A new poster showing the brilliant Lena Headey as Sarah.
The story takes off from the end of T2 and takes its own direction (it will ignore T3 entirely). After T2 Sarah and John Connor are thrust alone into a paranoid world where an FBI agent hunts them in belief that she is a deranged and dangerous lunatic whilst they live under the worry that more machines from the future can show up at any minute to murder them. With the return of terminators into their lives Sarah decides to take on skynet itself. A new, female Terminator (played by Summer Glau) is introduced to protect John Connor but it's unknown at this point what model she will be, possibly some unknown prototype at this point. One thing is known, the main characters make a leap through time in the pilot from 1998 to 2007 and that time travel will be a main component of the show. The question has also bee raised as to how the terminators manage to bring weapons back from the future. One answer is that, like the TX they have either inbuilt weapons or weapons kept under their organic skin. The other is that they send tech machines back to build weaponry from scratch and supply it for the machines.
Part of the pilot was reshot to disclude a scene where a Terminator attacks John in a schoolroom to avoid criticism over the recent spate of school shootings in America.