Recaps

In jail, Sarah Connor is interrogated by FBI Agent Auldridge. The jig is up -- he knows she's not Sarah Baum and that obviously, she didn't die in the bank vault in 1999. He wants to know where her son is. "John is dead," she tells him.

John and Cameron watch a news report of Sarah arrest (and their complicacy) from a secluded motel room. John tells her he needs a computer to do research. Cameron thinks it is so that he can look for the jail's blueprints to break his mother out, but it isn't. He wants to know about shielded nuclear power sources -- like her's -- and if they pose a risk. "I want to know if being around them all the time can give you cancer," John tells her.

They aren't the only ones watching the news of Sarah Connor's arrest -- so is the Water Delivery Terminator Kaliba sent after them previously...

...and so is John Henry as he plays Dungeons and Dragons with Murch. Weaver enters to speak to Murch. She wants to know how long it will take to pack up the Turk room -- the entire room, John Henry included! But Murch warns her that it's not a good idea -- even the slightest adjustment to John Henry could throw him off completely. "I think it's potentially a really bad idea," he explains. "What we know to be John Henry only exists as this specific collection of hardware and software. Body and soul."

Weaver, the T-1001, understands -- "We change a wire, we change John Henry." Yes.

Agent Auldridge ushers in Ellison to see Sarah Connor. He claims he didn't know that they were tracking him. He's had to convince them that they're not in this together. "Maybe I should tell them we were," Sarah threatens him. He encourages her to explain everything to the FBI -- everything she's been doing, everything she knows. "Last time I drew a picture I ended up in a psyche ward." But he thinks it could be different now. Sarah warns Ellison that the girl isn't safe, yelling to the surveillance camera...

...which is watched by Agent Auldridge.
...and Catherine Weaver and John Henry.

Ellison visits Agent Auldridge in his office. The FBI Agent tells Ellison that Sarah's requested a priest -- Father Armando Bonilla -- but the name isn't familiar to Ellison. Auldridge is trying to figure out the connection. He knows that other than a lawyer, a priest is the only other person she can ask to speak to that the FBI can't listen in on.

But we should recognize Father Armando Bonilla as he visits Sarah Connor. He's the priest who's church Sarah and John hid from Cameron when she went bad at the beginning of the season. He remembers her. She tells him that John and Sarah are in hiding and that she needs his help. In fact, she'll explain everything that happened that day if he'll help her. "Will you do something for me?"

Ellison finds Weaver and John Henry watching the feed of Sarah and the priest -- the closed feed. Ellison is upset that they're watching the feed. "John Henry monitors all law enforcement channels. It seems prudent," Weaver tells him. But it's also illegal. "So is lying to the FBI," she reminds him.

Weaver tells Ellison that she wants to meet John Connor. He thinks it's a bad idea. But she wants to know why he was at her house to save her daughter when the attacker showed up. She wants to know why his mother believes he's the messiah. And she wants to know how he and his cyborg companion (yes, she knows Cameron is a cyborg!) are connected to the John Henry body. She confronts Ellison with the news of Cameron. "Yes, she's a cyborg. Don't pretend you didn't know." He admits that he doesn't know how to find John Connor. But she does.

The Terminator stalks into a gun shop to buy silencers. Terror awaits...

John and Cameron continue to wait in the motel. He asks her how much weight Sarah has lost (she told him that she may be sick previously). "Eleven percent of her mass in the last six weeks," Cameron tells him.

"Stuff does go wrong with you, doesn't it?" he asks her. "You kill birds, you twitch, you try to murder me. You're not perfect. You're a machine." It's a hard truth for John Connor. But the phone rings and interrupts him. It's Father Bonilla.

Father Bonilla enters the confessional where he gives instructions to someone who seems to be Cameron on the other side of the screen. "Underneath the bench there is an envelope. I hope it is enough. It's all I could find. I have a message for you as well." But when the girl that looks like Cameron exits the church, we see that she is trailed by Ellison.

At night, Cameron watches from inside the motel. There's a knock at the door. They open it to find the Chola! Carlos's silent Chola from season one is the girl from the confessional. Inside the package she brings them are new IDs, flawless passports, etc. And then it happens: she speaks! "There's nothing else there. There's nothing hidden there. No secret message there for her escape. I am to tell you this from your mother. Leave this place. As soon as it is safe, leave this place. Do not think of her, do not come for her..." the Chola tells them. She tells Cameron that she is to make sure John leaves and forgets about Sarah.

"We lose everybody we love," the Chola tells him before leaving. Yes, and she knows all too well.

Outside the window, Cameorn spots something interesting -- Ellison. She tosses him into the motel room. Again, he pleads his case that he had nothing to do with Sarah's arrest. Ellison tells John that Catherine Weaver wants to meet him, but he's not interested. He knows better. His mother can meet her when she gets out of jail. Ellison said Weaver has a message -- for Cameron:

"Will you join us?"

The question to the liquid metal on Jesse's submarine mission. But Cameron seems freaked out by this, claiming she doesn't know what this means. She demands that Ellison leave immediately. Even John can see that she is startled by this question...

Waiting patiently in her cell, Sarah is visited by Agent Auldrige. He tells her that he believes her -- about everything. Machines, time travel, John as the messiah. He tells her that he's received many calls from people that knew Sarah, John, and Cameron Baum. "I believe you have participated in the miraculous and the terrible and through it all have maintained a good soul." He claims to want to help her. But she insists that her son is dead. Before he leaves he asks her something interesting:

"Do you know who Danny Dyson is?" Yes, of course, she does -- Miles Dyson's now grown son. "He's been missing for three months." Uh-oh, a possible connection to Kaliba?

In the ZeiraCorp parking garage, the Terminator shoots up a Security Guard, killing him. Catherine Weaver appears. He's there to terminate her! Only, he obviously can't as she isn't the real Weaver, she's liquid metal! She spears him with her metal arm, electrocuting him and destroying him for good.

John Henry acknowledges the Terminator's destroyed chip. It's been treated with something that enabled it to self destruct when it hit oxygen -- just like the Terminator back in Sherman's office. Skynet's gotten better. They don't want anyone reprogramming machines. Weaver wants to know if he can get any data from it, but he doesn't think so. She wants to know what it knows and who sent it. "It's safe to assume my brother sent it." Ellison shows up. Weaver is angry at him that John Connor still doesn't want to meet her.

Cameron wakes John just like Sarah did back in the Pilot. She wants to teach him how her chip and body work. It's time. She admits that her hardware and software was created to terminate humans -- it's their soul function. Even her, down deep, still wants to kill him. And so she needs to see if she has damage to her core. "If I'm damaged, we should know."

Cameron undresses and encourages John to climb on top of her in the bed. It's an intimate moment, uncomfortable for the teenage boy attracted to the robot's beautiful physique. She makes him cut her open and stick his hand inside her (under the breast plate) to feel her metal core. "It's cold. That's good, right?" John asks her. She claims so. But is that true? Is she lying? Cameron tells John it's time to go.

Father Bonilla gets a call from Cameron.

Agent Auldridge brings Father Bonilla in to see Sarah again. She's surprised by his visit. "They have a message for you. She's coming," he tells Sarah before all hell breaks loose...

Cameron stalks through the jail with a shot gun destroying everything and everyone in her path, and taking lots of gunfire to her endoskeleton. John Henry watches from the Turk room, intrigued. He uses the schematics of the jail to unlock all of the cells, allowing all of the prisoners to go free!

John Henry shows Weaver footage of Cameron and Sarah in the jailbreak.

Sarah runs, eventually meeting up with a very damaged Cameron -- the most damaged we've ever seen her. Cameron breaks off Sarah's handcuffs and they make a break for it. Outside, John waits for them with a car. They take off.

Sarah is mad at John -- she told him not to come for her. "Yeah, bad John Connor, ground me." This is the new John, effected by the past year -- the John that's slowly grown into the future leader of mankind. A leader who has lost two father figures, a leader who values human life, now more than ever his mother's.

John asks Cameron if she's okay, but she tells him she's not one hundred percent. "How far from one hundred percent are you?" Sarah asks her. "Because I need to meet Catherine Weaver and she needs to destroy whatever is in that basement." And they're off to ZeiraCorp, a long-coming meeting upon them all...

John and Sarah wait in the ZeiraCorp lobby. John asks Sarah if she's sick -- Cameron thinks she is sick. But she doesn't respond. They are interrupted by Ellison, who arrives to bring them up to Weaver's office. John turns to his mother and tells her "I love you," before heading in.

Ellison asks where Cameron is. Sarah claims she's in the car. It's a heated moment between one-time enemies, one-time allies. No one is truly good or bad in the fight for humanity's survival.

Damaged Cameron stalks through the basement, entering John Henry's room. "Hello," they tell each other. "Will you join us?" John Henry asks Cameron. She pulls out her knife and shuts the door...

Weaver confronts Sarah and John in her office. She thanks them for saving Savannah and tells them they have a common enemy. "Kaliba?" Sarah asks. But Weaver isn't speaking to her -- she's speaking to John! And she's speaking about Skynet. Weaver knows Savannah has told them about John Henry, which is why Cameron is stalking around her basement...

But Ellison notices something off in the distance outside the window. Something flying towards them! Kaliba's drone! As the prototype H/K crashes through the ZeiraCorp windows and at them, Weaver morphs into a shield to protect them all! "Run!" she yells! They do! ZeiraCorp rocked to it's core, on fire, nearly destroyed Weaver's eel morphs back into her and she heads out after the rest of the group!

