I'll admit, I broke up with Terminator a few weeks into the second season. It wasn't painful, we just drifted apart, seeing other people, and before I knew it, I had three episodes on my TiVo and very little desire to watch them. That delete button was just so... tempting, goddammit. But looking at the suggestions Charlie came up with for why the show wasn't at Lost levels, some seem ridiculous ("Not enough alpha males"? Seriously? That "problem" hasn't affected the popularity of female-led shows like Gray's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, The Closer or, for those looking for something a little closer to genre home, Buffy), but others were on the button - or remarkably close - to why I lost interest in the show... and, more than likely, why others never had interest in the first place.

The central conceit of the show is too narrow.
"We must stop the oncoming robot apocalypse, mostly by running away from and then destroying killer robots that are chasing us" is a great idea for a story and, as the Terminator movies have shown, can be very effective in the short term. But as the central idea behind a theoretically open-ended story like a television series, it's too little, too repetitive and ultimately boring - Setting up a cat and mouse game as the series tries to do, no matter how interesting, fails, because if neither side can ever score a definitive victory - and they can't, because one side winning ends the series, the way that it's set up - then the stories have no real impact and become meaningless. Charlie complained that "people think they know what it's about, because it's based on a movie franchise," and that's essentially true - but the real problem isn't with the audience's expectations based on the movies, but the fact that the show hasn't shown any desire to break with those basic expectations.

(One thing that would bring me back to the show? Less Terminators, less Skynet. If the show expanded its horizons - like Buffy going beyond vampires, for example - then that would be unexpected enough to signal that the creators were looking to appeal to more people than just the fans of the movies.)

There's no hook for the audience.
I know, you're sitting there spluttering "Summer Glau being a cute little reformed killer robot trying to stop the oncoming robot apocalypse isn't enough of a hook?" (And, in my mind, doing so in a Simpsons' Comic Book Guy voice, just because), but that's not the hook that I'm talking about. Lost captured the attention of its audience by hooking them in with a series of questions about the show from the very first episode: What is the island? What's with the smoke monster? Why have they crashed? Will they get off the island? (Now, they almost lost that audience by not answering those questions for a long time, but that's another story.) Heroes went another route in trying to hook its audience, by coming up with "Save the cheerleader, save the world" - Essentially the same idea of changing the future as Terminator, but with a catchier explanation and, more importantly, a pay-off. It's not that Terminator doesn't have the potential to appeal to a Heroes or Lost-size audience, more that it doesn't seem to want to tell that audience about that potential, or make it easy for them to jump in.
All of the characters are unlikable.
I can't be alone in thinking that all of the characters on Terminator are assholes, right? It makes a lot of sense, storywise - They're all so driven by their missions and their destinies that they don't have anything resembling social skills or the ability/time to go beyond their immediate needs, which are generally "I must stop/assist the oncoming robot apocalypse" - but as a casual viewer, it's tiring and boring. It also highlights one of the real barriers that's keeping this show from breaking through to a larger audience: This isn't a character-led show. It's all about the plot, and the characters are all very clearly in service to the plot... which stops them from being not only relatable to a mass audience, but also stops them from being believable.

Compare the show to, as Charlie did, Lost. While the island drama has as much of a plot-driven storyline that forces its characters to stay in near-constant "What is that smoke monster Oh God all the Others are going to kill us Is that a tanker Oh crap it's blowing up" anxiety, its characters still had time to find humor, romance, and other kinds of emotions in there as well (And the flashback device, as frustrating as it can be at times, allowed us to get to know the characters away from all that island anxiety, so that we cared about the ever-present danger even more as a result). Terminator doesn't do that kind of thing nearly enough.

It's not like people haven't tried to like the show.
To be brutally honest, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is its own worst enemy. It's one thing to ask why the show doesn't have 12 million viewers, but the premiere episode had around 19 million, and they've just dropped off ever since. The problem isn't that people haven't given the show a chance; it's that the show hasn't given them enough reason to stick around.

