A Quick Run through the Terminator Extras Finds Some Gems
Season One of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles came out on
8/19/08 and comes with the usual set of extras: gag reel, deleted
scenes, episode commentary, and featurette. (featurette/commentary
spoilers)
DVD Extras include:
Disk 1: Gag Reel
A yeoman effort made up mostly of flubbed lines and mal-propisms. The
highlights being any time one of the Terminators did something
spectacularly not Terminatorish, Dust-devil garbed Cromartie picking up
the biotech scientist by his crotch, and Lena Headley doing a little
dance when surrounded by nuclear scientist with guns.
Deleted scenes:
Disk 1: The Pilot, the Turk,
Disk 2: Dungeons and Dragons,
Disk 3: Demon Hand, Extended Demon Hand
Deleted scenes were a mix of understandable cuts and interesting
insights. The highlight for me really being the extended Sarah Connor
insane asylum interview in Demon Hand. It put an entirely new
complexion on the scene. It gave Sarah a classically Luddite background
and provided a horrifying mental image of lost childhood as a broken backed bicycle,
which is, of course, a kind of machine. Also given Sarah’s role as
mother, it reminded the viewer that Sarah was once a child.
3 featurettes
~Creating the Chronicles: Re-Boot
~Creating the Chronicles: The future war
~Creating the Chronicles: the Demon Hand
The featurettes provide good value with behind the scenes explanations of the thought processes behind various arcs.
“Creating the Chronicles: Re-Boot” was my favorite with a solid view
of everything that goes into assembling the creative vision behind
Sarah Connor. There were interviews with not only the Producers and
stars, but with the stunt and visual effects people who craft the look
of the series.
“Creating the Chronicles: The future war” went into a fair amount of
detail on the challenges of creating the future scenes for Dungeons and
Dragons. Originally it was going to be very WWII and Great Escape.
Happily, they went in a more psychological direction. A special gold
geek star goes to James Lima, their visual effects coordinator, for his
explanation for how Chrono-transportation works in T:tSCC.
“Creating the Chronicles: the Demon Hand” had a fair amount of
background discussion of the thinking behind the writing and visual
choices in “Demon Hand”. This featurrette had a beautiful juxtaposition
of image and description. They showed the image of Ellison standing
over the good doctor in the rain and surrounded by rainbows. Then the
producers discussed how the return of Sarah served as a spiritual
reawakening for Ellison. He had been going through the motions, but now
he has remembered his desire to succeed. As I looked again at the
rainbows and heard their explanation, it seemed to me that Sarah served
in this episode as Sophia, the wisdom of God, for Ellison. This was
only reinforced when the writers explained that Sarah saved Ellison
from the fire because she values life. She's trying to not only teach
John how to survive, but how to survive well. This fits in very well
with the sort strategic thinking described in Sir Basil Liddell-Hart’s
book “On Strategy,” which articulates that when you fight a war, you
are creating the peace that will follows. Given the number of fictional
narratives which espouse a Clauswitz-ian, “Blood is the price of
victory,” approach, it was interesting to hear another sort of
perspective. I've be very curious to see how that unfolds as the war
and series go on.
Episode Commentary
~Disk 1: Pilot: Josh Friedman, James Middleton, David Nutter, Summer Glau
~Disk 1: Turk: Josh Friedman, John Wirth, Lena Headley, Thomas Dekker
~Disk 3 What he Beheld: Josh Friedman, Ian Goldberg, Summer Glau, Brian Austin Green
Overall, the commentaries did a good job of balancing insights with
humor. This was achieved primarily by having Josh Friedman act as
moderator. When things got slow, he'd ask leading questions about
thought processes or throw in his own insights. They managed to avoid
the problem where commentators start watching the show and forget to
comment, or focus solely on one type of insight. The mix of actors and
writers/directors provided a little bit of everything.
“The Pilot” commentary had a lot of technical details about filming in
New Mexico. Since they discussed many of the things mentioned in the
featurettes, I'd say it's a good idea to watch the first featurettes
before watching the commentary.
The “Turk” commentary was really well balanced with the writers and
actors playing off each other into humor and background insights.
In “What He Beheld”, Brian Austin Green made an interesting point about
Derek's birthday gift to John. On one hand, he's doing a very nice
thing, but the result is that it somewhat manipulatively benefits Derek
by drawing John closer to him. This is further emphasized by John
keeping the "gift" a secret from his mother later. What is somewhat
boggling about re-watching the scene is that while they were filming
that highly emotional scene in the park, there were FBI agents being
catapulted into an inflated pool about twelve feet away.
Disk 2: Story Board Animation
This was a mildly interesting feature for budding tv writers and
producers. T:tSCC spends extensive time story boarding because they are
such an action intensive show.
Disk 2:Cast Auditions: Lena Headley, Thomas Dekker, Richard T. Jones
Disk2: Summer Glau Dance Practice
An interesting set of auditions for understanding how the actors got
their roles. It was particularly interesting because Jones’ audition
was for Ellison in the ‘90s, a man who was going places, rather someone
who has been stuck. Summer Glau’s dance practice was Summer Glau doing
a dance practice, which I'm sure some will find appealing.
All in all, the DVD set is a good value and should help fans gear up for the new season, and introduce new fans to what they missed.