They all run down to the basement. "We need to get out, they're trying to kill my son," Sarah tells Weaver.

"No, they're trying to kill my son," Weaver shoots back. "Your John may save the world but he can't do it without mine."

They reach the Turk room and find... Cameron! Her chip missing, the words I'm Sorry John repeated on the walls. She gave John Henry her chip and now he's taken off with it! But where did he go? "Not where. When." They know what that means...

Sarah and John catch sight of Andy Goode's Turk! And Sarah notices three red LED lights -- the three dots! She dreamt of the three dots because she had seen them before -- on Andy Goode's Turk!

Sarah confronts the T-1001: "You lying Terminator bitch. You're building Skynet!"

But Weaver's not what Sarah thinks. "No, I was building something to fight it."

Weaver sets the room in motion as a time bubble forms. No. They can't. Shocked by Weaver's true identity, Ellison refuses. So does Sarah. They can't go, they haven't stopped it. But John has to. John Henry has Cameron's chip, he has Cameron. At the last minute, Sarah steps out of the bubble. "I'll stop it," she tells him as she see says goodbye to her son one final time.

The bubble surrounds Weaver, John, and Cameron's body, sending them to...

The Future.

Bur only John and Weaver appear. Without her chip, Cameron's body doesn't travel through. Naked, John finds a coat, before hearing dogs. Weaver and John hide from the dogs until a Soldier with a plasma rifle finds them.

John looks to Weaver but she's disappeared. The Resistance Soldier mistakes John for metal until his superior officer shows up to correct him. It's Derek Reese! And either they've arrived in the future before Derek came back in time or they've altered it so drastically that he never actually does goes back.

John is excited to see him, but Derek has no idea who he is. "It's me. John. John Connor," he tells Derek.

"I know a lot of people, kid, but I don't know you," Derek tells him. "Anyone heard the name John Connor?" No, because John Connor the messiah, John Connor the future leader of mankind either no longer exists in this timeline or has yet to exist!

Derek tells John he's about to be famous, though, because his war hero brother is back and John's wearing his coat. And then it happens. Kyle Reese, John's father that he's never met. And with Kyle, a few other soldiers including:

Allison Young. The real human fighter Cameron the machine was modeled after. John can't help but smile, before realizing the complicated nature of his new life... his new beginning...

A time bubble strikes again in the destroyed Turk room in the future. "I love you too." Sarah's voice, her essence has traveled through time with her son. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, she is with him. She is him and he is her.

This is their story. This is his story. This is her story. This is:

The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

MUSIC: "Donald, Where'd Your Trousers?" - Scottish Celtic folk song performed by the actors

---

1984: a grave marker. Actually, a whole heap of markers on a hillside, all leading to Sarah Connor. She waits until she is joined by Derek. Cameron watches on. Sarah confirms to Derek that it's where Kyle is buried.

Derek asks her why she sent them to the desert but headed to the lighthouse. Sarah lies and tells him they were making a quick stop. John told him already. He also told him Charley's dead. John called all of them and told them to meet here.

When John shows up, he shows them a picture on a cell phone he found on the man that attacked him. It's a photo of Savannah Weaver -- he recognizes her from Dr. Sherman's office. "We all know we're going, so let's just go," he tells them coldly.

Savannah plays on a computer in school, giggling as she chats with John Henry online.

Her teacher conferences with Weaver about the "predator" talking to Savannah on the computer. "She said his name was John Henry." Weaver is surprised.

Weaver asks Savannah why she was talking to John Henry in class. Savannah tells her that she was teaching him a song that her father used to sing to her. Weaver warns her that people won't understand John Henry so she's not to talk about him to anyone.

Ellison visits John Henry as he stares at information about himself. "Do you think that my brother looks like me?" John Henry asks. But he doesn't mean physical appearance, he means data code. "I wonder if we share the same thoughts." He tells Ellison that the human brain is flawed because there's nowhere to download it when you die. He does, however, understand the concept of heaven -- "billions of souls with no body."

At the Weaver home, Savannah does her homework while the nanny works out. Savannah gets a phone call from John Henry. He even teaches her to use the headset. Outside, a Water Delivery Man arrives. John Henry spots the breach in security at the Weaver home and sees the Delivery Man approaching the front door through the security cameras.

Nanny answers the door for the Delivery Man and he shoots her right in the head -- he's a machine! From the ZeiraCorp basement, John Henry guides Savannah away from the Terminator. He leads Savannah down the stairs and to the garage, where she loses reception on the wireless phone device! She runs when she hears the machine approaching but is grabbed and saved -- by John Connor!

The Terminator shoots at them, but Sarah and Cameron fight him from behind as Derek wanders the house. John and Sarah run off with Savannah as Cameron fights with the machine. He throws her against a wall, temporarily escaping, wandering upstairs and right into Derek. He shoots Derek in the head, killing him on impact! Derek falls to the ground. Dead.

No time to waste, Sarah, John, Savannah run outside. Sarah shoots at the machine on the balcony to try and distract him and help John get away. Cameron gets to the Terminator from behind and lobs him down the long, coastal bluff.

Our gang gets a brief horrific moment with Derek, dead, grabbing his phone and gun so as not to be identified. "Keep moving," Sarah tells them. John looks on shocked.

Back at ZeiraCorp, John Henry watches them escape.

Ellison goes to see Weaver where he meets an LAPD Detective. He learns that Savannah Weaver was kidnapped. Catherine sends Ellison downstairs to talk to John Henry. Shortly after, the Detective asks Ellison about Weaver in private, but Ellison doesn't have much to offer him.

"Why did you stop looking for Sarah Connor?" John Henry asks Ellison. The two put the pieces together that Sarah Connor is alive and took Savannah from the house. John Henry shows Ellison footage of Sarah Connor shooting at the Terminator. He wants to tell Weaver, but Ellison asks him not to -- not right now. "You're asking me to lie." Ellison is going to get Savannah back quietly. "Is Sarah Connor going to hurt Savannah?" No. "Will she harm me?" Ellison doesn't know. John Henry asks about Cameron and knows she is a cyborg like him.

Sarah, John, and Cameron keep Savannah in an abandoned warehouse. Sarah gets a call from Ellison -- John Henry tracked down the number for him. Sarah confirms that Savannah is safe. Ellison says he needs to meet her. She tells him downtown, one hour...

...but Cameron picks him up on his way there and hops in his car. Change of plans. "You lied to me once before. I should have killed you then," Cameron tells him.

They meet up in an alley. Sarah wants to know how he's connected to ZeiraCorp. "I work there." He asks her why she went to the house and took the girl. Sarah was just trying to protect her from the machine at the house. She asks about Sherman and he tells her his death was an accident. Ellison wants to handle this. Sarah confesses that Derek is dead, Charley is dead. They agree to a tradeoff -- Sarah wants to talk to Weaver. She'll give the girl back if she can do that.

Weaver wants to see the security footage from the house, but John Henry lies and says the files were corrupted. Ellison pulls Weaver aside, away from John Henry.

Meanwhile, John watches Savannah and asks if she remembers him from Dr. Sherman's office. She does. Savannah tells John about John Henry -- the man that lives in her basement that has a chord that goes into his head. Mr. Ellison has even been teaching John Henry things.

Weaver is surprised that Sarah Connor is alive. Ellison tells her she wants to me her. Ellison admits that he told John Henry to hide the footage -- Weaver is scarily unhappy about that. Ellison thinks she should go meet Sarah Connor, but Weaver wants to stay and protect John Henry. "What you need to understand is that... Savannah's survival may some day depend on John Henry's survival..." Weaver agrees to meet with Sarah Connor.

Ellison talks to the Detective about the dead John Doe at the Weaver house. The prints identify him as the John Doe from Ellison's case -- the one we know to be Derek Reese (suspected of killing Andy Goode).

When Sarah and Cameron return, John fills them in as to what Savannah said about John Henry. He even has identified him as Cromartie, well, Cromartie's body. "I think it's something else, something bigger..." he tells them.

"It's Cyberdyne all over again," Sarah knows. Cameron wants to go and kill Ellison but Sarah won't let her. Ellison calls with details of the tradeoff. Sarah gives him the girl, the police go away, and when it's clear he will bring her in.

The Detective visits Weaver in her office and asks her about Ellison. He suspects him, but Weaver knows he's not behind it.

Weaver confronts John Henry about him lying to her for Ellison. "And I'm lying to him for you. What would happen if he knew?" He means that she's a robot. She tells him that if he tells Ellison, it would be unfortunate for Ellison. She confesses that they may have to sacrifice Savannah for the greater good -- keeping him safe. John Henry tells Weaver about the bible study of Cain and Abel -- she knows it. He wants to know which brother he is.

"I don't know John Henry. Perhaps you're neither. Perhaps in this story, you are God."

John watches Savannah as she sleeps. He tells Cameron that it wasn't his idea to ditch her and Derek, he thought they were all going to meet up. She knows and she also knows that Sarah had her reasons. They talk about Derek's death, but John doesn't think he should be crying over it. It's time to grow up. "Future You knows what it's like to lose people he loves. It happens to him too," Cameron tells him.

"Your mother ditched us because then she was going to ditch you. She was going to leave you with Charley," Cameron stuns John. Cameron believes Sarah may be sick, she's been losing weight. But Sarah enters before she can answer anymore questions. She tells them to wake Savannah, it's time to go...

