Thomas Dekker, who plays the teenager who's destined to grow up and lead the fight against the robot apocalypse, is a fine actor. I liked him on Heroes, and he's had some great moments on Sarah Connor. But I can't escape the nagging feeling that his character just isn't gelling, for some reason. He's literally the only aspect of an otherwise fantastic show that doesn't work for me. Is it the pouting? The emo vibe that continues despite the disappearance of the emo hair?

I feel as though Dekker, at least, is aware there's a problem with his character. I've read several articles where he's said something along the lines of, "Everybody was waiting for John Connor to step up and be awesome, and it's going to happen in season two." In season one, John Connor was a bit whiny and dependent on his mom to rescue him from stuff. But in season two, John is sulky and shuts his mom out. Since his mom rules, watching him be a jerk to her does not endear me to him. I'm just not sure "sulky" is an improvement on "whiny." Obviously, I'm generalizing based on two episodes so far, and maybe tonight's new episode will represent a total turnaround for the J.C. But comments Dekker has made about how Connor's rebellious streak "gets worse" in upcoming episodes don't fill me with hope.

John Connor is starting to remind me of Jason Todd, who took over as Robin after Dick Grayson got too big for those little shorts. Someone at DC decided to make Jason Todd "edgy" by making him rebellious and "troubled." They retconned Jason Todd's origin from a Dick Grayson clone to "punk kid who tried to steal the hubcaps off the Batmobile." And he was always getting up in Batman's grill, either defying or questioning Bruce, plus he was a loose cannon. When DC had a 1-900 number vote on whether to kill Jason, it was smoked-Robin time. When DC finally introduced another new Robin a few years later, Tim Drake was the opposite of Jason Todd: he was a nice kid who looked up to Batman, was incredibly psyched to be in the Batcave, and pretty much never disobeyed Bats' orders. He was a way better surrogate for the readers, in other words.

So how do you have a Terminator show without John Connor? That would be the interesting part, I think. Seeing what people do when the worst possible thing has already happened often makes for the best drama. How do you carry on when your whole reason for fighting is gone?

Lena Headey is continuing to blow me away as Sarah Connor, and I can only begin to imagine what she would do with the grief and rage at having her son taken from her by the monsters she's fought all her life. Since John was the linchpin of her relationship with Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green), it would be interesting to see what would happen between those two as well. Would they blame each other? Would they come together more than ever? What would happen to Cameron (Summer Glau) if the guy she's supposed to protect is gone?

In the end, our heroes would have no choice but to keep fighting. Maybe they'd have to try and make a new John Connor, by picking some other kid and trying to mold him into the future leader of humanity. Or maybe they'd redouble their determination to stop Judgment Day so that the world never needs a John Connor in the first place. And of course in a show about time travel, there would always be the possibility that they might be able to change the timeline enough that John would be returned from the dead.

That could actually be the end of the arc — the triumphant return of John Connor from an alternate timeline, possibly with a slightly mellower attitude. (Maybe they could find a John Connor from a timeline where the Terminators never tried to kill his mom or him?)

The Sarah Connor Chronicles remains one of my favorite shows on TV right now — hey, did I mention there's a new episode tonight? And Penny from Lost is on it? — so I'm just throwing out an idea for how to make it even cooler.

Just picture the scene: John has gone off half-cocked again, in spite of his mom's advice, and he runs smack into Cromartie (the awesome Garret Dillahunt) who does that thing he does with his head. Cameron shows up, and we, the audience, assume she will save John for the umpteenth time. The Terminators fight, and Cromartie backhands Cameron. We focus on her heroic struggle to get up, and then the camera swings around to show Cromartie throttling the bejeezus out of John Connor. Oops. Everything just sort of stops dead for a moment, and everybody gets a "game over" look on his/her face. Even Cromartie looks a bit bewildered or even despondent, now that his life's purpose is over. Cameron and Cromartie fight some more, but neither of them really has their mechanical heart in it any more. Sarah scoots out and quietly retrieves her son's corpse from the battlefield. Fade to black.

I'm thinking sweeps month. What do you think?

One reason the pilot moves so fast is to haul us from the status quo at the end of Terminator 2 to the show's new status. At the start, Sarah and John Connor are still hiding out, but they think they've averted the creation of Skynet and the war against the machines. They find out differently when a Terminator shows up to kill John, and a nice Terminator (Glau) comes to the rescue. The Connors decide to try once again to prevent Skynet from ever happening. Several bad-ass action sequences later, they find a time machine and jump forward to 2007, the new start date for Skynet. (And that's why Glau ends up naked and kick-boxing.)

We also meet some new supporting cast members: the FBI agent who's chasing Sarah Connor, Tommy Lee Jones style, and the fiance she ran out on. So the Terminators, the Feds and the fiance will all be on her ass every week. The searching-for-Skynet plot is the show's best hope of not feeling like a weekly cat-and-mouse game.

There are a few bad signs: Summer Glau is great as a killing machine, but not so great when she's pretending to be a normal girl at first. So if it's true that future episodes will feature her character going to school with John and trying to act normal, that could be an issue. Thomas Dekker, as John Connor, has a bit of a mouth-breathing issue.

And then there's the wimpifying of Sarah Connor's character. It seems to be pretty deliberate, and is a major bad sign for the show. The original pilot which circulated nine months ago showed her character as a non-stop hardass. Her only weakness was an excess of paranoia and rage, which threatened to drive her son away. The televised pilot adds a new scene, where Summer Glau is stitching up Sarah Connor's wounds. Lena Headey, as Connor, whimpers and says that she can't keep running or she'll lose her mind. And her son will leave her. It feels as though the network wrote saying, "Have her show more weakness." And you can bet those moments of weakness will be written into future episodes as well.

And then there's the final monologue. Here's the original version. Note also the original actor playing Sarah's fiance:And then here's the televised version, with a nice outdoor swingset scene instead of the indoor gun-flexing:

The logline for the series goes like this:

Son of a renowned, inventor/futurist father, who has mysteriously committed suicide; Nate Palmer (T. Dekker) is recruited by a secret organization to help search for his fathers last experiment... only to discover that he may be the experiment itself.