Sarah Connor (Lena Headey)

Lena Headey as Sarah Connor

In November 2005, 20th Century Fox announced that it would produce a television series called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring the adventures of the title character and her son in the years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This was followed by a November 2006 announcement that Lena Headey had been chosen to play Sarah Connor. The choice to cast Headey has been criticized by some fans and critics, notably those who feel only an athletic, muscular woman should fill the role established by Hamilton, who transformed her body into that of a muscled warrior for Terminator 2. The controversy has been covered by the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Herald, and The Guardian, as well as in online forums.

First Season

The series opens in 1999, a few years after the events of T2. Sarah and John Connor seem to be living a peaceful life. Living undercover after being blamed for the murder of Miles Dyson, Sarah is even engaged, to paramedic Charley Dixon. However, Sarah, fearing discovery, and perhaps, as John suggests, the certainty of a stable life, forces the two of them to flee again. On his first day in his new school, John is attacked by a T-888 Terminator posing as a substitute teacher called Cromartie. He escapes with the help of Cameron Phillips, a Terminator (in a Skynet-manufactured body that resembles a teenaged girl) sent back in time (by the future John) to protect him. Sarah hears of the shooting and rushes to the school, but is captured by Cromartie, who uses her to lure John into a trap. Again with the help of Cameron, they flee to a bank where resistance members have hidden the parts of a time machine. As Cromartie attacks them, the trio disappear into the year 2007.

Cameron suggests to Sarah that their primary mission should be to stop Skynet, estimated to go online in the year 2011. Sarah argues that time traveling was the wrong move and that if she had been allowed to stay in 1999, she would have had longer to prepare John and to prepare to destroy Skynet. It is at this point that Cameron informs her that she would have died from cancer (similar to the film version of Sarah) in 2005. Traveling to the future has given Sarah the time she needs to destroy Skynet in its infancy, faking her and John's deaths to keep the authorities from pursuing them, and to stay off the grid from Skynet despite it aware that they've travelled through time yet don't know which point in the timeline they are at. As the three of them attempt to evade discovery, and track down the origins of Skynet, Sarah is burdened with the extra knowledge that her own body might betray her. The third episode of the series shows Sarah at a doctor's appointment where she is informed that she is completely healthy. Nevertheless, she seeks preventative measures from the doctor to avoid cancer altogether. Later episodes show her more intensively training her body, and she is seen taking a handful of vitamins and medications.

Sarah's relationship with Cameron has been repeatedly antagonistic and they share a mutual distrust, as Sarah attempts to teach Cameron the value of a human life. Cameron also argues the importance of their mission to thwart Skynet's creation even if killing is necessary. During battles with Terminators programmed to kill the Connors, Sarah and Cameron often find themselves working together. Also, seeing as Cameron is the only other person who knows of her cancer situation, Sarah often approaches her for advice in the matter.

In the episode "Queen's Gambit", she discovers that her deceased lover, Kyle Reese, has a brother named Derek, who is also a time-travelling Resistance agent. Tormented by the memory of being unable to save Kyle, she hopes to save Derek from a similar fate after he is badly wounded by another cyborg; a T-888 Terminator. After she revealed his true identity to John, he seeks the aid of her former fiance Charley Dixon to save his uncle from dying. It is revealed that despite her knowledge of his connection to Kyle, Sarah continues to harbor distrust of the man, because she does not believe that he didn't murder Andrew "Andy" Goode, who was one of the creators of Skynet, which is later confirmed. Currently, they have an antagonistic relationship because of their opposing approaches to their respective mission to stop Skynet and its machines as well as their importances and concerns in John's life (despite of she's not yet aware that Derek has already deduced of his relation to her son and begins their relationship). Despite their mutual distrust, there are some attractions between them.

Second Season

In "Automatic for the People", Sarah worries that the likelihood of her contracting and dying of cancer has dramatically increased. In the same episode, Sarah meets John's new friend from his English class, Riley, and is concerned about their friendship because it potentially risks the family's safety from Skynet, but Riley's as well. Sarah tries to understand the loneliness and isolation from people his own age that John is experiencing. In the next episode, Sarah and Derek aid Charley in rescuing his wife from Cromartie, but she dies from shrapnel injuries received in a bomb explosion. While the Connors, Derek, and Cameron do not attend her funeral, they do seem to mourn her death at the dinner table.

In episode "Goodbye to All That" Sarah shelters a young boy named Marty Bedell who is being hunted by a T-888 because he shares his name with Martin Bedell, a future high ranking member of the human resistance, just as two other Sarah Connors were terminated in 1984 because of their name. Sarah helps Marty read the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for a book report; Cameron suggested the book after finding it on a shelf in their rented house. In "Self-Made Man", Cameron cites the novel when explaining another Terminator's accidental killing of forty-three innocent people in a fire started by his time displacement bubble: "Its just like in the Wizard of Oz, when the house falls on the witch."

