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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:SCC) ran on Fox for two seasons, from January 2008 to April 2009. The television series continues but significantly problematizes the storyline from The Terminator ( James Cameron, 1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day ( James Cameron, 1991). Narratively, T:SCC occurs before the third installment, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ( Jonathan Mostow, 2003), which kills Sarah Connor with cancer and ends on "Judgment Day," when the machines unleash the world's nuclear arsenal.1 T:SCC follows the efforts of Sarah (Lena Headey) to prevent the creation of Skynet, a sentient computer-controlled military industrial complex that declares war on humans, and to protect her son, John Connor (Thomas Dekker), the future leader of the resistance. Within the Terminator mythology, "future John" sends both humans and specially programmed cyborgs through time into the narrative's ever-traumatic present to protect the Connors and to assist them with their mission.
T:SCC mediates the US national trauma of 9/11 on allegorical and structural levels. Allegorically, the protagonists fight the product of the military industrial complex's hubris. Skynet was built to protect the United States and its interests, but it turns on its human creators, a parallel to US-funded allies who have become enemies. This analogy becomes less straightforward because Sarah, who has trained for this impending war in the jungles of Central America like a freedom fighter, must operate underground like a terrorist, and is indeed labeled a terrorist by the show's media spokespeople and law enforcement officials. She is a thief, a carjacker, and a torturer of humans in league with the machines, and she blows up buildings in her mission to stop Skynet.
What is most compelling about the series is the way in which its formal properties operate as a traumatic framework by fragmenting time and memory. From the franchise's Reagan-era movie origins in 1984 to the 2008 series, Sarah has fought to prevent war. Time travel makes what would be flashbacks (memories of war) into flash-forwards (memories of future war), resulting in a temporal confusion that is characteristic of trauma. In the Terminator franchise, trauma has always originated in the imminence of future catastrophes that the Connors continually experience in the present, but which are animated by Kyle Reese's (Michael Behn) "memories"...