Fox announced May 18th that the show is canceled. So heck.  But I'll write about it anyway, as it did have some merit (as well as a lot of inexplicably obtuse baggage).

The first person who has the nerve to say it gets struck off my Christmas card list, OK? If you don't know the Arnold Schwarzenegger line I'm referring to (from the original movie, The Terminator, 1984 -- and yeah, the definite article surprised me, too: I would have bet $5 it was simply called Terminator), if you've never heard any reference to one of the most well-known and repeated lines of all time -- in poor imitations of an Austrian accent, to boot -- then read on.

Or, heck -- even if you have. JUST DON'T SAY IT, OK?

Because he's not in the TV series. Apparently he got a day-job somewhere in California.

The TV series followed the adventures of a now-teenaged John Connor and his mother, and made reference to events covered in John's childhood, when the "Terminators" were sent back from the future to kill him--to stop him from becoming "the" John Connor who fights the machines after Judgement Day (the day the machines take over, in 2029) and leads the resistance to victory.

The time paradox is critical in the story arc from the first movie, through the subsequent Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines (2003), to the TV series (2008).

Both Sarah Connor and her son John have been told by visitors from the future that they will become strong and resourceful -- key figures in the salvation of humankind (and the kid's initials are J.C., how. . . prophetic?). So the characters live their lives in the present as a preparation for the future -- both to prevent Skynet from developing the Cyberdyne Systems and to become these "legendary" characters (their future selves).

That could well have been the crux of the series, and would have held more weight than the off-shoots into Sarah's dreamscapes and John's uncle's adventures on a submarine in the future (I never did quite figure that one out, nor did I ever really care who his girlfriend was or why she was also sent back from the future AND brought another girl back -- Riley -- to be John's girlfriend. Was this some kind of time-travel dating service?).

Becoming their "future" selves would have then been a self-fulfilling prophecy for John and his mother, prompting them to actions more extreme or brave or foolhardy (which did indeed occur at times, but without a unified thread of continuity). Although, of course, continuity is therefore highlighted as being just exactly what the fragmented lives of these characters did not have.

Performances by Lena Heady and Thomas Dekker as Sarah and John Connor were solid and demonstrated a steady growth -- as much as any teenager can relate to his (at times) psychotically disturbed mother.

Summer Glau was initially interesting as the Terminator-with-a-good-chip, but the story-line strayed into incestuous territory with her posing as John's sister "Cameron" (nod to James Cameron, no doubt) and being creepily asexual and sexual at the same time (she looks hot, but is a mechanical doll). The actor knows how to kick ass with balletic grace, however.

One of the stronger episodes featured "flashbacks" to the future -- yes, I meant that: they are flashbacks to what happened earlier in Cameron's existence that just happened to take place in the future (for a review of the logic of experiencing future events in your past, see the classic and hilarious conversation between Hurley and Miles in Lost, Season 5, Episode 11 "Whatever Happened, Happened.")

This episode, Episode 4 of Season 2, "Allison from Palmdale," allowed us to see the little girl whose body was used as a template for Cameron; the interface between her biomechanical endoskeleton and the memories still in the brain of Allison-who-was-but-who-is-now-Cameron was touching.

However, what started to become an interesting parallel in the series was evident between the development and education of John Connor, and the development and education of Weaver's protegé at Zeira (adapted from the Turk computer, and channeled through the biomechanical "John Henry" -- a prototype of the later Cyberdyne Systems model with "a hyper-alloy combat chassis" -- as Kyle Reese describes the Terminator in the first movie).

John Henry's mentor is probably the strongest actor of the cast: Richard T. Jones as the ex-F.B.I. Agent Ellison (with a nod to the ever-litigious Harlan Ellison). The implications are fascinating: how do you teach a machine to place ethical value on human life in a logical manner? The illustrations of this complexity are chilling; the death of John Henry's first mentor was caused by the computer, and a harrowing game of "hide and seek" that John Henry and Weaver's daughter play leads us to expect the same fate for the child.

We could have expected Season Three to provide further episodes examining John Henry's exponential growth in learning how humans interact. Too bad that won't happen.