I have to say, I’m not sure if it’s the layoff affecting my critical judgments, but I can think of plenty worse ways to spend an hour than with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I’m hesitant to call it actually “good,” but as a pilot, it could have been a lot worse.

The show works best as a silent movie: all action, no dialogue. The dialogue’s by and large terrible, with platitudes and wanna-be quotable lines replacing actual dialogue. The fact that the female Terminator can turn a human-like attitude on and off seems to me a complete cheat and flies in the face of established Terminator rules, but then again, this show wants to forget that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ever happened, so really, what could I expect?

After all, in T3, Sarah Connors is long dead. The solution? Time-travel past the time in which she would have died, placing her in modern-day USA in order to discover who founded SkyNet 2: Electric Boogaloo. Because cancer can do many things, but a flux capacitor hidden inside a bank vault can do a whole lot more.

I happen to actually like the insanely dark ending of T3, in that it offered a satisfying coda to the (now) initial trilogy of movies, stating in bald faced terms that the future apocalypse was set in stone: humanity was just that awful of a species that a hundred preventions of the inevitable couldn’t stop the oncoming onslaught. John Connor is always and ever going to have to lead us to salvation in the cold, cold future.

Chronicles may or may not lead to that end. It’s unclear if Sarah, John, and Cameron think they can stop the future or not. Given that Cameron actually exists, I’d say “no,” but then again, the logic of shows that employ time travel are so spotty that I can’t take Cameron’s continued existence as proof of the futility of their plan. (This is why I hate time travel in sci-fi so much, and why Season 4 of Lost gives me an ulcer when I sit down and think about the hole they’ve dug themselves into over there.)

In any case, we have Summer Glau back on Fox, which warms my heart. Her River-Nator is interesting after one hour, and I am happy to see anyone from Firefly on Fox again. Neither Lena Headey nor Thomas Dekker particularly stood out, but neither hurt the show. The only thing that hurt was me waiting for Dekker to get a call from Claire in order to videotape her falling from a tall edifice. Other than that, he did serviceable work.

The mystery of the show seems to center around the creation of SkyNet in the wake of Miles’ death. Ostensibly, the FBI agent will come around, a la Tommy Lee Jones, and realize maybe Sarah isn’t so crazy after all, and will work as a proxy inside the government to alert either the audience, Connor, or both as to the true nature of SkyNet’s rebooting within the government. And ostensibly, we’ll learn why the future SkyNet didn’t send back a slick, Robert Patrick-like model. Maybe it wanted brute force over silvery stealth. Or, perhaps, it could only afford the CGI for an older model for a weekly television series. That’s always possible as well.