FRIDAY FLASHBACK: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Welcome back to another Friday Flashback, Crave Online's weekly look back at the best and worst TV series of yesteryear.

But today, I need to warn all of you about the greatest threat to our way of life and even our very existence. Of course, I'm talking about Skynet, the artificially intelligent machine destined to destroy us when it becomes self-aware.

You're not fooling anybody, IBM! Even your fake "Watson" name for it still has six letters.

kill it... KILL IT!!

Sure, today it's just a computer playing Jeopardy. There's nothing to worry about... until it locks a nuke on your house for laughing at its "What Is Leg?" flub. And believe me, it knows that you laughed.

It's hard to fathom that it was only three years ago that Fox had an educational TV series to inform the public about this danger. "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" was essentially a sequel to the first two "Terminator" films and it ignored the third film, just like the fans.

And in the lead role we had Lena Headey as Sarah Connor, a former waitress turned fierce warrior who was dedicated to protecting her son so he could save humanity in the future. Heady actually got a lot of crap from the fans because she didn't look like Linda Hamilton at all. But I liked her in the role. My main problem with this series was the writing, but we'll get to that momentarily.

Thomas Dekker was John Connor and occasionally he wasn't bad in the part. Prior to this, his most well-known role was as Claire's gay best friend forever on "Heroes." Or he would have been more overtly gay, but back then there were rumors that his reps thought it would hurt his chances to get other parts and he quietly disappeared from the show. That doesn't seem to have hurt him though and he's still getting feature roles.

And finally, we have our newest Terminator, Cameron, played Summer Glau of "Firefly" fame.

Not quite what you think of when you picture a Terminator, eh?

That's better.

The pilot episode brings us up to speed with the story and sets up the trio to jump several years into their short term future to catch Skynet off guard and elude a Terminator calling itself Cromartie (Owain Yeoman). And it also exposed a long running problem with the machines. To set the scene, Cameron had passed herself off as another student at John's high school and gotten close to him. When they went to their next class, Cromartie came in as the substitute teacher, took attendance and cut a gun out of his leg and started firing at John, who dived out of a window to get away. Cromartie lumbered towards the window to follow, but before he did, he turned back to his students to say...

"Class dismissed."

Now, I have a theory about that. Clearly the T-800 model series has a design flaw that makes them crack jokes at inopportune times. And Cromartie shows us that it's not just Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator that does that! The damn machines just don't have any subtlety. If they really wanted to catch John, they should have just sent hot girls after him and quietly broken his neck when they got close.

Oh crap... I've just given Skynet a new idea, haven't I?!

The other thing about the pilot is that Cameron is much more human like here than she is in the rest of the show. And the strangely self-aware Cameron was a lot more fun than the monotone machine that she was depicted as later. Now that was just bad writing. Also, I should mention Richard T. Jones' James Ellison, the special agent who was hunting down the Connors.

If he looks bored there, that's kind of how he played it on the series too. Ellison's most interesting moments came when he slowly realized that Sarah Connor isn't crazy and that the machines really are coming from the future to kill us. But he never quite rises to the level of becoming a fully formed character. In fact, he spends most of the second season playing games with John Henry, a Skynet-like computer in Cromartie's body.

I should also mention Brian Austin Green's turn as Derek Reese, the brother of John's father and the best thing about this show. Seriously, until then I never knew that Green could act. The only thing I had ever seen him in before was "Beverly Hills 90210," and he was... shall we say... not good there. But on "Terminator: TSCC," Green was amazingly compelling and his death in the series was one of the most shocking moments in recent TV history.

Fox didn't promote his demise or hype up his death. At one point, a Terminator catches him off guard and simply shoots him in the head. It wouldn't have worked if Green hadn't made his character so likable, but it did. It really did.

The show earned its second season and then got a little strange. First with the introduction of Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) as a T-1000.

And here's where we found out what she really was when she transformed in front of a urinal to kill one of her employees. Or maybe she was the urinal, I forget.

Suffice to say, she was not quite what we wanted from a T-1000 in the series. Also, it seemed like a highway from the future must have opened up. Derek's girlfriend from the future came back in time. And John's girlfriend, also secretly from the future as part of a plot by Derek's girlfriend!

As for Cromartie, Yeoman didn't return for the regular series so he was replaced by Garret Dillahunt; which was explained in the show as Cromartie losing his skin during the time travel to the future (which seemed to conveniently forget that only flesh covered objects can travel through time in this world). I gave the show credit for being willing to kill off Cromartie in the second season... but Dillahunt didn't leave the show! Instead, he became the childlike John Henry, who seemed like he might be Skynet. However, he may have been something else entirely.

Not that we'll ever know for sure. The series ended on a cliffhanger that found John Henry jumping to the future with Cameron's brainchip, so John and Weaver followed him there and were seemingly stranded. John even reunited with his father and his uncle, Derek as well as the real girl that Cameron was based on. I would have liked to have seen that story play out, but there's a reason that we call Friday nights on Fox "The Death Slot."

My current theory is that the Terminators are still out there today, hiding in plain sight. Sometimes in unexpected places...