(Risk of spoilers if anyone missed it but here goes)

Major geeking out, I loved seeing the original Tarissa Dyson, and the ‘80’s-style music, action, and typography.  A couple annoyances:

All the characters seem to lack strategic intelligence.  John would have told his mother that the names “Sarah” and “John” make too easy a search string, so they’d be using at least one different first name.  The teen terminator (cool idea) would have been a better strategist and would not have left a bank vault full of future tech.  And a Terminator could not rip open a bank vault door.

(Was that whole bank vault time travel thing lifted from Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold?)

Shouldn’t John have gotten over his personal doubts by now?

That FBI agent has to know there really are robots running around now.  Whole football team’s worth of witnesses and all.

Loved the narration at the end: “Until then, a hell of a dogfight!”

I’m trying to avoid reading any spoilers tonight as I’m engrossed in the Australian Open Tennis.  The first ep of SCC is on my DVR and I’ll watch it in a few hours.

I liked it well enough to watch it again.

There were some pretty dumb moments (if they didn’t take the time to build that gun they wouldn’t have needed it) but it has Glau, so I’ll overlook them. After all… look at the first episode of STTNG.

I don’t know. Do you really want them to leave an active terminator running around in the past?

Watched it also with some interest.  The teenage Terminator was a good idea..a few plot holes that should get plugged with tonight’s episode.

At least this will give me something to watch until “Heroes” returns if the writers strike ends.

Second episode: cooler than the first but (with the exception of House first episodes usually aren’t that good.)

Teen Terminatorchick is a loose cannon.  Much harder to control than her counterpart from T2.

Important safety tip:  If you are working for the highway department and you find a really cool and suspiciously well-crafted titanium skull by the side of the road, use an oxyacetylene cutting torch on the electronics inside before you put it on display in your apartment.

Wonder if FBI dude will end up helping Sarah?

The second episode had one major continuity error and several plot holes, but I still managed to enjoy it.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

1. Major continuity error: How did the Terminator head manage to travel through the time portal? It was naked (read: had no skin covering it) and therefor should’ve either stayed behind or been destroyed. Presumably the super weapon Sarah had was destroyed so how come the Terminator head wasn’t?
2. The Connors are being pursued by an FBI agent who knows that Sarah believes robots from the future have been sent back in time to kill her and her son. So how does the (apparently mostly intact and still functional) remains of the Terminator destroyed at the bank end up in a junk yard? Not one person doing cleanup looked at that metal skeleton and thought it was weird enough to mention to the police/FBI?
3. How does the skeleton manage to accomplish tracking down its head in such a spectacularly inconspicuous manner? The movies established that the Terminators are built more or less like humans so most of the major sensory organs are in the head. I could see perhaps the argument that there was a homing beacon in the head and perhaps the head and skeleton are independently powered, but I would expect then that the skeleton would just travel in a straight line smashing anything between it and the head. Instead it manages to kill someone, dress itself in clothes, and rip off someone’s head and use it as part of its disguise until it can get to its real head. This implies a level of sensory ability in the skeleton that hasn’t been previously established
4. When did the T-800 models become so indestructible? You mean to tell me that even using a ‘future weapon’ the best Sarah could do was blow the Terminator’s head off but otherwise leave it fully functional?
5. Lastly, why the hell aren’t the resistance fighters armed to the teeth with ‘future weapons?’ If you establish that you sent someone back to build one then they can build more than one yet the resistance fighters had nothing but standard day weapons which they would know are more or less useless as anything other than a momentary stun gun on Terminators.

Yep, I spent too much time thinking about that episode just before bed time.

Okay.... nearest I can figure is that the first episode takes place after the second movie.  When they hop forward in time, Sarah is told by the good terminator that she is dead in the future four years after they left the bank vault…

So they are sometime before the third movie? or are we just going to do one of those “That movie was crap so we’ll pretend it never happened” things?

If we’re before the third movie, then is this particular “Skynet activation” what the third movie was about or did hopping forward in time already change that future?

And anyway, didn’t happy boy in the first movie say that they destroyed the time-travel thingie after he went through so that no bad things could use it again?

I’m sure someone can come up with an explanation that doesn’t make my head hurt.  This is why I hate time-travel in the movies.

Sarah and John and TerminatriTeen should be in the UK - Britain wound up building Skynet.

Did anyone else catch the homage to Hitchhikers Guide?  “Remain calm”

Les; yeah, I think we’re going to have to put up with considerable plot slop and technical inconsistency.  It does bug me that the T800 model is way stronger than it should be.  As an engineering problem no way could articulated cyborg hands pull bank-vault pins out of a door, even if titanium were 100 times stronger than steel.  Its internal actuators would concentrate stresses and cause breakages.

However, since “the future is not fixed” perhaps events after the second movie have changed it so that awful third movie simply never happened, or will happen in some completely different way.  Works for me.

And anyway, didn’t happy boy in the first movie say that they destroyed the time-travel thingie after he went through so that no bad things could use it again?

I would guess that they could have just rebuilt it?

OK, the series has more plot holes than a crocheted afghan, but… that scene where she’s standing in the room where the atomic bomb was invented, and she wastes those scientists and they turn into Terminators was worth the price of admission.  I could do a ‘philosophy of history’ class session on that scene.