Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has a strong command of tone, filling scenes of everyday existence with a sense of looming apocalypse and the uncomfortable feeling that violence could break out at any moment. It features a memorably tough female lead as its title character and gets a lot of mileage out of robot enemies with the uncanny ability to pose as human. Its only problem is that all those elements come on loan.
As an extension of the Terminator film franchise, that only makes sense. James Cameron's 1984 original and its 1991 sequel created a template solid enough that even a third-party second sequel couldn't screw it up. But television remakes require a little bit of reinvention to work and with The Sarah Connor Chronicles' pilot we essentially get 45 minutes of Terminator without the series' stars and with special effects that look really impressive. For television.
The story doesn't just pick up not long after the end of Terminator 2, it practically picks up with the same shot. We get footage of a highway rolling by as Sarah Connor (now played by Lena Headey, the Spartan Queen from 300) delivers some overripe narration. "Would he still reach for you," Headey says of her fated-to-save-the-world son, "if they only dream you've ever shared with him was a nightmare?" The year is 1999 (at first), and while this would seem to place the action squarely between the second and third Terminator films, the producers have said this takes place in an "alternate timeline." (Which, to their credit, kind of makes sense for this franchise.)
A spectacular-ish action scene involving an old-school Terminator finding the Connors opens the show. It's a dream sequence, but it establishes an air of paranoia that carries over throughout the episode. It's also enough to spook Sarah into abandoning her fiancé, packing up her son John (Thomas Dekker, Hayden Panettiere's gay, then not-gay, then mysteriously absent best pal from the early episodes of Heroes) and heading to New Mexico. (Her instructions: "Half an hour. One bag. Plus the guns… I'll make pancakes.")