By Kofi Outlaw

This week found John Connor and Terminator hottie Cameron heading back to school, while Sarah Connor resumed the hunt for Skynet.

Sarah approaches Miles Dyson’s widow, Tarissa, for the first time since she traveled eight years into the future. Tarissa isn’t even surprised to see Sarah looking the same age, despite the eight years difference. Sarah gives a Tarissa a file with photos of collaborators on her husband’s original research—men who are all capable of carrying on Miles’ work. Tarissa can identify one young man, Alex, who had been Miles’ favorite intern. Sarah tracks the name to a young cell-phone salesman, who in turn asks Sarah out on a date. Sarah agrees to dinner, hoping the opportunity will help her feel out whether Alex is actually the harbinger of mankind’s destruction.

Meanwhile, Cromartie, the terminator that attacked John in 1999, and was subsequently transported into 2007, storms a local hospital and makes off with a cooler full of plasma samples. With the stolen blood in tow, the cyborg abducts a leading geneticist, providing the man with advanced formulas necessary for synthesizing living tissue, to grow the Terminator a new skin for his cybernetic frame…in a bathtub. (Totally plausible.)

Sarah goes to dinner at Alex’s, house. There, the über-geek reveals his master creation, The Turk—an A.I.-based chess player that often exhibits “moods,” and the capacity for learning. According to Alex, The Turk is smart enough to beat any human player that ever had, or would exist. The demonstration is interrupted when Sarah catches a prowler spying on them through a window. Though Sarah fails to catch him, we see that the prowler is the one resistance operative that survived the attack on the safe house in episode two.


Speaking of the safe house, Agent Ellison shows up there to help a fellow agent sort through the mess of men with barcode tattoos, who don’t appear in any known database. The agent working the scene sees a drug deal gone bad; Ellison believes the case is related to the murder of his C.I., Enrique—especially when he notices a terminator-proof safe wired into the building’s power circuit. The plot thickens when the agent working the safe house case brings back the only set of prints that hit a match: the dead man’s print pattern matches those of a four year-old kid, living across the country. Ellison stands around, looking perplexed.

At school, John gets lab-partnered with a pretty girl, while Cameron tries to “not act like a freak,” and pick up some teenage traits to add to her repertoire. On the way to school, and later at school, the pair comes witness incidents involving a teacher whose front door at home, and classroom door at school, have both been vandalized with black paint and racy imagery. A young girl, present at both scenes, happens upon Cameron in the girls’ bathroom later, hinting that she is pregnant with the teacher’s baby—a secret too great for her to bear. Later that day the girl scales the roof and threatens to jump. John wants to do something, to save her, but Cameron prevents him from acting and the girl leaps to her death.

John is furious, insisting to his mother that he was right to try an act. Sarah and Cameron explain that it would have been foolish for him to intervene, and risk exposing himself to his enemies. John questions what good his role as “the hero” will be later, if he can’t even save those in need right now. Though it is a deep question, Sarah has bigger fish to fry; Cameron asserts that Alex must be killed, to prevent the threat of Skynet, but Sarah is not so sure. As a less fatal option, she burns down Alex’s house with The Turk inside.

Finally, the same agent working the safe house murders calls agent Ellison out to a new crime scene—one involving a prominent geneticist, whose bathroom is slathered in blood, and whose eyes have been torn out. It seems Cromartie got his new skin, and is ready to resume the hunt for John.


I found this episode of TTSCC to be, (while not nearly as action packed,) as intriguing as the pilot episodes. Seeing Sarah, the hard-liner, begin to question her tactics for saving the future was conveyed well, thanks to Lena Headey’s continued strong performance. The voice-over about events surrounding the atomic bomb’s creation was also pretty cool. Seeing John’s personality begin to oscillate between the scared kid, and confident leader, was equally intriguing, however Cameron’s humor-laden “Pinocchio” subplot was cheesy. But then, it’s also been cheesy in every TERMINATOR movie that has tried to do it, so no harm done. The Cromartie skin-hunt was overly convoluted, a bit drawn out and completely implausible. Doing groundbreaking genetics in a bathtub? A brilliant scientist agreeing to help an advanced machine, the likes of which he’d never seen before? Sorry, not buying it.

Still, I’m glad to see that the show will follow a serialized format. It will give the storylines time and space to build, instead of slipping into a formula of new-terminator-of-the-week. If that were going to be the case, I’d be saying “Hasta la Vista.”