Sarah Connor kick-started the new Terminator series with pancakes, past-future guns, Glauinator, and a side order of paradox.

When I first heard that Fox was doing a new Terminator series, I thought two things. 1) Please don't suck. 2) Please don't cancel it after three episodes.

Fox is capricious, but really Sarah Connor had me with, "One bag, plus the guns. I'll make pancakes." Lena Headey (Queen of Sparta - "300") does a credible job as Sarah Connor. Rather than going with Linda Hamilton's nuclear-crazy intensity, which would have been hard to maintain for a series, she dials back from eleven to a livable seven. We begin several years after the events of T2, which Sarah hopes prevented the robot apocalypse. Now she's waiting tables, getting engaged, letting herself slip into a near neighbor of a normal life. Thomas Dekker as John Connor (not gay Zach - Heroes), teenage maybe-savior would seem to have done some reading on what typically happens to saviors and wants none of it. Summer Glau (River - Firefly/"Serenity") as the good Terminatrix rounds out the cast. As a diehard Browncoat, she was just one more reason to program the DVR to, "Yes, please." Then there were explosions and killer robots and time travel paradoxes. Gotta love me a time travel story.

Actually, before we get too far into a review of the pilot, I really should mention:  Previously on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - it may be the pilot, but there were three movies.

~Terminator in which Sarah Connor had eighties hair, a machine and a Kyle-Reese-daddy-to-be traveled back in time, blew things up, knocked the mother of humanity's savior up, and got blown up.

~Terminator 2: Rise of the Machine in which said mother, Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton, was so awesome that an entire generation of violent little girls went squee. Oh, and Arnold said, "Hasta la vista," and "I'll be back." And they all blew things up. It was awesome.

~Terminator 3: Judgment Day in which Arnold was back, but not Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton (died of cancer/wouldn't do the movie), and is the movie that only I and about two other people (we have a secret handshake) liked. Oh and the world was blown up. But it's okay. John Connor is/was/will be ready to save humanity, because his mother was seven kinds of awesome and raised him right and was buried with guns. Lots and lots of guns.

T:tSCC (I'm not typing it every time) is set between T2 and T3 and in 1999. In T2, we were told that the world would end in 1997 (yes, I have access to Wikipedia). We begin, two years later, in the downward slope to Y2K.

We begin the episode where we should. Where anyone who has watched the movies knows that we must. On the flickering flash of the yellow dividing line of a road at night. We begin with Sarah speaking to us in a voice over in what rapidly becomes clear is a dream. Sarah’s nightmare of could be. Fear of being found by the cops. By the terminators. By the future, which isn't written, but seems to be fairly persistent.

We begin with Sarah driving with the narrow crescents of her headlights illuminate some bare seconds into the future. While the more distant turns and curves of the road are hidden by the passing darkness. The sun flickers night and day, because if the pilot has one overriding theme, it's the passage of time.

We are told the dates, shown times, hear character’s ages, and always, the sun rises and sets over traveling cars and stationary skylines. This is a story about time travel after all. And dreams. And hope.

In her first voice over, Sarah tells us that a child in the womb shares his mother's dreams. That's why he reaches for her in his first moments. And everyone who saw the opening scene of T2 knows what Sarah's dreams have been for the last fifteen years.

She's thirty-three. John is fifteen. I'm not a mathematician, but that would make Sarah all of eighteen when her life changed from going out on dates into battle scars. Three years older than John is as this set of Chronicles opens.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
West Fork Nebraska, August 24th, 1999

Remember when we partied like it was 1999. There was Y2K and the end of the world. And yet, well, we “partied” like it was 1999 and the world didn’t end. I still have party supplies. Not that it was a safer world, but we perceived it to be safer.

As Sarah might say, "No one is ever safe." Perhaps John was right and Sarah packed them up with guns and pancakes because she was afraid of commitment. Perhaps, running alerted the authorities (and random Terminators). And yet, there was an FBI agent at the police station to take Dixon’s statement. Dixon and Agent Ellison both think that they know Sarah, but they don't. Not the fiancé who told her a secret. Not the Federal Agent who has read the truth, but didn’t believe it.

I find it telling though that in that two year period of relaxing into almost safe, six whole months in a single spot, she took Kyle Reese's last name. When Agent Ellison entered it into the computer, it was for the first time, which makes me think it was the first time she used it. She slid it on her shoulders like a comfortable sweatshirt that she didn't want to take off in the next identity.

And I consider the dichotomy of the picture that Agent Ellison loaded into his computer of a smiling happy Sarah and her description, stab wounds and mental institutions.

But that was the last life, and the pilot was very quick to take us into the Connor’s next one.

Red Valley, New Mexico
September 6^th, 1999

August Summer has been put away. It’s September now and school is in session.

Somehow, I want to see some sort of significance that John meets Cameron (his good Terminator to be) in chemistry class, but I haven't come up with it yet. It is interesting that when Cameron introduces herself, she tells him about the father that she doesn't have (tractors - machines). He tells her about the boring father that he doesn't have (insurance - against the apocalypse)

When John goes home, Sarah is painting the walls green. I'd say it's symbolic of growing things, but it's a pretty puke green. Mostly I'm interested in the symbolism of slapping on a thin coat of paint to conceal the weapons she’s hidden in the walls.

While for John it's all about once more being the outsider. In a hick town, he’s somehow slapped on the wrong paint/the wrong clothes and is surrounded by old computers.