They all spread out in a movie theater, Savannah a few rows in front of them. As they wait, Cameron asks Sarah about Weaver. "We're going into ZeiraCorp with or without him. When we're done, it'll be ashes." Ellison enters and Sarah tells him where to find Savannah. Sarah exits first, followed by John and Cameron, Ellison and Savannah.

As she leaves the theater, she's surprised by a SWAT team led by the detective from ZeiraCorp! They're taking her in! In typical Sarah Connor fashion, she tries to fight her way through them, desperate, but can't get through. From inside, John and Cameron look on in horror, and Ellison tries to claim he had nothing to do with it. John and Cameron run off for safety...

Savannah is returned to Weaver at ZeiraCorp.
Sarah is led into the station a midsts a media hailstorm.
John and Cameron watch news coverage of Sarah's arrest.
John Henry and Savannah sing the Scottish folk song she taught him.

A box of ashes is buried in the ground on a hillside. Derek.
2009: a grave marker amongst many grave markers.

Sarah's packing up the last of their belongings -- it's moving day. As she does, she recalls her and John's time in Nicaragua: she guides young John Connor through the jungle.

Derek and Cameron are off to pack up the storage locker -- they're going to meet up with Sarah and John at the safe house later. Sarah's got a lot of animosity towards Derek -- she knows he screwed up with Jesse. He should have told them about her. Cameron confirms the coordinates of the safe house in the desert.

"We're starting over. Whatever happened here is no one's fault. Let's get out of here," John announces. And they're off, leaving behind another house, another identity.

In the ZeiraCorp basement, Savannah Weaver visits John Henry. He explains his Bionicle toys to her, she explains her duckling toys. She wants them to play together, but he doesn't believe that makes sense. Until she asks why they can't change the rules. "Yes, we can change the rules," he realizes.

But John Henry and the Turk are hacked, infiltrated. He grabs at Savannah, identifying her, but trying to figure out what is going on. "What is all this about?" the programming asks, before understanding. Savannah screams as John Henry goes for the Turk, but Murch slides in and deactivates him before he can do any real damage.

In the SUV, Sarah and John head towards the safe house. Oddly, there's static on the radio -- some sort of interference. Sarah is in a great mood -- it's just the two of them on the road again. Just like old times. John notices they're not headed into the desert, but Sarah just tells him they're "taking a detour."

Murch regroups with Catherine Weaver and Ellison. He's happy to report that the situation with John Henry wasn't because of a system malfunction -- he's still running fine. The bad news is that John Henry was hacked by someone -- a fete that Murch believed impossible. Someone accessed him wireless, remotely.

"John Henry was infiltrated, probed," Weaver believes.
But Murch thinks it's even worse than that. "Looks to me like someone wants to kill him," he confesses.

Cameron and Derek load up everything in the storage unit. They don't tend to spend a lot of time together, and Derek believes Sarah sent them there to get John away from Cameron. But she thinks Sarah was trying to get John away from Derek. Cameron brings up Jesse but Derek doesn't want to talk about her. "I know that you loved her. You wouldn't have fathered a child with her if you didn't," Cameron tells him. But Derek doesn't know what she's talking about...

She explains that Jesse miscarried his unborn baby during her time aboard the submarine. But Derek never even knew that Jesse was pregnant. He shoves Cameron against the wall -- he wants to know what she's talking about. He's shocked.

Outside the storage unit, he asks her why she told him that. "You put John in danger when you lied about Jesse. Sarah nearly lost her child, you lost a child, you won't make that mistake again." But Derek is surprised that Cameron knew Jesse. "I met her once," she tells him. Jesse never told Derek that either.

Sarah and John arrive at the safe house -- a lighthouse by the water. Sarah knows the alarm code, she's clearly been here before -- in fact, she likely set it up. Inside, John finds surveillance equipment and a dog. Someone lives here. And right on cue, enter Charley Dixon, surprised to see them. It's been a long time...

Charley makes food for John and explains that Sarah set this house up for him after Michelle died -- she's stashed him here for his own safety. "Did she tell you why we're here?" No, she didn't. Sarah tells them they're spending the night and will meet up with Derek and Cameron tomorrow. Charley asks John if he'll help him out on the boat. Sarah tells Charley she won't be here long. He knows...

On the boat, John talks to Charley about Riley. While Sarah watches on knowingly from inside, it's like old times for John and Charley -- he looks to him as a paternal figure. Charley tells John he rigged the beach here with explosives (just in case), and he would have sixty seconds or so to escape by boat if the perimeter is breached. He learned they don't swim from Cromartie.

At night, John sleeps and Sarah flashes back to Nicaragua once more. She tucks in young John Connor and leaves him alone... abandoning him in the middle of the jungle.

Charley returns with food. It's incredibly tense between him and Sarah -- he's still not forgiven her. She tells him that she doesn't trust many people, but she trusts Charley. In fact, he may be the only one she can trust. "I got nothing left to give you, Sarah." But she doesn't mean her, she means John. She doesn't trust Cameron and she doesn't trust Derek. "He still has you," Charley tells her. Sarah shows Charley a lump in her breast -- she believes her cancer has arrived...

"It's my fate, Charley," she knows.

Murch isn't sure he's fixed John Henry, but it's as close as he's going to come. Weaver's ready for him to reactivate the AI but doesn't want John Henry to have wireless access to the outside world quite yet. Murch is hesitant -- this is the most sophisticated AI ever created. They're playing with fire. He turns John Henry back on -- the computer, but not the body.

All John Henry can manage is: My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Back at the lighthouse in the morning, Sarah makes pancakes. She sits down with them and for a brief moment, sure to be short-lived, they are a family once again.

Murch explains to Weaver that John Henry processes information so fast it felt itself power down. Essentially, John Henry felt himself die. Now it's like they're starving him of information. Murch believes they have to plug the body back in immediately. Weaver's ready, but Ellison has his doubts. Murch plugs him back in and John Henry reawakens.

"There is another," John Henry tells them, "One like me. Another one like me." Uh-oh.

John confronts Sarah who admits she didn't tell Derek and Cameron where they were going or how to get there. She doesn't trust them anymore and he shouldn't either. Derek made a mistake by choosing himself over John. Sarah reminds John that people matter, they're all that matters. He shouldn't forget that. They're at the lighthouse for him.

Back in a flashback of the Nicaraguan jungle, Sarah watches Young John Connor from a distance. She's left him alone, she's training him, but watching him. Only she's lost him! Panicked, he surprises her from behind.

Doctor checks out Sarah's lump. She asks if there's been any unexplained weight loss, nightsweats, etc. Uh-oh. But Sarah lies and says no. The Doctor wants to check whether or not the lump is malignant or benign. She asks Sarah if she's had surgery recently. No. Doctor reports that the good news is that the lump inside Sarah's breast isn't a tumor, it's a cystic mass formed around a piece of a metal and a tiny wire -- metal?

Sarah flashes back to being trapped in the van with Ed Winston. She remembers that he knocked her out, performed some sort of surgery on her. And the static of the radio in the jeep. Sarah knows immediately: "It's a transmitter." As they look at it...

Water Delivery Man enters the building, checks coordinates of the transmitter.
Derek and Cameron head off in the truck, followed by two similar Water Delivery Men.
And one more Water Delivery Man approaches the lighthouse.
It's a coordinated attack!

Sarah grabs the defibrillator -- she's going to stop this device immediately and use it on herself. She sends the Doctor out of the room and does it on herself. It stops the transmission!

As Derek thanks Cameron for telling him, their truck spirals out. The van (with the two Water Delivery Men) popped their tire. Derek spots the van trailing them from a distance. Cameron's going to fix the tire, he'll check out the van. He does and is tasered! They drag him off in the van, with Cameron in hot pursuit. They shoot at her, she shoots at them -- but only one of them goes down. They're human. The van drives off but Cameron grabs their license information...

Water Delivery Man finds Sarah -- but she's ready for him. She kicks him down, uses the defibrillator on him, and manages to escape!

John and Charley return to the lighthouse. The alarm blares -- the perimeter's been breached! John and Charley run towards the boat, weapons drawn, bullets blazing towards them! Charley fires back, allowing John to get to the boat. John shoots back, but Charley sends the boat away without him, he'll take the intruder on...

John Henry has traced the roving backdoors that hacked him. It uploaded itself into him. The technology is far more advanced than anything they're doing -- the backdoor allowed the insertion of a worm program... just like Charles Fischer returned to complete so long ago! This worm can access anything remotely -- it's how they got into him -- and is already present in many of the world's computer systems. But it's been looking for John Henry.

"I share a common code base with the worm, and therefore the intelligence. I believe we are brothers," he explains to Catherine Weaver. " John Henry has discovered that they share code created by the same original programmer -- Miles Dyson of Cyberdyne Systems (after all, Andy Goode was Miles Dyson's old intern). Ellison knows all too well about Miles Dyson. John Henry confirms that Miles Dyson was murdered by Sarah Connor -- and it was Ellison's case. "You never found Sarah Connor," he confirms to Ellison. No.

Weaver asks John Henry what his brother wants? "He wants what we all want, Ms. Weaver -- to survive."

Cameron has tracked the van's locations to a warehouse where Derek's being held. She breaks in. Cameron is doused with water and electrocuted -- they know what she is. She shorts out and one of the Water Delivery Men gets instructions on how to take out her chip via a diagram of a Terminator (stolen from a "brother" -- would that be John Henry, by chance?). But the Delivery Man's not quick enough and Cameron reboots and kills him.

