High-octane showdowns, Terminator love triangles and time travel are just a few of the themes in the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, rebooting on Fox this fall.
The hour-long premiere, "Sampson and Delilah," which debuts Monday, picks up where the first season’s explosive cliffhanger left off, with the fate of cyborg Cameron (played by Firefly‘s Summer Glau) obscured by flaming wreckage. Sarah Connor (Lena Headey, who played Queen Gorgo in 300) resumes her role, in which she protects her son, John Connor (Thomas Dekker), and prepares him to lead a future human rebellion against the grim, robot apocalypse.
This season, audiences will be introduced to several new cast members, including mysterious ZeiraCorp CEO Catherine Weaver (Garbage singer Shirley Manson, pictured below); John’s high-school love interest, Riley (former soap opera actress Leven Rambin); and an expectant mother who moves in next door, Kacy Corbin (Freaks and Geeks alum Busy Philipps).
Series creator Josh Friedman took a break from working on the show to get on the phone with Wired.com and chat undercover Terminators, the new cast of leading ladies and parallels to Battlestar Galactica.
On kicking off Season Two with a bang: "Last year we were establishing the world and the rules of the world and bringing people up to speed. This year, we have a bigger budget, so we can give viewers more sense of the place and Los Angeles. We have some really cool action sequences and show more of the future sequences where the Terminators have completely taken over.
"We have an awesome episode where we get a good sense of Cameron’s back story — and what she was made for. That’s one of my favorite episodes so far. We also will show more of Brian Austin Green‘s past, his point of view and where he came from. [Green plays Derek Reese, John’s uncle who traveled from the future.]"
On the female-heavy cast of Season Two: "It’s a great show for women, in terms of having so many kinds of strong women. John is just coming into his own and watching these women protect him and mother him — how much of themselves do they lose? I was talking to Lena about this idea that Sarah is always at risk of losing herself. She is a great pillar of strength, but always struggling with her maternal side — she almost becomes a Terminator herself. And Cameron is very traditionally feminine and learning how to use those skills. She’s either learning how to be be human or just getting better at portraying one."
On the romantic tension between John and Cameron: "Some of the events in the first episode make John re-evaluate his relationship with Cameron. Not only do they remind him of what his role is to her, but he is struck by how much he feels for her. That’s kind of scary for him. I think Riley’s character is an opportunity for him to find another place for his emotion. It’s not something Cameron will sit idly by and let happen. She can’t."
On fan obsession with whether John and Cameron will ever get it on: "There are a lot of people who are just like, ‘That’s icky,’ so I don’t know how much people want to see that happen. But at this point, just watching them balance out the emotional and power dynamics of their relationship is intimate enough — it’s just not a sexual relationship. But — there are very few ‘nevers’ on this show. Science fiction has always been a great place to explore gender politics — that’s why there is a big gay and lesbian following of sci-fi."
On parallels to Battlestar Galactica: "I’m a huge fan, I’m just behind a season. It’s almost so good and so close to what we’re doing, sometimes it’s painful to watch. We have a writer on our show who was on BSG the first two years, and she serves at a checkpoint to make sure we don’t cover the same ground. I don’t know who the 12th Cylon is and I’ve threatened to fire people who tell me anything about that show. I like the idea that there are hidden Terminators … but you have to be careful or else it becomes Where’s Waldo?, and a cheap effect. There could be a Terminator that we discover along the way. I can’t even remember how many there are on the show right now."
On the show’s biblical themes: "The original material had religious underpinnings — Sarah was Mary, John is the Messiah, there’s a weird birth that involves moving through time, well, John’s not fatherless but still.
"I was always interested in that aspect because of the focus on the apocalypse. I like to explore how the world ending and how sci-fi mythology butts up against Jewish-Christian theology. Richard T. Jones‘ character [detective James Ellison] faces a lot of things that don’t fit in his world view. They may or may not fit into his theology, but it is Judgment Day. Just a different form of Judgment Day."
On Terminator Salvation, the upcoming movie: "I’ve kind of stayed away from the film. I’ve had some conversations, talked about some marketing ideas but haven’t read the script, so I don’t know what’s going on with it. I’ve kept my head buried in the show and the mythology that we’ve built. I hear Batman [Christian Bale] is in it."
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