On Monday, it was announced that Fox had officially picked up Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for a second season. While the news wasn’t particularly surprising, I was still happy to hear it. Because not only did I enjoy the show, but it got me back loving a franchise that I had a pretty serious falling out with.

I loved the first two Terminator movies. And Terminator 2: Judgment Day had a perfect ending to the story. But a third movie was always an inevitably, even as the franchise rights got passed around Hollywood for what seemed like an eternity. I was excited for T3, figuring that all they had to do to make me and most fans happy would be to provide a clever enough reason as to how there could still be a future with Terminators.

In the movie, when John Connor refers to the events of T2 and says, “We stopped Judgment Day,” the Governator responds, “You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.”

The theme of the first two films was that the future was not set, that it could be changed, that humans are responsible for their own destinies.

T3 took that all back, and did so without even bothering to give an explanation.

After I walked out of T3, I had given up on the Terminator franchise. Even the news that the estimable Christian Bale himself would be starring in the next Terminator movie (and possibly two more after that, if the whole “Terminator Salvation” trilogy comes to pass) didn’t change my mind.

The announcement of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t immediately sway me either, but I tuned in, largely because there was no other television to watch thanks to the writers strike. But the show gripped me right away, by continuing the story of the first two Terminator films and largely ignoring the third. When John and Sarah Connor encounter Terminators, they are confused as to how they can still exist in the future. They set out to stop Skynet, once and for all, and they enlist Cameron to get to the root of how Skynet still comes to be despite their actions at the end of T2.

Now THAT got me interested again. Finally, we were going to get a real explanation as to how the machines come to rise.

The show was a bit uneven in the beginning, (how was Cameron a totally convincing normal teen girl one episode and a socially awkward machine the next?) but the show quickly found its footing, and has introduced a lot of new elements to the story, while building upon the mythology of the first two movies. The re-introduction of the Dyson widow, Dr. Silberman, and the Reese family were handled brilliantly, and I found myself really enjoying Brian Austin Green’s acting (certainly a first for me.) The show seems to have large plans and a lot of back/future story left to flash out involving the history of SkyNet, what kind of a machine Cameron was, and what the Terminators were doing to Derek and his friends in that creepy house. The “cliffhanger” ending wasn’t supposed to be a season finale, and I don’t think anyone really suspects that Cameron is gone – would Fox really get rid of hottie Summer Glau that easily? – but there are still more than enough loose ends to make Season Two worth watching.

And now that the Terminator franchise is interesting again, I’ll be tuning in.