Note: Many moons ago writer Natalie Chaidez chimed in with her breakdown of the Badass Writer Chicks of Sarah Connor. Well, here’s her long-ago promised take on the men of the writer staff now ready for your reading pleasure…

Well guess who got their tighty-whities in a bunch because I didn’t blog about them? The boy writers of SCC, who, in the interest of equal time for all candidates, will now get a few choice Chaidez comments about them.

Friedman. Genius screenwriter dabbling in one-hour drama and making all us seasoned TV pros look like amateurs in the process. Right now he’s rocking this circa 1976 Coppola shag, which he keeps threatening to cut but secretly I think he’s quite fond of. Josh is an awesome boss, and honestly the worst thing I can think of to say about him is that he, like every showrunner I’ve ever worked for, has developed some odd dietary quirks since his series began. For instance, he no longer eats Pop Tarts for breakfast, which in hindsight I suppose wasn’t the healthiest start to an exec producer’s day.

John Wirth, or “J Dub” as he is affectionately known here at SCC, is our other commander-in-chief. Wirth is the O.G. of the staff, and was brought on by the studio and network to teach Freidman the ropes of running a TV show, with his 800 years of production experience. In addition to his mad writing, on-set and editing skillz, he’s a raconteur extraordinaire. The man is a born story-teller. The staff’s favorite tale involves Don Johnson, two strippers in nurse get-ups and a ‘titty-whacking”. Need I say more?

Supervising Producer John Enbom is a worthless traitor who abandoned us for the petty task of running his own TV show. It’s a huge loss as he was both the classiest and funniest writer among us. His last episode (Alpine Fields) married a Cheever-esque critique of repression in WASP culture with an awesome killer robot plot. Which, in a nutshell, just about sums up Mr. Enbom himself.

Writing team/producers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz are the fan-boy whiz kids every great sci-fi show needs. Ashley used to be a computer programmer, working for the military, which basically means he was building SkyNet. Zack can recite by memory the plot of every Star Trek episode, if you give him the title, and has a degree from Stanford in Soviet Cinema. They play Dungeons and Dragons every month, and Ashley actually demanded Comic-Con as a religious holiday. Again– need I say more?

Our SCC “new media” writer is Mr. Hadley Klein. If you took about a dozen cans of Red Bull, stirred in a couple double espressos and topped it off with a hit of crack, you just might have half the energy this kid has. Hadley is a lanky bundle of charisma, charm and hustle, poured into the world’s tightest pair of skinny jeans. It behooves me to only say kind things about him, as it’s quite clear that he will soon be all of our bosses.

Last but not least are our two staff writers, Ian Goldberg and Dan Thomsen. Ian wrote the brilliant season one finale, What He Beheld. Ian, like Friedman, is a Johnny Cash afficiando. He looks like a young, cuter version of the Clash’s Joe Strummer. Dan, on the other hand, looks like that shaggily hot blonde actor Sienna Miller was dating for a minute. He gets this thousand yard stare sometimes in the writers’ room, as if mulling over some deep, dark personal tragedy, which usually turns out to be just a lame plot point we pitched. He wrote the season one episode, Vick’s Chip, which was my fav because it implied Mr. and Mrs. Vick were having… yes… Terminator sex. The annoying thing about both these guys is that they’re so damn young and so talented.

Which, minus the damn young part, basically is how I feel about all the SCC guys.

Note: Last week Today is the Day co-writer Zack Stentz weighed in before Part 1. This week we hear from his writing partner, Ashley Miller, before the concluding chapter.

The Future. It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Here’s a fun fact about yours truly. The Terminator was the very first rated-R movie I ever watched. It was on video (“VHS,” he said, dating himself). My brother brought it home and kinda dared me to watch it with him. At the time, on-screen violence freaked me out. Blood really freaked me out. Guys pulling their own eyeballs out of their heads and dropping them in the sink really, really, really freaked me out.

Somehow, I persevered. I loved it. I watched it over, and over and over again. Many reasons why – the quotable lines, the great characters, the exciting story. I connected with all of them. It became a favorite. But of all the things that drew me to this film, the biggest and most important was the Future War (note the caps!).