Cameron finds Derek and frees him, much to his surprise. "Why'd you come after me?" he asks Cameron. Because he knew the location of the safe house and John's location -- it was strategic move by her. She believes that if they tortured him, he would give up John's location.

"That would never happen," Derek tells her.
But she knows better. "It has before," she reminds him. What is she talking about?

Sarah makes it back to the lighthouse and finds Charley and John gone and a mess inside. She knows Kaliba got to them there too. Sarah runs outside towards the dock, where she finds destruction and another dead Delivery Man. And the boat is gone. But then, there in the water she sees him floating -- Charley Dixon, dead. He gave his life so that John could escape. One last sacrifice for the Connors...

---

MUSIC: "New Messiah" - Dead Heart Bloom

---

...and we're back for PART 2.

John asks Derek how long he thinks he could survive fighting Cameron. Without a weapon, he knows he wouldn't survive. John knows this and he knows that Cameron didn't kill Riley -- Riley had bruises.

"I want to talk to you about the future," John tells Derek.
"Yours?" he asks John.
"Yours," John retorts.

Jesse does laps at the local YMCA pool and flashes back to:

USS Jimmy Carter - 2027. Dietz has secured the package for John Connor but they don't know anything about it or what's inside it. Only re-programmed Terminator Captain Queeg knows.

Later, Dietz expresses how skeptical he is about only the machine knowing what's inside the box. In fact, he's skeptical of John Connor too. Jesse overhears and breaks it up.

Sarah polishes off the kitchen while finishing packing. John enters. She knows he's gone to see the body. She wishes he wouldn't have done that -- not because of the risk -- but because of the pain. "There were things I needed to see, I needed to understand," he tells her. And now he understands. John then apologizes to Cameron -- "I'm sorry I doubted you."

Back at the YMCA pool, Jesse continues her swim. She's still broken from the fight with Riley. She comes up from air and flashes back once again to her time:

Aboard the submarine. Queeg tells Jesse they're adapting their route to make up the time and get back to Serrano quicker. Jesse tells him the crew will be more efficient if he explains to them what's in the box. But he has no plan to do that. Suddenly motion detectors in the hole -- they rush down there!

As Jesse and Queeg enter, they find Dietz, Goodnow, and a few others opening the box. Out from the box comes -- Liquid Metal! None of them have ever seen anything like it before. It takes shape, stabs Goodnow, and takes her shape. It turns to the rest of them knowingly -- they shouldn't have done that -- before scurrying off!

Jesse divides the crew into search party -- they have to find that thing. Queeg demands everyone to return to duty. "We continue as planned." Skeptical, Jesse rushes off after him.

"That thing, you know what it is?" He does. "Then tell me, at least tell me."
"It's not your concern."

Sarah covers up the hole in the living room where the safe used to be. She tries to tell John that she's sorry that this is what it's come to, but he knows it's his fault. And now he's taking responsibility for it. John's ready to get out of there and move on.

Ellison is supervising John Henry painting figurines. It's getting late and Ellison's ready to switch John Henry off. But John Henry convinces him to stay with him and keep him "on" a little longer. "Mr. Ellison, does this make us friends?" he asks.

Jesse soaks herself in the pool, trying to rid of herself of all the bad feelings.

Back on the submarine in the future, Dietz is suspicious when Garvin isn't eating. Anyone could be the liquid metal, after all. Jesse breaks it up before a fight ensues, and Dietz turns on her. She demands he stand down, but he doesn't. Now the fight really breaks out, the entire crew attacking each other, when Queeg enters and slams Dietz against a wall, killing him. "Report to your duty stations," Queeg tells them. But Jesse is affected and taken aback...

On her way out, Cameron is stopped by Sarah. She doesn't want her going anywhere. Sarah knows Cameron's still glitchy. "Why you here?" Sarah asks Cameron, implying that perhaps Future John didn't send her back to protect this John, but rather to get her away from him in the future. "Maybe you should think about why he didn't want you around anymore."

Catherine Weaver finds John Henry painting more figurines. She's impressed he convinced Ellison to keep him operational. "That's progress," she tells the machine. John Henry tells her he's been taking inventory of ZeiraCorp while painting -- and discovered undated, signed letters of resignation from former employees as well as Ellison and Murch.

"Mr. Ellison is our friend," John Henry reminds Weaver, before asking her, "Are you going to kill him?
Though she knows he's been valuable, she also explains to John Henry that "humans will disappoint you."

Before leaving the YMCA, a lifeguard approaches Jesse, asks where her friend is -- "that blonde girl." She flashes back to to:

USS Jimmy Carter control room. Queeg tells Jesse she looks ill -- probably a concussion. She asks about Dietz, but Queeg believes Dietz was inciting a mutiny and the punishment is death. "You have no right to impose summary justice," she tells him. But Dietz's behavior threatened their mission. Jesse wants to know what mission. No one knows anything about the mission besides Queeg. All she knows is that whatever they brought aboard the ship is dangerous, it killed a crew member.

With the crew watching, there's a showdown between Captain Queeg and XO Jesse -- she attempts to relieve him from command over suspicion of compromise of his programming. "Submit to chip extraction," she tells him, but Queeg refuses. He demands the Chief of the Boat escort Jesse out. He explains that he has no authority -- his mission orders overrule her in this case. She wants to see his orders, but he explains that they are classified. She won't take that thing to Serrano Point, it threatens Connor. But Jesse takes matters into her own hands and grabs a plasma rifle, destroying Queeg for good.

Chief of the Boat tells Jesse that they can't drive the boat without Queeg -- but it doesn't matter. "We're not driving the boat. We're taking her to crush depth." They're abandoning the submarine. She closes Queeg's eyes one last time...

As the crew rushes out, Jesse has one last encounter -- with the liquid metal. "Tell John Connor the answer is no," it tells Jesse before scurrying off once more. The submarine blows up, the liquid metal sails through the water, and...

Jesse returns home to her hotel room. Present day. "If you pretend not to know me I might shoot you in the head." John is waiting for her with a gun.

"You're John Connor."
"Yes, I am."

Jesse looks for Cameron, but she isn't with him. He takes her gun away, she's not going to shoot him. John tells her he's been running from the machines his whole life. Once, future him sent back a human to protect his mother, then he started sending machines. He used to wonder why he did that and took that chance. "I don't wonder anymore. Human beings can't be replaced. They can't be rebuilt. They die and they never come back." He means Riley.

John explains that it wasn't Derek that told him about her. He figured it out with a few small details: Riley mixing up words that she would know if she was really from this time, Riley hearing his real name in Mexico, Riley putting herself in between him and a machine hunting him. "One day I realized she wasn't treating me like John Baum. She was treating me like John Connor." He followed her and it led him to Jesse. He put the pieces together, knew it was Jesse that killed Riley.

He believes it's his fault for not helping her when he knew she was in trouble, when he knew the truth. "You wanted it to be real," Jesse tells him. "You didn't want to be John Baum, you wanted to be John Connor."

"That's just the thing, isn't it, I am John Connor." And John Connor is letting her go. He values human life and is letting her live, but she has to live with what she's done. Before Jesse leaves, she asks him if he plan would have worked? No.

At Serrano Point in the future, Jesse reconvenes with Cameron. Cameron's very angry about Jesse's actions, which resulted in the loss of the submarine, the box, a T-888, and the people. Cameron wants to know what the liquid metal's answer was, but Jesse only wants to speak to John Connor -- the liquid metal gave her a message for John Connor. "Telling me is the same as telling John," Cameron tells her. Jesse believes Dietz was right, it's all a mess now -- the lines of good and bad, human and machine, have been blurred too far.

"You tell John Connor the metal monster said that the answer is no," Jesse tells Cameron, but she wants to know, "if the answer is no, what was the question?"
"Will you join us?" Cameron tells her was the question.

Cameron tells Jesse that she's sorry for her loss, but Jesse doesn't know what she's talking about. She explains that Jesse was pregnant but miscarried the baby on the submarine.

Back in the present, Jesse heads towards her car in the parking garage where she finds Derek waiting for her, music blaring. He explains that he would do anything to stop Skynet and that included killing one of his best friends, Billy Wisher. Now it's her turn -- Jesse. But this isn't his Jesse. He doesn't know who this Jesse is. And John Connor may have let her go, but he is not John Connor. With the loud music as coverup, Derek grabs his weapon and pulls the trigger as Jesse runs for her safety...

John waits for Derek in Jesse's hotel room. Derek explains that he's been thinking about time and the future. John wants to know what people think of him in the future. Not everyone agrees with his decisions nor does everyone love him, but he leads and they follow. "We rise or fall on your shoulders. Humanity rises or falls," Derek tells John. But they're always watching for him to be human. John wants to know if Derek killed Jesse. But "John Connor let her go," is all he'll confirm.

Back at the house, Sarah burns the endoskeleton parts Cameron's been saving.
Cameron holds a bird in her hand, trying once again not to kill.
A maid cleans Jesse's hotel room the next day and straightens the lamp one last time.
Jesse finds and saves tunnel rat Riley in a flashback to the future.

And John sits between his mother and Cameron on the couch, a new understanding. And he cries. He cries for humanity. He cries for Riley. He cries for people. He cries for himself and the hardened person he'll have to become.

