The Connor Wars Writer’s Room 30 – The Fourth Season

If you haven’t already, please take a read of the fourth season premiere script of The Connor Wars, F0401 – “Chronicle”. Not only will the rest of this make a little more sense, but it will also make moot anything that could be thought of as a spoiler.

If you are at all spoiler-phobic, you need to bail out NOW. Because once this paragraph is ended, any surprise you want to have about the season 4 premiere will be but a memory. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Season 3 was about the rapid rise of John Connor to becoming “The” John Connor. Some might say “too rapid a rise” (I’d be one of them), but sometimes you have to just go with it. Season 4 is about the consequences of that ascension. This is newer territory than a lot of Terminator stuff we’ve seen. It’s not long after the start of this episode one where the TSCC timeline would have had Derek, Cameron, Jesse, Riley, and seventy-bazillion T-888s from the future going back to the past.

Now it’s war. It’s the resistance. It’s Skynet. Mano a mano. For upwards of 8 years after the season 3 finale. And I’m writing it up in five teleplays and one screenplay (or the equivalent of 7 episodes). Needless to say, a lot of time and a lot of events are going to be covered in not a lot of pages. In comparison, the twenty-two episodes of season 3 covered a period from about mid-March 2027 to mid-late-December 2027. Nine months. And even then, if you’ll recall, I was speeding on through the season through the bulk of the middle episodes.

It’s going to be faster, now.

An effect of this speed-up will likely be a bit off choppiness in the storytelling. With the introduction of Clio, the chronicler from the future, I’m hoping to smooth out some of the rougher edges of the story. Clio is the all-the-results everywoman. I intentionally made her able to conform to any of the likely scenarios of who wins the war.

At the end of the season, there will be a declared winner. There’s still going to be loss. There is going to be gain. I hope that, in the end, most of you are satisfied with how I end up tying things together. We’ll see. There’s still a lot of writing for me to do from now until then…and I’d best get to it.