We interrupt this hiatus to encourage you to vote in Round Two (the Game Changer Round) of E! Online’s Save One Show!

Please go there and show your support for our little Terminator! Sure, we love the other choices too but honestly, they all stand a better chance at renewal than us. Go there! Let’s see if we can’t get FIVE HUNDRED votes by tonight! Perhaps there’s something in store on here if we can…

It’s a sad day in blogland as we bring this season of Terminator blogging to a close. We won’t know about a potential third season until FOX announces their schedule mid-May, but please continue getting the word out there: tell your friends, pester the network, rewatch episodes online. No decision has been made yet. We’ll try and post important news as soon as we know officially.

Whatever happens, it’s up to you now. Speculate on the fate of your characters, follow and support our robot team (cast and crew) in their future endeavors, and take the lessons of Sarah Connor with you as you go. Keep in touch — some of us have taken up twittering (@hadleyk is mine, @josh_friedman is Josh Friedman, @ashman01 is Ashley Miller) — it’s the perfect way to stay connected!

Thank you to everyone for your support of the series. It has been a true pleasure for all of us to be able to share these stories with you on the screen (and online), through the good and bad, and hope that many more days of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and further blogging await us in the future…

…after all, there’s no fate but what we make.

Phase two of post-finale video extravaganza. Check out this peak behind-the-scenes as we run a test for our big ZeiraCorp crash stunt from last week’s Born to Run. I coerced Executive Producer James Middleton into playing the role of Narrator, but see if you can also spot Josh Friedman, director Jeff Hunt, or VisualFX guru Steve Galich hard at work.

It was important to test out the track (built right through Weaver’s office) with a harmless piece of plywood before the day of production when the actual, practical H/K got its chance to shine. And don’t worry, there’s more footage to come — including construction/finishing touches on the practical H/K.

Note: Many moons ago writer Natalie Chaidez chimed in with her breakdown of the Badass Writer Chicks of Sarah Connor. Well, here’s her long-ago promised take on the men of the writer staff now ready for your reading pleasure…

Well guess who got their tighty-whities in a bunch because I didn’t blog about them? The boy writers of SCC, who, in the interest of equal time for all candidates, will now get a few choice Chaidez comments about them.

Friedman. Genius screenwriter dabbling in one-hour drama and making all us seasoned TV pros look like amateurs in the process. Right now he’s rocking this circa 1976 Coppola shag, which he keeps threatening to cut but secretly I think he’s quite fond of. Josh is an awesome boss, and honestly the worst thing I can think of to say about him is that he, like every showrunner I’ve ever worked for, has developed some odd dietary quirks since his series began. For instance, he no longer eats Pop Tarts for breakfast, which in hindsight I suppose wasn’t the healthiest start to an exec producer’s day.

John Wirth, or “J Dub” as he is affectionately known here at SCC, is our other commander-in-chief. Wirth is the O.G. of the staff, and was brought on by the studio and network to teach Freidman the ropes of running a TV show, with his 800 years of production experience. In addition to his mad writing, on-set and editing skillz, he’s a raconteur extraordinaire. The man is a born story-teller. The staff’s favorite tale involves Don Johnson, two strippers in nurse get-ups and a ‘titty-whacking”. Need I say more?

Supervising Producer John Enbom is a worthless traitor who abandoned us for the petty task of running his own TV show. It’s a huge loss as he was both the classiest and funniest writer among us. His last episode (Alpine Fields) married a Cheever-esque critique of repression in WASP culture with an awesome killer robot plot. Which, in a nutshell, just about sums up Mr. Enbom himself.

Writing team/producers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz are the fan-boy whiz kids every great sci-fi show needs. Ashley used to be a computer programmer, working for the military, which basically means he was building SkyNet. Zack can recite by memory the plot of every Star Trek episode, if you give him the title, and has a degree from Stanford in Soviet Cinema. They play Dungeons and Dragons every month, and Ashley actually demanded Comic-Con as a religious holiday. Again– need I say more?

Our SCC “new media” writer is Mr. Hadley Klein. If you took about a dozen cans of Red Bull, stirred in a couple double espressos and topped it off with a hit of crack, you just might have half the energy this kid has. Hadley is a lanky bundle of charisma, charm and hustle, poured into the world’s tightest pair of skinny jeans. It behooves me to only say kind things about him, as it’s quite clear that he will soon be all of our bosses.

