Spoilers. This episode heralds the end of an unofficial trilogy of Sarah-centric episodes -- thank God. And how apt that a story revolving around the notion of dreams would resort to showing Summer Glau in her bra to wake its audience up.If you're fighting to save humanity, regularly pursued by lethal cyborgs from the future, what do you do when you have a few sleepless nights? That's right, you check into an expensive sleep clinic! Well, if you're soporific Sarah Connor (Lena Headey), that is -- someone who could ironically send anyone to sleep by just talking to them for five minutes. Glau shows more emotional range than Headey, and she's the robot.
Anyway, Sarah checks into said clinic, under the care of Nurse Hobson (Julie Ann Emery), and meets an English roommate called Dana (Michelle Arthur) who has recurring nightmares of being burned alive. As is typical of this series, Derek is AWOL for the entire episode without explanation, but John (Thomas Dekker) and Cameron (Glau) float around to lend their support in-between Sarah's treatment for "night terrors" -- particularly a regular dream she has about being kidnapped by Ed Winston (Ned Bellamy), the craggy goon she killed awhile back at the Skynet-affiliated factory, before attending his funeral last week.The story dances between Sarah in the clinic -- where she begins to suspect strange goings-on, particularly when her roommate is burnt to a crisp while she sleeps (as you would) -- and Sarah's recurring nightmare of being kidnapped by Ed Winston and thrown into the back of his van.
Clearly, one of these storylines is a dream, and predictably it's the one that least resembles a dream. I can understand the thinking behind this episode, and it admittedly did grow more interesting once the reveals started to appear, but the narrative was fatally wounded by the simple fact that... well, Sarah Connor is the least interesting heroine ever conceived. Which is some going, considering her movie progenitor was one of the best. Headey just seems to struggle with this character nearly every week -- hamstrung by the writing, and forced to mumble her lines, wince, furrow her brow, then perhaps throw out a crooked smile she immediately looks guilty about.
Beyond the problem of basing a whole episode around the mental state of someone it's impossible to care about, "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep" also continued a tepid storyline about Sarah feeling bad about killing someone -- but this attempt to humanize Sarah, by showing us she isn't the type who can kill and just get over it, flies in the face of events in T2. And it just isn't interesting or insightful. If the writers are so wary of writing Sarah as a butch killer in the Linda Hamilton mould on network TV, then simply making her into the exact opposite isn't going to fly. Even the writers are unsure what Sarah should be, as the climax of this episode involves their heroine mangling her own wrist to escape from hand-cuffs, before jabbing a man in the eye with a hypodermic needle -- all very hardcore, and more in-keeping with the Hamilton incarnation!And then there are Sarah's pretentious voiceovers, which you could playback on tape and market as audio valium. They walk a fine line between insight, affectation, tedium and amusement. This week's ponders the notion of succubus (spectral beings that torment sleepers) and was perhaps most irritating because you can see what the writers were aiming for... but the execution is just flat, plodding and unintentionally hilarious. Sarah was right about one thing in her closing line, though; this was a real "bad bitch" of an episode.
19 March 2009
Virgin1, 10pm
Writers: Denise Thé & Natalie Chaidez
Director: Scott Lautanen
Cast: Lena Headey (Sarah), Thomas Dekker (John), Summer Glau (Cameron), Richard T. Jones (Agent Ellison), Ned Bellamy (Ed Winston), Julie Ann Emery (Nurse Hobson), Michelle Arthur (Dana), Sashen Naicker (Night Tech) & Manny Montana (Hector)
