Summer Glau

I don’t think she’s too thin, do you? Of course, I am not entirely sure how one calibrates the scale when determining the normal weight parameters for a waitress catapulted from happy obscurity into a frontline fight to save her son, upon whose survival to uber-soldierly adulthood rests the entire fate of humanity. So I, perhaps, am not best placed to answer the vexed interblogwebular question of whether Lena Headey is too twig-like to make a convincing warrior-mother in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But I can say that at least she doesn’t have the ropes of tendons running down her neck that made Linda Hamilton, in Terminator 2, look like the Hollywood version of Deirdre Barlow. That was distracting.

The Chronicles - mercifully to all who gaped in horror at Terminator 3: The Fall of the Franchise - pick up more or less where the second film left off. Dyson is dead, Skynet is defunct and the Connors are as relaxed as you can be when you know that you alone stand between the world and Armageddon. Then, alas, they see a man walking towards them with a familiar, measured and, crucially, unstoppable tread and the whole "Get down John!" cycle starts up again. This time, however, John’s protector is only-outwardly-normal classmate Cameron, played by Summer Glau. This sounds like a particularly unsightly seasonal infection, but she is actually quite the prettiest Terminator on the block. She mangles her evil counterpart in various ways before hooking the Connors up to a computer that sends them forward to 2007 so they can - like, definitely this time - make sure Skynet never gets built.

I used my own time machine, which looked slightly like a plane to New York and a TV remote control, to peer at episodes to come, and the future looks bright. The Chronicles have a solid skeleton covered in lively narrative tissue. As long as three raisins a day keep some flesh on Headey’s bones, we’ll all have some fun.