It bears mentioning right now that I am as much a fanboy of the Terminator universe as I am of a certain franchise involving starships, ray guns and boldly going places – particularly the first and third iterations of said franchise (put a gun to my head, ask me which one I love more — go ahead — then you tell me what the answer should be because hell, you’re the guy with the gun). The future in that other franchise is bright. Optimistic. Occasionally scary, but really… in a world where you can wear your pajamas to work, how scary is your world really? The Terminator universe, on the other hand? Scary. If you’re wearing your pajamas to work, it’s because you had to steal them off your buddy’s corpse. Polar opposite of optimistic. And yet…

There’s this guy: Kyle Reese. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He’s a little screwed up in the head. Tough, resourceful, falls in love with polaroids. Yeah, he’s kind of a romantic. This guy comes back in time to save the girl of his dreams and stop the end of the world. And he’s not wearing pants. Not even pajamas.

That, friends, is my definition of “hero”: a naked, crazy guy with a gun and an unhealthy obsession with women he’s only seen in pictures. Also, a profound appreciation for the world he discovers. Is it pristine? Nope. Peaceful? Uh-uh. But a fine place nonetheless, and worth fighting for. There’s a great moment in the deleted scenes where Reese collapses on the ground in the middle of a field, weeping over a flower and its fate.

To me, that’s the Terminator franchise: loving a single flower enough that you would risk everything to protect it. Because it has value and beauty and meaning. The flower is at the heart of the Future War.

So what does that have to do with Today Is The Day - Part 2? Everything. Tonight’s episode is about a little flower. There are no heroes in this flower story. There are no villains. There is only the flower each character carries with them. It is not sad, it is not happy. It can be neither because, as a story about a flower, it is a story about hope.

Also, for your viewing pleasure there are killer robots, plasma rifles and submarines. There is war, fisticuffs and death. A mystery. A confrontation. There is a reconciliation, and someone learns the truth. In short, it’s a very full hour. Enjoy your visit.

“Did you know,” a friend told me while touring Stage 28 and ogling the nifty new set you’ll see tonight, “that there’s never been a bad submarine movie?” I bit my tongue and refrained from mentioning Down Periscope, because his general point stands. When you look at the roster of films set on submarines, from The Enemy Below and Run Silent Run Deep up through Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide, you realize they’re all pretty entertaining. There’s something inherently dramatic about being trapped in a box under the ocean with only a thin sheet of metal separating you from certain death. No matter how familiar the tropes get— sonar pings, depth charge attacks, sealing off the flooded compartment with the guys still inside to save the boat— they never fail to grab you.

So it should come as no surprise that the writing staff has long wanted to do a Terminator: SCC episode set on a nuclear submarine. The setting always seemed like a natural, especially with On The Beach rattling around our collective subconscious, and the introduction of the Jesse character gave us a natural “in” for doing a submarine story. How, in the middle of an apocalypse, does a petite Australian freedom fighter wind up in the ruins of Los Angeles? The earlier episode Alpine Fields provided the answer in dialogue: courtesy of the USS Jimmy Carter (aside from the obvious humor in the name, do an Internet search to discover why the Jimmy Carter is actually ideally suited for use by the Resistance against the machines).

And if you rewatch that episode, you’ll actually see that we were already planting seeds for tonight and next week’s two-parter episode— Jesse initially expresses confidence in John Connor’s leadership and comfort with the idea of serving alongside a reprogrammed T-triple Eight, leading to the implied question of what happened to Jesse to turn her so passionately against reprogrammed machines, Cameron, and John Connor’s leadership. Today is the day— or rather, tonight is the night— you begin to discover the answer. And of course it all takes place on a submarine.

