How can a show so flawed be so awesome to watch?

That’s the question I was again left pondering after Monday’s second season premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, “Samson and Delilah.” There’s a few things wrong with this show—like the fact that the title character is the third or fourth most interesting—that gnaw at me and sometimes have me wondering if it’s worth a slot on my crowded viewing schedule.

But in the end, it brings just the right mix of scary suspense, intriguing premise and just enough good acting and writing to overcome the occasionally syrupy melodrama and gaping plot holes.

So I’m going to keep watching, for now, because TV is there to entertain, and this show is still damn entertaining.

We open up right where we left off, Cameron’s been blown to bits, or at least it seemed so. She wakes up in a shredded SUV while inside gunmen overtake John and Sarah (Thomas Dekker and Lena Headey). They’re after the Turk, the electronic embryo of what will one day become SkyNet. They could have killed the Connors five times in the time it took Cameron to get up and walk, and that’s their downfall.

But the blast has damaged the Glaubot (Summer Glau). She accidentally burns the house down rescuing them, but it turns out she’s not there to rescue. She’s there to terminate. Only a convenient explosion saves John.

The soundtrack at this point is terrible, by the way.

At the apartment complex where the FBI raid on Cromartie went horribly bad, the aftermath is grizzly. Rows of body bags are lined up, and Agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones)—the best actor and character on this show—has developed an unlikely alliance with Charley (Dean Winters), by the way, and it soon seems Charley and Derek (Brian Austin Green) are seeming partners too.

It’s in a familiarly groaning moment of overacting that Sarah gets distracted behind the wheel while yelling at John and broadsides a minivan and they both end up more injured than the gunmen left them.

Anyway, we meet a new and mysterious redhead played by Shirley Manson (who fellow Access’ory Chris Serico will be glad to hear is awesomely scary). She’s negotiating purchase of the Turk. Turns out what Sarah and John had wasn’t the real thing.

I loved when, as Cameron tracks John and Sarah, stopping to analyze convenient blood spatters on the sidewalk, she wanders into a market and borrows some staples and baby wipes to stitch up and clean her face. Yecch. Meanwhile, John and Sarah pop in to a local church, break up a baptism and hide.

It was annoying to see Charley and Derek motor around town in Charley’s ambulance, conveniently popping up at each key scene. But I don’t know how else you weave them into the story. (Then again, that’s not my job.)

Manson’s slight brogue and taut features give her a menacing feel, but her exposition was labored and kind of cheesy. And I was so sure she was going to kill the guy who sold her the Turk. He just walked away puzzled.

John and Sarah realize they have to kill Cameron. They can’t just run from her. She’s the ultimate enemy because she knows everything they have done and are going to do in the future. I was impressed at the old “alarm clock in the baptismal font” trap that Cameron fell for – good plan to disable her, but next time have the right size screwdriver ready so you can pop out her brainchip before she wakes up.

That was a nice right hook by Cameron, by the way, taking out John and Sarah’s truck with one punch. This show does not skimp on the action scenes one bit. But it was ridiculous that Cameron didn’t kill Sarah after John ran off. It was worse that she found the warehouse where John was hiding almost immediately. Worse still that he hotwired it before she found him. Sometimes she’s just the worst terminator ever.

OK, enough criticism for now. I absolutely loved it when John and Sarah had Cameron pinned between the grills of two trucks and John attempts to remove Cameron’s chip, effectively killing her. Her frantic plea not to do it, even telling her she loves him and he loves her—totally hard to swallow, I know—just worked for me. Glau completely sold that scene. I really want to know what happens between these two in the future? Objectively, I admit it’s unbelievable he even hesitated, but to the writers’ credit he pulled her chip anyway, setting up an admittedly implausible final scene where he gives her a chance to prove herself.

In real life, that’s when she kills him, but in real life there’s also no evil homicidal cyborgs from the future.

The intervening scene where Sarah explains to John that terminators don’t know love was just painful to watch. Ellison’s face-off with Cromartie (Garret Dillahunt) at the end was a good reminder that he is the heart of this show, the one guy the viewer can actually relate to.

In the end, we see Catherine Weaver, the redhead, for who—or what, actually—she really is as she morphs from urinal to killer, a la Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s T-1000.

Two notes: Cameron pondering the resurrection is all kinds of intriguing to me. I guess I like that robots-becoming-human angle. And John cutting that dopey mop of a hairdo makes me like this show 23 percent more.

So yeah, I’m going to keep watching, and you should too.

By the way, someone big is going to die and even John is shocked. It was reported back at Comic-Con that a major character would be eliminated this season, and Dekker said fans will be “shocked at what this specific death signifies in the scope of the Terminator.”

He also says we’ll see a new John Connor this season, replacing the lame-dash-O version of season 1.

“But this year, the hero that will eventually save the world will emerge and it doesn’t happen just by accident,” he said.

Not a moment too soon.