The show was good, a handful of people here saying it sucked makes no difference in the big picture. What the article dosn't talk about was the change-over in corporate leadership and show time scheduling. As the studio leadership changed over, they had new people take over that wanted to push their perfered shows; the re-do the scheduleing and put Terminator: TSCC at a time slot that was certin to kill the show, just so they could take the better time slot and push their programming. Also, they never really announced when they changed from the orignal show day and time. The die hard fans picked up on this, but the regular viewers who enjoyed the show had no clue and figured, hey guess it got cancelled and never bothered to look into it further, so the ratings dropped, and the show finally did get cancelled. Too bad, it was a good story line, and they never had filler episodes, each episode was a continuation of the previous, which i liked very much.

yes, they realised that Firefly DVD sales are still strong so.... they give Dollhouse another season while cancelling all the good shows.

SCC had its moments, and I think overall it was very good, even if I had to yawn through the moody pauses as Sarah says "so, John, how do you feel", as he just looks moody in the half-distance. Perhaps they were trying to increase the female watching figures.

I watched it a couple of times to see some cool terminator robots. Everyone was human-looking. Yawn for no-budget and no cool terminator robots.

A simpler explanation is that this show was just another attempt to increase the profits of the terminator franchise.

I don't think that in itself a problem - I'm looking forward to seeing Terminator 4, after all - I guess the problem was trying to cash in on the name, but also Fox expecting it could be done on the cheap.

Whether it was an attempt to make profit or not, I've always thought a TV series spin off would be interesting to see - in particular, showing stories set during the war (which this series did to some degree, and which Season 3 would have shown far more of, by the looks of how it ended). I don't really care who does it, as long as it's done reasonable well (and I think this show was generally good), and as long as they actually follow through with it.

But instead Fox give us a half-story that's cut off on a cliffhanger, with lots of loose ends around. It means that although I loved it, it's useless to the Franchise as a whole (unless someone else continues that story). I also fear it makes it far less likely that anyone else will want to do a TV series based on it (because of the expectation of failure, but also the confusion in all the additional storylines that have to be considered non-canon).

I can understand trying to build a storyline to try to build a base to build the story on, but to spend an entire season doing so...not the way to make good TV. They spent the entire season moving towards something, but we never really got any idea of the something until the last 45 minutes of the season.

let me spell out a basic point here: Terminator = Action there was little action this season.

Sci-fi stories don't all take part in the same Universe, and there are only 2 properly hard women in TTSCC (not including Cameron). Though I noticed the guy who invented Ghost in the Shell does seem to like his female protagonists (Dominion Tank Police, Appleseed, and probably more I don't know about), and he doesn't do much to make them unique from show to show..

... and yet they way I learned it existed was through bus stop posters of a woman in a vest with a shotgun slung over her shoulder.

Target your marketing.

Two seasons, about 30-ish episodes IIRC, isn't so bad as things go. But the problem is that due to the lack of any kind of notice, I'm left with the feeling of only seeing half a story - as if I'd been watching a film that cut out half way through. Sure, the first half might have been really really good, but you'd be annoyed - and you'd never recommend it to anyone else for watching.

Whilst I realise that a lack of long term planning seems to be common for networks like Fox, it seems like most other shows have had a chance to wrap up their story, whether they went on for 10 seasons, or were cancelled after a few episodes. Even Firefly got a DVD to finish up. Rome is another example which was cancelled after only the second season, but they knew in advance, so could pick up the pace and at least tell a complete story.

Terminator OTOH ended on a cliffhanger in Season Two, with many loose ends unanswered through the season. To add to that, Season One suffered due to the writer's strike, and that also had many loose ends that were simply dropped and never resolved. Given that season two had several episodes in the middle that were slow moving and didn't seem to go anywhere, there would have been opportunity to drop some material out to finish the story, if only they knew in advance.

Thankfully they'd made the decision to keep the storyline a separate story from the canon of the films - and a good thing too, what use is half a story to the franchise? Which is a shame, because it was a good story they were telling.