Last but not least are our two staff writers, Ian Goldberg and Dan Thomsen. Ian wrote the brilliant season one finale, What He Beheld. Ian, like Friedman, is a Johnny Cash afficiando. He looks like a young, cuter version of the Clash’s Joe Strummer. Dan, on the other hand, looks like that shaggily hot blonde actor Sienna Miller was dating for a minute. He gets this thousand yard stare sometimes in the writers’ room, as if mulling over some deep, dark personal tragedy, which usually turns out to be just a lame plot point we pitched. He wrote the season one episode, Vick’s Chip, which was my fav because it implied Mr. and Mrs. Vick were having… yes… Terminator sex. The annoying thing about both these guys is that they’re so damn young and so talented.

Which, minus the damn young part, basically is how I feel about all the SCC guys.

During production of Born to Run, I stormed the set with a little flip cam to be able to provide you guys with footage of everything cool happening behind-the-scenes. I’ll be posting a few of these raw videos this week. Production value not guaranteed.

Here’s Josh’s first walk-through of the destroyed, post-apocalyptic Turk Room set.

Good morning Chroniclers, hope you’ve all survived your post-finale mind explosion. Just wanted to drop by with a little note to talk about the future of this here blog: we will continue to update with posts fairly regularly for the rest of the week, giving you unexpected exclusives and special goodies for your continued support of our little robot baby, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

After this week we will likely take a (mostly) hiatus for a bit until we know anything more about our future — updating only with pressing information about DVD sets, news of a potential season three (four, and five), and highlights of where else you can find our cast/crew, etc. Oh! A few of us have joined the ranks of the tweeting twitterers (@hadleyk), so feel free to find us on there! Use your best John Henry skills…

I have no plans to address the story/plot/mysteries of the finale, Born to Run — we’ll leave that to you and your imagination. Thanks again for all of your ongoing support!

You loved it, you hated it, you want to see more of it. Then tell everyone you can. And remember to keep voting in the E!Online Save One Show Poll! Didn’t I tell you the FUTURE depended on it?

This is it — the season finale. Born to Run. Discuss away (after you’ve seen it!).

So, Derek Reese is dead. And Charley Dixon is dead, too. Dead, because we killed them. We sat down, and we wrote it, and we killed them.

Okay. So here’s the deal. It’s not like we enjoy doing that. Trust me, I know what you guys think. I’m a fan – I know how we think. I know what I invest in, I know how I invest in those things. It’s not rational. It doesn’t make sense. We bond emotionally with characters because they speak to something in us. So when they die…

It hurts.

This is not an apology. This is me confessing on our behalf. Not to ask forgiveness, not because we crave absolution. Because we want you to know that sitting in the writer or producer’s chair doesn’t deaden you to the horror or pain that unfolds in your characters lives, just because you chose that they would suffer it.

You love these people. I loved them, too. I loved Riley. I loved Jesse (jury is out I know – but go with it). I loved Charley. And I loved Derek. They were heroes. Flawed heroes. Tragic heroes. But heroes, every one. Which is a pretty romantic way of saying they were screwed from “go”. Because it’s the destiny of the hero to die.

I read something once that stuck with me as a writer, though the source is lost to memory: you haven’t told a character’s story unless you’ve told the story of his death. I’ve meditated on this for years. Really. It’s not as simple as it sounds. It’s not about telling all the beats of the story, from cradle to grave. It’s about how we understand a character’s life through an understanding of his or her death.

Riley Dawson died a fighter, struggling to survive – in the end, an animal. The kind of animal that could survive Judgment Day. If Jesse is dead, she died alone… in her own mind systematically betrayed and disappointed by everyone she believed in and risked all to protect. Defiant. Charley Dixon sacrificed himself not for John Connor, future leader of mankind – he did it for John, the boy he called “son” in his heart.

Derek Reese died like a soldier. Doing the job. Exactly the way he expected he would. No blaze of glory. No eulogy. Only the mission. His number came up, as everyone’s eventually must in the cold mathematics of war.

If that’s small comfort to you, you’re not alone. It’s not supposed to be comforting. It’s supposed to be a kick in the gut. It’s supposed to hurt like hell. On some level, The Terminator franchise is about the value of human life. Death is the scale on which it is measured. Pain means it matters.

And we keep moving.

You’re all racking up the votes on the Save One Show poll and as promised, we want to return the favor. Here’s one last exclusive clip before tonight’s Born to Run finale, but you should know: this half of the scene may be interesting, but it’s what happens in the second half (tune-in to see it!) that will really shock you. Feel free to theorize.

Born to Run
Tonight!
8PM/7PMc
Live on FOX