Pop Vultures

In honor of this week’s season finale of the cyborg-infested Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, today’s Friday 5 celebrates the best artificial lifeforms on television. Sure, they’re electronic, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want praise from time to time.

5. Buffybot (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sometimes, I worry that I mention Buffy too much, but considering how much ground the show covered in its seven seasons, it’s often hard not to. After all, it’s not every vampire-based show that manages to seamlessly blend robots into the storyline. The Buffy-bot was originally commissioned by Spike for his personal plaything, as he apparently felt that it was beneath the dignity of a centuries-old vampire to purchase a Real Doll. The creepiness inherent in that particular act ensured I never jumped on any sort of Buffy/Spike ship, but the Buffybot herself ended up having a far more exciting life than the typical sex toy gets to lead. Not only did she help save the world from Glory and double as Buffy during one of her inconvenient deaths, but she ended up with her own action figure. What more could a robot want?

4. Cameron (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). In its first season, the show proved itself to be good, but hardly great. John Connor has turned out to be the whiniest savior of mankind ever, and it’s hard to watch Lena Headey attempt pull-ups without comparing her to Linda Hamilton and her arms of steel. However, the real star of this show has proven to be Summer Glau, who easily manages to combine the bad-ass quality necessary in any terminator with the childlike confusion of one who completely fails to understand the people that surround her. She has proven completely believable in a role that demands only the barest flicker of emotion in the eyes, and yet she manages to convey volumes with those flickers.

3. B-9 Environmental Control Robot (Lost in Space). There’s only one reason this robot made the list: “Danger, Will Robinson!” But if that’s been good enough for the last 40 years of pop culture, it’s good enough for me.

2. Transformers. Before it was an awesome Michael Bay movie, it was an 80s cartoon. Boys, girls and hungover 20-somethings would spend most Saturday mornings plopped in front of the TV with a bowl of Sugar Pops, watching the never-ending battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron for control of the earth’s resources. The show had everything: a rockin’ theme song, an epic storyline with its own complicated mythology and, most importantly, it had cars that turned into robots. To an eight-year-old, it really didn’t get any cooler than that.

1. Cylons (Battlestar Galactica). As good as the rest are, Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons blow all the other robots out of the water (off the circuit board?). They may have been built at one point, but these days their emotional reasoning, responses and desires are as complicated as any human’s — and yet wholly distinct from those that created them. For a race of artificial lifeforms that waged an apocalyptic nuclear war on humankind, they can be surprisingly sympathetic characters. They are also every bit as unpredictable as their original source material, and that is one of the show’s strengths. Rather than depend upon mechanical, robotic characters, the show uses the Cylons to explore just what it means to be human — and the answers are as vague and ill-defined as one might expect. And, for good measure, they’re all gorgeous (the females, at least. The designer of the male models was apparently a bit less superficial).

What do you think? Which TV robots push your buttons?