I have a feeling It was Summer Glau in the basement in the future practicing ballet.

How did a kick-ass character like Sarah Connor become such a wimp?

Will Bruce Davison be felt up (and licked) by the orderlies in the nut house?

How about how does Cameron return to looking normal after getting sploded? Is she gonna take a skin bath and go to a plastic surgeon? Who could they trust to do this?

You gave up on caring about the high school plots like I gave up on the entire show, huh?

Will Summer Glau find an excuse to do ballet at the prom? Will she be elected Queen? Will John's nerdy friend get in her pants? Will he still want to get in her pants if she's burned from the explosion or is she, of course, unscathed?

Do we care about the Russian mob?

Did the writers really send a squad of fighters into the past only to be killed off without doing anything or were they setting up several more meandering plotlines to be brought up haphazardly in flashbacks (Bubs is free now)?

Will anyone actually care about the answers to any of these questions, or was this a bad renewal that's already dead in the water?

U can look but you cant touch it, if you touch it imma set some drama you dont want no drama.
Well the dude probably wont mind

I think Cromartie is a great opportunity for some brilliant stunt casting guest stars if this show goes on for a while.

I don't get why John and Summer go to school at all.

But yay, James Urbanic gets to come back(evil russian mob guy, and voice of Dr. Venture)!

Here's another unanswered question...

If Summer Glau was any hotter, would she explode?

I really hope her "Cameron" character doesn't get remade like Cromartie, meaning they replace her with a new actress.

Warner Brothers would be releasing the DVD. Fox just airs it, WB makes it.

@papertiger201: The interesting thing will be to see if they bring back Summer Glau....

If she gets a skin bath she may not look the same, an obvious cover for a possible contract not being renewed.

Maybe Katee Sackhoff will play the Terminatrix, thereby cementing her typecasting as a cyborg for life. It will be impossible to make a Cyborg show without her!

There are as many proto-Skynets available as necessary; it's inevitable.

John goes to school because he wants to.

@darcymcgee:

They will bring back Summer. Friedman wrote the part for her.

@shadownode: Yah, that was my biggest gripe.

Sarah Connor is soooo protective of John, yet allows him to go to school. You'd think that after the first Terminator found him and nearly killed him, she'd just let him get his GED.

Plus, time travel stories are becoming more and more repellent to me. It's becoming a crutch for lazy writing and the issues surrounding causality are only barely considered.

I'll continue to watch it.
Because, hell, it wasn't THAT bad.

@Tim Faulkner: I hope it's dead in the water. I really hope it is.

Question: Do they really expect us to be cliffhung by the suspense of whether or not a Terminator will survive a car explosion?

@themidnighter:

No. That wasn't supposed to be the final ep of the season. It just ended up that way because of the strike.

@Plague:

Same here, the FBI SWAT-team getting shot into the swimming pool was one of the most unintentionally funny things I've seen on TV in ages, though.

"How exactly does a chess-playing computer get to become a military A.I. that destroys the world anyway? And how many proto-Skynets are there in the world exactly?"

Please, you guys don't understand this? It was explained, somewhat in the show, but chess is akin to war and strategies in winning wars. Good chess players think WAY ahead and great generals of war do the same. Thinking one move or maneuver ahead will get you killed. Thus The Turk could become Skynet due to it's "wargames" mentality.

@sandmanfvr: So they offered up the most bare bones explanation of how it could happen, probably, maybe?

That's not the evolution of Skynet, that's the evolution of a stupid idea.

T@PriorMarcus:
With the american public not to smart to catch on to alot of "technobabble" like in Star Trek, most shows dumb it down. I love technobabble and it makes Sci Fi smart (when used right). Don't blame shows/writers etc for keeping things simple, they want ratings and usually not intelligent viewers.

@Ken:

I think that's part of the dynamic between the two characters. Sarah doesn't want him to go to school, but he's going to do it with or without her approval.

@Seth L: The swat team getting thrown into the pool, that kept getting redder from blood was one of the best scenes in TV Sci-Fi ever. Plus it was set to Johnny Cash!! Then the song picks up again just in time to see my girlfiend, Summer Glau get exploded.

@sandmanfvr: A fair point. Consider yourself followed, nice rebuttal.

"What was in that basement room, with the spooky piano music, where Derek and the other future resistance fighter prisoners were being dragged?"

Obviously it was a Total Perspective Vortex. Or a timeshare opportunity...

@Seth L: Actually, it made me queasy to see cops slaughtered like that. Maybe I'm just getting old. And these slaughters strain suspension of disbelief because all hell would break loose if this happened. You didn't have to worry about it in the movies, but if you want this grounded somewhat in reality the consequences would be enormous.

@se7a7n7: Hey, hands off. I saw her first.

@shadownode: Understood.

But exactly what will it take for this kid to realize that he's the target of unstoppable, psychopathic cyborgs from the future? How many more attempts on his life (both in school and elsewhere)until he gets the idea that he needs to lay low.

I totally grok that it's the dynamic of the show, but T2 was more on-target with the Sarah Connor who went deep underground and got all para-military in anticipation of the impending war.

@Seth L: I thought it looked like a Barrymore Pool Party gone horribly wrong.

@Ken:

He'll have to strike a balance on that. If he just hides in a hole until judgement day, he won't be terribly useful.

Not going to school isn't exactly laying low, either. Kids that don't attend class tend to get noticed by neighbours, and attract the attention of authorities. The population of homeschooled is a lot smaller for robots to sift through, as well.

