The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Awesome

• In the season finale for the first season, Cameron's rather deadpan response to Morris asking whether the really nice car she was standing beside was hers.

Cameron: No. It belongs to the guy I killed and stuffed in the trunk.

• • Cameron gets another one earlier in the series, when Derek witnesses her casually disposing of a rogue Terminator by punching it through a wall and then blasting it with a grenade launcher.
    • Then, she tops it in "The Tower Is Tall But the Fall Is Short" by defeating another Terminator by calmly and easily twisting it into a pretzel.
    • In "To The Lighthouse," a goon attempts to take Cameron out by shocking her with a powerful jolt of electricity, which would force her CPU to reboot, a process that normally takes two minutes. Said goon gets ready to cut open her skull and tear out her processor while she's disabled, when Cameron suddenly shows that she's.... improved.
    • Heck, Cameron is just a walking talking Crowning Moment of Awesome. She doesn't even blink when she's being beat up by other Terminators!
• While I could tolerate John the Annoying Dick Child, John the Bum In Denial, and John the Goddamn Batman, it was T:SCC's John that made me really believe he had the chops to command the resistance. A kid is about to be terminated, and John (knowing full well what he's getting himself into and what's at stake if he fails) calls out to the Terminator and identifies himself. For a kid. That's the sort of guy you'd drink with, then follow into a mushroom cloud.
• Derek himself wins forever in the season finale, where a man is holding John hostage and demands that he and Sarah Put Down Your Gun and Step Away. Derek's response is to simply shoot him between the eyes, without blinking.
  • Made even more awesome by the fact that he covers the eyes of the little girl when he does it.
• Cromartie gets his in the season finale where he brutally dispatches an entire FBI Hostage Rescue Team off-screen to the sound of Johnny Cash. Helped by the incredibly stylish (and suspiciously cost-effective) way it was shot.
  • Then, in "The Brothers of Nablus," Cromartie takes out another Terminator by stabbing it through the chest and TEARING OUT ITS HEART!
  • "The Mousetrap". It's not just awesome for Cromartie pulling off a cool Xanatos Gambit, it's awesome because he outmarted Sarah Connor.
• Both Cameron and the Connors each get one in the first five minutes of the new season premiere. The Connors are tied up and being beaten, and it looks like Sarah is about to get raped by their attacker, when John breaks free and kills him. Meanwhile, Cameron takes a car bomb to the face. Unsurprisingly, that just makes her angry.
  • One of the most wonderful yet frightening aspects of that whole sequence is watching Cameron emotionlessly clambering out of the destroyed SUV. She pauses, turns her head to one side, and there's a giant piece of shrapnel stuck in the back of her head, which she promptly rips out. Then, she steps inside the house and obliterates one of the goons against a wall with casual ease, and then starts....slowly....limping....up the the stairs in time to that chilling song by Bear McCreary. That is what it means to be a Terminator: steady, implacable, and terrifying.
  • The later episode "The Tower Is Tall But The Fall Is Short" further expounds on John's awesomeness, by actually showing him breaking free, grabbing Sarkissian, and shattering his neck.
• John gets a second one in the premiere, where he reactivates the possibly-homicidal Cameron because he believes that she can be trusted now that he's repaired her chip. In order to prevent either of them from stopping him, he points a gun at his mother and uncle, then hands it to Cameron.
  • As it turns out, he didn't repair her chip, but Cameron decides not to Terminate him anyway, because John Connor is just that good.
    • That darn well ought to count as one for Cameron too. Disobeying orders when you know they're wrong? Well, that's commendable. Going against her programming, the closest thing a machine has to Brainwashed and Crazy, just because she doesn't want to hurt John? That is freaking awesome! Not to mention it makes you go "Awwwww!"
• Allison may have spent most of her single episode crying, screaming, and vainly trying to escape from SkyNet's prison, but at the very end, as Cameron is choking her to death, she shows an inspiring burst of defiant courage as she stares her murderer in the face and tells her that she will never help Cameron kill John Connor.
  • Allison gets an understated CMoA with her second line in the episode.

Terminator: What is your name? Allison: My name? Why should I tell you? Terminator: If you don't tell us, we'll give you one. Allison: Go ahead. I'm dying to hear it.