As an aside, I'm curious what ratings are considered "popular" in the US. Here in the UK, over 10 million would be mainstream major success, and about 3 million would still be okay - and that's for a mainstream terrestrial channel. Of course there are also much more people in the US - but I was also under the impression of there being a lot more channels. Given the hundreds of channels of rubbish that gets churned out, it seems odd that good shows have to fight to survive...

Virgin 1, which showed Terminator in the UK, gets ratings of the order of hundreds of thousands ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/oct/02/tvratings [guardian.co.uk] ), which would be considered good for a non-terrestrial channel. I'd be curious to know what the UK figures for Terminator were like (they were over a million for the debut, record ratings for the channel - http://www.digital-tv.co.uk/blog/terminator-debut-breaks-virgin-1-viewing-figures.html [digital-tv.co.uk] - but I realise it would've dropped off since). Anyone know?

unfortunately all of that made to plot move slower than a glacier

And none of them mattered.

Once the killer robot gets a head shot on the boy (he's dead, no chance of resuscitation) the show is over. The "very complex plot with many main characters" collapses because there is nothing else to carry it.

A well written series would not have that flaw.

Funny you should mention that. Whilst watching T2 the other day with some friends, we were taking a little trip on the Time-Travel-Paradox line, and came up with this little nugget:

If in the original film, the 1st Terminator sent back had indeed completed it's mission and killed Sarah Connor, then that would have ensured Skynet never gets/will be created.

• Sarah Connor dies before crushing metal motherfucker #1.
• Chip never gets found.
• Cyberdyne in 1991 never get to perform their research.
• Skynet doesn't get developed.
• Obviously wont become Self-Aware, as it doesn't exist.
• Judgement day doesnt occur.
• Everyone lives happily ever after.
• Profit?

it would look poor for each season of Terminator to wrap up with "Skynet is defeated" and then the next say "Oh wait, no it isn't!"

Oh absolutely, and it's annoying when that stuff happens.

But at the same time it would be nice just sometimes to have something that was thought out in advance and planned over a few seasons to tell a definite story. I.E. skynet defeated by end of S3. No "well it's popular, lets string it out" or "it's unpopular, wrap it up folks!"

Don't worry, I realise this is unrealistic.

Debatable. I saw Claudia Christian on stage at a con the weekend of the announcement, and she told her side of the story. She said that she had just asked for some time off (three or four episodes) to work on other projects, and Strazynski refused. That was the deal-breaker in her new contract, so she refused to sign. Then JMS spread the story that she was greedy. She said in public that she did not ask for more money.

As I said, this is her side of the story, but I found her very personable and believable.

You are missing Terminator is more about "Mother Protecting Her Child From Uncertain Future" then governator from future. I can take it in two, two hour long movies, but not every week.

The truth of all this aside, since I can't participate in that particular angle of the discussion (well, at least not intelligently, which I realize is not normally a hindrance to internet "conversation") since I've never watched it, if all the things the submitter said about the show were true, he'd be right.

Fox doesn't like complex narratives because complex narratives don't bring in the viewers, which means they don't bring in the advertisers. Fox is number one right now because of one thing and one thing only: American Idol. That's not a cheap shot at them or their viewers, it's a stone cold fact. American Idol is currently the bread and butter of the Fox lineup and it basically subsidizes experiments like TSCC. Fox is in the business of making money, and they've hooked the lowbrow demographic. Little potshots into "higher art" are really just stabs in the dark meant to try and get that rare unexpected success, and if they don't blow up quickly into reliable revenue streams, they get cancelled so that American Idol's simplistic, popcorn-style entertainment can fund another experiment.

Art and business don't work well together for a reason: they're motivated by different things. Anytime you have widely successful art in both a cultural and financial sense, it's pure dumb luck. Until sci-fi nerds start recognizing that fact, they'll just be disappointed over and over again.

It doesn't matter how smart, complex, or artistic something is, if it's on network TV, it's there to make money, and if it's only appealing to a small, highbrow crowd (whether that applies to the particular show under discussion or not, I have no idea), it's not going to do that, and it won't last long.

But none of those things (excellent, above average, interesting) are primary connotations of elitist.

Elitist has connotations of exclusionary snobbery. Not just rule by (or in this case appeal to) a group that's above average, but a group that considers themselves above average and flaunts that view while ignoring any evidence to the contrary and working hard to keep "outsiders" out.

