By Kofi Outlaw

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES is the new Fox action/drama that builds upon the lore of the TERMINATOR franchise. The show is set between the events of T2 and T3, during those years when mankind’s future savior, John Connor, and his militant mother Sarah, were on the run, trying to stay off the grid, and out of the sights of the murderous Terminators.

The Pilot episode picks up in 1999, two years or so after T2. Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son John (Thomas Dekker) are still living under assumed identities, yet have managed to craft a life for themselves. Sarah is married to a courageous EMT (OZ’s Dean Winters), a kind man, who cares for John as if the boy was his own son.

When nightmares about judgment day begin to haunt her, Sarah gets a premonition that John is still in danger again. She instructs the reluctant teenager to pack one bag and walk away from the life he has come to love. Sarah’s paranoia proves to be on point: no sooner has she fled than FBI agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones) shows up looking for her. Ellison has been tracking Sarah for years, ever since he was assigned to bring her in for the death of Miles Dyson, the brilliant robotics engineer who Sarah claimed would one day create Skynet and bring about Armageddon.

However, agent Ellison isn’t the only one on the Connors’ tail. When Sarah’s latest alias is uploaded onto an FBI website, a dormant Terminator is reactivated and missioned with eliminating John.


The Connors soon land in new rural town, and John begins school again. There he meets a pretty girl named Cameron (Summer Glau), who takes a quick shine to him. Things are beginning to look up, that is until a substitute teacher, who is really the Terminator assassin, shows up to John’s classroom and tries to mow him down with a 9mm. A chase ensues, and John is narrowly rescued by Cameron, who reveals that she too is a Terminator, sent back by the future John Connors to protect his younger self. Soon after the incident agent Ellison arrives on the scene, only to find a classroom of high school students, each of whom echo Sarah Connor’s story about unstoppable killers with mechanical parts.

The Terminator assassin hunting John is relentless. It takes Sarah hostage, and stages an ambush for John using her as bait. However John and Cameron turn the tables, springing their own trap on the Terminator and rescuing Sarah. The trio makes a hasty escape, and goes underground, into hiding. But nonstop fleeing has taken its toll: John cannot run anymore, yet he is still too young to act the great leader he is supposed to become. Ever the protective mother, Sarah vows to lead the fight against the machines until her son is old enough to hold reigns.

The trio decide to travel to the home of the late Miles Dyson. There, Sarah confronts Dyson’s widoq with the truth: Miles died by his own hand, a hero defending the future. Sarah presses the widow for information about who could still be carrying on Miles’ work. Sarah reasons that someone had to have completed the Dyson project, to create Skynet, cause Judgment Day, and ultimately cause more Terminators to come back through time after her son. However Tarissa knows nothing, and Skynet’s new origins remain a mystery.

With the Terminator assassin still on John’s heels, Cameron resorts to a drastic option. The cyborg reveals that, like herself, many other agents of the future resistance have been sent back through time by future John Connors, to guide his young self along the way. Cameron walks John and Sarah into a bank, holds it up, and demands the manager shut them in the safety deposit vault. The plan: to use components stashed in the vault by an engineer from the future to construct an ion cannon and time traveling device, left as tools for resistance fighters stranded in the past.


The killer Terminator comes banging down the vault door just as Cameron activates the time travel module. Sarah gives the deadly cyborg a face full of ion charge, and a second later she, John and Cameron are naked on a freeway in the middle of night. Cameron has transported them ahead eight years to 2007—four years before Judgment Day is supposed to occur. Though they are out of time, and all traces of their former lives are gone, Sarah and her son have found new purpose in hunting down and destroying Skynet for good.

I found this first episode of TERMINATOR: TSCC to be fairly good. The acting wasn’t too bad, the F/X’s were pretty good for network TV, and the plotline doesn’t seem like it will shy away from some heady, time-travel metaphysics, which will surely  play a role and how twists and turns develop. I’m not hooked for the season, but the show definitely has enough going for it to keep me coming back for at least a week or two. After that, we’ll see…