#TSCC Episode 1×01 “Pilot”

Additional Cast

Owain Yeoman………….Cromartie
Sonya Walger…………….Michelle Dixon
Nick Wechsler……………Deputy Ridge
Charlayne Woodard…Terissa Dyson
Dean Winters…………….Charley Dixon
Aaron James Cash…….Terminator

Written By 

Josh Friedman

Directed By 

David Nutter

First Broadcast 

January 13, 2008

Significance of Title: 

None

Single Sentence Synopsis: 

Sarah and John meet a robot and go back to the future.

Terminator Tropes

• Come With Me if You Want To Live
• Concealment Equals Cover
• Crazy-Prepared
• Kung-Shui
• Meaningful Name
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome
• Reluctant Warrior
• Shout Out

Quotable Quotes

Sarah: “Half an hour. One bag, plus the guns. I’ll make pancakes.”

Cromartie: “Mr. Ferguson is ill today.”

Cameron: “Come with me if you want to live.”

Ellison: “I’m here because my boss, the United States of America, thinks Sarah Connor is a deluded, dangerous, Grade A Whack-a-Mole who killed a man because she believes that in the future he invents a computer system that declares war on the world.”

Ridge: “What the hell happened here?”
Ellison: “Twenty-two witnesses, Deputy Ridge. Twenty-two of your good town folk. That’s a whole football team. Guess what nineteen of them saw?”
Ridge: “A..a shooter with some kind of robot leg-.”
Ellison: “A shooter…with some kind of robot leg.”

Trivia

David Nutter is no stranger to directing pilots. According to IMDB, he has made at least eighteen of them, including episodes for Supernatural, Smallville, Dark Angel, M.A.N.T.I.S., Space: Above and Beyond, Roswell and Heroes (which also featured Thomas Dekker).

The pilot episode, which features not one but two shootings that take place at a school, was handed in to the network on the same day as the shooting at Virginia Tech. The story was adjusted so that the first scene took place at a library, rather than a school.

Aaron Cash, who plays the Terminator in the opening dream sequence, met Josh Friedman in a coffee shop while Friedman was working on the pilot script. When Cash showed Friedman a video of a commercial where Cash played a cyborg, Friedman cast him as the killer robot.

Both Aaron Cash and Summer Glau have ballet training. (Aaron also coached Summer in her dance sequences for the episode “Demon Hand.”) According to Josh Friedman, he found that casting dancers as terminators was a great idea, as dancers have a lot more control over their movements.

Dean Winters was not the original actor cast as Charley Dixon.The role was re-cast because the chemistry with Lena didn’t seem quite right. In fact once Winters was cast, the bedroom scene with Charley and Sarah was completely re-written to make it warmer and sexier.

Josh originally wanted to cast Garrett Dillahunt as Cromartie after seeing his audition but when it came time to film, Dillahunt was working on another series so Owain Yeoman was cast instead. Dillahunt returned to the role of Cromartie and in fact plays three different characters over the course of the show.

When Sarah, John and Cameron arrive in the future, the road works sign indicates that it’s September of 2007, which is when the pilot was originally meant to be aired.

This is not the first pilot where Summer Glau has been naked on camera. Her character in Firefly was also introduced in that way for the pilot of that series.

Charlayne Woodard is no relation to actress Alfre Woodard.

Discussion

In hindsight, this pilot had a lot of work to do, narrative-wise. For example, it had to introduce the franchise to new viewers while not boring or alienating current fans. It had to introduce new actors for Sarah and John Connor. (In this respect, I think Lena Headey was the tougher sell for established fans than Thomas Dekker.) It had to live up to the marketing campaign, which featured plenty of action, killer robots and Chicks With Guns ™. Most of all, it had to establish a new direction for the storyline.

Consider: a movie is limited in its ability to deliver story by its very nature. A science fiction or fantasy film is even more restricted as a certain amount of screen time needs to be spent introducing the audience to the world of the story. A TV series has more leisure to explore characters and ideas. This also means that you can’t use the same narrative beats in a Terminator TV series as you do in the film. In the films, a terminator shows up, a protector shows up, they chase, they fight, humans (mostly) win. A TV series based on this formula would get stale very quickly.

