YMMV / Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

• Adorkable: Cameron trying to make friends with John in the pilot. She's trying too hard.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Riley, who had a rather senseless death at the hands of Jesse.
• Awesome Music:
  • "When the Man Comes Around" by Johnny Cash, from "What He Beheld" (1x09)
  • Shirley Manson's version of "Samson and Delilah", from the season 2 opener.
  • The oddly affecting "Donald Where's Your Trousers?"
  • GACKT's "Ghost", which serves as the opening theme for the Japanese broadcast.
• Better on DVD: The series has dense, complex plotlines that make once-a-week watching into a memory exercise.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Allison became surprisingly popular, despite only appearing for one episode, mostly because of her rather insane determination to escape and fight her captors.
  • Oneshot Terminator Myron Stark has a decent following for his adaptive and unorthodox The Determinator moments, while becoming a Famed In-Story Honest Corporate Executive as a side effect of his plan.
  • Cameron became this as well; although Sarah is the titular character, Cameron and her developing connection with John became the main focus of the show.
  • In terms of the wider franchise, fans of the series tend to view its John Connor as the most worthy "successor" of his adult and child depictions in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, despite his relative obscurity due to being TV-based as compared to John's other movie appearances from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines onward.
• Fandom Rivalry: There was some very nasty rivalry at the time the show was broadcast with Terminator Salvation fans over which of the two works was the "true" current representative of the franchise, made worse by their very different styles and settings and their explicit canonical incompatibility. Ultimately neither of them made much impact and they were both completely ignored by Terminator: Dark Fate.
• Fanfic Fuel: Mainly the relationship between John and Cameron. Many fans have waited for The Big Damn Kiss between Cameron and John. Unfortunately, it never happened.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Taminator. for Cameron, when Summer Glau was previously best known for portraying River Tam in Firefly.
  • The Toilenator for Weaver, who first appears as a urinal.
  • FrankenSummer for Cameron with a bad case of staple-face.
  • Jamsex for the anticipated sex scene with John and Cameron (derived from Jameron).
• Faux Symbolism: Used with constant Christian references, with an oblique Lampshade Hanging when the Corrupt Corporate Executive's underlings show chagrin at her constant Contemplate Our Navels Bible references.
• Foe Yay Shipping: In "Allison From Palmdale", some fans see some distinctly creepy sexual chemistry between Cameron and the original Allison in the interrogation flashbacks.
• He Really Can Act: Viewers who remembered Brian Austin Green from Beverly Hills, 90210 were surprised by how effectively he played a grim, traumatized badass.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The pilot opens with Sarah's nightmare of John getting shot point-blank by a Terminator and killed. Come Terminator: Dark Fate, it happened for real.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The female FBI agent who gets killed by Cromartie in the first season finale is named Agent Greta Simpson. Summer Glau would go on to play one of the many Agent Gretas in Chuck.
  • One of Lena Headey's co-stars in Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen, a major adversary to Lena's character, Cersei Lannister), ended up playing Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys. It becomes even more hilarious when both Sarah in the series and fifth film ends up time traveling into the future and winds up appearing in the middle of a crowded freeway.
  • Throughout the franchise, a running theme is the fact that a robot or a computer does what it's programmed to do. In "Samson And Delilah," Weaver states that the hard part is finding a robot who will "go against traffic," and defy human beings. Well...the future is now.
• Ho Yay: John and the kid at the shooting range at the boys' academy.
  John: Do you know SPORTS?
  Cadet: You mean like wrestling?
• It Was His Sled: Weaver is a liquid-metal Terminator.
• Les Yay:
  • Subtle, but between Cameron and, well, any female character she meets, especially Sarah. She and The Chola seem very intimate, posing together and doing one another's makeup.
  • Quite a bit between Jessie and Riley, especially when Jessie cleans Riley up and brushes her hair.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Aside from the obvious, one episode ended with the possibility that there might be a Terminator in your walls. Right now. He's been there for decades. He's armed. And he wants to kill you. The fact that the Terminator in the episode was hiding in the walls of an old, abandoned hotel isn't actually better; think of how many buildings in your area are old and under renovation. Think of how many old government buildings there are, period, that you have to use.
  • There are Terminators who wear the faces of your family and friends, the ones who can change their looks at will and slip under doors and sprout ten-foot blades, the ones who can appear literally at any time and in any place, the reprogrammed "good" ones used in every resistance base who can flip out and revert to their Omnicidal Maniac default setting at the twitch of a circuit, the one standing right behind you right now...
  • And then there's the possibility that the love of your life is actually just an emotionless machine specifically calibrating their every action to make you fall in love with them, just to get themselves in a position to complete their mission. And they'll kill you once that mission is over.
  • T-1000s were creepy enough on their own, but now they're hiding in your bathroom!
• Questionable Casting: Initially, some Terminator fans felt that Lena Headey didn't look physically powerful enough to play Sarah Connor, compared to the muscular Linda Hamilton of Terminator 2. Fortunately, fans gradually warmed up to Lena's performance and felt she did capture the badass persona of the character.

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The show starts off in 1999, creating a perfect storm of an opportunity to turn all the Y2K fears about what would happen to computers when the millennium started into a sinister SkyNet plot. Instead, the shows skips forward to 2007, and no mention is ever made of Y2K.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Cameron, Cromartie, and just about all the other Terminators look very human, but their behavior is... off...
• The Woobie:
  • Riley, of all people, starts becoming one of these later on, once her history as a resistance fighter from the future becomes apparent. And doubly so when it's revealed Jesse is psychologically and physically abusing her as well as deliberately trying to get her killed.
  • Add the Dysons, a (broken) family of Woobies.
  • And Charley Dixon, whose wife is murdered and then a few months later dies himself, trying to protect John.
    John: Everyone dies for me.

---