Warning: spoilers abound. If you haven’t seen the episode, stop reading right now.
For as much action as there was in the season premiere for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” not a whole lot happened. They set up a whole bunch of stuff to happen later, but as a stand-alone episode, it was like a Michael Bay movie: stuff gets blow’d up, and you’re entertained while it’s happening, but the minute it’s over, you think, why did they need that much time to tell that little story? There is a reason for it, of course, but it’s a cart-before-the-horse reason, as if they wrote the episode backwards and worked their way to the beginning. When they got stuck, they inserted a car chase and blew shit up.
But that ending. Man, oh man, is it awesome. The last two minutes, in particular, are of the “Hell, yes” variety. Pity there was so much chaff around that sweet, sweet, wheat.
The episode opens with a decidedly not-dead Cameron, rebooting her frazzled memory chip after surviving a car bomb. (This kind of bomb apparently does not burn hair. Must be from the future.) She finds the culprits in the process of beating Sarah and John, and dispatches with them both. Then she sees John…and her chip tells her to terminate him. Holy shit! Run, John, run! How’s that for a Sweet 16; the robot that he’s wanted to have sex with for a good month or two now wants to kill him. That’s a buzz killer.
Sarah and John must now run from everyone, taking refuge in a Spanish church. Cameron follows the trail of bread crumbs (blood) they left behind, and the chase ends after Sarah and John have wrecked two stolen cars and two stolen semi trucks, which Sarah and John used to pin Cameron so she can be taken offline. Cameron “begs” John for her life, which is actually the most emotionally powerful scene in the show’s history to date. But John yanks out her chip, with the intent to destroy her. Again, hell of a way to spend your sixteenth birthday, burning the girl you wanted to have sex with.
But hormones are a powerful, powerful thing, and when it comes time to actually torching Cameron, John can’t do it, and instead reinserts her chip to see if she’s really gone bad. She hasn’t, of course, though even she tells Sarah that he must never pull a stunt like that again. If Sarah and Derek already mistrusted Cameron, it’s gone up a hundredfold now.
Poor Agent Ellison. He is inexplicably spared from certain death by Cromartie, but has completely lost the trust of his superiors at the FBI. He is ordered to go on a paid sabbatical, and even receives a sinister visit from Cromartie later on. “I won’t lead you to her,” he tells the machine. “We’ll see,” Cromartie replies. Now this is going to be an interesting plot thread. It’ll be like “The Hitcher,” where Cromartie (Rutger Hauer) will cause untold amounts of mayhem, and Ellison (C. Thomas Howell) will be the only living witness to Cromartie’s crimes. If it plays out this way, Ellison will be in the fetal position sucking his thumb by the sixth episode.
Ah, but even that thread pales to the introduction of Catherine Weaver, the CEO of an unnamed tech company who just paid handsomely for the Turk, the chess program that will ultimately give birth to Skynet. Weaver is played by Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage, and whatever misgivings we had about her casting were removed the second they revealed that she was a Terminator, baby! And not just a regular T-800, but a shape-shifting T-1000. Can you bleed like me? Um, no, because we’re not made of liquid metal. The progression of her accent through the episode was amusing, though. Try to sound American. Not working? All right, try to be British. Not working either, huh? Ah, hell, just do your Scottish thing. You’re a Terminator. No one will care. (Smart choice.)
Fans of the movie series surely loved the multiple “T2” references in this episode. Before Cameron “corrects” herself, she tortures Sarah into calling his name, even saying, “Call to him.” Sarah refuses, and you’re just waiting for Cameron to say, after she inflicts some pain to raise the ante, “I know this hurts.” The semi trucks recall the big highway chase scene (and even the pipe bomb scene in the first “Terminator”), but the money shot is Weaver morphing from a urinal into her badass self, and then whacking a mouthy tech guy the way that Robert Patrick took out the security guard at the mental ward. Like I said, Hell, yes. The episode was a series of baby steps, but each of those steps looks to bear bountiful fruit in the episodes to come. Though if we’re lucky, they will start writing future episodes from the beginning, rather than from the end and working backwards. After all, there is no fate but what we make, right?
