Sometime this season, a character will die..
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One of the least interesting things to come out of San Diego Comic Con was news that one of the seven main characters on Fox's bubble show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, apparently is going to be terminated before the show wraps up for the season. I'm not a fan of the ratings-challenged series and I make no bones about hiding that fact, but I try to be fair, and I'm being fair right now when I say that this trick smells like desperation.No show on solid footing can play games with its main characters during the season because any show worth a salt is going to have the main cast locked up for the entire season. If you kill one of them in episode 6, you've still got to pay them for episodes 7-22 whether they appear on camera or not -- otherwise they aren't regulars, they are recurring. It'd be a huge waste of money, so it's generally not done unless there's a problem on the backend like an actor wanting out, or something along those lines. That SCC is going to play games like this seems exciting at first as it allows them to actually put their characters in real peril, but it's too good to be true and something spells out how endangered this series is.
I can tell you straight out that it's not going to be series stars Lena Headey or Thomas Dekker. Obviously you aren't going to have The Sarah Connor Chronicles without Sarah and John Connor, making it literally impossible with rebooting the franchise. While it's true that it was never established when Sarah died, it's pretty hard to believe that they'd take that plunge after naming the show after that character. Then again, I've never felt like Headey fit in to begin with. Summer Glau is probably the one bright spot of the entire series -- even though I think Brian Austin Green is a close second -- so she's out of the question as well. Nobody actually cares about Green, even though I think he brings more character depth than anyone so far, nor the other handful of series "regulars".
It'll probably boil down to either Shirley Manson, or one of the two other middle tier characters. Either way I think it's a cheap way to get publicity for a struggling series that clearly hasn't found its voice quite yet and isn't giving me much hope that it ever will.
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