Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Episode 3 in Season 1 is entitled "The Turk" after the eponymous chess playing computer in the episode. Several electronic chess players have been named such in reference to the original "The Turk", an eighteenth century hoax. The original was a box with a mechanical human upper torso that would move chess pieces, within the box a midget would sit and manipulate the arms with levers.
  • Dyeing for Your Art: While training with firearms for the pilot episode, Summer Glau was hit in the face by an ejected bullet casing. Rather than cover up the resulting mark with makeup, the injury was left visible on Summer's face throughout filming for the pilot, as one of the "wounds" Cameron picked up in combat.
  • Continuity Nod: Multiple references to events in the first two movies, even a few in-jokes referring to the third movie.
    • Sarah's death from cancer in the timeline averted by their jump forward is a ref to Sarah dying from Leukemia between T2 and T3.
    • The picture of Sarah that Kyle Reese carries around as a good luck charm in the future is a re-creation (with the new actress) of a very similar pic seen in the first movie.
  • "Hey, It's That Guy!":
    • One of the T-888s appears as a cult leader in Dollhouse.
    • The racist douche Dietze from "Today Is The Day" is a wounded defected Ravenswood soldier in Jericho.
    • Garret Dillahunt AKA Cromartie/John Henry shows up as a possibly crazy wife killer in Lie to Me.
      • At the same time Dillahunt was playing Cromartie/John Henry, he was also appearing on Life as the evil, arrogant Big Bad, Roman Novikov.
      • He was also one of Tommy Lee Jones' deputies in No Country for Old Men.
      • He's also a psycho burned spy with a fascination with Bibles.
    • Shirley Manson is a Terminator... cool.
    • Bobbi Sue Luther from Junkyard Wars as the silver-tongued Bar Skank. Yes, that's actually how the character was listed in the credits... "Bar Skank."
    • Zoe Graystone is a blonde high school student.
    • In the episode "Alpine Fields," Lauren's father is the same actor who played Dobson in Firefly. Seeing him and Summer in the same scene together without him pointing a gun at her and using her as a human shield is somewhat surreal.
    • The Persian emissary from 300, the one Leo kicks down the well, is a resistance fighter.
      • Speaking of 300, Sarah Connor looks familar...
    • Surprised nobody's yet pointed out Trip Tucker as a (strongly-hinted to be) wife-beating sheriff.
    • Enrique is Bra'tac?
    • Hey cool, Jet is a General at a military academy.
    • Trevor, Casey's cop boyfriend, is actually Esposito?
    • Hell, the core four characters are all made up of That Guys: Queen Gorgo, Zack, River Tam and David Silver.
    • Jesse is played by Kendra Shaw.
    • Queeg, the Terminator commander of the USS Jimmy Carter, is played by Cutty.
    • Warren Mears was framed by his future self.
    • Apparently John Connor used to sound a lot like Littlefoot and Fievel when he was younger, for some reason.
  • Mythology Gag
    • Sarah's assault on the Dyson residence with an M4 in T2 is mirrored by Cromartie's with an M16.
    • Cameron dressed as a motorcycle cop in one episode, complete with Cool Shades, is a ref to the fake cop T-1000 in the second movie.
    • Also, from the second season premiere, Cameron's use of "Call to him", a reference to a scene in T2.
    • In "Automatic for the People," Riley says that John's English teacher is "Mr. Henricksen," a reference to Lance Henricksen's role in the first film (and to the fact that Lance Henricksen was James Cameron's first choice for the role of the T-800).
    • When Cameron's "switch is flipped" to Terminate instead of Protect in the season 2 premiere, when she is chasing them it has a limp not unlike T-800 in first film.
      • And the T-1000's in the second film (actually the result of a sporting injury Robert Patrick suffered that was incorporated into the T-1000's gait.)
    • In "Goodbye To All That", the terminator of the week begins killing people with the name Martin Bedell, of which there are exactly 3 in the area, just like the 3 woman named Sarah Connor in the first film. As with the film, the intended target is the last one on the list.
      • And the terminator is using the same ".45 Long Slide with Laser Sighting" gun prop from the first film (the production also took some promotional pictures of it with Summer Glau before they returned it).
    • The T-1001 uses the same finger-wagging motion to taunt Jesse that the T-1000 did to Sarah in T2.
    • Born to Run has a Terminator buying from a gun shop, and a terminator attacking a police station, presumably as continuity nods to T1
    • In the finale of season two, Cameron says "Hasta luego." to the gangster girlfriend from season one.
    • Andy Goode's future alias, Billy Wisher, is a nod to William Wisher, the screenwriter for T2.
    • The first shot in the pilot episode shows a stretch of road while Sarah narrates, which mirrors the ending of the second movie.
    • Cameron's love of Fingerless Gloves is a nod to the pair the T-800 wore in the first movie.
    • Self Made Man, the episode which featured a Terminator sent back to kill the Governor of California.
    • When Cromartie goes on a rampage in Mexico, Derek assures a wounded cop that he won't be back.
    • "The Good Wound". Sarah describes John to the nurse she kidnapped in almost word for word how Reese described John to her.

"He looks like his father but he has my eyes. You trust him. He has a strength about him. I'd die for my son".

  • Shout-Out
    • Detective Ellison is named after sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, whose stories inspired the first Terminator film. The episode "The Demon Hand" is even named after one of Ellison's Outer Limits episodes, "Demon With A Glass Hand."
    • Someone who watched way too much anime might argue that Cromartie is a shout out to Cromartie High School.
    • Cameron is a Shout-Out to James Cameron himself.
    • Savannah telling her mother: "You can't sing." The mother is played by Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson.
    • You can't help but think of the sci-fi classic A Boy and His Dog upon seeing that last shot of Allison Young in the future with an Evil-Detecting Dog at the end of "Born to Run".
    • Sarah spots a tortoise on its back and flips it right side up. She and Cameron then have a discussion about whether artificial beings can feel empathy.
    • Cromartie, the main Terminator villain in the first season, stole the identity of an actor who previously starred in a movie about a barbarian.
    • The weird-looking UFOs featured during the second season were inspired by, and their design was based upon, a well-publicised UFO called the "dragonfly drone" that received a lot of exposure in the UFO community a few years ago. They're even referred to as drones in the series.
    • There are a few references to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, such as Sarah calling Cameron "Tin Man" in the second episode as well as adopting the surname Baum (after L. Frank Baum, the author of the books). In "Goodbye to All That" (itself a Literary Allusion Title to a line from one of the books), one scene has Sarah and a boy she rescued reading a passage from the original book.
    • There's a student at the military academy in "Goodbye To All That" who wants to fight in a war. Derek Reese berates him for this, having seen action himself. The students name? Pyle, of course.
    • John Henry frequently plays with Bionicle toys while trying to develop his imagination.
    • John Henry discovering another AI, stating simply "There Is Another".
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