Come with me if you want to live...

Oh. Hell. Yeah.

(Warning, the following post contains spoilers for the first hour of the new television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.)

So, the long awaited Sarah Connor Chronicles premiered tonight on Fox. Man, I have to say, I found it a very satisfying hour of television. It almost was enough to make up for the fact that Fox is for the third year in a row shunting aside the remaining episodes of Bones for that dreaded spawn of evil, American Idol. But I digress.

I've been excited about the Sarah Connor Chronicles for almost a year now, ever since rumors started circulating as new shows for the 2007-2008 television season started getting shopped around last year. I was at first super jived that it got picked up by a network, then super bummed when Fox decided to put it on the back burner until mid-season. Of course, that turned out to be a fairly smart move, given the writers' strike, since now Fox has several unaired episodes in the can to compete against other networks' reruns or reality series.

Even though I've been following stories and news about the show as it developed over last summer, I still have to say I had many pleasant moments of surprise as I watched the first half of the premiere. The second half will, of course, be airing tomorrow night at the show's actual normally scheduled time. For the first time since its "finale" I find myself relieved that there aren't going to be any new episodes of Heroes this season, since that means I won't have to try to pick between which of the two shows to watch. I can focus my Monday nights on the plight of the Connors instead. Huzzah! Once more I have something to keep as a happy thought to get me through the suckiness that is Monday at work.

The series picks up in 1999, two years after the events of the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Although I was prepared for events to pick up after T2, I was a little disconcerted to see they were in 1999, as I had seen several references to the show taking place in "modern times," which I took to mean more or less present day. But as it didn't really throw a big loop in the continuity (the vagueness of the timeline between the first two movies was always something I found more than a little annoying, but details like that tend to matter to me for some reason) I decided just to roll with it. This is definitely a decision that paid off.

So, the show picks up two years after Sarah escapes from the loony bin and, with the help of her son, the friendly Ah-nold robot, and Myles Dyson, destroys the company and technology responsible for creating Skynet, which is how the robots in the future manage to take over. Sarah and John are living under an alias and seem to be finding some sort of normalcy in their lives. Sarah's boyfriend even decides he's ready to take the next step and proposes to her. This of course prompts Sarah to get the heck out of dodge. She realizes they've become comfortable and that means their guard is down. So she up and moves them to some hick town in New Mexico. Unfortunately, she doesn't take into account the fact that her boyfriend, worried about her sudden departure, thinks something is seriously wrong and goes to the police. This alerts the FBI and the evil future robots to her current alias and allows them both to find her in New Mexico PDQ. Unfortunately for Sarah and John, the terminator gets there first. He sneaks into the school as a substitute teacher on John's second day and after taking roll, and getting to John's name, he whips out a gun he had conveniently hidden in his robot leg (which illicits both the reactions of "eww..." and "cool!") and starts shooting up the classroom in an attempt to kill John. John, of course, being trained by his mother in "Survival from Assassin Robots 101" jumps out the window and high tails it to the parking lot, trying to make his escape. The only casualty of the shooting appears to be a girl in the class named Cameron, who had befriended John on his first day.

Luckily for John, Cameron is no ordinary girl. She's a terminator too, a friendly sent back from 2027 to protect the future leader of the human resistance. She slam-dunks the big bad with her pick up truck and saves John, uttering the now famous line that was said in all three movies, "Come with me if you want to live." Best. Pickup line. Ever. Also, the delivery from Summer Glau was just excellent. She's so teensy, it amuses me when she gets to kick butt. Joss Whedon is gleaming with pride in the picket lines even now, I am sure.

So, we now have established our three main heroes, and John and Cameron meet up with Sarah and they hit the road, planning to head for the border and hide out in Mexico for a while. Unfortunately the stress of being a future hero to humanity is starting to get to John and Sarah realizes she can't keep them running forever, not without risking losing her son for good. She grills Cameron about why the machines are still around and we find out that Skynet still gets built even though Myles Dyson and his work were all destroyed. She doesn't know who builds Skynet in this new future, but she does know when and where.

