Welcome to Cathode Ray Mission, veteran critic David O’Connell’s semi-regular deep dive into the history of genre television. Here you’ll find everything from Gerry Anderson puppets to long-forgotten horror anthologies, one-season wonders, long-running classics, and more – the weirder and more obscure the better. Long live the new flesh!
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
2 Seasons
Created by Josh Friedman (based on characters created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd)
Starring Lena Headey, Summer Glau, Thomas Dekker
In 2008, the best Game of Thrones actor to ever play Sarah Connor (it is known, Khalessi), loaded her shotgun and strutted onto the small screen.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, initially taking place four years after those events, mostly ignoring the timeline of the previously released sequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
None other than Cersei Lannister herself (Lena Headey) starred in the title role, with Summer Glau (Firefly) taking on the role of Cameron, a model T-889 F Terminator, sent back to bodyguard a teenage John Connor (Thomas Dekker) from future threats. Mainly this threat consisted of the reoccurring series villain, Cromartie (Garret Dillahunt) – a T-888 with specific orders to hunt down Sarah and John. However, as the show evolved, those threats became much more complicated, as the small Resistance cell struggled to thwart Skynet’s plans.
Wildly ambitious, this series often smacks up against its own limitations, mostly budgetary, notably in the pilot episode, which really is a litany of all the series’ woes. That first episode is tasked with wiping out the continuity of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and giving us an alternative timeline to develop the series in. It does this by skipping John and Sarah from the ’90s into the future of 2007, which seems like a drastic bending of the rules previously established rather than a clear break. The pilot also struggles to find its style, relying on a dizzying array of cuts in its action scenes, to hide its budgetary deficiencies.
Thankfully the show does settle down quickly, and within a few episodes begins to prove its worth, something that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles would continue to do, up to its unresolved cliffhanger of a finale. It’d still be held prisoner by its purse strings, but would creatively work around it (something very much in the spirit of Cameron’s original guerrilla film making on The Terminator). What it did better than any other Terminator sequel since Judgement Day was expand the mythos in an interesting and well thought-out manner. It showed a genuine respect for the subject matter, often lifting entire chunks of dialogue from the first two films, and using them with an almost fetishistic reverence. But it wasn’t afraid to develop something of its own, examining the events both before and after the fall of Skynet, and seeing some something very different for John Connor.
As the series developed we see a future where John Connor has won the war, but is in danger of losing the peace. A future where he is still revered by the ragtag freedom fighters he commanded, but not entirely trusted due to his use of reprogrammed Terminators (“metal”) as a military asset. Cameron is seen as a symbol of this both in the present (by the Resistance fighters they meet, and John’s family), and in the future (where she may be something more again). Cameron in the present, may be doing more than protecting John’s future, she may be influencing and teaching him in ways that will affect that future peace.
Then there’s the suggestion that the timeline is fluid – a premise that Terminator 2 embraced, while the first film is a closed loop. As Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles progresses you can certainly hear the thunderous beating of butterfly wings, where a future that our cast of regulars see set in stone becomes more and more altered as the series progresses (until the surprise cliffhanger reveal at the end of season two, where John Connor is no longer recognised as the Resistance leader in the future). In part this is brought about through the core characters’ interactions, but in the second season it’s also through the machinations of ZeiraCorp and their CEO, Catherine Weaver (quickly revealed to be a liquid metal T-1001, played by Garbage’s Shirley Manson). Weaver is actively attempting to build an AI, and although the audience is originally lead to believe it’s a precursor to Skynet, it’s suggested that “John Henry” may be something quite different. By the end of its second season, the series had created a very fertile ground to grow the Terminator franchise in, beyond merely riffing on the first two films.
Finally, all this is presented against the moral ambiguity of being a resistance cell, especially conveyed through the lens of a post 9/11 world. That question of how far they are willing to go, how much of their humanity they must sacrifice, is a constant point of tension between Reese (Derek Reese, brother of The Terminator‘s Kyle, played by Brian Austin Green), Sarah, John, and Cameron – and consequentially great fodder for drama. Add to this John struggling to gain his own sense of independence from his fiercely protective mother, and the implication that all the characters (bar Cameron) are suffering from PTSD, and scriptwriters certainly weren’t lacking for something to write about.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have been an imperfect creation, struggling to bring the world of a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster to life on a TV series budget, but it certainly was an interesting one. The imagination and inventiveness it frequently demonstrates, certainly went a long way to covering its flaws. With series creator Josh Friedman one of the numerous writers attached to Terminator: Dark Fate, hopefully he can bring that same sense of originality to a franchise clearly in need of revitalisation.
