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.

“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.

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.

Top Ten Things To Look Forward To In Tonight’s Alpine Fields

10. Sarah Connor with a sledgehammer.
9. Return of a character not seen since Dungeons and Dragons.
8. Haley Hudson (Weeds‘ Quinn Hodes) as…?
7. Our favorite nuclear power plant turned Resistance Base — Serrano Point.
6. Cameron being that crazy, kooky cyborg, Cameron (you like her paired up with Sarah, you say?)
5. One mini-Firefly reunion (Summer Glau and Carlos Jacott).
4. Funny Games influence on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
3. Double-team directing! An episode brought to you by both Charles Beeson (Allison from Palmdale) AND Bryan Spicer (Goodbye to All That).
2. More insight into the complexities of Jesse (and Derek, for that matter!).
1. Oscar Wilde’s last words.

Tonight. 8PM/7PMc. Only on FOX.

This promo says tomorrow, but it’s all-new and it’s TONIGHT.

Alpine Fields. Three stories. One ending.
Tonight. 8PM/7PMc.

Derek and Jesse are to… ?

Alpine Fields. Monday 8PM/7PMc. Only on FOX.

Sarah and Cameron are to David, Anne, and Lauren as… ?

Alpine Fields. Monday 8PM/7PMc. Only on FOX.

Sarah and Cameron are to David, Anne, and Lauren as…
Lauren and Anne are to Derek as…
Derek and Jesse are to… ?

Alpine Fields.

Three stories. One ending. Next Monday, 8PM/7PMc.

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.