Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles should probably be a major disappointment.  You don't just take a billion dollar franchise known for some of the greatest action ever put on film, completely discredit the plot of one of the movies (Terminator 3), recast the protector Terminator by replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger with a pint-sized girl from Texas (Summer Glau), turn John Connor into an angst-y teenager, make the action scenes work on a television budget and expect to create a worthwhile addition to the world of Terminator.  But, somehow, FOX did.  Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles succeeds, surprisingly so, and the reason is simple: they stuck to what made the movies so good.  Solid characters, a clear, un-cluttered sci-fi story, and good action.  I've seen people roll their eyes at the Sarah Connor Chronicles commercials, not because they don't like the Terminator movies (who doesn't?) or because the promotions are poor (they're OK), but because Sarah Connor feels like a shameless attempt to squeeze more out of a franchise whose best days lay over a decade ago.  However, viewers will be pleasantly surprised by what they get from tonight's premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  It's a well-executed continuation of the series, punctuated by the best action you'll find on network TV, an attractive cast and satisfying sci-fi storytelling.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks up a few years after the events of Terminator 2.  John Connor (Heroes' Thomas Dekker) is a teenager, working his way through high school.  Sarah Connor (300's Lena Headey) works as a waitress in whatever small town she and her son end up migrating too.  The duo is constantly on the run, assuming different aliases in an attempt to stay hidden from the Terminators who've been sent from the future to kill John Connor.  If you aren't familiar with the first two Terminator movies, don't worry, that knowledge isn't necessary for watching Sarah Connor.  In class one day, John meets Cameron (Firefly's Summer Glau), an odd girl who turns out to be a protector Terminator, sent to help keep John from being killed.  We spend most of the pilot watching the trio escape from an evil Terminator.

However, The Sarah Connor Chronicles isn't going to be The Fugitive with Robots.  Sick of running, Sarah decides that she's going to unravel the mystery of SkyNet (she thought her T2 actions may have stopped the robot uprising before it began...no dice).  There is a twist at the end of the pilot (which I won't ruin) that sets up the series' premise – it's a good one.  Also in on the action is Agent Ellison, an FBI investigator hot on Sarah Connor's trail.  Though he first believes Connor's story of killer robots from the future are the ramblings of a crazy person, he sees some things during his pursuit that may make him a believer after all. 

Josh Friedman (“War of the Worlds”) is the show runner and wrote the pilot script.  He writes good action and natural exposition, and the characters seem well-rounded enough (though this may just be a result of me knowing the characters previously).  The beauty of the pilot script is the amount of action (which is basically non-stop) that also combines a ton of effortless set-up for the entire series.  The four main cast members are all given difficult tasks, and they succeed in varying degrees.  The best of the four is probably Thomas Dekker, who gives John Connor a nice edge.  His acting has some electricity to it, and you'll believe his inner struggle, his abundance of self-doubt.  Richard T. Jones, as Agent Ellison, doesn't get any screen time with any of the other main cast members in the pilot, but he delivers extended, information heavy dialogue as well as you could hope.  Summer Glau plays a different model of Terminator than we've ever seen nefore and, as a result, it's hard to make anything of how she portrays it right now.  She passes for a slightly off, but believable high schooler in her first scene, but gets more robotic as the episode goes along.  The viewer is given the hint that, perhaps, Cameron is capable of much more emotion than any Terminator before her.    Maybe it's inconsistency on Glau's part, maybe it's a larger part of the story.

Lena Headey feels a bit miscast as Sarah Connor.  Linda Hamilton really inhabited that role, especially in T2, when she got insanely buff, and generally kicked loads of ass.  Headey is a bit slight for the role, physically.  She portrays the mother/son bond with Dekker very well and her ability to be both overbearing and loving at the same time is impressive, but there's just one thing: her American accent sucks.  Headey is a British actress, a good one, but (at least at the time of the pilot) she has yet to master her American cadence.  Her English accent floats in and out of almost every line of dialogue, and it's a bit distracting.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is not perfect.  It's cheesy at times, the robots occasionally do things I don't think robots would do, and I'm not sure how it will fare in future episodes.  But, if you're a fan of the movies or you like action or if you have nothing to watch on Mondays, give Sarah Connor a chance.  It's one of the best things TV has going in this strike-stained Winter of 2008.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of FOX)