This season a mother will become a warrior, a son will become a hero, and their only ally will be a friend from the future.
Why it is hard sci-fi
A two-season network show that picks up after T2 and runs the time-displacement rules from the Terminator films at series scale. The show commits to multiple displacements with conflicting agendas, a Skynet research program in present-day LA, and a working set of resistance assets. The show is procedural about the cost of each displacement and the limits of bringing organic envelopes back.
Science inside it
Time-displacement under strict cargo rules, neural-net controllers for terminators, the engineering of a Resistance covert program in a non-aware present, and the social-engineering of present-day Skynet researchers as marks. The show is also one of the few TV portrayals of a hidden AI program inside a real-world tech company.