Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TV Series) Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep (2009) User Reviews

Sleep deprivation

[GameAndWatch · 7/10 · 6 September 2013]

I liked the idea of this episode and enjoyed it to some extent, but perhaps the writers tried a little hard.

I'll confess upfront that I don't really enjoy this Sarah Connor (or her hair style or terrible accent). It's not helped either that her character has been neglected.

Sarah is not the only one that the writers have failed to flesh out. If I were to try to pick the most wooden character of the series I'd have plenty to choose from. Even John, but he's cool and pretty enough and the future leader of man kind, so I can let that one slide. Maybe there are just too many characters and not enough screen time.

I've become a little bored with the series. At this point in I'm wondering if I can even be bothered to ride it through to the end.

I think what happened was that back at the desert warehouse, Sarah was knocked out. She was then taken somewhere, drugged and questioned by Winston. Which begs the question as to when she actually got shot in the leg. Maybe it was all in her head (while her leg was being taken care of). Or perhaps this whole outing occurred after the wake.

If you look at the episode Desert Cantos, she seems in pretty good shape as she lifts herself through a window. The dialogue that John Henry records states that someone had been shot at the warehouse, presumably Winston. In which case the pair of them make a speedy recovery.

So perhaps Sarah never got shot at all and we had a couple of episodes of delirious paranoia. After all, am I supposed to believe that Sarah doggedly went through every surveillance tape of each employee? That would have required a lot of video forwarding and a lot of popcorn. Best leave that sort of job to the cyborg.

Highlights: the Coyote and Cameron in her underwear.

Dog Eat Dog...

[Xstal · 5/10 · 8 August 2022]

Sarah's nightmares become all too real, causing stress that's really tough to deal, awake and asleep, this episode's bleak, the mothership is listing, soon to keel.

A bad trip

[thefilmguy7 · 2/10 · 4 December 2009]

Wow with episodes like this it's no wonder the show got canceled. The second season really just got caught in a downward spiral in quality. It increasingly lost sight and focus of what the show was supposed to be. This episode was just ridiculous. My top favorite films are stuff like Donnie Darko, Fight Club, and The Fountain. So I'm definitely a fan of cerebral mind benders but this episode just did a terrible job at trying to be smart. It was just a mess and the worst part is that it was a mess that meant nothing in the grand scheme of the show. This whole episode was just a waste of time. I just don't know what the creative team was thinking with this crap. This show had a lot of potential but they just totally lost their way by this point.

Absolute Mind Trip

[Castellan · 9 October 2009]

One of my favorites of the series, the title character makes a huge leap forward in character development. The question of the value of human life is brought in the fore again. It portrays clearly a shift for Sarah on the scale of morality that all the characters in the Connor household dynamic sit on. The need for vigilance and internal pressure on Sarah is so well illustrated in the quote from Hamlet that the title is drawn from: "Some must watch, while some must sleep: so runs away the world."

This episode is most definitely one that is much better when watched a second time. Much of the surprising content that rewards the audience's attention to detail is hidden in things like some of the props, the costume choices, the way dialogue in a few scenes parallels previous episodes, and the minor shifts the characters have taken toward similarity to each other.

Nightmares

[Tweekums · 8/10 · 13 February 2013]

As the episode starts Sarah calls John to tell him that she has found a plant that supplied metals to the warehouse that was destroyed two episodes back; as she goes to investigate it she sees a coyote then a man shoots her in the back with a taser. Suddenly she wakes up; she is in a clinic to help her with her sleeping. Every time she sleeps she dreams about the man; he has her captive in a van and is questioning her. She doesn't know what the dreams mean but grows to believe something strange is going on at the clinic. Eventually she and John locate a room in the basement here she must confront the nurse who she believed was up to no good and finally escape the nightmares.

This is a rather strange episode; I spent much of it wondering just why she was in the clinic when we hadn't seen her checking in; I even wondered if I'd missed an episode! Eventually the reason we didn't see her checking in comes later and when it does it is quite a shock! There is a good amount of action; some of it quite shocking… I know seeing a man stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle made me cringe. The episode was pretty good although I don't think it would be disastrous if you missed it as it didn't appear to advance the main plot; it was just a good stand alone episode.

What?

[robert-jones2582 · 2/10 · 9 July 2010]

It confounds me how bad this episode was, when the following six were some of the best episodes of the entire show. I suppose they already had their best episodes planned out and saved for last, and they just didn't have enough material for another episode, so they decided to write something absolutely horrific just for kicks.