I'm personally opposed to the idea that more viewers/voters means a better outcome (Heinlien once asked why a 40-something moron should be able to vote, while a 16-year-old genius could not)--but that particular word has taken on strongly negative connotations.

I have already explored this line of logic.

If SkyNET isn't built, then it can't send the T-800 back in time to kill Sarah and John then IS born but not as the son of Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor because there was no reason and no method for Reese to go back to 1984. Sarah Connor never learns what is to come and therefore doesn't prepare for the coming war.

It's still possible that SkyNET would be developed, but later. Since there was no "John Connor" to lead the human resistance, it would wipe out humanity.

LK

Why not Harley Quinn?

You make a good point about series there. TV should do more miniseries in which a story is developed and completed drawing to a definite ending. The stories are more compelling when they don't look like they're contrived to keep the series going indefinitely.

... that season one was pretty good. Writing was pretty clever, it was an interesting concept. By season two, at least the first couple of episodes I watched before I started hating it, the writing started to crater and it turned in to a classic case of writer trap due to time travel. I think the robot coming back in time to destroy the nuclear power plant episode completely lost me on the whole series. You can only do so much time travel before it starts become obvious its just a crutch for writers who can't think of anything better to do. It reaches a point absolutely nothing has consequences or resolution because in the next episode some time traveler can come in and completely undo everything that's gone before. Star Trek has pretty much had the same problem throughout its history.

Its also a problem with the terminator concept that as the terminators spend more and more time as humans and less and less as menacing robots the concept gets boring. The best parts of the first movie were when Arnold had all his skin burned off and he is a very menacing machine at the end. By movie two liquid terminator does some cool liquid effects but for some reason he is almost ALWAYS the same actor in the same police uniform and there is zero reason he wouldn't have morphed in to some other form except the director didn't want to hire another actor. By movie three the terminator is a hot chick, never changes form, there is no real sense she is a robot. She is just a hot chick the director wanted to milk and that movie just completely sucked. I'm hoping Salvation has lots of good ole menacing robots.

And the geek guy in me really starts hating all the soap opera love interest, especially John Conner's not very appealing love interest. I know they are trying to hook the female demographic but it is the aspect I hated most in Battlestar Galactica too. The series spent most of the time being soap opera and who is screwing who. Of course its cheap to film, good filler, and I guess people are really like that, but you spend half the show on it it stops being sci fi.

This.

I hate writing styles that originate from 4chan...

I suppose only a few here following the whole series and got any value from it
I found the script well written and a plot that actually flowed with continuity from one episode to the next, which is unusual with popular programming these days. The season finality was the best episode of all and brought many sideline stories together. Now I'm bummed that another series worth viewing had bit the dust

If in the original film, the 1st Terminator sent back had indeed completed it's mission and killed Sarah Connor, then that would have ensured Skynet never gets/will be created.

I don't agree. There were two possible endings to the story in Terminator 1 -- Either the T-800 is destroyed and pieces of it are recovered by Cyberdyne systems or it survives and, to quote a famous engineer from another movie about time travel, "How do we know he didn't invent the thing?" Cyberdyne systems could have found themselves with a new chief researcher with a few odd habits and a mean temper.

The only way for the closed time loop which created Skynet to be broken is if the Terminator is completely destroyed such that no trace of its existance can be found. This happened in the last scene of Terminator 2, which is why the story ended there and no effort was made to make a second sequel, TV series, or anything else like that.

Kind of like how there only needed to be one Highlander movie.

Look, if I'm watching a movie about humanity's war against machines, then I want to see machines and humans fighting it out.

Making the machines look like humans is simply a budgetary cop-out.

If I wanted to use my imagination for such epic battles I'd read a book.

1. It was on Fox. They always cancel good shows after one season.
2. That this show wasn't good was why it got a second season. Being scifi was the final nail in the coffin.
3. It wasn't very good and didn't have much direction. Writers wasted too much time on meaningless filler.
4. Most fundamental problem -- the Terminator universe is tapped out. There's not really many more stories to tell, at least not with the current characters.
5. They're trying to follow up a mega-budget best action movie of all time with a small-budget TV series. Never will a budget be more painfully obvious than in that situation. "We can't afford to fight the Romulans, we don't have the budget for it! We'll have to negotiate."

