Sarah Connor (Terminator) - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

This incarnation of Sarah Connor is an alternate future version of her film series counterpart. In November 2005, 20th Century Fox announced that it would produce a television series called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring the adventures of the title character and her son in the years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This was followed by a November 2006 announcement that Lena Headey had been chosen to play Sarah Connor. The choice to cast Headey was criticized by several fans and critics who argued that she bore no resemblance to the athletic, muscular woman established by Hamilton, who transformed her body into that of a muscled warrior for Terminator 2. The controversy was covered by the Los Angeles Times The Boston Herald, and The Guardian, as well as in online forums.

In a deleted scene of the episode "The Demon Hand", the first details of Sarah's childhood are revealed during a session with Dr. Peter Silberman. When she was seven, her father—a chronically depressed war veteran—loses his mattress factory job to a machine, which leads to dysfunction within her family and her father's subsequent abandonment of them. Her mother finds a job as a waitress. Even as a child, Sarah has an intense technophobia. After her father leaves, Sarah stops spending her afternoons with her childhood friend whose father is an engineer with IBM. Instead, she takes to visiting the factory where her own father had worked to watch the gears and belts of the machines, knowing something is wrong with what she sees.

The "Pilot" episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks up Sarah and John on the run in 1999. Her FBI file lists her age as 33 on August 24, 1999, placing her birth date between August 25, 1965, and August 23, 1966, and making her age 17 or 18 when John was conceived in The Terminator. She claims in "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point", whether truthfully or not, to have been 19 when John was born (around nine months later). Due to the forward time-travel jump in "Pilot", Sarah and John are now eight years younger than their birth-dates would otherwise indicate.

In the "Gnothi Seauton" episode, Cameron Phillips mentions that Sarah would have died from cancer on December 4, 2005, if they had not jumped forward in time. Cameron also mentions that John Connor sent Cameron back in time to help leap over Sarah's death. At the end of the episode, Sarah is at a doctor's office, where her forged drivers license shows her alias' birthday as February 4, 1974.