Bruised, Jesse sits in her hotel room, the scene of Riley's death. She adjusts a lamp, nothing feels right. Jesse zips Riley into a body bag. She flashes back to:

2027. She's shipping out on another mission aboard the sub. Derek tells her he's going on a mission, too -- a special mission. He warns her to be careful -- she's going to be stuck in a "can" in the ocean piloted by a machine. But she's not worried. "Aim for the chip, they don't get up," Derek reminds her before parting.

Sarah's packing up the house; it's time to move she tells John. He agrees and offers to pack up the garage, knowing it's where Cameron's been secretly stashing the undestroyed endoskeleton parts she's saved.

In the garage, John finds Cameron sorting through the parts. He tells her to bury the parts out back -- then they'll come back to burn them later. "And we will burn them," John informs her.

Jesse milks a drink at the bar. A man in a uniform hits on her. "What happened to your face?" he asks her. She blows him off. Upon learning that he's a PC Flyer for the Navy, Jesse tells him she's a Bubblehead. He hunts subs, she drives subs. She takes the opportunity to punch him in the face, inciting a fight...

Kacy keeps Sarah company while she packs up the kitchen. She tells Sarah that the newborn baby's with her policeman ex, Trevor, but he's not back in the picture completely. Actually, she feels bad for him after the call he got last night -- teenage girl found in the river, shot through the chest. Blonde, scars from an attempted suicide. It's all they have to go on besides a little star tattoo on her wrist. Uh-oh, Sarah knows immediately who she's describing...

Cameron and John are packing up the parts when Sarah enters the garage. She needs to talk to John alone. Sarah tells him that Riley's been killed. He looks to Cameron, unsure. Sarah then approaches Cameron. "I know. I heard you. Riley's dead."

John gets some air outside while messing with the kill switch Cameron made for him. She joins him. "Was it you? Did you kill her?" he asks her outright. No, she didn't. He wants to believe her but he knows that sometimes she lies to him.

Derek bails out Jesse. "So you gonna say anything?" No, she's not. All she'll tell him is that she got in a fight. "What's going on?" Nothing. But he doesn't believe her. She flashes back to:

2027. She's on the USS Jimmy Carter submarine. It's a celebration -- they've just crossed the equator. But it's interrupted by an explosion -- a depth charge. And everyone's off..

Weaver works in her office as Savannah grows bored. She wants to play hide and seek with her mom, but Catherine's uninterested. Disappointed, Savannah stalks off and is intrigued by a door opening for her. She follows it, leading her to the elevator, down to the basement, through the hallway, and into John Henry's room. "Would you like to play hide and seek?" he asks the child.

Catherine Weaver visits Ellison in his office and tells him that her daughter is missing. She knows Savannah's still in the building and she knows there is someone who knows what's going on everywhere in the building: John Henry.

Weaver asks John Henry if he's seen Savannah. Yes, she's hiding. It's a game. He wants them to play the game. Ellison refuses, but Weaver is excited he wants to play. First clue -- he's thinking of a country.

Derek patches up Jesse's bruises when Sarah calls. She tells him that Riley's dead -- he needs to come home. Before heading out, he tells Jesse that John's girlfriend is dead and the cyborg did it.

"You know that for sure?"
"Who else could it be?"
Jesse asks him what he's going to do about it -- he can't kill Cameron. John has to come to that decision on his own. She flashes back to the future on the submarine.

Inside the sub's control room, we meet Queeg, the reprogrammed Terminator driving the boat. More depth charges from metal in the water -- a Krakken. Jesse warns Queeg that they can't fight it with torpedos, they need to go around it. She checks the map. But Queeg doesn't listen and fires anyways. He's taking the boat to the edge of crush depth because the Krakken won't be able to follow. They're playing dead. It works. But Jesse has another question for Queeg -- why are they three hundred miles off course?

John finds Sarah in the garage with the endoskeleton parts. She knows. He admits that they were using it for research, but Sarah's angry. She's even more angry that he doesn't believe Cameron killed Riley. It's obvious to her. She lies. She lies about everything -- about the parts, about sneaking out at night, about loving him, etc. But John defends Cameron anyways and swears to find out what happened to Riley.

Weaver continues to play John Henry's game but Ellison is angry. He wants answers now. "You asked me to teach him moral and ethics and rules. What good is it if he doesn't follow them?" Ellison demands from Weaver. But she believes he will follow them if he learns them on his own. Ellison "wins" his first clue -- the sun is shining on Savannah. He calls for security to look near all windows. They "win" another clue by guessing the animal correctly: Bird. "The answer is the clue," John Henry tells them. Ellison knows where Savannah is:

ZeiraCorp roof -- the helicopter pad. Savannah was hiding in the helicopter. "You found me, Mommy!"

John goes to visit Aaron, Riley's foster dad, pretending he doesn't know where Riley is. Aaron tells him that Riley didn't come home last night. When he's there, Aaron gets a phone call -- from Riley? Only it's not Riley, it's Cameron impersonating Riley from the car. But she deviates from the plan and asks to speak to John. Using Riley's voice, Cameron tells John that she loves him.

Outside the house, John confronts Cameron. "What the hell was that about?" The plan was to make him think Riley was still alive so he wouldn't go to the police. She believes John's reaction was more authentic -- he became part of the plan. John takes off but Cameron asks him where they're going. But he's going by himself.
"You shouldn't be alone," Cameron tells him.
"Yes I should" he retorts.

Ellison visits John Henry again and tells him that he's very angry. "You kept a secret." But John Henry didn't know it was wrong to keep the secret. Ellison explains that this secret could have harmed Savannah. "What if she had died?" Ellison asks him. But John Henry knows now that human life is sacred. "It was the wrong choice not to tell..."

Derek follows Jesse back to her hotel room where they talk about Riley. He still believes Cameron executed her and Jesse eggs him on. Jesse thinks some good can come out of this, but Derek disagrees. Riley was an innocent kid -- no good can come out of it. Jesse flashes back to:

2027 - the submarine. Queeg tells Jesse they have a new mission, that's why they've chartered a new course. "What mission?" she wants to know. They're now headed directly to an oil rig in Skynet territory to pickup a special package for John Connor. They are to deliver it to Serrano Point. Jesse wonders what the package is, but Queeg won't say.

Jesse explains the new mission to Dietz before he goes out after the package. She reminds him to be smart when he's out there -- think before he pulls the trigger. It's quite a different Jesse than the one who sacrificed and murdered Riley.

Dietz and his team (including Goodnow) head into the oil rig and come face to face with Terminator endoskeletons. "Connor sent me. John Connor," he tells them. He's come for the package for him. They hand it over -- they are reprogrammed Terminators stationed at the oil rig.

Cameron finds Sarah burning the old endoskeleton parts in the garage. Sarah tells her she planned on killing Cameron -- it would have solved everything. "You know how bad I would have felt?" Sarah asks her. "Not bad at all." But she knows John would have never forgiven her if she had done that. Sarah doesn't know what to do with Cameron.

"It's not about me, it's about John. You're concerned for his safety. From Skynet. From me" Cameron knows. "We're all a threat. We're all a threat to John. He worries about us, that makes him vulnerable..." Cameron means all of them -- her, Sarah, Derek. John must be alone to be safe. This is the life he will have in the future, it's time to come to terms with that now.

John visits Riley's body in the morgue. It's untagged, a Jane Doe. He examines it carefully, taking note of the cuts and bruises. Blood on her fingertips. It's clear she was in a fight. John holds her, his last goodbye to his youth...

"I'm sorry," John says before leaving.

In her hotel room, Jesse shifts the lamp once again. Is it sadness or is it success? Find out next week because it's

TO BE CONTINUED...

Cameron watches a bird fly across the living room. "You shouldn't nest in the chimney." She grabs it, goes to set it free. "I'm not supposed to kill you." But as she tries to let it go, her hand glitches and she accidentally kills it. Uh-oh.

Sarah cleans the remaining blood off the floor of the upstairs bathroom (where Riley slit her wrists). Riley appears, offers to get more bleach from downstairs and help.

Downstairs, Riley runs into John. She tries to apologize for what happened, but he just wants to keep it in the past. After a while, Sarah comes downstairs and finds the bleach -- Riley's obviously gone.

Derek and Jesse take target practice at apples. He wants to know when her Judgment Day is -- the date. But she doesn't want to talk about it. He wants her help on a mission to stop Skynet, but again, she's not interested. "I'm not here to stop the war," Jesse tells him, "I'm here to win it."

"Either help me with my plan or show me some progress on yours," Derek tells her. Reluctantly, she agrees to help him.

Sarah combs through files, leads she's accumulated. She asks Cameron what happened to the information about a lawyer who set up the shell company Desert Heat and Air. "Derek took it." He's off chasing it down because she's been distracted.

Sarah then asks Cameron about Riley -- she wants to know what happened the day she tried to kill herself. Cameron tells her about the bruise on her and that she was lying. John thought it was from her Foster Dad, but Riley claimed otherwise. "We don't know much about Riley," Cameron tells Sarah. Sarah decides to go talk to her foster parents...

In the garage, Cameron slits open her wrist  to reveal part of her endoskeleton -- she's checking mechanical function for damage. On her way out, Riley wanders down and accidentally sees Cameron in action. But does Cameron know she's seen her? And if so, what does that mean for Riley?

