Sarah Connor Finale and Terminator Talk with Josh Friedman and Brian Austin Green

This past TV season, sci-fi fans saw the premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which expanded on the popular time-travel foundation laid by the hugely successful Terminator films. Although the series got off to a great start, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was forced to shut down production and reshuffle its season episodes when the writers hit the picket lines. After an abbreviated run, the series returned to the Fox airwaves and now has its 2-hour season finale on Monday, March 3 at 8pm.

Last week The Deadbolt dialed in to a Fox conference call to talk with Sarah Connor Chronicles creator Josh Friedman and series newcomer Brian Austin Green (Derek Reese) about various elements of time travel, incorporating humor into the show, whether fans will get to see the unproduced content left behind by the writers' strike, and whether we'll see Derek Reese return for a second season if Fox gives it a green light renewal.

In case all of you Terminator nuts out there were hoping for a few spoilers on the finale or the possible second season, forget it... the boys were quick to shut everyone down.

Josh Friedman on initially wanting to bring back Kyle Reese and how much he had worked out before Derek:

"I’m not going to say how I was going to do it but I had an idea but it was one of those things that probably worked really well on paper, and I could easily explain it to you if we sit down for ten minutes. But I think it was probably something that was a bit of a bridge too far for an audience, and again, Kyle is sort of a sacred cow and I think it's one thing to see him in the future and it’s another to see him in the present. I don’t know, I still hold out hope that somehow I’ll figure out [how] to get him back. But every time I ever brought it up, everyone looked at me like I was completely insane. I listen to everyone every once in a while when it’s unanimous."

Friedman on how he and the writers approach time travel in the series:

"I try not to abuse the time travel too much. I think we think about it all the time. I’ve been in the writer’s room and there will be points - it happens at least once a day where all of a sudden we just go quiet and everyone stares at each other because we completely tilted like a pinball machine because we can’t wrap our brain around what we’re trying to do. I think that I have a pretty specific idea as to what I believe the rules of our universe are and I try not to violate them. I think that chaos theory abounds and that’s always my argument, a specific geek argument, "Why doesn’t Skynet just send..." - well they can’t send a nuclear bomb back. I think even Skynet probably at this point understands that the causality is so complicated that it’s unclear as to what any one thing might do. So I think to do something en-masse is a very - they might end up destroying themselves, when they need the humans as much as the humans need them. They need the humans more right now, until later, once they’re created, then who knows."

Brian Austin Green on the time travel aspect of The Terminator world:

"We had the conversation too, of the possibility of bringing Kyle Reese onto the show instead of Derek. But then within that was the whole concept of, 'Okay, well, then at what point are people actually dead and at what point do we have to realize that a character is gone?' It’s a weird, confusing line. I don’t know how specific you can really get with any of it, because at the end of the day it’s something that’s completely nonexistent at this point. So who knows how one thing can overlap into another and how one decision can affect another? It will probably be an argument we’ll be having until the end of time."

Austin Green on working with an actress that can't show the qualities of a human:

"Well, it’s fantastic for this job. Summer [Glau] is so good at completely staying in those moments and I think that oddity is what sort of creates the tension and excitement in the scenes. You do scenes all day long with people that react and when you have somebody that just sits there and blankly stares at you they almost end up becoming these staring competitions. And Summer and I will sort of laugh by the end of them if we haven’t made it all the way through, just because it’s an interesting relationship between the two of us. They’ve both known each other for a long time and there’s a lot of tension within it."

Austin Green on his likeness being transferred to other mediums - comics, books, etc:

"I hadn’t thought about that at all. Again, it’s almost like wrapping my brain around actual time travel. People have asked me that before and just going into the first episode that I had, Josh knows, I was really worried about how people would respond to me playing this character. I was a huge fan of the films and I was a huge fan of Michael Biehn and Kyle Reese as a character. So I knew I was kind of holding a heavy weight in taking it on. At this point it’s not really how involved in the franchise or how big a part of the franchise I am or not, it’s really for me just the daily stress of making sure that I’m being true to the character in the franchise."

Brian Austin Green on the biggest challenge he faced after signing on to the series:

"I’ve got to say the biggest challenge going into the show was the fact that I was hired the night before I started work. So I really knew very little of the character except for the first script that I had in my hand, which is the first episode that everybody saw of my character. So the big challenge for me, as an actor, was the next day on set whenever I’d see Josh, just asking him as many things as I could. Just trying to get as many answers to questions as I could, because picking up a script and not knowing what happened before, it’s like, 'Okay, what the hell is a Turk and what the...' There’s so much involved in every script. The scripts are so detailed. And I really had no reference.

Sarah Connor Finale and Terminator Talk with Josh Friedman and Brian Austin Green Page 2