Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a wonderful flawed, exciting and ultimately disappointing show. It had two great performances from it’s actors, but two disappointing ones as well. It lasted two seasons, which was about one and half seasons more than most people expected. The show was one of the few explicitly religious shows on television and mixed it wonderfully with a science fiction premise, but there were too many stretches of seasons where the show seemed to drag and that ultimately doomed the show.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles took off after the events of Terminator 2 . It skipped past Terminator 3 just as Terminator Salvation did (and for good reason). Four years after the events of T-2, John and Sarah have a life and are living with a good man. But the Terminators find him and try to get him again. This time he’s rescued by a human looking Terminator (Summer Glau from Firefly) who takes them into a bank vault and creates a time machine out of the pieces left there. They jump 10 years into the future (hoping to throw off the Terminators) and our show begins.

The lead characters are Sarah and John Connor and the religious parallels are played up. John Connor’s father is a man from the future who was sent to protect his mom who is birthing a child that will save the world (Christ and Virgin Mary parallels abound). The show is meant to focus on Sarah, who has to train her son to be a savior, and John, who has been forced to live with the knowledge that the fate of all humans will rest on his shoulders. But they are the weakest of the characters on the show. Sarah was never fully defined and was often pushed into the background (a problem when your name is on the show) and John was too indecisive and bratty at times. The writers never really got a good handle on either of those characters.

Much better were their two sidekicks: Summer Glau as Cameron, a human looking Terminator who exudes strength, mystery and sex appeal and Brian Austin Green, in a career resuscitating role, as John’s Uncle from the future who comes back on a mission and injects real gravitas as a kick-ass soldier who knows what the stakes are and will do whatever is needed. Richard Jones was ex-FBI agent James Ellison who had a crisis of religion when he watched a Terminator destroy his entire FBI team and just walk past him. Shirley Manson, from the band Garbage , played a shape shifting Terminator who was trying to create Skynet, but with human understanding. And Garrett Dillahunt was excellent as a stalking Terminator who was then hooked up to be the interface for a young Skynet.

The show was excellent when it was dealing with the consequences of the character’s actions and when it focused on the battle ahead. But there were too many shows that seemed to drag. Having 22 episodes in season 2 seemed to present too big of a challenge to the creative staff. The show dragged too much with stand-alone weak episodes in the middle and plot lines that seemed to never end (the three dots came and went too many times). A 13 episode season would have been a much better fit for the amount of story the creators had for it.

At it’s best, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a exciting science fiction adventure that dealt with religious themes and the dangers of foreknowledge with a deft touch. At it’s worst, it was a boring adventure show about people whose motivations were unknown or confusing. A shorter season with tighter plotting would have made the show a classic, but the best that can be said now is that it was a wonderful and interesting failure.