When he looked up at her - spouted a line about the rules being written on the inside of his eyeballs - for a moment, all I could think was that John has Sarah's eyes. They're both pale green. Like the walls. Except more pretty(er), and less puke.

But nowhere is safe. The FBI flew in. The Terminator arrived.

They both found them (would find them - tenses are the first victim of time travel) because Sarah didn't want to shed being Sarah Reese. Didn't want to have to be someone else. Again.

Just when things were going so well for John. Having a moment with a pretty girl. Opening up about his dead hero father. About his uptight mom.

In many ways the pilot doesn't make any allowances for the viewer who is not familiar with the first two movies. When John Connor says that his father was a soldier who died in battle, that only really means something if you know who that father was. If you know that Kyle Reese was sent back in time by John himself. That future John who apparently keeps (kept, will keep) lobbing people into the past. Hoping that the future isn't/wasn't written. Except the parts that are really persistent. Like puke green paint under your finger nails.

Like a Terminator with a gun in its leg. Here I'll pause, because really, why a gun in its leg? Okay, it's cool, but it's not like it's a disruptor cannon in his leg. It's a pistol. Seventeen day waiting period, unless you're a killing machine with a dry sense of humor. Class dismissed.

As John jumped out the window, we have almost a replay of Sarah's opening dream. Except this time, the Terminator tracked with his red gaze, did the trademark inevitably inexorably walking forward past the stop sign and wham - there's the Glauinator (or Rivernator or Summernator or... it'll take fandom a few days to settle on a name) with a truck.

She says the line that she has to say. That's as inevitable as day following night. "Come with me if you want to live." Really, far more than any other line, this is the mantra of the Terminator stories. There's always one more threat and one more protector. Sucks to be John. Savior of mankind and all that, always having to run away. Sucks to be his mother, but she's more into repression. And guns.

When John called his mother, and the Terminator said, "I love you, John," he knew it wasn't her. Because something as simple as "I love you" isn't how she shows it.

Then we have my favorite scene in the episode. A male terminator (if they can be said to have a gender) pretending to be a woman, a mother. A female terminator (if she can be said to be a she) pretending to be a boy, a son.

It's a neat trick. So is the slamfest that follows. Inexorable machines and Kevlar chairs. Seriously, I love my couch, but I love that Sarah did that. Hid guns in the walls and made her furniture something to hide behind.

Then they ran. We are reminded once more of the road, of time, as a truck entirely unrelated to the plot  - as far as I can tell - sailed down the highway. At least it looked cool.

While the teenage hero-to-be slept, the cute killing machine sewed herself up without a bra on. She's a different kind of Terminator. For one thing she eats (potato) chips.

She's from 2027, two years before Kyle Reese was sent back in time (and yes, again with the Wikipedia). Now the robot apocalypse will arrive on April 19, 2011. Similarly to T3’s plotline, it was not stopped by the events of T2, just delayed. Like a terminator, who would have found them anyway. They always do.

When John begged his mother to change the future, to create a world where he can live as just someone, no one important, that's when we see Sarah’s love. Not in "I love yous", but in, "Alright. I'll stop it." She promises to repaint those inexorable yellow dashes down the road and save him from his future. Although, mind you, that generally causes accidents.

Then it’s the past/the future. September 9th, 1999.

They arrive at the Dyson Residence, where a little boy calls for his mother. He's another child whose father died in battle, who will never really know him. Heroes. Dead men.

The mothers are left behind to shove their way through the rubble. Or, you know, a robot could blow up a truck. Again. Which is something I appreciate about robots. We both like explosions.

However, as the first movie promised, Terminators don't feel. After being blown up, he whirs and gets up. Then again, when Sarah was injured, she bled, but kept going until she had time to feel.

And Sarah feels so much. "I'll lose my boy. He'll leave me."

When John told Cameron that he was all his mother had, he was right. It's just, he didn’t complete that sentence. She’s all he has too. It’s just at this point, he's fifteen. He thinks his mother is sort of immortal. That she can change the future. Sarah knows that she isn’t. That she might not be able to.

While outside, the sun rises over the city. And it's day. 7:52 a.m.

Off to a bank. Into the vault. We see through Cameron's eyes for the first time. She sees in regular color and not red at all. She gives them keys, always nicely symbolic, and parts that make a gun. I love the idea that while time travelers can bring no weapons from the future, there are two approaches to that. Send back beings that are the weapon. Send back people with knowledge to make the weapons. Not to go too much into the Pandora's legend, but suffice to say, here, hope is contained in a safety deposit box. Hope created both by the future that sent the engineer back and the past, 1963. A year in which among other things(*) “The Feminine Mystique” was published, Martin Luther King Jr. told us that he had a dream, and Kennedy was assassinated.

But that's 1963. In 1999, Agent Ellison mulls the evidence and decides that he knows "Less and less all the time."

In one way our heroes are in a trapped room. Big old lock. No exit. And in another, they have infinite exits. And a mission. Find Skynet - stop running (moving, traveling) - fight. The gun turns red and they shoot the unstoppable force with their future gun from 1963 and next stop 2007. How soon it seems like the past. Time's like that.

There they are. Surrounded by fire and a ball of white light. Cars spinning out of control. Stark naked and running past a sign that tells us to expect delays. They are where it all begins. Where Skynet begins. This time.

They're safe.

No one is ever safe.

We end, exactly where we should, on a monologue. On a montage. They stood by swing sets, empty reminders of childhood, and got ready for the series to begin.

I’m ready to go with them, because it really didn’t suck and I really don’t want Fox to cancel it.

*Source: http://www.historycentral.net/dates/1963.html