• • • It takes serious steel in your spine to essentially tell the implacable killing machine that just captured you and wants to kill you for simply being human to just fuck off.
  • A machine shows up to Allison's cell and slides a tray with a glop of food on it. The response from a wounded, tired, imprisoned, tortured, terrified, and no doubt extremely hungry teenage girl? Smash that shit against the wall.
• Catherine Weaver has had several:
  • In her very first episode, when we found out she was actually a T-1000. You will never look at a urinal the same way again. EVER.
  • In the "The Good Wound", Weaver saunters casually through a warehouse full of people... and murders the fuck out of everyone there with her metal Terminator hands. Then she blows the entire building apart. At this point the Unflinching Walk is just gravy.
  • She gets another in the finale, when she casually confronts the T-888 sent back to terminate her (it probably thought she was the actual Catherine Weaver, and not a superior model terminator), by opening with the line: "Hey! I liked that gate!" It unloads two silenced pistols into her, only to watch in confusion as the bullets pass right through her and she repairs instantly. Then she stabs it through the chest with her arm and jabs her other arm into a circuit breaker, using her body as an electrical conduit to fry its circuits.
  • And then in her office, she calmly tells the others to duck because a Hunter Killer is on a collision course with her window. She spreads herself out like a net, protecting them from the resulting explosion, and tells them to run.
  • Any moment Catherine Weaver spends with her daughter Savannah. She is an evil killing machine, sent back from the future for reasons unknown, replacing the real Catherine Weaver, and she still takes the time to try to understand her daughter, and love her as much as she can. Doubly counts as a CMOA for Ellison, as he is her mentor in mothering.
• "Today is the Day (Part 2)" John tells Jesse that he knew the whole time that Riley was from the future. He calmly explains that he isn't going to kill her. He simply says that he is John Connor.
  • "If you pretend not to know me, I might shoot you in the head." John Connor, FUCK YEAH.
  • Derek Reese gets one right afterward, when he calmly explains to Jesse how he feels now that he knows that she killed Riley and how utterly manipulative she has been all along. Then, he tells her that while John Connor let her go, he isn't John Connor, and pulls out his pistol.
• John Henry calmly reassuring Savannah and telling her what to do to avoid the guy about to kill her. You can almost feel his heart break when her headset is out range of her cell phone and he loses the connection. Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
• In the season finale for the second season, Cameron's rather deadpan stripping in front of John. John then cuts into her and reaches into her frame to check her nuclear power supply.
  • "That's interesting." Suddenly, Ellison!
• Cameron's rampage through the prison, complete with glowing red Terminator eye and the iconic Terminator theme.
  • And right before then, the priest asks Sarah what they should do while the alarms are going off. Sarah's response? "Pray."
  • And not to mention 0.0 casualties. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if we'd actually seen the Termovision stating that.
  • And John Henry backing her up electronically by starting a prison riot.
• Time travel to the rescue!
  • "Will you join us?"
• Riley, of all people, gets one as she is Rescued From the Scrappy Heap when she turns on Jessie for trying to have her killed by Cameron.
  • She also gets a retroactive one in the scene where she stands up against Cromartie and yells at him until he leaves the Connors' house. It's retroactive because being from the future, Riley is fully aware of who both John and Cromartie are, meaning she knew Cromartie was a Terminator. The fact that she stared down a fucking Terminator using nothing but words is pretty damned awesome.
• "Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today". Just... wow. From Cameron using her epic levels of Fetish Fuel for practical purposes ("I know that being John Conner can be lonely") to Cromartie's effortless slaughter at the police station to Ellison finally deciding to help Sarah, that episode had the highest Holy Shit Quotient of the series, but the Crowning Moment however is definitely the church shoot-out. For those who somehow missed it (for shame!), Derek and Sarah pump Cromartie full of several dozen bullets with the usual level of effect and it looks as if he will escape again, only for Cameron to appear behind him with an enourmous shotgun and proceeding to blast him in the face, and again, and again, and again, blowing off half his head. Disabled and twitching on the floor, he can only look up as Our Heroes gather and John empties one more bullet into him, silencing him forever. Epic. Win.
• In "Heavy Metal," Sarah and Cameron have captured a human employee of a Terminator and are interrogating him. Sarah tries beating information out of him, but the man is unfazed. So Sarah takes a knife, cuts the man free, and stabs the knife into a nearby table, then tells the man he's free to go...if he can get past Cameron. He gets up, glaces to the knife, and then to Cameron, looking fairly confident. Next scene, he's driving down the road, gripping the wheel with white knuckles, looking absolutely terrified, and Cameron is sitting beside him with a little smile on her face, managing to convey exactly what happened without speaking a word.
• In the episode where Sarah and Cameron got jobs in a nuclear plant, Cameron hustled some guys in pool. Her smile at the end was icing on the cake.
• Cameron saving Derek's life from a "defective" terminator in the future. She pushed through a wall and fired a mini-bazooka thing into him.
• Morris thought he was just lying to a policeman for John and Cameron -- which is cool enough -- but actually, he was lying TO A TERMINATOR'S FACE. And he got away with it. Badass.