ABSTRACT
There is a moment in the feature film Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) in which a deadly female cyborg from the future is pulled over for speeding. She avoids a ticket when she glances at a Victoria’s Secret bill-board and quickly inflates her breasts just before the male police officer reaches the side of her stolen car. Not only does the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–09) revise the narrative timeline of the film series by eliding the events depicted in T3, 1 it also—and this is perhaps more significant—revises the traditional, gendered (and largely negative) depiction of female cyborgs in science fiction cinema. In its crossover from film to television and in the years since the first two Terminator films, The Sarah Connor Chronicles emerged onto a television landscape that had been altered by a new feminine warrior model in Buffy the Vampire Slayer—an alteration that inflects the new Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) character as well. Part of this revision can be seen in the shift from a male cyborg protector in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to a female (played by Summer Glau) 2 in the Fox series that foregrounds the heroism of women and teens (without Arnold Schwarzenegger) in its apocalyptic narrative. During the twenty-four-year time period between the first chapter of the Terminator film series (1984) and this twenty-first-century television adaptation, the (pop) cultural representation of female heroism has changed dramatically, inevitably influencing characterization as it moves across screen formats.
