text: Thread: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  Posts 13,283	Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  They showed the pilot for this one last night on FOX, with the second episode being shown tonight. Episode 1 introduced us to high-school age John Connor with his mother Sarah, still on the run with seemingly no apparent reason (seeing as, from their point of view, they should still think they succeeded in stopping SkyNet from being created due to their actions in T2). It also introduced their new now-standard plot device of reprogramed Terminator-Protector, who happens to look like a high-school teenager. Hints are also dropped that this new TerminaTeen is even more 'human' than previous models.
  Overall, I though the show was fairly entertaining. There seemed to be no evident drop in production values -- I'd have a hard time distinguishing between this show and watching one of the movies on TV. The producers must figure that everyone knows where they're going, because the show makes absolutely no attempt to catch you up on any of John & Sarah's backstory. They reference the movies fairly regularly, even visiting the Dyson family (of T2 fame) with no explanation at all of who they were.
  The continuity makes my head hurt a bit, though. By all indications, this show seems to take place between T2 and T3. From the point of view of John and Sarah Connor, they should believe that their actions in T2 averted Judgement Day. Yet, they're still running. Also, the show takes liberties with the already bad time-travel rules established in the series by saying that somebody was sent back in time to the 1960s to build a time-travel device so that it could be there to later send John, Sarah, and TerminaTeen into the future to stop Cyberdyne Systems yet again. All of this, apparently, will be forgotten by John Connor when he later appears confused to see more terminators in T3. I'll probably keep watching, but that's mostly because I think the source material for this stuff that Cameron developed is fairly fantastic (albeit derivative of any number of other sci-fi authors) and it's just fun to revisit this world/concept.