After T2 I felt that there was really no more need for any sequels, the story was done. If they absolutely had to tell a story, the only one left was the future war. Keeping up with the time travel at this point would have just become a paradox wankfest. T3 turned out to be as weak as everyone feared. T4 has the potential of being good but some of the reviews I read are fairly devastating saying it has 'splosions but no heart, no characters to invest in.

As far as a Terminator TV show goes, it has all the weaknesses of a time travel movie sequel. More terminators have to get sent back, it runs the risk of becoming Highlander except instead of immortal of the week we get terminator of the week. You also end up with villain decay. Arnie was terrifying in T1 and it took a whole movie to kill him. In the TV show you have T-800's showing up and getting whacked with a single blow. Granted, in T1 they had access to shitty weapons and a T1 going up against infantry with heavy weapons would actually be at a disadvantage. Arnie never moved fast enough to avoid taking hits in T1, he was just tough enough to absorb the damage. If the cops were armed with 50 cal machine guns, he'd probably have been immobilized. Anti-armor weapons would blow pieces off of him, hyper-alloy combat chassis or no. But this makes a lot of sense. A Terminator isn't designed to be the perfect armored fighting machine, that's what the huge tanks and hunter-killers were for. The Terminator was about infiltration, trading protection for camouflage. It can pass for a human until it gets close enough to do some damage. It can crawl through the warrens the humans live in, places where the larger units can't fit.

The producers really should have gone and invented their own show instead of making a Terminator spin-off. But if they were dead-set on doing Terminator, they should have just set the whole thing in its own continuity and said "Let's do a Terminator where we don't ignore time paradoxes but embrace them." Show the timelines changing over the course of the show, some things the characters recognize and other things are left only to the audience to observe. Ok, so originally Skynet is getting its ass kicked and decides to time travel to stop the resistance. The war was sixty years in the future and there was no John Connor, it was trying to kill someone else. Kyle Reese was sent back in time, couldn't protect the original target but met and fell in love with Sarah Connor and fathers John Connor. Knowing that the war was coming, they can create a resistance movement before Skynet strikes. The war still happens and now Skynet makes the same time travel assassination decision but focuses on John Connor instead. It fails but pieces are left behind from the original Terminator which accelerates the research program that develops Skynet. Skynet itself is unaware of these changes to the timeline. When it tries sending back a T1000, it schisms the timeline and now there are two competing futures with one common past. Only one of these futures can be realized. So now Skynet is at war with itself since each one wants to be the sole victor.

The way that would play out in the show would have been a fucking head trip. Events of previous episodes may or may not have happened. Characters who were killed may end up being alive again no

Well, just as a note, in the show they kinda blew parts of that out of the water.

Apparently, it can go forward, not just backward. The time machine indeed does not go back. However, someone with sufficient knowledge can rebuild one. As stated in the pilot of the show, the resistance had sent one guy back to 1963 so that he would have a lot of time to reconstruct another time machine that could then be used in an emergency in the "present" as it pertained to the show (which was the late 1990's).

So a Terminator could just jump back, spend 15 years building a time machine, do the research they needed, and then jump forward/backward again to whatever time they needed to in order to complete their mission.

I love the show too, but the whole thing does require some suspension of disbelief (which I don't mind doing - it's supposed to be entertainment afterall).

T3 kinda addressed that though. Even with the chip destroyed, and all the research at Cyberbyne gone, Skynet was still created by a seperate time a bit later.

Part of the theme of that movie (and part of what the show missed and I hated it for) was that Skynet was sort of an unavoidable eventuality of humanity's drive towards better computers and technology. Skynet is going to come about regardless, and everything the Connor's do is only staving off the inevitable.

I think that in the same manner, Skynet is also trying to fight the inevitable. If by some weird chance he kills John, another leader WILL take his place. Just as humanity is destined to create an AI opponent so are they destined to create a leader to fight it. That's the neat thing about the last episode of the show that I did like (thought it was not addressed too deeply). When John jumps forward that last time, he jumps into the future. He skipped the entire time that he was supposed to be fighting. NOBODY knew him or had every heard of John Connor . . . yet the resistance was still there and fighting.