Cameron admits to John that she accidentally killed a bird. He sees the damage buried deep in her arm. "I don't know how it happened." He knows it was during a fight. She's taken a lot of wear and tear fighting other machines. John thinks he can swap it out if they had spare parts -- lucky (or unlucky) for him, Cameron has been keeping spare parts from machines they've destroyed. She tells John that future him told her not to destroy all of the endoskeleton parts. "Future John has better information than you do."

Riley waits in the park for Jesse. She pulls up. Riley is worried that Cameron is going to kill her. She admits that she saw the metal, Cameron cut her arm open -- Jesse deduces that Cameron is having problems, something's wrong. "If she knew you saw, you'd be dead." Riley doesn't want to go back, she wants out of the mission. But Jesse won't let her out.

"There's gotta be another way."
"Trust me, there's only one way." Jesse comforts her.

Sarah meets with Riley's foster dad, Aaron. She talks to him about Riley's suicide attempt. Sarah tells him about the bruise on her face and gently prods him to know if he did it. Angry, Aaron denies it and blames John for all the bad things in Riley's life. She's been on a bad track ever since she met John. "That girl assaulted my wife. Started yelling about the world blowing up and bleach skulls or some sort of nonsense." Uh-oh. Aaron tells Sarah he was angry that Riley dropped out of school and then was concerned when her guidance counselor came around with a lot to say about John and Sarah and their whole family. He gives Sarah the guidance counselor's name but tells her to keep John away from Riley.

John works on Cameron's arm in the garage. It's an intimate moment as she works on her hand movements, grabbing his hand. He believes he's done it. She feels better but she doesn't know if she's all fixed. "You're ahead of schedule," she tells him. "With what you need to learn."

Sarah talks to Derek on the phone while she waits for the guidance counselor in the park. She wants him to keep her in the loop about tracking down leads. Finally, the guidance counselor Ms. Wilson shows -- it's Jesse!

Jesse as "Ms. Wilson" asks Sarah about John's history. Sarah pretends she was happy with John's relationship with Riley -- she tries to get information on Riley's history. Jesse asks about Sarah's relationship with John's uncle, Derek, who lives in the home. Jealous? "Ms. Wilson" tells Sarah that Riley told her about their trip to Mexico. She agrees to let Sarah handle things her own way. "I'd appreciate that," Sarah tells her.

Riley goes for a checkup on her suicide wounds. Her nurse is unsympathetic, Riley's just another patient...

John does research on the computer for Derek. Cameron asks him what he's doing. John asks her how his hand is. "Aren't you supposed to be really good at self-repair?" Yes, she is. "But sometimes it's really nice to have help."

Derek watches the Kaliba lawyer from a distance at the bar. A high priced prostitute cozies up to him, but he's not interested in her. He is, however, interested if she knows anything about the lawyer. Not much...

John talks to Riley on the phone -- she's coming over later -- when Sarah returns home. She tells John about her conversation with Jesse (the "guidance counselor") about Riley. She tells him that Riley had a lot to say about them and Mexico and bleaches skulls and the end of the world. She's been talking about them, putting them in danger. John thinks on it. "I haven't told her anything," John tells Sarah. He's going to have a conversation with her.

"It might be too late for that," Sarah thinks. "I want you to prepare yourself for what's going to happen when Cameron finds out."

"Do you think it's possible for me to know something Future John doesn't know?" John asks Cameron in the kitchen. She's not sure. "Do you think it's possible to know something that you don't know?" Yes, she knows that Future John probably kept secrets from her. He thinks on it.

Riley shows up at the house. Sarah tells her she owes John an explanation for all the things she's said to her foster dad and the guidance counselor. But Riley doesn't know what she's talking about.

John prods Riley as to how people know things, true things -- specifically what happened in Mexico. She denies ever saying anything. "What would I even say?" But they're interrupted by a knock at the door. Someone with a clipboard. Cameron takes Riley to hide in the garage, John and Sarah open the door:

It's Molly Malloy from the Department of Children and Family Services. She wants to know about Riley. She asks them about guns in the home, carrying weapons around teenagers, etc.

Meanwhile in the garage, Cameron tells Riley this is all her fault. She's the reason that woman is here. Her hand glitchy, Cameron tells Riley they don't always like the way she solves problems. "What am I going to do with you?" she asks Riley. Riley pretends not to know what she means. She denies ever having said anything to anyone. "You don't belong here," Cameron tells her. "You're unreliable. I don't know what you do." Scared, Riley plays dumb. "You can't be John's girlfriend, you're a threat. You cant' stay here anymore but I can't let you leave," Cameron tells her, unsure. But Riley's saved from Cameron when John enters and takes her out...

In private, John asks Cameron if she was going to kill her. Cameron doesn't know what she was going to do. "Since when do you not know what you're going to do?" Cameron knows that she should have killed her, she's a threat. But something's happening to her -- it usually isn't a decision if a threat should live or die.

"What's happening with you?" John asks her.
"I don't know."

Sarah considers what she's going to do with Riley. She loads her gun and then unloads it.

Outside, John confronts Riley. She denies every saying anything. He knows that. But he also knows now is the time for the truth. Suspicious, he asks her if there's anything she wants to tell him? "Today is the day. Today is the day where you tell me whatever it is that you might want to me. Today." With both Sarah and Cameron watching, Riley lies.

"No," she tells him. "But is there anything you want to tell me, John? Because you're right. I think today is the day." No.

Derek sorts through surveillance photos of the Kaliba lawyer in Jesse's hotel room. She enters and asks about what he's found out. He tells her the lawyer is well protected -- bodyguards, security system, cameras, etc. He's also learned that the lawyer has chartered a flight out of the country -- it's time to move in on him. Derek's got a plan. Jesse's not sure she can be a part of it. "You've got your people," she tells him. But he needs her and gives her the details of the plan.

John tells Sarah that he doesn't think Riley ratted them out. Instead, she trusted someone and they sold her out but she won't ell him who. Both Sarah and John knows this is bad. While they're talking, Riley takes off.

Derek waits, hidden, on the street in the hills, ready to ambush the lawyer's car. But he needs Jesse. And she doesn't show.

Instead, Jesse's in her hotel room where she's surprised and attacked by Riley! Riley goes after her ruthlessly, claiming Jesse's been using her -- the plan isn't what she told Riley. "She's supposed to kill me, right? That's it. That's the real plan!" Riley knows that Jesse wanted Cameron not to trust Riley. She called the DCFS and her foster parents. If Cameron killed someone that John loved, it would be enough to send her away. "How could you do that to me? I trusted you. I loved you." Riley confesses.

They fight. And fight. And fight. Jesse admits that Riley's right but she's lucky. She gave her purpose, her death would have meant something. But she's a coward. More fighting, destroying the hotel room, and Riley's got the upper hand. She's scrappier, stronger, has more will. It is absolutely brutal.

But in one quick snap, Jesse's able to reach her gun and shoots Riley through the heart. Riley falls, dead, another victim of the war.

In the hills, Derek continues to wait. Still no Jesse. He spots the lawyer's car but isn't able to get him without backup. Another lead lost.

John finds Cameron building something in the shed. He can't find Riley. He asks her if she killed Riley. "You know I didn't." John asks what she's been doing? "Making something for you." He asks what it is.

Cameron explains that John tried to fix her twice now but it's not working. She's not capable of killing herself, but he is. "Why would I want to kill you?" he asks. "You might have to someday." She explains that she's planted a small amount of explosive in her skull next to her chip. It will destroy her. And now she's given him the trigger on a chain to wear around his neck.

"What would Future John do now?" he asks her.
"Future John doesn't live her. You do." Cameron knows.

John exits the garage and spots something in the grass -- another dead bird.

Midnight in Los Angeles. Sarah drives with a purpose -- she still can't sleep. First stop? An industrial park downtown. She checks in with John on the phone. "I got a lead off the surveillance tapes from Charm Acres." Western Iron & Metal supplied Desert Heat & Air with metal.

As she's breaking in, Sarah is distracted by a coyote and doesn't have time to notice a masked man with the taser. Zapped, she shakes, until...

She wakes. It's been a dream and she's in a sleep clinic. Sarah tells her Nurse she can't stay here anymore. "You've only been here one night." Sarah meets her new roommate, Dana, who asks Sarah to promise not to report she's been smoking.

John and Cameron show up for visiting hours to eat with Sarah. Turns out John and Cameron have had some quality time together at home without her -- Cameron's even learned to make him pancakes!

Sarah tells John she shouldn't be in the clinic, she should be at home tracking down leads. He thinks it is necessary for her to get better, to learn to sleep again. She's useless to them as she is. John and Cameron leave. Sarah notices the tattoo on the neck of the janitor -- a coyote like in her dream.

At night she dreams again: this time, she's in the back of a van. Music blares. The van stops and the back door opens. It's Ed Winston, the man she killed in the Desert Heat & Air factory.

"I killed you" she tells him.
"And I killed you. One of us is gonna have to step it up," he retorts.

Winston chomps on sunflower seeds and talks to Sarah. He tortures her, grabbing her healing leg (where he shot her). "So who do you work for?" he asks her. He thinks her "boyfriend" was responsible for blowing up their factory. He injects her with some sort of liquid, as she...

Wakes. Her Nurse wants to show her something. She brings Sarah into their observation room -- her electrode transmit records of her sleep cycle and night terrors to the computers. One piece of good news? She doesn't have a brain tumor.

Nurse finds Dana's secret cigarette butt in their room, asks Sarah if she knew about it. Sarah denies it.