This is quite possibly the worst episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles that was made, and possibly the reason for the show not getting a third season. Part of it was the narration. Again. After 24 episodes of the show, almost all of which started with Sarah Connor's melodramatic voice-overs, it gets old. If there's one thing I have learned from this show, it's that you cannot start every episode of a show the same way. The best episodes of season 2 in my opinion--Samson & Delilah, Alison from Palmdale, Brothers of Nablus, Self Made Man, and every episode after this one except To the Lighthouse--did not start with any sort of narration. They had variety, something the other episodes didn't.

Especially this one. This episode was the same drug-induced crap throughout. It was irrelevant, hardly meant anything that I could discern, and the only good parts were the scenes of John and Cameron. If the episode, as I suspect, was supposed to show us Sarah's fears, etc., I think that the scenes of John and Cameron accurately depicted her feelings towards both of them.

That's why it gets a 2 rather than a 1.

An episode sent back through time

[keyope · 2/10 · 19 August 2022]

This is the lowest ranked episode of the show on imdb and for good reason. It has nothing to do with any of the other episodes. It's as if this episode was sent back from an alternate future where there was a third season. Not only does it not fit into the timeline of these episodes, but it's really boring. The last few episodes were building towards something, but then suddenly in this episode Sarah is in a sleep clinic because she's had insomnia for 2 weeks. Eh?

The insomnia wasn't mentioned in the previous episodes. In this one she's just having lots of boring dreams, and occasionally talking to a sleep therapist in the clinic. Then when this episode ends having achieved nothing, the next episode carries on like this never happened. It's the ultimate filler episode. I'm only giving it a two because there was a brief and entirely unnecessary shot of Cameron in her pants.

Bottomed out

[LaverneandShirleysucks · 1/10 · 11 February 2022]

This was painful to sit through and had zero relevance to the main plot of the show. Season one was so great but it seems they just hit a wall and ran out of ideas by this point and bottomed out. You don't know what's Sarah's dream or what's reality in this mess of an episode and it's almost as if they were purposely trying to kill the show. This doesn't even get one star. In fact, there should be a zero star option for pitiful episodes like this. Ugh.

Spacefiller sleepfest

[briandecarrun · 2/10 · 23 October 2016]

This episode is a good example of a wasteful spacefiller when writers are out of ideas and want to space-fill. Probably the first sign that the writers couldn't keep a full series of ideas and if the network saw this, well then it maybe made up their mind. Lena Headey for me always seem to overact as Miss Angry throughout the series so again something the writers could have maybe rounded her a bit more. This series had no much potential with some excellent episodes but within them you had turkeys like these and some parts of a script which seemed to be drawing it out. This episode is the worst in the series and really shows maybe why there was not the confidence in the writers to make another series without turkey episodes like this one.

Bad bad trip

[verexal · 2/10 · 21 August 2010]

I have been looking at the whole show again to see/appreciate how much I'd miss it... and I've been really disappointed in the second year. Yes, Summer Glau is more glamorous than the previous year, they brought in extra people to bring out her attributes, but that's about the only positive aspect.

This sleep episode is its nadir, unquestionably. I kept stopping and wondering what I'd missed. It's incomprehensible across the board at a time when the series needed to be peaking and sparking sponsors to be screaming for it to be kept alive.

Writing this makes no difference. The show is gone. But it's a reality check. I'll miss what they had the first year. The showrunners killed the show; the director killed this episode.

I have enjoyed both seasons.. . But.

[johnto1-1 · 1/10 · 24 March 2009]

I have enjoyed all episodes of season 1 and every episode of season 2 up to this episode. I do not like a story, or a plot that has no live action. No character development, no robotic action. This episode is based totally on Sarah's dreams and drug induced imaginings. I waited to watch the 3 episodes which followed before I commented on this. I feared the script writer had run out of ideas. Fortunatelly, I can tell you this is an isolated case and I hope we don't see more like it. I welcome second opinion, so do watch it, maybe I missed something, when I fell asleep from shear boredom. I hope we get Season 3, although having just spent $200 million on Salvation. Perhaps I shouldn't ask for more.

Playing With Mind

[Littleman95 · 4/10 · 21 January 2021]

Sincerely this episode was messed up. Nothing is really totally clear and it was pointless. Like I said before, I guess they are getting out of ideas for there episodes. I start thinking about quitting this show.