When my brother and I were younger we’d get into some vicious fights. We never caused each other any permanent damage, but not for lack of effort, and our animosity was often reset when our mom was always there to temporarily keep the peace by forcing us to “hug and make up.” I say “often reset” because we would hug and make up, but we didn’t want to, and sometimes forced hugging is not the best solution when people want to hurt one another. It was dangerous to lower your guard in that situation, because we naturally both saw it as the perfect opportunity to deliver a vicious knee to the crotch. And so when we were going in for the make-up hug, we’d sort of scuttle in sideways, taking away the most devastating crotch-shot angles, and the “hug” would be more like a one-handed “hey dude” pat on the back, while the other hand protected our delicate areas from the inevitable sneak attack.

It was with a similar caution that I approached “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” I wanted to embrace it, but I was wary of having my metaphorical nuts crunched.

Brief synopsis since there’s probably some weirdo who isn’t familiar with the “Terminator” films: Sometime in the future humans invent a computer that becomes self-aware and decides to wipe out humanity. John Connor is the leader of the human resistance and apparently the only human capable of fighting back when the robots attack, if the computer’s reasoning is to be believed. So the two sides send cyborg assassins and protectors back in time to kill or protect the Connors, and a billion-dollar franchise is born.

So the films are fun, but I don’t care much for the TV series “Sarah Connor Chronicles” at this point, and it’s not just because they aren’t allowed to cuss. The fact that there’s this burgeoning sexual tension between John Connor and a robot also isn’t bothering me too much, but maybe I should re-evaluate that. No, my main complaint about the show is a combination of little things.

In the “Terminator” films, the cyborgs themselves changed in every movie, but it worked. It made sense within the context of each story. Plus the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t change much (owing, obviously, to the filmmakers’ desire to be consistent and not at all to the acting ability of Arnold). In the TV series, they’ve changed the cyborgs, and so far the differences don’t make a whole lot of sense.

It’s established early on that John Connor’s mysterious protector, a Terminator made up to look like a hot babe, is a type of cyborg that no one’s seen before. So I’m sure we’ll discover more about her as the series drags on, but so far as I can tell she’s a prototype that is human enough to flirt and get close to John without him realizing she’s not human, but she still has the ability to become robotic and socially awkward when the script calls for a bit of humor or dramatic irony.

So she’s new, but the other Terminators, the bad guys that are trying to kill John, seem to be your standard robot-encased-in-flesh killing machines typically played by awesomely accented actors-turned-governors. And it’s well established that those types of Terminators are built to kill and not much else. They don’t understand things like emotions or subtlety. They talk like a computer would talk, bluntly and only when necessary. They break through walls and stuff. We know these guys, right?

On his first day at a new school John has a run-in with a Terminator that’s posing as a substitute teacher. Like they do. The Terminator comes in to John’s class, gives the standard “I’m your substitute for the day” speech, sits down at the teacher’s desk and takes roll. When he gets to the name John is using as an alias, he tears open his own leg, pulls out a gun and starts shooting. Wait, what?

Points to consider:

• The Terminator knew exactly where John would be, when he would be there and what he would be calling himself but didn’t bother to figure out what he looked like? “I’ll just call roll when I get there. I’m a Terminator.”
• Why the old gun-inside-the-leg trick was necessary is another mystery. A really stupid mystery.
• Did the Terminator get teaching credentials? Maybe that scene will be on the DVD.
• This whole thing is pretty sneaky for a Terminator — right up to the point where he started shooting even though he could just as easily have given a pop quiz or something and busted out an “assassinate the concentrating student” maneuver. His impatience ruined a meticulous plan (by cyborg standards). Wait, can Terminators get impatient?

Sure, it’s just one scene, but it’s near the beginning of the pilot, and so it was that metaphorical nut cruncher as I approached with open arms.

Then there’s this whole Terminator-searching-for-his-head subplot, in which the cyborg steals a homeless person’s head and attaches it to his robot body while he goes in search of his real robot head, all the while I’m sitting on my couch cursing the WGA and the AMPTP for being so stubborn, as I’ve actually set up a series recording for this crap in hopes it will get better or I’ll get dumber and start liking it.

Performances are fine. Not much to speak of. Summer Glau is weirdly sexy as John’s robotic protector, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. If the series lasts long enough we’ll surely discover that she’s modeled after John’s real-life future wife, which will unjustifiably make all in-show sexual tension and out-of-show fan-boy drooling seem less weird. Just don’t forget that she’s not human right now, guys. Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker are fine as Sarah and John Connor.

The real trouble isn’t the overall execution of the show, it’s the details. But maybe I’m focusing too much on details. If you take a moment to think about the “Terminator” world, which I don’t recommend but I did because of my intent to write this review, you’ll realize that it’s utterly implausible bullshit anyway, as all that time travel would eventually lead to infinite copies of everyone running around in every time period between the mid ’80s and probably into the next millennium given how audiences are sucking this crap up. And when you really think about it you realize that if the Connors succeed in their mission to keep SkyNet from being invented, none of the events of the films or TV series could take place anyway. So it it doesn’t make much sense as a series, or at all, really. But I was willing to suspend disbelief for that point in the films since we can still imagine the story to be linear in them, and I’m not typically the guy who cares much about those sorts of details.

The good news, maybe, is that all is not lost in the series. It’s pretty stupid so far, but not irreversibly so, and the thing about TV is that there’s a chance for it to get better. I’m going to file this as one to keep an eye on, even though I probably shouldn’t. It’s still “Terminator,” even if it treats me badly. What, you think I don’t give my brother a hug when I see him just because he used to kick me in the crotch?