In a really flippin' sweet scene, they head back to L.A. to a bank where Cameron claims to have a safety deposit box (opened the year the bank was built) that is the key to helping them track down and stop the creator of Skynet. As we all know from the movies, when someone is sent through time in this universe, they can't take anything with them (not even clothing). They can however, send someone back to the past to build things that other travelers might need. This is just what the resistance did. They sent back one of their best engineers to 1963 to help build the bank vault. In the process he left all kinds of goodies behind for his comrades, including what turns out to be a time machine, so they "would always have a way home." They fight off the evil terminator (who, like a Timex, takes his lickin' but keeps on tickin' and has followed them to the bank) and poof! In a ball of energy and lightning our three heroes emerge naked and slightly confused (except of course, for Cameron) on an L.A. freeway in the year 2007. Huh. Well, there's that time-setting issue from earlier explained and resolved.

We learn this is the when that Skynet is once more built, so now Sarah and John can get down to the business of trying, again, to stave off the destruction of mankind at the hands of the machines. End of episode, tune in tomorrow night.

Overall, I was just really impressed. I have to admit, I kind of liked the third movie, and I knew going into this that the series was kind of created to discount everything that happened in the last film installment. I was worried it might be kind of lame, or a stretch to fill a series with a good enough story to be worth watching and to make people forget that someone has already told us what happens next. But the pilot alone opens up a whole new mission and it is very believable that this is where Sarah and John could have ended up going rather than how events unfolded in movie three. The kind of nice thing about the whole franchise is that it is based on time traveling. As is mentioned in this episode, they've already changed the future once. Now is their chance to change it again. The fact that all of their attempts to stop Skynet from being built seem to be doomed to ultimate failure is also a really interesting commentary on humanity as a whole. I mean, seriously, is there a more true myth of human nature than Pandora's Box? We are a curious race, and as far as technology goes, we do seem to be a bit obsessed with making things better and faster and capable of doing more for us. Like all of the best science fiction, the Terminator franchise has always been an excellent cautionary tale, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles are no exception.

I am also pleased as punch with the casting we've gotten so far. We all know I adore Summer Glau (if you're wondering who she is, she played River in Firefly/Serenity and Tess in The 4400). This show gives her another chance to be a surprise powerhouse, but it's not just a reprisal of River Tam--as a terminator, she's got a whole different way of handling conflict, and of dealing with her human charges. Thomas Dekker (he was Claire's friend Zach in the first season of Heroes) is also doing well as John Connor. I am sure the powers that be didn't intend it this way, but he's a good transition from Edward Furlong (who played the character in T2) to Nick Stahl (who played him in T3). He's got the attitude down as well. I mean, he's at an age where he's expected to be an angsty rebellious teenager, but he's also got the added burden of knowing the world thinks his mother is insane when she's really anything but, and the knowledge that he's destined to save the human race. That's a heavy load and not a lot of young actors could pull that off. He seems to be giving it a pretty decent go though. Last but not least we have Lena Headey as Sarah Connor. She's got a pretty damn big pair of shoes to fill, because I don't think there's a Terminator fan in the world who isn't going to be comparing her to Linda Hamilton every step of the way. If she hadn't done such an outstanding job in T2 maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal, but she set the bar so freaking high most actresses couldn't even see it from the roof. I think Miss Headey's off to a pretty decent start though. I look forward to seeing how she, and the rest of the cast, does in future episodes.

I can only hope this show does well. It's got a lot of good things going for it, so maybe the stars will all line up nicely on this one. I definitely know what I'll be doing for the next few Monday nights, that's for sure.

Anyhoo, until the next post, everyone stay safe. We've still got a few years until the robots take over and try to kill us all.

And don't worry.

I'll be back.

C