Re: Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, paiiinful
Yeah, that's a fair point -- T3 and T4 were more just about "Here's what happened next," than about the notion of fighting the future.
Now, this gets into problems with time travel (especially time travel FRANCHISES) in that you end up with sort of "causal cul-de-sacs" where Skynet and the resistance in the future send someone to the past which in turn guarantees that the future will be what it is and essentially closes the loop. In that sense, you can run into predestination problems.
But TSCC in the opening episode basically says "We're totally blowing open the continuity." It became highly unclear WHAT the future was, given that you had obviously antagonistic terminators, friendly terminators, and "neutral" terminators or at least terminators from some other faction whose origins and intentions were as-yet unknown. And it expanded on the concept of a "War throughout time." I mean, rather than confining everything to the present day, you could have this or that person at ANY time in the past doing this or that to try to affect the future. So everything was thrown open and anything could happen.
I thought that was a cool concept that they could've played with, and they doubled-down by introducing really questionable bits (which were later used in T4) about humans who don't KNOW that they're terminators or at least have been reprogrammed as sleeper agents.
Like I said, lots of potential, and very good acting, but didn't develop fast enough to hook an audience.