With the season finale of "Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles" coming up Monday night, fans are asking the question on whether or not Fox will pick the series up for a second season in the fall.

Executive Producer Josh Friedman says he hopes that decision comes through soon because the time to start writing a new season needs to start now.

"The ritual for most first-year shows to come back into the network to tell them what Season 2 is about," Friedman said during a teleconference with reporters Thursday that included Airlock Alpha. "It's a little weird this year because of the strike."

That strike with the Writers Guild of America has fouled up a lot of television shows, and "Sarah Connor" is no stranger. The Terminator show was originally planned for a 22-episode first season, which was later reduced to 13. But then because of the strike, only nine episodes were produced, meaning that a 10th episode Friedman said he really enjoyed, may have to be scrapped.

"I can't tell you what Episode 10 was, but it was a fantastic for being Episode 10, but is a horrible season premiere for Season 2," Friedman said. "I really wanted to do Episode 10, it was one of my favorite ideas, but it would be terrible as a season premiere."

Friedman wouldn't elaborate on what the episode was about, or really on the fate of recurring guest star Brian Austin Green who is playing Derek Reese -- John Connor's uncle -- from the future.

"Brian is doing an awesome job," Friedman said. "I think he's brought more to the series than any of us imagined he would, and we are really happy about that."

Green, who also participated in the conference call, said he was a fan of the original Terminator films, but didn't get much of an opportunity to worry about whether or not playing one of the Reese brothers would be dangerous in terms of fandom reaction because he started shooting the day after he was offered the job.

"I knew very little of the character except for the first script that I had in my hand," said Green, who is probably best known for his work on another Fox series, "Beverly Hills 90210."

"I was really worried about how people would respond to me playing this character, and I was a huge fan of MIchael Biehn and Kyle Reese as a character. I knew that I was holding a heavy weight and taking it on."

It's not really how involved in the franchise he is, or how big of a part he now has in the Terminator series that occupies his mind, however. It's more about being true to the character that fans are expecting him to play.

"When I go on [Web sites] and find that the fans don't have that feeling, then I have somehow let them down," Green said. "That is all I really think about."

Time travel has become an important element in the new Fox series over the course of the last six episodes, which inevitably has brought up questions on whether or not the use of the common science-fiction element is not only creating paradoxes, but plot holes as well.

"I try not to abuse time travel too much," Friedman said. "I have a pretty specific idea to what the specific rules of our universe are, but the chaos theory still abounds. A specific geek argument is why doesn't SkyNet just do this, but I think even SkyNet at this point understands that this causality is so complicated and it remains unclear at what anytime something might do. They could end up destroying themselves, and they need the humans more right now anyway."

Green said he had his own questions about the use of time travel in the series, but feels so far there isn't a busy highway of time travel taking place, and that Friedman and the writers are handling it well.

"We had this conversation, too, of the possibility of bringing in Kyle Reese onto the show instead of Derek," Green said. "That was the whole concept, but we had to think about at what point are people actually dead? And at what point do we have to realize that a character is gone?"

Of course, there are plenty of comparisons that can me made among the different science-fiction franchises from the Cylons in "Battlestar Galactica" to the machines in the Matrix trilogies, and even "Blade Runner." Friedman, however, said he worked hard to make the Terminators something different from what traditional fans have been watching, to the point where he even gave up watching the SciFi Channel version of "Battlestar Galactica" for more than a year while developing the series.

"It's interesting because there are two groups of people who watch these shows," Friedman said. "There's the real sci-fi people who watch these shows, and then there's everyone else. And the everyone else probably never seen 'Battlestar Galactica,' and probably can't remember 'Blade Runner,' and they are all fascinated by it.

"Then you have the sci-fi people who have probably seen every episode of Star Trek and have seen that particular episode with Data [from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'] and asking if they are going down that road because we've seen this road. It's a delicate balance."

The two-hour season finale of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" airs Monday at 8 p.m. ET in an earlier timeslot on Fox.