REVIEW: 'Sarah Connor Chronicles' episode maintains down-to-earth creative poise while title character hunts UFOs

Rarely getting lost in the series' premise, "Earthlings Welcome Here" strikes the proper creative tone with "Sarah Connor Chronicles" fans who might not understand what it means to fight against fate.

What does not become watered down to appeal to young pop culture-obsessed viewers in the series is the perspectives of its title characters, who live drastically different lives than normal people. Certain lines of dialogue often accurately compare what is going in the real world with their war-oriented mindsets so that viewers understand their plight.

Riley (Leven Ramblin), who is a straggler from the post-apocalyptic future, says in the episode about her foster family, "They don't know how good they have it. All they do is complain about every little thing, and everyone at school is the exact same way. It's like one big whine-a-thon."

Any other TV series with a cast of attractive young stars would primarily focus on the superficial details of intimate relationships, but "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" at least attempts to emphasize to its viewers the pain of not having the luxury of living as though there will be many tomorrows.

Of particular interest about the Riley character is the nature of the mission she is carrying out to keep John Connor (Thomas Dekker) away from "her," whoever that turns out to be.

But "Earthlings Welcome Here" also shows how people respond to the detachment of these characters from the pre-Judgement Day world.

Lena Headey's Sarah Connor reminds everyone watching that her cat-like readiness whenever gun shots go off would be alarming to anyone outside of her inner circle, even to the transvestite alien aficionado, Eileen (Dinah Lenney). More importantly, Sarah's lack of emotion in this episode might be setting up a character flaw with which she might have to come to terms later in the series.

Dialogue itself is not the only story tool utilized toward this end.

"Earthlings Welcome Here" adds the detail of Riley when she arrives in the present being amazed at a pleasant smelling hotel room and the soft pillows that are likely in short supply in the nuclear wasteland from which she comes.

In another scene meant to evoke the seriousness of her mission, Sarah seeing a much more intense vision of herself spinning a knife serves to remind her to snap out the momentary moments of comfort she sparingly experiences. Though, this and Sarah's vision of herself from when she was a waitress establishes the inner emotional demons she will likely soon exercise.

Still, that this TV series is based in the science fiction Terminator world, which is already a very exaggerated version of reality, takes away from making viewers perceive in the first 30 minutes of the episode that Eileen is just a paranoid UFO nut with nothing to back up her alleged sightings of the three-dot aircraft. Anyone watching already accepts that the premise involves an artificially intelligent computer network ushering in a nuclear holocaust in the near future.

"Earthlings Welcome Here" establishes a lot of promising plot points effectively utilizing several simple TV story telling techniques topped off by the appearance of the mysterious three-dot flying contraption from Sarah's dreams that could very well be an early model of the HK-aerial planes from the past Terminator films.

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