Oh X-Files, how do we writers adore you? Let us count the ways. Number one: the seamless melding of sci-fi and procedural plot, which has rendered oh-so-many inferior imitators. Number two: the awesome flash-light illuminated action sequences through spooky/cool Canadian locations. Who knew Vancouver had such topographical diversity? And number three: one of the most iconic sci-fi ships of all-time, between a laconic porn-loving crusader for Truth and his red-headed, trench-coated doubting Thomas of a partner… oh Mulder and Scully. Catch monsters! Uncover alien conspiracies! Exchange witty quips and amazing scientific snippets during playful and sexually-charged scenes in low-rent motel rooms! Oh X-Files… <3 <3 <3

My latest SCC episode, Earthlings Welcome Here, is an homage to one of the writers’ room’s all-time favorite shows. I’m not claiming it’s as good as Chris Carter and co’s best eps, and no Duchnovy of course (sigh…), but it’s our humble peek into UFO sub-culture, and its surprising intersection with Killer Robots From the Future.

I began the process of writing the script, as I often do, by doing some real life research. Wanting to know more about “Experiencers,” as those who have encountered E.T.’s call themselves, I attended a meeting of a group known as M.U.F.O.N. It was at this meeting, held in the sanctuary of a church in Studio City, CA that I learned about the process of hypno-therapy to recall lost or repressed memories. It was a fascinating event, and I incorporated my findings into the show.

I’m sure many of you will be wondering exactly what Sarah finds at the end of her quest for the three-dots. That answer — at least part of it -– will be revealed by the end of Earthlings. How are aliens and Terminators connected? Tune in tonight (and on Fridays at 8PM starting February in 2009).

The Truth is… well, you know the rest…

TUESDAY UPDATE: Love you, bloggers. Hate on my eppy or love it, we’re all playing together in the same imaginary playground — writers and fans alike — your close attention to detail and thoughtful, interactive viewing make creating T:SCC hecka fun..

It’s Thursday, December 11th. Our holiday break is still some days away and we intend on making the most of our time. So what’s going on in the different facets of Sarah Connor-land?

You’ll catch the fall finale, Earthlings Welcome Here, this coming Monday night. It’s our last show before the big move to Fridays in February, so jump online afterwards and discuss. Meanwhile, the writers are spending long, mind-bending days in their room nailing out the specifics of the end of the season. As for production, they’re plowing through late nights and complex scenes for episode seventeen, as directed by Jeff Woolnough (who did an excellent job directing our fourteenth episode, the first one back in February). Yesterday’s shoot featured a real helicopter on set. Today? Rehearsal for one important climactic scene that will take the entire day to shoot tomorrow.

Fun, fun, fun…

Three stories. One ending. Last night’s Alpine Fields hit home for Derek — and some of us here. Can your actions in the present really change the future? Yes, it seems there is hope after all.

You may have noticed that writer John Enbom took a little influence from the Michael Haneke film, Funny Games, for the Sarah/Cameron story. “Anne” is the name of the mother/female protagonist in both the film and our episode, and both dogs meets a similar end (complete with a sad, fated yelping).

Alpine Fields is the first episode in Sarah Connor history to be co-directed. Because of our crazy production schedule, we actually shot half of the episode (”six months earlier”) during the beginning of August and the rest of the episode (Derek/Anne/Lauren and the future mission) in October. Allison from Palmdale’s Charles Besson directed the Sarah/Cameron/Fields cabin story and Bryan Spicer (Goodbye to All That) directed the present day and future stories. Both are credited on the episode.

Did you recognize the light blue sanitation suits worn by the resistance members in Serrano Point at the end of the episode? While you might remember them from the film Outbreak, their reappearance is actually more significant than that. Purposely, they were the same ones worn by our cast during the present-day story in Serrano Point in Automatic for the People. Seems somehow the nuclear power plant did end up in the resistance’s hands…

Last night also featured the return of Lena’s 300 co-star, Peter Mensah, as General Perry. If you were paying close attention to his conversation with Derek, you can deduce when these Alpine Fields future scenes take place in relation to those from Dungeons and Dragons. Piecing it all together, you’ll realize that they fit into the implied time lapse between certain scenes from that season one episode. But just how much time lapsed? Spoiler alert! This certainly isn’t the end of the story — we’ll be filling in more details of that future later on this season. Even more, you may have realized the story of Derek and Jesse’s first chance encounter seemed familiar — because you’ve heard them talk about it before in The Tower is Tall…

Hey, did you catch the name of the Fields family dog? Charles Barkley. Wa-ha-ha. And they say we’re all doom and gloom around here. We do funny too. And for the record, while breaking this story in the writers’ room, he was simply nicknamed “Scraps.”