So how does this episode do?

Very well, I think. It takes place two years after Terminator 2: Judgement Day and we start with voice-over narration from Sarah Connor, which not only introduces fans to Lena Headey as Sarah but also connects us to the second film, which used Sarah’s voice-over as a very effective storytelling device.

There are those who believe that a child in the womb shares his mother’s dreams. Her love for him, her hopes for his future, as is told to him in pictures as he sleeps inside her. Is that why he reaches for her in that first moment and cries for her touch? But what if you’ve known since he was inside you what his life held for him? That he would be hunted, that his fate was tied to the fate of millions. That every moment of your life would be spent keeping him alive. Would he understand why you were so hard? Why you held on so tight? Would he still reach for you if the only dream you’ve shared with him was a nightmare?

This leads into a brutal action sequence which ends with a terminator shooting John dead.

Sarah (to Terminator): Do it! Do it! Kill me! Nothing matters anymore! KILL ME!
Terminator: You’re right. Nothing matters anymore. Only the boy. The future’s ours. And it begins…..NOW (followed by massive nuclear fireball and Sarah waking up with a start.)

So this scene not only serves as exposition (if John dies, the world ends) but also as foreshadowing. The major theme of this series is that the future war is happening here in the present and rather than just protect and train John in anticipation of Judgment Day, Sarah needs to go to war. Another thing I like about this scene is after Sarah wakes up, we get to see Lena showing her skill at expressing these little emotional beats. She doesn’t say anything but we can see her taking in the message from her dream and deciding what she needs to do. It’s one of the qualities that Lena brings to this role that I love and we see more of it in the second season.

I’d also like to take a moment to talk about Summer Glau’s performance as the re-programmed terminator Cameron Phillips. I think this was a great casting decision for a number of reasons. Summer has dance training so she acts with her entire body and she has a lot of control over each part. This lets her move in a way that seems graceful at first but then you slowly realize that it’s a studied, mechanical grace and it’s really very creepy on an almost subconscious level. (I’ll talk more about this later.)

Thomas Dekker’s John is a bit more controversial. After being attacked by Cromartie, he, Sarah and Cameron are on the run once more.

John: Why is this happening again?
Sarah: I don’t know.
John: You stopped it.
Sarah: I guess I didn’t.
John: But you can. You changed the future, you just didn’t change it enough. So you can do it again.
Sarah: I don’t know, John.
John: I can’t keep running. I can’t. I’m not who they think I am, some…messiah.
Sarah: You don’t know that.
John: I know. I can’t lead an army. Maybe that’s you but that’ll never be me. So you’ve gotta stop it. Please! (beat) Mom…
Sarah: All right.
John: All right what?
Sarah: I’ll stop it.

Based on the comments made on the Internet discussion boards, this was a very controversial scene. Long-time fans remembered Edward Furlong’s cocky, street-wise portrayal of John and were stunned at this seemingly wimpy, milksop version that they saw on their TV screens. New viewers were thinking, “This is supposed to be the savior of humanity?”

What they missed, of course, is that this is the precise moment that the story changed. Up until now, it’s been the bog-standard Terminator plot line:

• Bad robot shows up.
• Protector shows up.
• Bad robot attacks.
• Protector defends.
• Connor(s) and protector are chased by bad robot.
• Somebody figures out how to stop the bad robot.

This is also a smart acting choice by Thomas Dekker. His John Connor is a fifteen year old kid and despite the fact that he’s been training for his post-apocalyptic role as a bad-ass leader of the last remains of mankind against the machines, he’s still a fifteen year old kid. He can’t just suddenly become his future self and Dekker chose to regress the character a bit so that we can watch him develop and grow.

The point, I think, that Friedman and company were trying to tell us was, “Okay, we’ve honored our cinematic roots, but now let us show you the kind of long-form storytelling you can only do in a TV series.” Up until now, our characters have been very reactive, mainly trying not to die. In the films, this leads up to a big, splashy, exciting finale but this is the first episode of a series so we can’t do that.

This is where Friedman does something brilliant. He turns the standard story formula on its head. Those hunted by SkyNet become the hunters. Our protagonists break the seemingly endless cycle by jumping forward eight years to find and kill their enemy before it’s born.

 

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