Terminator Time-Travels to TV

"Come with me if you want to live."

You might've heard that line before. And if so, it was most likely delivered in a thick "I'll be back" sort of Austrian accent. Well, Fox is hoping that TV viewers will now hear a double meaning in that famous sci-fi entreaty. Not just as a robotic warning, but as an invitation to step away from the current wasteland of TV offerings and into the network's much-hyped small screen version of Terminator, which is subtitled The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

That's not to imply that a hulking mighty-man machine vaguely resembling the governor of a Left Coast state will be hanging around. No, this time the robo-protector shows up in the form of a teen girl who appears to weigh just shy of 100 lbs. soaking wet. But trust me, Terminator still means Terminator.

The Future Future's Past?
The Terminator storyline is derived from a series of three sci-fi flicks that have all featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as either a good or bad version of the titular rampaging cyborg. It's a tale of a future in which a worldwide computerized defense system called Skynet becomes self-aware and takes on the job of eradicating mankind. Down but not yet out, beleaguered humans fight back, led by an almost messianic individual named John Connor. He's so successful, in fact, that the menacing machines compute up the idea to send a cyborg hit man, a heartless, robotic Terminator, into the past to kill the great man's mother before he can be born.

The TV version picks up shortly after the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day ends, in the year 1997. So far the machines have failed in their quest and John Connor (played here by Thomas Dekker) is currently an insecure 15-year-old. He and his mom, Sarah (Lena Headey, last seen as Queen Gorgo in the film 300), are on the run from the cyborg assassins. They thought they had saved themselves and humankind by destroying the company that was building Skynet, but as this series begins they quickly realize that more must be done. Helping them with a little of the heavy lifting is Cameron (Firefly's Summer Glau), the aforementioned teen cyborg.

Along with marauding robots, however, there's also a government agent hot on Sarah's heels who thinks she's a crazed killer. So in an attempt to keep the Connors safe, Cameron arranges to have the three of them zapped 10 years into the future to 2007. It doesn't work.

Of Questions Why and CGI
If the story and its many timelines are starting to confuse you, you're not alone. Some will be willing to stretch their suspension of disbelief to make all the various film and TV story pieces fit. But others will find the show's twists of logic bewildering and probably end up with nagging questions. For example, how come all these laser-eyed robo-soldiers can't hit the broad side of a barn when wielding their high-tech weaponry? And why is John's protector a svelte and wispy young woman while all the bad machines are still the old-style bruisers? (For the first question, I don't have an answer. But for the second, how about this: John Connor of the future must have remembered that as a teen he needed a date for the prom.)

In the plus column, Chronicles does have some interesting character tug-and-pull between Sarah and John. She's a hard-edged blend of desperate determination and paternal protection, and she feels that she must go tough on the boy to prepare him for the future's trials—while he just wants to slog around as a normal teen. Along with that, the who's-the-top-guard-dog tension between Sarah and Cameron adds another compelling story element.

Simultaneously a plus and a minus are this sci-fi offering's special effects. Chronicles is definitely no pale imitation of its forebears. Everything from cyborgs smashing about with gleaming endoskeletons sticking out through their pseudo-skin to nuclear holocaust dream sequences point to this as a TV production gussied up with high-dollar motion picture-style pizzazz.

Naked Violence
But when all this CGI bombast bursts through balsa wood set pieces like they were, um, balsa wood, it carries a good deal of edgy content with it. For instance, on the violence side there are explosions and large-gauge bullets ripping into characters on the street, in high school classrooms and everywhere in between. And each episode has at least one scene featuring the petite Cameron going toe-to-toe with some hulking mech-man.

She—and Sarah too, for that matter—give as good as they get, but watching them bleed while being thrown through walls or bashed down onto car rooftops from four stories up is still mighty unsettling. And if it isn't, then maybe that's even worse, because this kind of femme fatale fighting both glamorizes and feeds our increasingly violent culture's need to downplay proper femininity by reconstituting women as buff and soulless—as women who are more than willing and able to put the hurt on anyone who crosses their path.

Up close nastiness, meanwhile, includes such things as a Terminator using a letter opener to carve a huge chunk of flesh out of his own realistic-looking leg, a bot with a dead human head jammed down on top of its metallic neck and Cameron digging bullets out of her chest with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

You realize pretty quickly that pretty much everything about Chronicles is sensationalized—onscreen and off. One ad for the series displays Cameron in an armless and legless robotic pose with only her hair covering her breasts. Another shows her crouched-over, full-on naked Terminator stance. That purposely titillating sexuality dribbles into the show through numerous cleavage shots, exposed skin and form-fitting clothes. Or, on some occasions, exposed skin and no clothes at all. The pilot episode shows (from a distance) the Connors and their teen robo-sidekick all running around naked after teleporting to the future/present.

The script for this 9 p.m. (eastern) series peppers viewers with "d--n," "h---," "a--" and "b--ch."

Reckoning With Reality
At the close of the first episode, Sarah is pondering the situation that she and her son find themselves in, and she muses about the future saying, "This is going to be one h--- of a dogfight." And, indeed, that looks to be exactly what this Fugitive-meets-Frankenstein high-action hybrid will deliver from week to week: bullets, bashing, bare bodies and battle-bots.

I'm not surprised, actually. This is, in effect, Terminator 4, after all. And the fact that it's on a TV in your family room instead of on the multiplex movie screen doesn't seem to have changed much about it.