Continuity alert! When Sarah gets a call from John she explains to him that “We got a hit on a name on the list. Alpine Fields, it’s a family…” Let’s go back, dear friends, and take a little look at the bloody list on the basement wall at the end of Automatic for the People. Yep, there it is! “Alpine Fields” — right below “Greenway,” “P. Alto,” “Dr. B Sherman,” and… ?

We learned quite a bit more about Jesse and other facets of the resistance in this episode. For starters, it’s an international war. “Been making troop and supply runs back and forth to Perth for months now. Seawolf sub. The Jimmy Carter,” she tells him. “You’ve got a nuclear submarine?” Derek retorts. Do a little deductive research and you’ll quickly uncover where exactly Perth is — Western Australia. Even more, Jesse explains to Derek later that they’ve started growing food again there. She offers Sydney a delicious snack of Plumpy Nut– “Peanut butter mixed with baby formula and vitamin powder,” as she describes it. And it’s real, too.

Alpine Fields is the first episode in the series to not feature an appearance by John Connor. For what it’s worth, this episode was not shaped or designed as such. Fear not John Connor-addicts, our boy-wonder will be back next week for the all-new Earthlings Welcome Here.

When Derek spots Lauren’s Saint Christopher’s medal dangling around her neck, he encourages her to take it off — “It’s a target.” Later (after Anne’s death), Lauren takes off with her baby sister, leaving her medallion behind. In the Catholic faith, St. Christopher was a martyr that was killed during Roman rule. He is significant because his story is one “in which Christopher carries a small, yet almost unbearably heavy, child across a river. The child is later revealed to be Jesus Christ. It is this popular story from which Christopher became the patron saint of travellers, and it is the source for the derivation of his name. The Greek word Christophoros translates into ‘bearer of the anointed one.’” Baby Sydney, of course, grows up to save many lives in the future…

Some of you eagle-eyed viewers may notice that tonight’s episode, Alpine Fields, sets a new record for the show in number of onscreen chyrons used to designate the time and location of what we’re seeing. We normally hate to use these little audience helpers, popular as they may be, but we made an exception for this episode, and you’ll probably notice why as well: it’s probably the most structurally complex thing we’ve done to date.

While in the past we’ve used flashbacks and played games with linearity and narrative structure, this is the first time we’ve simultaneously had one character flash back to her past while another flashed back to his. But such is the twisty nature of time-and-cause-and-effect in the Terminator universe that it made the most sense to tell the story of Derek Reese and his multiple connections to the Fields family in the past, present, and future.

And speaking of the future, I always feel bad when it leaks out that an upcoming episode is going to feature scenes from the Future War ™, because I know a segment of our viewership is in for both elation and disappointment. The tantalizing glimpses of mankind’s desperate struggle against the machines are some of the most memorable scenes from the Terminator film series— the closest the franchise comes to pure science fiction action porn. Yet they also tend to be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to shoot, and in this case we chose to use the future to tell a smaller and more intimate story.

So while you may not see flashing plasma rifles, marching endoskeletons and exploding H/Ks, we hope you’ll be intrigued by the hints at the global nature of the man vs. Skynet war as well as moved by the story of a family trying to survive the unthinkable and a man’s struggle to find a reason to live in the midst of devastation and hopelessness. Because while other science fiction worlds have come and gone, the human drama at the heart of the Terminator franchise is the exact ingredient that’s kept people watching for nearly a quarter century.

We here at T:SCC pride ourselves on being Self Made Men and Women. So how did we help ourselves during the shaping of the most unique Terminator episode yet? Walk, if you will, in our shoes for a bit…

Self Made Man is another example of an episode we turned around quite fast. We only just completed production on this episode on October 15th! First-time Terminator director Holly Dale rocked out a script by our now go-to Camerontastic writer, Toni Graphia, who’s work you might remember from this season’s Allison from Palmdale or last season’s ballet episode, The Demon Hand, also Cameron-centric episodes.

