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SUMMER GLAU ''Terminators don't have a lot of finesse,'' says the actress of the teenage cyborg she plays. ''They destroy whatever is in their way''
Michael Desmond

Today, on a sunny afternoon in November, inside a soundstage in Burbank, they're not shooting anything nearly so interesting. Nobody smashes through a plate glass window or tears a car door off its hinges, and there's no sign of any bad Terminators at all. Instead, Glau (who's done sci-fi before, playing River Tam in Joss Whedon's Firefly/Serenity) and Dekker (who has a sci-fi credit too, as Zach on Heroes) perform a scene in which their characters meet between classes in a hallway at their high school. Not exactly an adrenaline ride. After they finish, Dekker steps outside to talk about ''the vibe'' of the show. ''It's got a lot of influences,'' he says. ''There's The Fugitive, with the characters being chased and hunted every week. But there's also Twin Peaks, with new developments every episode about how one thing is connected to something else. We're all trying to solve this mystery.''

You don't have to be a self-aware supercomputer to spot the obvious temporal paradox in all of the above. In 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, it was revealed that Sarah Connor had died of leukemia. Also, at the end of T3, civilization ends in a nuclear holocaust. But pay no attention to such minor metaphysical technicalities (although Connor's cancer will be addressed in episode 2). ''This show completely diverges from the T3 timeline,'' explains consulting producer James Middleton, waving away the contradictions. ''We're not trying to mesh the mythology of the movies with the mythology of the TV show. In T2 there's a famous line: 'There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.' So what we've done in the pilot is make a new fate for Sarah by giving her an escape hatch in the form of a time machine that brings her to [2007]. Essentially, this show is our version of T3.''

Middleton says the idea for the series came to him while he was working on that first version of T3 as a senior exec at C2 Pictures, the company that made Schwarzenegger's last hurrah as an android action hero (and that's also producing The Sarah Connor Chronicles). ''After T3 came out, I started to miss Sarah,'' he says. ''I kept thinking, How could we bring her back? Animation? Another movie? But a TV show seemed like the best way to tell her story. How this woman lives day to day while facing threats from the future and being chased by law enforcement and trying to raise a son. You need a TV show to tell that sort of story.''

NEXT PAGE: ''One day the writers just weren't on the set anymore. Nobody turned up. It's been pretty confusing without them.''


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