Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

A timely attempt to reinvigorate James Cameron’s classic cyborg warfare franchise on the small screen before McG launches the big tent-pole continuation next summer, Terminator: Salvation, The Sarah Connor Chronicles pick up directly after the events of T2, following the renegade lives of John and Sarah Connor and their battle to stay alive long enough for T3 to be forgotten. It’s pretty ripe material for a badass sci-fi series. What would life be like for a mother-son duo who’ve been involved in all manner of fantastic civic and corporate destruction that could only be viewed as acts of crazed terrorism by public officials not so ready to believe in attempts to avert a coming computer apocalypse or the need to keep John Connor alive so that he can lead the future of humanity? Well, naturally they are pursued by the FBI, and their flight is complicated by the continual stream of cyborg assassins from the future still trying to crush the life out of poor John, which his overprotective mother is doing to him emotionally. To help out this dire situation, future John sends back a new terminator to his teenage self, this time a graceful hottie of a robot protector he names Cameron, wonderfully portrayed by Firefly/Serenity’s Summer Glau. In order to fully modernize the story and add urgency to the struggle, the series employs the famous naked time jump to bring our heroes to 2007 in an attempt to shake the FBI and vicious body builder bots, which doesn’t work for long, but flings Sarah Connor past the date of her death and closer to the time of the apocalypse so that they can concentrate in earnest on finding and destroying Skynet before it’s born. There’s an abundance of special features spread across the three discs, all including "Terminated Scenes” you can watch alone or integrated into the episode. Disc one includes a series of production and project gestation features that go above and beyond the talking heads to show a great deal of behind-the-scenes footage, as well as two commentary tracks with the principle actors and producers, and a "Gag Reel” with some funny, adorable Summer Glau moments. Disc two has an animated storyboard, Summer Glau’s dance rehearsal and cast auditions for lead Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker and FBI man Richard T. Jones. These tapes highlight the show’s greatest strength and weakness: there is plenty of potential, largely due to Glau’s robotic charm and unsuspecting menace, but much of the series falls faintly flat because Lena Headey just doesn’t play a very likeable or convincing Sarah Connor. And they’re her damn chronicles! (Warner)