All of the historical information was fact checked multiple times by Toni and our various department heads, researching the period online and in texts, as well as speaking to experts at History for Hire, the prop house that specializes in period pieces and has provided set dressing for hundreds of films and television series’ such as Chaplin and Mad Men.

For us, one of the highlights of the John/Riley story was John’s big fight with sleezoid Mike at the party. Though it wasn’t specified directly in dialogue, this scene was originally crafted with the knowledge that John is, in part, still reeling from PTSD and killing Sarkissian (as was revealed in The Tower is Tall…). It certainly mirrors Cameron and Eric’s conversation. “You don’t know what it’s like, to have something inside, you, something that’s damaged, something hidden there…” To which she responds, “It’s like a bomb. Waiting to go off.” Was this John Connor going off?

Through Myron Stark we meet 1920s silent film star, Rudolph Valentino. This character is actually the first real person represented in our series to date. Wikipedia informs us that Valentino “was an Italian actor, sex symbol, and early pop icon. Known as the “Latin Lover”, he was one of the most popular stars of the 1920s, and one of the most recognized stars from the silent movie era. Some of his best known roles include the silent films The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His untimely death at age 31 caused mass hysteria among his female fans, propelling him into icon status.” If you paid close attention, you know the premiere that Stark “met” Valentino at was, in fact, The Sheik, a film about a charming Arabian sheik’s infatuation with an adventurous, modern-thinking Englishwoman. Eventually, he abducts her and keeps her in his home in the Saharan desert.

It was like old times in Burbank during the filming of Self Made Man. All of our 1920s era scenes were shot on the Warner Bros backlot, the same studio grounds that opened during this period and went on to be used for filming some of the most famous films of the decade.

In Will Chandler’s eulogy we learn that he wanted to build The Pico Tower — the one Myron Stark would eventually construct in the same spot — at Pico and Third in Los Angeles. Only problem? Pico and Third run parallel in LA! Okay, so we used our geographical imaginations to pass clearances…

TV Critic superstar Alan Sepinwall has kindly been devoting a little weekly time to us on his popular blog. In this week’s take on Self Made Man, Sepinwall mentions that “the show has been consistently entertaining on an episode-by-episode basis for most of the season such that it’s not an urgent need for answers. But at some point, I would like a sign that the writers know where this is all going.” Trust us, Alan, it’s going somewhere.

As if you didn’t have enough reason already to watch, next Monday’s Alpine Fields takes on the great debate as to whether the Connors and company can actually alter the future with their actions in the present. And the following week’s fall finale, Earthlings Welcome Here, will tackle Sarah’s obsession with the three-dots, bringing you to a surprising conclusion. Where will it lead? Trust us, it’s not just going somewhere, it’s going somewhere good.

Strange Things Happen at the One-Two Point…

That’s an episode title, and it’s a Go proverb. No, really. The game of “Go” has proverbs, and that’s one of them. If you’re interested, you can find a couple of really good, in-depth descriptions of what this actually means with respect to playing Go. But the important thing for us (and the episode) is its meaning in a larger sense: in certain situations, the rules of battle change. The pace of battle gets faster, more intense. Everything can become life-and-death (which, as it turns out, is another term that comes from Go).

Why this obsession with an old strategy game from China played with white and black stones? Well, when a writer goes in search of a metaphor… just as when Sarah Connor goes in search of three dots… sometimes, we land on a thing we’re so sure is right that it becomes everything. In this case, Go and its proverbs. At the risk of getting meta, Go became the tale and the tale became Go. Starts simple, gets complicated. Nothing is what it seems until you get to end-game and suddenly realize “of course”. It was always this way. It was always going to end this way. It had to end this way.

There’s a great Go proverb that didn’t make it into the episode but applies nicely: “learn the nuclear tesuji”. That’s a fancy way of saying sometimes the only way to prevent a loss is to get ticked off, destroy the board and beat your enemy senseless. It’s meant in jest, but it’s strangely effective. At the very least, it might make you feel better.

Just ask Sarah Connor. And Skynet…