Science fiction plays host to some of the toughest characters in all of fiction, so we’ve set out to put together a team of the toughest of that tough bunch.  Think of it like the Avengers, except with more bullets and a heavier focus on fighting aliens.

If you’ve got a job dismantling angry robots or shooting at things in outer space, or you need someone to travel back in time and kill your creepy Uncle before he’s born, we’ve got the ultimate team to do it.

These are the most unstoppable, gritty, hard-as-nails characters in all of science fiction. On their own each is fully capable of saving the universe. Together we suspect they’d literally be able to do anything.

Sarah Connor

When you first met Sarah Connor, she was a meek, mild-mannered waitress just sort of floating aimlessly through her life. Encounters with a vicious, single-minded cyborg from the future, sent back to hunt you down so your son is never born, have a way of changing that. Over the course of the first two movies in the Terminator movies, Sarah transforms into a serious action star, teaching herself all manner of combat and survival skills, actively seeking out any and all knowledge that might help her in her one-woman war against Cyberdyne Systems and a future ruled by human-hunting machines. Basically, she’s a perfect addition to your team of mercs, and will always be working to improve her already ample skill set and add to the team.

Why don’t adults get meals that come with prizes? Some of my favorite rituals from childhood involved being elbow-deep in a box of cereal, feeling around for the prize, or dumping all the food out of my Happy Meal just so I could get to the toy. So how come we don’t get a grown-up equivalent? After-dinner mints and fortune cookies don’t count, damn it. I want to be able to finish my snazzy, five-star meal, and then have the waiter bring me out a Rocket Raccoon action figure on a silver platter. Sadly, I will probably never live in such a world, but at least pretending is a little bit easier thanks to these faux Happy Meals that were ripped right out of my Happy Place.

These awesome fake Happy Meals are the work of Los Angeles digital artist Newt Clements. (He mostly comes out at night. Mostly.) His Pinterest is full of a wide variety of crazy projects, but his Happy Meals collection is one of the most extensive. He’s got over 100 of the things by my count, and they’re all incredibly well done. Designing Happy Meal boxes to tie into Doctor Who, Aliens, or Escape from New York would have been worthy of a story in and of itself, but Clements goes the extra mile by imagining what toys might be included with each meal as well. And I don’t care what bounty McDonald’s has on offer, there’s no way it’s cooler than an action figure of Firefly’s River standing atop a pile of Reaver corpses.

With Marvel bringing Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to television and Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist to Netflix, bringing a piece of the big screen to the small screen is an emerging trend in Hollywood. While TV and movies don’t operate in the same way, it seems like on its surface, it would be good to continue a story in another medium while building a new and larger audience. The latest big screen property to find its way to your television set is the new Terminator film series.

According to Deadline, Skydance Productions and Annapurna Pictures is looking to bring Terminator back to TV. Skydance and Annapurna are the production companies behind the new Terminator 5 reboot series and sources say that the new TV show will directly tie into the new reboot trilogy.

Zack Stentz and Ashley Miller (X-Men: First Class, Thor) will write and produce the new TV series, while Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier will executive produce. Kalogridis and Lussier are the writers behind Terminator 5, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the new Terminator TV series will follow the reboot film, while catering to an audience that might not have seen the new movie.

J.J. Abrams and former Fringe exec producer J.H. Wyman hit it out of the part with this week’s two-part Almost Human premiere, launching a show that already looked to have serious potential all the way to the top of our must-see-TV list. Karl Urban and Michael Ealy make a great pair as John Kennex and Dorian, a haunted cop distrustful of synthetics and his atypical android partner, respectively. Hopefully the show will beat the odds like Fringe did and settle in for a long and fruitful run.

But in the meantime, we got to thinking about what we would do if we were in Kennex’s position. If we had to pick an android partner, who would we want watching our back as we were out there protecting the world from dangerous cutting-edge tech and ruthless criminals? Here are our top picks.

Cameron (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)
Sure, the Terminator series provides several options when it comes to pairing up with a capable and combat-ready synthetic partner, but our vote has to go to Summer Glau’s Cameron from Fox’s short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And not just because she looks like Summer Glau. Robert Patrick’s T-1000 has the versatility of that whole liquid metal thing, but frankly even if the IT department assured us he had been reprogrammed, we’d never feel comfortable turning our back on the thing. Arnold’s T-800 model proved that it could be just as good a protector as a killer, but he sort of stands out in a crowd. I mean, so does Summer Glau, but in a very different way. Arnold Schwarzenegger is many things, but “subtle” is not among them. Part of the advantage of having an android partner is the element of surprise, and if you were to ask a random person to describe what a murderous cyborg might look like, you’re likely to end up with a sketch of T2-era Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the other hand, the bad guys would never see it coming when Cameron lifted them over her head and tossed them out a window.

Firefly fans got great news earlier this week with the official announcement of Serenity: Leaves on the Wind, an upcoming comic book series that picks up with Malcolm Reynolds and his (surviving) crew in the aftermath of the 2005 movie. It may not be as exciting as an actual new TV series or movie, but it’s still very cool. It also got us thinking: what other short-lived science fiction shows would we love to revisit on the comics page?

There’s already plenty of precedent, after all. Even before the announcement of Leaves on the Wind, many different genre series had found extended life in comics form. In addition to the Firefly/Serenity universe, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse have all continued to explore their respective universes to varying degrees. So have shows such as Farscape and Jericho. Hell, there’s even a new Six Million Dollar Man comic that will pick up where the 1978 TV series finale left off.

That’s one of the great things about continuing something in comic form. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed. It doesn’t matter how old the actors are. The characters have remained timeless, just waiting for us to join them again for another adventure. The list below are my picks for six prematurely cancelled series I’d love to see reborn as comics. Sound off with your thoughts and your own picks in the comments below!

Last week, the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign explored the possibilities for short-lived TV series to come back in a big way. Whether or not the Veronica Mars movie will be a big success is inconsequential, because the door has theoretically been opened for other beloved canceled TV series to find an audience after their death. Could a TV series like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles come back as well? According to its creator, don’t count on it.

Screenwriter Josh Friedman created and developed Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for Fox in 2008. The series ran only two seasons before it was canceled due to low ratings. But with the success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign, Sarah Connor fans want the same thing for their favorite TV series. Friedman recently took to Twitter to break the news to fans that a Sarah Connor movie project is unlikely. Read his tweets below:

All u asking about a TSCC kickstarter…rights situation, budget necessities, motivation of corporate entities make it HIGHLY unlikely.

— josh friedman (@Josh_Friedman) March 16, 2013