In a way, I think that Lost is a bad comparison for Terminator. While thinking about Charlie's question, and the show itself, I kept coming back to Battlestar Galactica. It may not seem like the most obvious choice (After all, more people watch Terminator than BSG, if only because more people watch Fox than SciFi in general), but it strikes me as the closest thing to Terminator out there: It's a spin-off of a familiar franchise that deals with apocalyptic themes and similarly driven characters - not to mention robots that look like humans and are out to kill us. But it does everything right: It gives us characters who we can relate to and believe in, who manage to behave like real people in between all the drama. It steps outside its central conceit to give us legal dramas and Iraq War metaphors and, yes, even annoying Starbuck-centric "I am an angel of light" moments. And it even manages to reinvent itself enough in a way that not only gives viewers a steady stream of new memes (Will they find Earth? Who will win the election Will they get off New Caprica? Who are the final five? Who is the final Cylon? What the frak happened to Earth? etc.) but also, most importantly, enough payoff to make those questions and hooks worthwhile.

Why isn't Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles the new Lost? Because it's an entirely different show with entirely different aims, I think. But I also think that it shouldn't try to be, really; instead, I'd much rather they looked at Battlestar Galactica a bit more closely and learned how they did it. If Terminator ever becomes as compelling as BSG, then the viewers will hear about it and come back, after all.

As many critics have pointed out, writing YA fiction doesn't mean avoiding so-called adult topics like sex, horror, and politics. China Mieville has written a dark YA novel called Un Lun Dun, and Cory Doctorow has published the highly-political YA book Little Brother. It sounds like Paolo Bacigalupi's YA novel will be political, too. So what exactly separates YA fiction from A fiction? It would seem that it's simply the ages of the protagonists. YA fiction features teen heroes, and A fiction features those over 18.

If age of protagonists is the delineator, that means publishers could easily repackage Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep as YA fiction, since at least half the novel is about two young people on a strange planet. Or hell, why not make Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem YA too? Its protagonist is just 18 years old. But nobody would think Stephenson's book was for young people, just as they wouldn't likely slap "young adult" on the cover of a Vinge tome. Obviously age isn't the only indicator, then: There is something more than safe subjects or young characters that makes a book YA.

I think you and I know exactly what that "something" is. It's niche marketing. We've already got clothing, games, and technologies aimed at teenagers. Now we have scifi books aimed at them too. I don't want you to think that I have some giant objection to niche marketing, because I don't. It's helpful to have bookstores divided up into sections. What I don't like is when one of those sections is specifically designed to repel me, to make me think that I shouldn't be there.

When scifi novels with adolescent protagonists are marketed as "just for adolescents," a curtain of taboo falls between most adults and that novel. In an era where there is so much legal panic around relations between adults and young adults, it's hard to deny your knee-jerk response that there's something slightly distasteful and pedophilic about an adult reading stories aimed at people under the age of 18. I just can't get that scene from the movie Happiness out of my head, where we figure out that one of the main characters is a pedophile because he buys Tiger Beat magazine.

What I'm trying to say is that labeling novels YA in the hope that that will make them "mainstream" may actually backfire. You will certainly alienate possible adult readers, who feel vaguely nasty for cozying up with a genre aimed at teens. And I believe in the end you will lose teen readers, who are exactly the sorts of people who dislike being told that their youth bars them from understanding adult novels. What self-respecting 15-year-old wants to read "young adult" fiction when she could be reading stuff actually written for adults?

The beauty of science fiction is that our hypothetical 15-year-old can read adult fiction and enjoy it just as much as adults do. Not because scifi is simplistic, but because it usually operates on multiple levels: One level is devoted to an adventurous plot, and the other seethes with social subtext and commentary. The most successful scifi novels should work as entertainment for people of any age, and can suggest deeper ideas to people who have been on Earth long enough to want a little contemplation with their space battles.

Many of the recent and forthcoming YA novels in scifi could just as easily be marketed as novels without any particular age designation. My guess is that young people would read them anyway, just as I read adult novels by Rudy Rucker, John Varley, and Robert Silverberg when I was in the "young adult" target market.

If we really want to open science fiction up to new readers, we won't do it by dividing our audience up into smaller and smaller groups. Nor will we expand the minds of young people by telling them that they should only read specially-designated novels for young people. Why not admit that teens have a place in the world of adult imagination, and vice versa? Adults and teens are different in all kinds of ways, but surely they can meet in the world of fiction. Since so much scifi is about changing the future, it seems crucial that this genre forge alliances between youth and adults. We'll build a better space-faring species together if we don't deliberately create generational barriers where they aren't necessary.

