The Terminator #4 // Review

It’s 1965. The Baltic Sea. Captain Masha Alekseev is in charge of a Whiskey-Class Soviet submarine. The ship is carrying-out a classified operation tht includes rather unwelcome company from the KGB. He’s a courier responsible for the mysterious cargo that the ship is transporting. Captain Alekseev is about to find out the full extent of the difficulty in The Terminator #4. Writer Declan Shalvey continues an exploration of events around the edges of the Terminator franchise that surmise a whole lot of time travel that goes way beyond what was suggested in the original movies. The story makes it to page and panel courtesy of artist Lorenzo Re. Moody, murky color decorates the proceedings thanks to color artist Colin Craker.

The captain doesn’t have a whole lot of time to worry about the people onboard the submarine. The sub’s being attacked by strange weaponry that doesn’t seem at all like the normal depth charges that they might be running into. The KGB figure aboard the sub doesn’t seem concerned, but there’s something really disturbing about him...especially when he takes command of the sub and finds himself up against everyone else onboard...and they find out that he’s not exactly human.

There would have to be insanely complicated politics in the future world of The Terminator franchise. Any world that has AI that deeply integrated with the basic survival of the human race is going to run into problems that are going to seem quite bewildering to people serving on the front lines of something as primal as the Cold War. Shalvey explores a bit of this in something that plays a bit more like an abbreviated version of The Thing or Alien than anything else. There ARE elements that feel very deeply rooted in the Terminator franchise, but this particular story feels much more of a fusion between it and other Cold War-era sci-fi franchises.

The entire thing takes place on a 250-foot long submarine that could only fit a cramped, little complement of 52 people.  Re balances the cramped conditions of the sub against the big intensity of the drama. There ARE lost of scenes that feel like they’re taking place in a very, very small space, but the tight drama never feels as uncomfortably close as it would on an underwater vessel of this size. Re DOES capture the drama, but it doesn’t feel as distinct to the setting as it could have. Craker follows Re’s lead by delivering muted color to the page with the occasional splash or spray of hot color around the edges of everything.

There’s quite a lot that had been suggested by the first couple of Terminator movies that might have suggested that there was a hell of a lot going on in the future that could have been quite a bit more complicated. Shalvey and company explore another end of the potentially dangerous complexity of time travel in a world of AI-dominated technocracy.

Grade: B