@shadownode: NO way a sullen EMO teenager is "going to do it anyway" when you're talking about school.

Drugs yes. Sex yes. Petty theft (as in T2) yes.

School? Hell no. He's gonna ditch that in a heartbeat.

Part of the problem of not having believeable characters.

@tlac: yeah, I dig it. Still, I think it's a safety valve in case she gets a better offer (perhaps a movie, or a Whedon penned anything which is bound to have better dialogue.)

@PriorMarcus:
(doffs cap in appreciation)

Maybe someone can answer this for me:

If inorganic matter can't time-travel unless it's covered in flesh, how did that Terminator head travel through time with them in the pilot?

@IronicSans: Please, step away from the logical wires - were dealing with The Sarah Conner Chronicles right now, the entire thing could exploded if we try to apply common sense. It's volatile.

@c0dek: A piano... with pedals and everything! In the future, there is only one piano, and the robots have it. Duh.

@Macloserboy: I agree, excessive violence makes me queasy too. It *is* one of the hallmarks of the Terminator franchise, so I guess we should expect it from the show though...

Also, Dear Network Execs,

I am a young female TV watcher with purchasing power! FEMALE. And I watch this show. Yet I too lust for the stunted emotive responses of the Glaubot. Take her away and you will have ripped my still-beating heart from my remote!

Will anyone ever point out the paradox at the heart of the "Stop Skynet" mission, namely, that if Skynet does not exist then there is no reason for Kyle Reese to travel back in time, and thus John Conner was never conceived.

@laughingacademy: The entire franchise is built upon a ton of paradoxes.

@PriorMarcus: Well, that's why they can't stop the machines, JUDGMENT DAY WILL COME!

@Seth L: I thought it was a fairly clever idea at first, but then it went. on. too. long. and became almost Python-esque. I half expected the reverse-angle to show the pool completely empty of water and completely full of bodies, in a pyramid.

Plus, the one guy who survived wouldn't see the light of day for months, they'd be "debriefing" his ass for so long.

@IronicSans: the head was covered in flesh that burned away as it traveled through time.

Apparently it was always supposed to be covered with flesh but FOX wouldn't let them show burning flesh on a terminator skull on TV (damn FCC).

@helenanapier: rofl! Glaubot! I love it! Sorry, if i'm behind the times, I haven't read that before...

@KatieH: Yep, that's what I thought. Disembodied heads flying through the air isn't very TV friendly, even for prime time I suppose.

I'm glad this show at least gets a second season. Unlike Blade: the series. I know alot of people didn't dig Sticky Fingazzz as Blade, but Chronicles really reminds me of this show. Especially the part where the cop slowly becomes aware that Vampires really do exist. Plus that show had alot of hot vampires doing nasty things. That was the only reason I ever had to watch Spike TV.

The only way to describe this show as it is now is with the word abortion. About the only part of it that was any good was in the last episode of the season, in the scene with the FBI Agents and the pool. That is the only time that the show managed to get across the fact that we were dealing with a murderous robot (I refuse to say Cyborg, artificially grown skin and hair do not cut it with me).

The rest of the time you just never can take the characters seriously. Lena Headey has no edge. The Terminators in the show come across as goofy. John seems to be, save for the whole being chased by murderbots thing, essentially a normal kid. In short, the characters are exactly opposite of what they were in the first and second movie.

There is never truly a sense of urgency in the show, which considering how the entire premise of the show is that John, Sarah, and Glaubot must dodge Terminators from the future and a number of groups in our time (law enforcement, organized crime, etc...all of which have more resources than the main characters) and save the world from an impending apocalypse is truly an achievement.

Of course, the storylines in the episodes themselves aren't exactly compelling or believable either (not only did they use a NAS as the prop for the rebuilt Turk, they actually zoomed in on the damn thing so that you could read the text next to the LED lights on the thing) and they seem to lack any internal logic.

Worse, they decided that half of everyone and everything in existence in the future decided to go back in time. They made time travel so prevevalent that one is left wondering why John Connor didn't just send every survivor, every soldier back in time.

They even managed to raise the question of why future more future technology (weapons and otherwise) wasn't taken back in time by showing how easy it is in artificial skin. Or why the soldiers sent back in time and Terminators weren't made to memorize something like lists of stocks and when their prices go up and down so that when they arrived in the past they could quickly amass resources to complete their missions.

The show manages to fail in all the same ways that the third movie did, which ultimately isn't surprising, considering it is by the same production company that made T3.

@laughingacademy: The show isn't so much built on paradoxes as it is on the premise of the inevitability of technology.

If Miles Dyson doesn't invent Skynet, someone else will sort of thing. Judgement Day is inevitable, unless humanity fights constantly to prevent it.

At least that's my slightly melo-dramatic take on it.

@darundal: The only way to describe this show as it is now is with the word abortion

That's really an offensive sentence, and use of language.

It's also a noun, and not really appropriate for describing a show. It's a specific "thing."

The show falls into the same category as T3 the movie in that T2 the movie is one of the best action films ever...ever...and following up on it makes it almost impossible to not be judged against a fairly gold standard.

T3 the movie wasn't great, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe...it just wasn't nearly as good as Terminator 2.

Similarly, T:TSCC on TV isn't nearly as good as I'd like it to be: I want it to be Firefly or Galactica Season 2, but it edges closer to Galactica Season 3 without quite reaching Bionic Woman territory.

Who knows the answers to those questions? Certainly not the writers - they are just making it up as they go.