That's what bugs me about Sarah Connor. Rather than trying to prevent the war which is basically going to happen regardless, her ass should be stocking up on weapons, ammo, etc, and John should be becoming as badass as possible. Essentially, everything that was implied as happening off-screen between T1 and T2 that they just gave up on after another terminator showed up.

As harsh as the AC above is, they definitely have a point. You can't see Glau's bones in her arms and, from carefully studying all the large size pictures I found find of her on Google Image search (some of the most worthwhile studying I've ever done...) I believe that those are her natural boobs.

Breasts are pretty much the first thing to go on a woman when they stop eating - they're mostly made of fat after all. After that you can see the bones in their arms and also the bone structure in the face becomes clearly visible.

Victoria Beckham [wordpress.com] is one of the classic celebrity examples of someone who doesn't eat enough. Notice the fake breasts - you can clearly see her right nipple through that top, it points slightly up and to the right - and you can see her cheek bones far too clearly.

I'm not saying she has a proper eating disorder as that would be totally unfair and impossible for me to know. I'm just pointing out that that's what people start to look like when they do have a disorder. Obviously it can get far worse; I've known an adult woman whose weight fell to about 4 stone.

Summer Glau is physically perfect, neither too fat nor too thin. We should have her preserved, naked and petrified, for all time!

Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if kinetic energy (things that shoot stuff at high velocities) will always be the weapon of choice even far in the future. Even with advanced materials of today, it's really hard to stop a very fast and heavy projectile without using something very heavy which would still probably take permanent damage. Phasers just seemed silly to me because if you had the technology to create such a thing, you probably had the technological level create some lightweight device that could repel such a weapon.

Even if there were advanced weapons, the crew of Firefly could barely afford to keep the ship together, so it make sense that they would use old school weapons.

I would think that's an oxymoron. To be hard sci-fi, you're supposed to emphasize actual science, which says that it's impossible to travel back in time. Any of the theories in which you can go back in time comes with things that tend to eliminate paradoxes; for instance, a wormhole could only go back a finite amount of time that is less than the time since it was created (ie you can only jump back to some specific time between the present and when the wormhole was created), and that's ignoring the fact that you'd have to both be able to create a stable wormhole and be able to move one of the ends.

Another theory posits that you would travel back in time into an alternate universe. This would mean that if you tampered at all with the timeline, it wouldn't affect you in the slightest, leaving causality intact.

If you take relativity at face value, then it says that time is just another dimension, like length, width, or height, and everything deterministic, which means that the conditions in the universe right now perfectly predict the conditions of the universe in 1000 years. Since this is the case, if in 10 years a man were to travel back 20 years in time and take a potshot at your dad, then right now your dad would already have this memory of a crazy dude who shot at him for no apparent reason. For all intents and purposes, this would mean that the entire timeline of the universe is already set and we're just acting it out, as it were. No paradox, since the timeline's already incorporated any changes into itself.

Paradoxes of causality are just mental masturbation. It's like speculation that the LHC will destroy the world: sure, it's possible, but the possibility of it is so slim that arguing over the details of how it would destroy the world and making fun of someone else for thinking it will destroy it differently is ridiculous. No scientific theory says that this is possible and anyone who resorts to science to make an argument over the mechanics of it is woefully lacking in knowledge.

So, what else was the series going to tell us? What else are the new movies going to tell us?

For one, how that whiny little bitch John Conner could plausibly become the leader of the resistance. T3 utterly failed to do so; its John was more of a whiny bitch than the T2 John who at least had the excuse of being a teenager in foster care who didn't know his dad and thought his mom was a loon, and he didn't change much over the movie.

The show managed to at least accomplish that. He becomes brave, and begins to see how he both inspires and endangers those around him and starts to act somewhat like a leader who you can really see in a few years being ready to do what he has to do.

Plus the two-factions-of-machines plot was beginning to get interesting.

Of course much of that story could have been compressed. That certainly was the show's biggest failing. That funeral episode was a truly painful way to get like one or two minor revelations. If the Season 2 finale had been the Season 1 finale, then the show might be ending at its actual end and it'd be remembered fondly.