The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Terminated?

It's not hard to imagine that this show isn't going to get another season. Fox, home of misplaced Sci-Fi, is bound to have noticed that the show has failed to find an audience. This may be partly because Fox is also traditionally the home of Clueless Program Planners; if you're aware of how Monty Python railed against program planners, and how the Browncoats blame the Fox network for the death of Firefly, you might be expecting a rant about the inability of a network to give a show a good home.

Not so.

If T:TSCC is going to die, it's because it has been a bit too intelligent for it's own good. This is a conclusion I've come to after sitting through most of the last season.

During the last 20 or so episodes, we've seen John Connor grow up to realise who people think he is and what he's going to have to become in order to lead humanity's rebellion against the machines. "Future John" is a lonely, isolated person. Everyone he loves dies, generally to protect him. John has learned about who he can trust and the price he pays for trusting the wrong people.

We have seen the Connors coping with the results of their actions - and this is a bit of a first for a show like this; the premise of Terminator movies seems to be that stuff explodes, covering up the fact that the movie series asks questions about free will, the nature of intelligence, emotion and emergent behaviour. The TV series has asked similar questions, has also dabbled in fate, destiny...wyrd, in a word. More, it has stared long and hard into the repercussions of the life that the Connors lead. For example: John kills a man. Well, every hero kills sooner or later and although a hero never feels good about it, it never slows him down.

It slows John down. It grinds him to a halt. He blames his mother for his having to take a life to save hers. For a while, he hates her.

If you like your entertainment to not only make you think but to do a little thinking of it's own, then this might be the show for you.

Here's another good 'un: Sarah Connor discovers a factory apparently making Terminator type flying robots. Part of the fall-out from this discovery is a terminator stalking the factory and killing everyone in it.

The next week, rather than brush all this under the carpet and move on, we go to the funerals of all the people that died. Yes, we might discover something unsettling about the whole operation that's germane to the uberplot, but we still see a small town devastated by the loss of two dozen people.

Part of the joy that this show brings me is that it has been developing very slowly and carefully; the audience wanted it paced rather faster, but I think they might have missed the point - we're seeing John Connor undergo his last temptation and his hours in Gethsemane. Hey, I'm allowed to point out the biblical links - his initials are J.C. and he's going to save the human race by being something other than human. Not in a sci-fi way, in the most human way possible - by isolating himself from love, kindness and joy so that he can be the most effective leader and commander that he can be. There's a really good reason his best friend is a Terminator called "Cameron".

This is so worth watching, as good as Battlestar ever was, but with far less RDM-wank. People want to watch something on Friday night now the toasters are gone? They're on Fox.