Terminating Television on Monday Night

Over the last few weeks somehow Mondays have become a night of terminating.  First there was American Gladiators, which is all about terminating the competition, and now there's Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles, too.  If there's ever been a show more about terminating I can't imagine it.

Except of course that last night Sarah Connor didn't terminate anyone.  She had this perfectly good guy, Andy, who ought to have been terminated, but she didn't do it.  Andy, you see, developed this awesome computer that was really swell at playing chess and had apparently developed "moods" and the ability to think for itself.  There Sarah was, trying to work out who was going to create Skynet now that Miles Dyson is dead, and she had a great candidate.  Andy had even worked as an intern for Dyson at Cyberdyne.  Sarah ought to have ended him then and there, but she didn't do it.

Listen, stop your foolishness, it's not like I'm advocating terminating people willy-nilly, just fictional characters in a fictional show that have a very good chance at developing a computer system that will eliminate the vast majority of humanity in a nuclear holocaust.  If you could prevent Judgment Day, wouldn't you?  Sarah chose not to.  She just destroyed the computer he was building.  How is that going to help?  Andy can just rebuild it, he can make it stronger, faster, better.  It wouldn't even take him the same 8 years that it took to make the first version.  I know that Andy didn't mean to start down the road towards building a computer that was going to almost end the world, but he had, and he ought to have paid the price. 

Over on Gladiators, one of the contestants, Jennifer, almost terminated my enjoyment of the show.  She was this incredibly whiny contestant, that just prior to her Eliminator run (for which she had a head start), complained about not feeling well.  Apparently her ending up in the water twice on events was enough to start, within the span of a couple of hours, some horrific cold that was going to prevent her from running the Eliminator to the best of her ability.  What an absolute cop-out.  Setting up an excuse for a loss that hasn't yet occurred is not what one likes to see out of a competitor in a sporting event. 

Jennifer did in fact come in ahead of her competition in the Eliminator, winning the night.  Happily though, her time was too slow to allow her to advance to the next round of the competition.  Good riddance.  If we don't see her again it'll be too soon. 

She may be a solid athlete and she may have honestly not felt great prior to the run, but setting up your excuse for a defeat in advance is not how good competitors act.  Can you imagine if Tom Brady went into a Super Bowl press conference next week and explained how his thumb was bothering him and how he didn't think his team would win because of some soreness?  There would be an uproar.  There ought to be an uproar, and Hulk, who was interviewing Jennifer when she started whining should have called her on it.

The Hulk ought to have terminated her before she ever ran the Eliminator.