Barbie doll lost an arm? That’s nothin’. I hate to break it to ya, but it’s all downhill from here. You got twelve years of school to look forward to, and each grade is tougher than the last one. Then you work a crap job until you’re old and gray. That’s the game of life, and if you don’t play you end up dead in the gutter with the rats and the junkies. Take it from Red, the biggest thrill in your life will be these little chocolate candies here. Eat all you want, we got a whole warehouse full. These things won’t melt in your hand like that other cheap sh**.”

Just then I imagined a large shoe coming down on our affable spokescandy, crushing him into the sidewalk. That’s the way it goes in the school of hard knocks.