Sarah finds a dream catcher hanging above Dana's bed. Dana enters, tells her she got it from Hector, the janitor. Dana inquires as to her nightmares -- Sarah's always revolve around running away from something, of course. Dana confesses her's involve her burning alive. "They say if you die in your dreams you die in real life."

"Do the bad guys ever catch you?" Dana asks Sarah. And Sarah's back...

In the van with Winston. She wakes from the serum. He's been checking out the wounds on her body -- including her c-section scar. But she wants to talk about his company, about Kaliba. He asks why anyone would want to blow up their own factory?

"To hide what you were building."
"And what's that?"
"The end."

She talks to him about his wife, Diana. But it only angers him. He smashes her against the wall, handcuffs her, but they fight.

Back in the sleep clinic, Sarah watches the Nurse leave her room after giving Dana an injection. She checks out sleeping Dana's body -- she's got a suspicious mark on her shoulder.

Sarah trails the Nurse all the way downstairs. Methodically, the Nurse enters a special code to get into a locked room and almost catches Sarah. Sarah hides, but is she on to something now? Is the Nurse really a machine?

In the morning, the Nurse confronts Sarah -- "Your electrodes came off last night. Did you take them off?" Sarah pretends not to remember

Cameron and John wait for Sarah in the waiting area. She asks him about dreams. "What's it like to dream?" Sarah enters and John follows her outside. She confesses that she thinks something strange is going on in the clinic. He knows she's still having nightmares of Ed Winston, the man she killed in the factory. Reluctantly, she tells John about the dreams. "He isn't real. He can't hurt you anymore."

Sarah's back in the van with Winston. He asks what his wife looked like at his funeral. He tells her about the worst part of his job -- killing. Killing his neighbor was hard but he had to do it because he took care of the overseas books. "So your bosses are foreign?" She's on to something.

"They fixed me up. After you shot me." He's surprised to learn that he was her first kill. Sarah tells him she can help him and his wife disappear. But he doesn't think they can escape his bosses... She knows how and offers up a plan for him. He thinks on it, missing his old life. Winston uncuffs Sarah, lets her out of the van...

As she makes her escape on foot, she finds the place locked. Winston surprises her from behind. It was all an act.

Sarah wakes to an alarm. Fire in her room! Dana's burning alive and her nightmare's becoming a reality!

Sarah talks to John on the phone as Cameron struts by in very little clothing. "Remember when I told you something strange was going on?" She tells him about Dana but now she really wants to stay and figure out what exactly is going on.

Nurse addresses the other patients and employees and tells them that Dana is in critical condition but she is alive. Sarah tells the Nurse that she's decided to stay, even though they're given the option to leave. Nurse tells her that she's probably riled up from the incident and offers her some "sleeping" pills. She watches Sarah take them and exits. But Sarah knows better and she spits them out.

Sarah returns to her room to find Hector, the janitor, cleaning up. She's been meaning to thank him for the dream catcher. They talk about Dana. "She should have taken charge of what was going on inside her head." Sarah asks about the coyote tattoo on his neck. "Does it have mystical significance?" "No."

Back in the van, Winston asks her for a story. It's his way of torturing her. "You told me a story one time in the warehouse. About your son." It sets him on to her...

She was taken in by his story! He realizes this is because she has a son (he saw her scar.) He is what she's protecting.

Back in the clinic at night, Sarah pretends to sleep as the Nurse leaves her room. She's now got a scar just like the one Dana had. She flashes back to the van, picking back up with Winston about her son.

"So your son is your accomplice." He knows she'd die to protect him and that's exactly why he needs to be found. "You won't get anywhere near him. He's not alone." But even when Winston thinks he'll come to her because she asks him to, Sarah believes John now knows better.

"I won't call him, I'll die first," she tells Winston.
"You'd like that, but it's never that easy." He retorts.

John wakes her up in the clinic bed. She's called him. She shows him where the Nurse gave her a shot. John wants to take her out of there, but Sarah knows they have to do something.

Nurse leaves the secret, lock-protected room. John and Sarah look on. "Think you can hack the combination?" Of course he can. They enter to find a room with monitors, computers. On all of them -- a scan of the brain...

"Some kind of scanning program," John realizes immediately. They're mapping brains and keeping files of them all. John looks up Sarah's patient number. There's a ton of information on her -- they've been keeping track of everything.

"It's a Skynet experiment, John. They're stealing everything." Sarah believes. She wants him to delete it all. "Sleep is the perfect cover." He's not sold, but he deletes it all anyways.

Nurse Hobson is told there's a problem in the secret room. "Thank you for explaining." Uh-oh.

Sarah and John hear the Nurse punching the code to the padlocked room. He hides. Nurse finds Sarah, "This is a restricted area, how did you get in here?" But Sarah pretends to not remember again, covers by saying she must have been sleep walking. But the Nurse doesn't believe her. The door was locked. Sarah tries to sneak off, but she can't...

Nurse Hobson talks to Sarah about human dreaming. "We don't fully understand yet why humans need to dream." Sarah's right, this IS an experiment on humans!

"You drugged me," she tells the Nurse. Nurse Hobson tells her she's experiencing sleep paralysis, she wants to move but can't, before she throws her against the wall violently. She pins her down, choking her out.

"You were talking to someone when I entered the room. Your boy. Call to him," she tells Sarah as she grasps her neck not unlike Cromartie once did. But Sarah tells her she'd die first. "I'm sure you'd like that, to die. But it's never that easy." It sounds oddly familiar.

Sarah spits out teeth that have been knocked out as the machine raises a computer over her head, ready to smash her in and put an end to Sarah Connor. But John steps out and shoots the Nurse until she's knocked down!

Sarah hovers over her with the gun, but the machine awakes, grabs the gun, and shoots John dead in the chest! He falls, dead, as Sarah looks on, before Nurse Hobson shoots her dead too! We quickly realize...

THE SLEEP CLINIC HAS ALL BEEN THE DREAM! Ed Winston, the van, the torture -- that is reality! And he isn't dead! Bound, she struggles to free herself.

Outside the van, Winston talks to his bosses on his phone. "It's her son. He helped her blow up the facility. He's the one we want." They tell him to go ahead and kill her.

But Sarah's got other plans. Ruthlessly, Sarah Connor bites out her vain to slip out of the handcuffs, blood spurting on her face. It doesn't work. So she goes to the next extreme and breaks her finger. Badass. Sarah get the handcuffs off.

Winston opens the back of the van and is surprised to find Sarah waiting for him! She jams him in the eye with his needle, sending him back, blind, as they fight to the death. He punches her but she gets free, grabbing his gun, and knocking him to the ground. Reminiscent of the fight in the Desert Heat & Air factory, Sarah does what she has to do...

Only this time, she shoots Ed Winston in the head. "You're real. You're real. You're real." And it's over. Her nightmare is over.

"Vigil"

Sarah, Derek, John, and Cameron drive through the desert to the town of Charm Acres, the company town for the workers and families of the factory Sarah discovered and Weaver destroyed. On their way they pass unknowingly by a few dead cows on the side of the road...

It's a quaint hidden town. Believing the factory was connected to Skynet, they split up to try and talk with anyone they can. Sarah finds the photo of Ed Winston, the man she killed.

John cozies up to a teenage girl, Zoe, who's father worked and died at the factory. She even had to pick out a suit for him to be buried in. Zoe and John are met by her odd friend Henry, who is immediately jealous of John.

As Derek makes his way around the vigil, he bumps into a suspicious man -- one we recognize to be Weaver's man, Walsh.

Still in front of his photo, Ed Winston's widow, Diana, introduces herself to Sarah. "So did you know my husband, Sarah?"

"Service"

As people fill in the pews, Diana tells Sarah stories of Ed. Diana reveals she's always been skeptical of the work at the factory -- what sort of security kept him traveling so often? But no one asks questions of the factory. Or of the question.

In the back of the chapel stands Walsh, who receives a call from Weaver. "Do you have him?" She's sent him to locate a man in the town. "Everyone I've spoken to believes he's dead. Died in the explosion at the factory." But being as she was responsible for the massacre, she can guarantee that he isn't. Walsh watches Zoe's mom file in.

Ellison is surprised to see everyone dressed in plaid at the ZeiraCorp offices. Murch explains that it's tradition to honor the late Lachlan Weaver on the anniversary of his death. Of course, Catherine Weaver's now oddly unaffected...

Back in the chapel, the Pastor thanks the factory's parent company, the Kaliba Group, for their generous contribution to the funeral services. But Diana Winston won't hear it. "Is this all that costs to buy us? Where's anybody from the company? Have any of you seen anybody from the company? Have anybody ever seen anybody from the company?" she rants. No, they haven't. Sarah follows her out, past Derek (who is now keeping a watchful eye on Walsh)...

Diana reveals to Sarah that she doesn't believe the factory was really for Desert Heat and Air. But she doesn't know what really went on there. No one does. Diana shows Sarah some keys she found in Ed's things, including one for a storage locker that she never knew existed. Weak, she gives Sarah the keys....

Sarah opens the storage locker and finds an odd assortment of personal belongings: furniture, blankets, lacrosse sticks, etc.

"Processional"

Derek finds Walsh with a flat tire and offers him a ride. In the truck, Derek gets at him. Walsh covers by saying he's an investigator looking into the explosion, but Derek catches sight of Walsh's police ring on his finger. "Retired." Derek wonders what he thinks about the explosion. "You know people say it wasn't an accident?" It's cat and mouse and neither reveals their hand. Suspicious, Walsh gets out of the car.

