When you have a fictional universe, preserving fans’ fond memories of its intricate, specific qualities is far easier when you stop publishing new titles, be it sequels, spin-offs or other works. Should you decide to continue the ‘franchise’, the end result, more often than not, is that the peak had already been reached, and try as you may, you won’t succeed in getting back there. That’s why sequels have a bad reputation: habitually, they build upon their predecessors, yet never quite reach them, and end up pulling the entire series down.

It was perhaps such with Myst: while Exile, Revelation and End of Ages weren’t bad games at all, they lacked the pure excellence of Riven. And it was certainly so with Terminator: the third movie failed to add any memorable elements of its own, and as such now serves to give a worse impression of the trilogy as a whole.

Thus my worry with The Sarah Connor Chronicles. An entire TV series based on a movie trilogy whose canon is already on the verge of irreparably damaged timeline nonsense? A father who knows his own son before he was conceived, a company reverse-engineering chips before they were built. And who wants to see “miraculously, humans keep surviving the fight against virtually indestructible, highly aggressive and optimized machines” over and over again anyway?

It turns out I do — for now, at least. I think there’s something endearing about — of all things — the character of Cameron, the “good” Terminator who happens to look and act a bit like a teenage girl. Summer Glau is a terrific choice of actress, making Cameron wooden, programmed and predictable as you’d expect a machine to be, yet curious, inquisitive and knowledge-thirsty.

The show goes jumps between disturbing (a mad scientist using human tissue for an android) through amusing (Cameron’s attempts at “not acting like a freak” at high school) to controversial (should a bright-minded person be killed if their clever invention will one day be indirectly responsible for mankind’s destruction), while maintaining a goal that appears near-impossible to attain — preventing Skynet’s creation once and for all.

And so, I’ll continue to watch, hoping for more episode in the style of this week’s, which have it all: a flashback to young John, a connection to the first Terminator motion picture, a return of a character from the pilot, Cameron puzzled by human behavior and a Terminator’s remains found.