No fate but what we make...

Wow. Sarah Connor Chronicles is well worth your time. For the moment it's my new favorite show. I think the first two episodes (there are three) are freebies on-line right now. Tiny spoilers ahead.

They manage some great shout-outs to the original movies. I think the only really heavy-handed one (that still works) is "Come with me if you want to live." The fact that Summer Glau's terminator is named "Cameron" still makes me giggle. They used the ending of T2 (which is the first shot of the show, BTW) to muddy the waters enough so that even the stuff you "know" becomes a little uncertain. Judgment Day has moved around, but it's still going to happen. They even figured out a nod to Terminator 3!

I'm sure the folk that have seen the Terminator movies way more time than I have can find some bigger errors than I did. So far the only detail I think they missed was humans aren't hacking and wheezing and puking after time travel. The timeline seems fairly solid. I'm not sure I ever did the math that T2 happens not too long before Judgement Day - John is born in 1984/85 and he's twelvish. So it's 1997ish (even though the movie was in 1991.) I don't entirely buy that Sarah was supposed to be 18 in Terminator. Sure, ok, why not? (18 looked a lot older when I was 15.) The one thing they really threw out is the idea that there was no more time travel after Reese and Arnold made their first trip to 1984. T2 didn't worry about it too much either. Turns out there was a LOT of time traveling. Of course these people are from farther in the future, so who knows what happened THEN? (Seems like they didn't invent that FX intensive liquid metal.) And time is a lot less circular than it was in the first movie. Again, that also went out the window with the second movie.

This show is giving me some of the same vibe that BSG used to give me when they would pick the solutions that would WORK even if they didn't "feel good". (It all went to heck entertaining and still very watchable heck after Pegasus.) Sarah vs. Cameron is a great conflict. Talk about Tin Man.

The show addresses some of the issues that bugged me about T2 to the point where I didn't even enjoy it anymore (and almost all at the end). (Yes, I know there are deleted scenes that show that Arnold could learn. Don't care.) My favorite fix so far? Cameron is a lot less malleable than Arnold was in T2. She only listens to John. And according to her, John isn't John yet. (I love that.) She'll do the ruthless unthinkable things that future John and Kyle Reese would have done that Sarah might not. She's not nearly as cards-on-the-table as Arnold. There's some secrets to her mission she hasn't let on. And she was clearly devoted to future John. She looks at John with a little bit of wonder and disgust at why he isn't yet who he's going to be.

Sarah is a really terrific mix of the "girl next door" that she was in T1, a devoted mom, and trying to be the super-tough warrior of the future. She's not as accepting of that last role as she was in T2. More like she was in T1. And by this point she's really really really tired. They've also done some nice work with what kind of events would have been triggered after T2. And Sarah is still having some pretty vivid nightmares. (Interesting question: If nuclear Armageddon is a certainty and you have visitors from the future telling you about it's outcome, is it worth prolonging WW II by having the Los Alamos team retroactively whacked?)

John is ok. I like him more than I did in T2. Way more than T3. (Ok, the very end of T3 still rocks.) It will be an interesting sub-plot (even if it's just hinted at) about how he gets from 1999 tech to learning 2008. (And computer geeks knew about browser history in 1999 too. It wasn't QUITE stone knives and bear skins.) What a seven year period to jump. Yikes. There are some historical details they're going to have to catch up on very quickly. And did you SEE who's governor of California?!?

Oh, the time jump. Very nice. Allows them to keep the movie continuity and still not have to deal with it being 1999 all the time. I'm sure we'll learn more about some of the details surrounding that later.

I like the FBI subplot. It always bugs me when the authorities are willfully stupid about the inexplicable. This guy seems convincible. He won't quite be the inspector Gerard of The Terminator. I'm betting he will be part of the team or dead by the end of the season.

I hope they continue to grow the resistance subplot slowly. And so far, no flash-forwards to the War. I hope they're holding those in reserve.

I wonder if they know where they're going with this? We've got three seasons till Judgment Day, right? To say nothing of Terminator 4 with Christian Bale as John waiting in the wings. Will this show really tell a whole story? Do they have a plan?

I wonder who or what they're holding in the wings? What about our friendly psychiatrist from T1 and T2? Will we see Kyle Reese as a kid? That's the biggest time-travel related "Huh"? If JD doesn't happen in ''97 and the resistance apparently gets shifted accordingly, isn't Kyle going to be quite a bit older when Skynet falls? Or is Sarah's Kyle from an "alternate future"? It's all so complicated.

And will Fox actually tolerate having a sci-fi hit? This could be ground breaking. Go writer's strike! (Until we need new eps, of course.)