The Dark Knight is very clearly a film of two halves, as the cliche goes. The first half is impressive, if flawed: Foregoing the flash of an Iron Man or Incredible Hulk in favor of direction and visuals that seem more influenced by movies like Michael Clayton and Heat, it's successful in spite of the men in the funny outfits fighting over who can try to save the day. In fact, for the first half of the movie, it's as if everyone involved is kind of embarrassed about Batman's involvement... which makes sense, considering Bale's performance when he's wearing the costume, all near-parodic husky whispers and threatening pouting (He's better as Bruce Wayne, thankfully). The movie comes to life more when we're watching Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent and Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon as the last two good men in Gotham trying to deal with the chaos caused by the Joker's appearance in the criminal underworld than watching Batman stiffly fight dogs and men in clown masks.

Not that there aren't good action set pieces - the climactic chase through Gotham where the Joker is both trying to kill Harvey Dent and simultaneously just piss off Batman is wonderful, over-the-top enough to be spectacular but realistic enough to be thrillingly believable, edge of the seat, viewing. A shame, then, that it happens less than halfway into the movie itself.

That's the main problem with The Dark Knight. We can put up with bad dialogue, accidentally homoerotic scenes of male bonding (The scenes of Harvey and Bruce falling for each other are unintentionally hilarious) and unimpressive second-fiddle villains as long as we have a story that actually worked. Instead, we get a movie that wraps up all of its themes with a literally explosive climax about ninety minutes in, and then forgets to stop. When Maggie Gyllenhall's Rachel Dawes - Katie Holmes' character from Batman Begins - gets killed as the result of the Joker's schemes at the same time that he escapes from the Gotham City police station and causes the accident that turns Dent into Two-Face, we're given a strong emotional end to all of the movie's character arcs - The (already cynical) idealism of the heroes has been shown as naive, Dent has compromised his morals for the woman he loves, and Batman has realized that he can't save everyone. It's a downer of an ending, but it is an ending... something that the moviemakers seem to have either missed, or else felt compelled to ignore in order to give the audience some kind of closure that is completely unnecessary.

Everything that follows the death of Rachel betrays the tone and intent of what came before. Batman goes from flawed hero to a man who - thanks to his new cell-phone-tapping sonar technology - can now see through walls, hear every conversation in the city, single-handedly defeat a SWAT team and the Joker and his henchmen all at the same time. Dent goes from a nuanced but fucked-up character to one-dimensional one-schtick murderer out for revenge at any cost. As the plotlines pile-up on each other - and there are three subplots in particular that serve no purpose whatsoever, although I guess that Chris Nolan got a trip to Hong Kong with one of them. The movie devolves into crass melodrama, something that is made all the more obvious by the end of the movie, where a small blond child tells his daddy (and the audience) that despite everything, Batman has done nothing wrong. The boy's daddy - Oldman's Jim Gordon, at this point finally the police commissioner - gives a long and sprawling monologue about the fact that Batman isn't a hero, he's more than a hero, he's a "silent guardian" and Gotham City's "dark knight."

The end of the movie in particular is, despite the intent of the creators, far too neat and tidy: The bad guys are either dead or captured, Batman makes a noble sacrifice for the good of his city, and everyone else pretty much goes on about their business in exactly the same way as they had at the start of the movie. It's a lazy and, considering the unsettling nature of the first half of the film, frustratingly safe way to finish.

There is one area, however, where all of the hype is earned: Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker really is everything people have been saying. Nervous, edgy, uncertain, he's magnetic everytime he's on-screen, and by far the best thing about the movie. For the first time outside of the comics - and perhaps just the first time anywhere - the Joker actually is scary and disturbing, fucking with everyone's heads just for the hell of it. Even when his character gets reduced to near-generic expositionary villain at the end of the movie, Ledger's performance really sells it. I don't know if that means that it's Oscar-worthy, as people have been saying, but it's stunning, stunning work.

The best way to enjoy The Dark Knight may really be to just leave once you've seen Aaron Eckhart lying in the hospital bed, half of his face, covered in gauze, weeping; it's not just that it doesn't get any better than that, but that it gets much, much worse. Stick around at your own risk.