I wasn't exactly as pumped for a Terminator series as I was for Bionic Woman, but so far it's made a better impression. If you're unfamiliar with the backstory, you should probably rent the three films that are in your nearest video store. The gist of it is that humanity will soon come to an end during an apocalypse engineered by artificially intelligent machines that we created. Our only savior is a boy named John Connor and his only protection is his mother Sarah. Grown-up Johnny ingeniously sends A.I. bodyguards back in time in order to save his teenage self. In the films, that bodyguard is known as the Terminator and is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the TV show, the kid's protection is a young girl named Cameron, played by the chillingly robotic Summer Glau (Serenity). Cast as the messiah is Heroes' alum Thomas Dekker. But as the title infers, the main character of the show is his mother, the resilient Lena Headey (300).
In the pilot, Sarah has a nightmare about her son being murdered by a mechanical mercinary, which she takes as a prophecy. She immediately packs her bags and ditches her fiancee, so she and John can escape the inevitable. Luckily, Cameron infiltrates his new school as a student and slows the mercenary down long enough to take both of them to safety. All of this ruckus plus her fiancee's missing person's claim, raise the awareness of an FBI agent, James Ellison (Richard T. Jones from Why Did I Get Married?), who has been searching for them ever since she killed a man who would one day design Skynet, the cause of the apocalypse. John is so fed-up with running all the time and never getting to be a normal kid that he begs his mom to let him fight back. She resolves to find the new person who develops Skynet, which leads to Cameron helping them time travel. They go from 1999 to 2007.
Once they're in this new time period, they're pretty much at the mercy of Cameron, since they are not too familiar with this world. Think about it. If you skipped roughly 7 years of time, you'd have missed a lot--especially politically and technologically. When some gangster she's trying to get fake IDs from mentions how dangerous it is to provide such a thing after 9/11, she is completely clueless as to what he's referring to. Then he describes the ill-fated day, giving her the opportunity to explain why this show is such a poignant addition to this generation's pop culture history: "I cannot imagine the apocalypse...If I had witnessed [9/11], I'm sure I would've thought the end is near. I'm sure I would've thought, we have failed."
I'll keep watching the show for a couple of reasons, the main one being that there is still so much that Cameron has failed to tell them that I'm interested in finding out. For example, I believe the real reason they time-traveled was because Sarah dies from cancer in 2005. Such a secret adds the element that she'll have to not only fight off machines, but a fatal disease while preparing John for war. And if she doesn't find a donor, she'll only has 5-6 years to live. Then there's the additional aspect of time travel which isn't heavily used in the films. According to Cameron, they can't bring anything with them from the future, so they have to send people back to build it--meaning there are hidden treasures all over. The people that they send are resistance fighters, which means that there are people from the future hidden in plain sight. Their enemy also sent Terminators back in time, but they cannot identify John because they don't know what he looks like. But if their systems are updated, they will try to attack--meaning, random people can assault him on the street.
The action itself is sometimes boring--honestly, it's just a bunch of machines clunking together with blank expressions. The most interesting and amusing portions of the show are when Sarah and John interact with Cameron. Like I said, she has a lot of secrets. One of which may have to do with her assertion that she's not like the other Terminators. I have a feeling she might have been modeled after John's future girlfriend/wife and infused with all of her memories. But the fact that she's keeping secrets puts Sarah on edge. She continuously makes a point of treating her like a machine and not a person, referring to her as Tin Man and chucking her out of the window a couple stories up when her system shuts down. John, however, shows signs of being smitten. But usually he's just griping about not being able to hang out at the mall or use computers.
So if you love the films and are interested in a little more action--in addition to your Chuck, Heroes, and Bionic Woman roster--then you might want to TiVo this.
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