Perhaps because I want to like everything about it so much, I find myself finding fault with every minor detail in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

So let me just cut you off right now, before you can dismiss me as a hater, and say I love this show so far. It’s dark, tense, compelling and just plain cool. It’s not the original, but it’s what you would expect, hope even, the original would eventually become.

That said, while I was watching “The Turk”, last night’s episode, I found myself irked by the way the writers seem to be trying to lighten things by slipping in a quip here (Cameron’s “I fooled you.”) and a cliched moment of motherly concern there (Sarah’s admonishment to Cameron to wear clothes around the house.)  When Cameron follows John to school and he implores her not to be a freak and then spends five minutes explaining what that means, I was thinking of Small Wonder, that 80s campfest in which a family adopts a cute little girl who’s a robot.

That’s not the image they want to be calling to mind with this show. That said, this show also does not shy away from the dark, the deep or the gory. And we got scads of both last night.

Sarah is having bad dreams about being their when Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project. Knowing that nuclear holocaust is just four years away, she wonders if she could have pulled the trigger before old Robbie became the “destroyer of worlds.”

She confronts this potentiality when her cell phone-selling boyfriend turns out to be a Cyberdine wunderkind who’s blazing trails in artificial intelligence. The Turk is both a historic foray into AI and the name of the smart machine that fills Andrew Goode’s coat closet. Today it plays chess. But tomorrow it might be in a bad mood and decide to destroy humanity.

Before the end, Cameron tells her she must kill him, but Sarah opts for just burning down his  house. Guess she couldn’t pull the trigger after all.

Meanwhile, evil terminator Cromartie is pulling himself together. He’s skinless, but he’s got a formula for that. He just needs a little whole blood and a brilliant scientist to put together the epidermal bath he needs to get back to the hunt. These were the creepiest scenes of the episode for me, when Cromartie emerges from the blood-bath and the scientist cuts his eye slits open.

The obvious lesson lies in the scientist’s trusting wonder at the breakthrough he was a part of. He clearly put aside his sense of self-preservation because he didn’t seem to question that he would become disposable as soon as this monstrous machine before him got what it wanted. By the way, I’m not the only one who thinks terminators these days look a lot like Cylon centurions.

Ellison arrives at the crime scene, having already tangled with the local cops at last week’s safe house massacre. He knew that was more than a drug deal gone south, and he knew Carlos was holding out on him. The forensics file showing that one of the corpses bore the fingerprints of a 4-year-old Ohio kid was the second strangest thing he saw that day. The mess Cromartie left behind had to be the first.

It seems to me that Ellison is being painted as a no-nonsense career FBI agent, but one who’s too smart to take things just as they seem. Therefore, I have to figure he’ll eventually become privy to the future John and Sarah already have seen, and he’ll become an ally. That’s long term, though. For now, he’s on the hunt for them too.

I thought the high school scenes were going to be my least favorite of the episode, especially when a girl’s bathroom melodrama escalates into a suicide attempt in which John looks like he’ll be the valiant hero. But when Cameron holds him back and that girl just falls to the pavement with a gushy thud (What were those images around the school that drove her to that?), my respect for this show increased tenfold.

They just let her die, which is what almost no show would do. But to be true to the premise, that John’s survival is paramount to the survival of mankind, he can’t be playing the hero on the evening news. He has to lay low, even if it means letting a sad young girl take her own life right in front of him. And no terminator sworn to protect him would let him do otherwise.

Thomas Dekker, who plays John, has his work cut out for him. He’s surrounded by two of the strongest female characters on television this side of Cara Thrace. John Connor will lead the resistance, but he’s not that man yet. He has to stay true to the role without being overshadowed. He touches on that challenge and more in an interview with iF Magazine.

That challenge is what drew me to playing this role in the first place when I first talked to David [Nutter] and Josh [Friedman]. John has a big arc that is planned and in the pilot he starts by being in the mindset of just being normal and being done with everything. I don’t think John is going to be ready for awhile to accept that this is what he has to do. I’m excited about playing the arc of his decision [to accept his predestined role]. He can’t go through life hoping that the future isn’t going to happen and he has to realize that it is going to happen. From the onset in this series there are little things. For example in the pilot, John is the one in the vault who decides that they are all going to time travel. That was a very important point for us to make early on, to show the glimmer of what is coming.  

I’m still working on it every day when I come in in the mornings. There are days when I read a scene, and you know as an actress you usually have a gut instinct about it? When you’re playing a robot your gut instincts don’t come into play so much, you have to think about it. You have to shape the character. She’s very mysterious, so we’re having to kind of, we’re having to build her and build an arc for her. When I read the pilot, I said to Josh [Friedman, executive producer] “I don’t really know how to do this.” I’ve played very vulnerable characters so far, very emotional characters, and this is something really different for me. So I really trust a lot in what the writers are doing.