The episode, "The Tower Is Tall But The Fall Is Short," revealed that the attack from Margos Sarkissian has left John traumatized as he killed a man to save Sarah and may have considered suicide to escape the violence in his life. Sarah took the blame of Sarkissian's death for John, however, which Derek and Cameron later find out in the mother and son's argument. She never has realized what is happening to her son since until an incident involving with one of the family's weapons, which he claimed was an accident. Things have changed between them since then, as John is having difficulty of letting go of his guilt for killing Sarkissian and withdrawing from people in life, and Sarah's realization that she cannot always be able to protect her son. At first, she was reluctant to seek psychiatric aid for John and herself, possibly because of her experience from Pescadero Institution, but sought counsel from family psychiatrist Boyd Sherman, along with finding out the doctor's role in Skynet's future.

In the next episode, she is kidnapped by Cromartie, but she is rescued by John and James Ellison, the same FBI agent who was originally determined to bring her to justice. Along with Derek and Cameron, they devise a plan in which Ellison lures Cromartie into a nearby church. Sarah and Derek land multiple shots from the upper windows, Cameron comes in and blows the left side of its head off with a shotgun, and John finishes it off with a Desert Eagle. After burying Cromartie with the intent on coming back to destroy it later, Sarah maniacally smashes his CPU with her MP5. Her stress after the battle with Cromartie results in nightmares and sleepwalking. She visits Dr. Sherman again but is unable to be honest with him due to secrecy. She remembers a part of the dreams where there's a three-dotted symbol, which she discovers she have seen them before left by a dying Resistance soldier in her basement.

Sarah's obsession with the three dotted symbol led her to Dakara Systems, a technology company whose logo includes the three-dot symbol, on the episode "Strange Things Happen At One Two Point". There, Alexander Agagi II, son of the CEO, Alexander Agagi, is developing an artificial intelligence program under "Emma," named after his late mother. It is also revealed that the technology was based from the winning Japanese team's whom Andy Goode's Turk program were against during a chess tournament before his death. However, its CEO conned her money, and his son's technology revealed to be useless, which shocked the young Agagi. Realize that she has been chasing a wrong lead, as Derek and Cameron have suggested previously, her stress has begun to be uncontrollable as she smashed mirrors in her bathroom. Derek also has begun to question if Sarah is losing her sanity or already has, as he knew her history in a mental hospital from John.

On the episode "Earthlings Welcome Here", she attended a UFO Convention to further her investigation with the three-dotted sign. This led her to a woman named Eileen, which was later revealed to be Alan Park, a scientist who specialized in Light Detection and Ranging -- an optical remote sensing technology used for robots. After he completed his work for an anonymous company, he found himself being targeted by someone. In fear of his life, he changed his identity and underwent sex reassignment surgery. He was convinced that it had something to do with the project with his former employer, and the drone sightings within Mojave Desert area and government conspiracy as the technology he was working with at the company was so advanced, it shouldn't have existed. He revealed that the company sent a blacked out van to pick him up along with other people every morning and drove them to an office/facility. Sarah took him to a hypnotherapist, Dr. Barbara Morris, to unravel his memories to find out the location of the facility. An assassin arrived during the session, and murdered Dr. Morris and Park. However, Sarah recorded the session with her tape recorder, and used the clues he revealed. It led her to a warehouse. As she entered the building, she fought a man, Ed Winston, who works there and during the struggle, Sarah apparently accidentally killed him, but not before he wounded her leg. As she crawled outside the warehouse, she saw three bright dots in the sky, and later as she got a good look, the three dots are hauls of a craft: a Hunter-Killer. On the episode, "The Good Wound," she kidnapped and forced a doctor, Felicia Burnett, to remove the bullet from her leg, and told Derek on the phone to destroyed all the evidence of her being hospitalized to prevent the authorities and the machines of learning her identity and tracking her. After Derek found her, Sarah finally decided to tell Derek of his relation to John, but he revealed he already knew. Later, on episode "Desert Cantos," the family arrives to the company town, Charm Acres, looking for potential survivors of the warehouse's explosion. At the end of their search, Sarah, John, Derek, and Cameron are shocked of seeing a Hunter Killer drone, the same machine Sarah saw earlier.

On episode "Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep," reveals that Ed Winston survived the gun wound delivered by Sarah. While following a lead from Charm Acres led her to Western Iron & Metal factory, Winston kidnapped her He then subjected her with hallucinogenic drugs to find out why she apparently bombed the factory and who are her accomplices. After enduring Winston's physical and psychological torments, Sarah breaks free and attacks him. Sarah overcomes Winston and shoots him in the head, killing him for real this time.

At the end of the episode "Adam Raised A Cain", she is arrested by the police, being beaten in the process, and is taken to jail.

During the second season finale, Sarah is rescued from jail by John and Cameron. Sarah accompanies the two to go see the T-1001 impersonating Catherine Weaver, as Sarah believes Weaver is building SkyNet. John is sent to the future leaving Sarah behind in 2009.

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