So despite my weekend-long immersion in/obsession with the astonishing Portal, I did manage to check out last night’s premiere of the awkwardly-titled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which fits all of the criteria for shows that I like:

1) Does the show in question feature killer robots? [Y/N]

So I thought it was worth checking out, because hey, James Cameron’s first two Terminator movies are great, and that girl who plays River in Serenity is in the show, and it’s, like, guaranteed to feature killer robots! Plus Portal was over.

Did anybody else check it out? I thought it was eh, okay. I guess there’s another episode tonight, which I will probably watch, because I’m assuming there will be killer robots in that one, too. But fuck, that chick from 300 is a a goddamn terrible actress, and she’s supposed to be taking over for professional badass Linda Hamilton? At least the kid playing John Connor is an improvement over Whiny McDouche, but after giving it some thought, I’m pretty sure a deaf and dumb toddler would be an improvement as well, so that’s not too impressive.

The series’ Achilles heel—that Arnold is nowhere to be seen—is a pretty big one, but I’m actually pretty sure you could tell a pretty cool Terminator story w/o Arnold—the mythology is certainly rich enough (by which I mean “bewilderingly convoluted”) to spin the narrative off in a few different, non-Arnoldy directions that could be interesting. Unfortunately, Sarah Connor doesn’t really do that; last night’s episode was pretty much just an extended chase sequence of Sarah and John Connor running around like morons while a friendly/hot Terminatrix named Cameron (HAW! Get it?!), who’s played by that girl who’s good at kicking people from Serenity, saved their asses over and over. And… scene.

Since Fox seems intent on continuing to milk this franchise for all it’s worth, it’d be nice if it felt like they had any idea what made the first two films so badass. Namely, it’s this: James Cameron’s got a fairly unique ability to combine likeable-enough characters and epic themes with great action sequences and pioneering special effects. It’s a surprisingly tricky balance that Cameron alone has pretty much nailed, but whenever someone else tries, it just kind of falls flat. Like Fox’s whoring out of the once-solid Alien franchise (seriously, how does one go from this to this?), they seem to see an opportunity here to cash in without much effort. Which is lame, ‘cause there’s an interesting universe here, and a lot of cool places they could take this series. Here’s hoping after last night’s weirdly bland pilot, they kick it up a few gears. Because good shows about killer robots are, probably not surprisingly, pretty hard to find.

Episode two of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is on tonight at 8 on Fox, and you can watch the first episode for free right here.