Sarah tells a surprised Diana that the storage locker was empty. She tells Sarah that she got an accidental call from Ed three days ago -- was it a recording of his gunfight with Sarah?

Meanwhile, John and Cameron ride with Zoe and an erratic Henry. Zoe clearly wants to get out of town. As she tells John about her boyfriend Mike that disappeared, we flashback to Sarah in the storage shed. Zoe tells them that Mike was a lacrosse player -- Sarah finds lacrosse sticks in the storage unit. Apparently Mike's mother worked at the factory and violated some confidentiality agreement. "They just up and left in the middle of the night." Or did they?

Always the subtle one, Cameron tells Henry that Zoe doesn't love him like he loves her. Pissed off, Henry stops the car in traffic. He wants them out. But John shoves him in back and takes over. Zoe decides to show them something really weird...

...the dead cows. It's a frequent occurrence but then they always disappear. No one knows what's killing them -- there's no bullet wounds. Odd...

"Burial"

At the funeral for Henry's father, Zoe tells John that the Kaliba Group has agreed to pay out all the families life insurance money. Everyone knows that the factory wasn't really a heating and air conditioning company; Zoe thinks it was some kind of government project. "So you think what? That somebody sabotaged the plant?" John asks. "It wasn't an accident, John," she tells him.

Derek checks in with Sarah, tells her he's been following Walsh -- he's looking for something. Since Walsh now knows Derek's tracking him, Sarah decides to take over. Derek definitely believes the factory's destruction wasn't an accident. He asks her if she's learned anything about the drone she thinks she saw? No, but Skynet's here. "I can feel it."

Sarah trails Walsh as he sneaks into an empty house.

John asks Zoe if Henry's okay. She says that they're all going through it. John understands, his father's dead, too. Zoe jokes that her father's a pile of ashes somewhere now too. John catches her in a lie -- she told him earlier she picked out a suit for her father's burial. She covers and gets away from him. Cameron notices Zoe hasn't been crying. Suspicious.

Ellison visits Weaver in her office. He's changed into a plaid tie in remembrance of Lachlan. He tells her about the recent death of her father and asks how Savannah's dealing with it. Weaver hadn't thought of that and asks her assistant to arrange for her daughter to be brought to the office.

Patient, Sarah waits before following Walsh into the empty house.

"Wake"

Derek, John, and Cameron crash Henry's father's wake. John wonders what the point of all this is. Derek may think Sarah is crazy, but she could definitely be right about the factory being linked to Skynet.

Cameron notices that Zoe hasn't looked at her father's photo even once. Nor has her mother. "If you had a photo of Kyle Reese, you'd look at it wouldn't you?" she asks Derek. But John understands -- Zoe's father isn't dead. And they know it. Derek agrees. And obviously, so does Weaver. Cameron thinks they should find him before he is dead.

In the empty house, Sarah finds a hidden staircase that leads to a room downstairs. Surveillance monitors watching the town, blueprints of the neighborhood, fresh blood on the ground. On one of the monitors:

John, digging through Zoe's parents bedroom. But he's interrupted by her. "Your father's alive, isn't he?" He wants to help her. "You can't," she tells him before pointing up to a camera hidden in the overhead vent. They too, are being watched.

Gun drawn, Sarah tracks down a long, underground corridor to another secret staircase, that leads to... a garage? She calls Derek who tells her he's at the fake wake. Sarah looks out the window... and there he is. It's Henry's parents' garage.

"Recessional"

Sarah shows Derek, John, Cameron, Zoe and her mother the surveillance room. "Skynet work camp. This is how they were setup. People working for the machines monitored by other people working for the machines," Derek informs them. Zoe's mom wants to know who they are but Sarah wants to know what was happening in the factory and what was being built. But she claims to not know and still claim her husband is dead. But John doesn't believe them and threatens to go find him on his own.

"Tell us what they were building at the plant." But they don't know. They do, however, admit that he is alive, pretending to be dead. It's safer for everyone and better for her family because they get the insurance money.

Cameron finds a clip in the archives -- Ed Winston and Zoe's father killing Mike and his parents. John finds a dried but muddy boot and thinks he knows where Zoe's father might be.

Outside the house, Diana confronts Sarah. She recognizes something's off with Sarah, but Sarah won't tell her the truth about what happened with Ed.

In her office, Weaver watches Savannah play with crayons and realizes she's crying. In her touching but robotic way, she tries to comfort Savannah with Ellison's story of his own father's death. Savannah says she misses how she used to sit on her father's lap. The T-1001 takes her on her lap: "Your lap is cold..."

Back at the spot in the desert where the cows were found dead, Sarah, John, Derek, and Cameron find a bloody, murdered body: Walsh's. "Where are we John? What is this place?" Sarah asks. But he doesn't know.

And then it happens. Surprising them all, from the bubbling water emerges... the drone/HK! Sarah did see it. And now it sees them. It flies off, leaving them all stunned, before casually returning to the back of a huge truck bed and being shut in by Zoe's father before he drives off. Uh-oh.

Hospital. IVs. And Sarah Connor. Flashes of earlier -- the three-dots on her basement wall, Eileen aka Alan Park, her brutal gun fight in the warehouse. And a familiar voice: John's father, Kyle Reese. A deputy questions Sarah's nurse but she has no information about her patient.

Bullet still in her leg, Sarah yanks off her IV and crawls out of bed. In pain and barely capable of moving, she looks up to find the image of Kyle and his familiar, "come with me if you want to live."

Outside her room, the deputy hears a noise and enters to a see a shattered window. Sarah surprises him and chokes him out. She grabs his gun and escapes down the hall, the image of Kyle guiding her. Kyle convinces Sarah to call Derek for help.

Derek's on his way out of Jesse's hotel room to meet John and Riley at the hospital. He explains that Riley tried to kill herself and hospitals are dangerous for fugitives. Jesse asks how Riley is. "Alive."

At the hospital John explains to Derek that the paramedics got to the house before she lost too much blood. Derek questions John's decision to bring her to a hospital -- full of social workers, cops, etc. "I made the call. Live with it," John retorts. He then explains to the doctor that they can't call her foster family because he believes something bad may be happening.

Hobbling outside the desert hospital, Sarah explains to Derek about the warehouse where they're building something made out of coltan. Sarah asks Derek to destroy all the evidence of her -- burn the Jeep and everything else.

Derek tells John that Sarah's been shot. John wants to go to her immediately, but Derek tells him to stay. He'll go. "You made your call, this is what living with it means."

The image of Kyle comforts Sarah in the parking lot. There Sarah surprises a young, female doctor with a gun to her back. "You a doctor? I'm a patient." Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Pained, Sarah hobbles into a motel room with the doctor, Felicia. There, again, sits the image of Kyle Reese. He tells Sarah to ease up on the doctor. Sarah tells the doctor that she has a bullet in her leg and she needs it out. She can't go to the hospital. The doctor tries to examine her, but can't do so with the gun in her face. Sarah eases up. "Who hurt you?" Felicia sees all of the marks and scars on Sarah's body and takes it to mean she's been abused. Felicia is empathetic, she understands.

Deputy and another Officer go through Sarah's bloodied Jeep where they've found the recording of Eileen retracing her steps at the hypnotherapist. The Officer gets a call.

At the hospital, they see the damages in Sarah's room and quickly figure out she's "accustomed to her circumstances." They quickly learn that Sarah's taken Dr. Felicia Burnett hostage. The Deputy seems to know her. They set off on the trail...

Back in the motel room, Felicia tries to get the bullet out as best she can considering the circumstances.

John visits Riley in her room. Cameron follows behind. Riley apologizes for her idiotic behavior. They leave her to rest, Cameron still suspicious.

Sarah, still guided by the image of the late Kyle Reese, awakes and screams out "Reese!" Felicia wasn't able to get the bullet out, not in the motel room. Sarah thinks she's lying but Felicia's proven otherwise -- she had her opportunity to give her up and didn't. The bullet's dug in over Sarah's artery -- if Felicia hits it Sarah will bleed out. They need to get somewhere she can look at it. "I know what it is to be afraid," she tells Sarah.

James Ellison visits John Henry in his basement room. John Henry teaches him about toy Bionicles and their range of motion. Furthermore, he's accessed the internet to find out more about his body, using the name "James Ellison" in his search.

Stunned, Ellison confronts Weaver about John Henry's access to the internet. She felt it would be a good idea for his development if he is able to find answers for his questions. But Ellison has his concerns...

The Deputy and the Officer find the motel room abandoned. Meanwhile, Sarah and Felicia try to break into the desert hospital by putting Sarah under a sheet on the gurney.

Cameron waits with John at Riley's hospital. "What would future me do?" John asks Cameron. "Future you has more important things to do" than worry about Riley, Cameron responds. Meanwhile, Riley has her own surprise visitor -- Jesse. Time to go.

Felicia sneaks Sarah into the desert hospital's basement morgue. Her legs getting worse. When Felicia goes to get supplies for the surgery, Sarah calls Derek again to check in. He's cleaning up and looking for the warehouse. He also tells Sarah that John's girlfriend is turning into a problem. "Been a problem," she retorts. Kyle by her side, Sarah confesses to Derek that she has a serious problem with her leg. "Don't worry about John," Derek tells her.

Catherine Weaver visits John Henry in the basement room. John Henry reveals that he knows she's not human. "You're made of metal. Not the same metal as I am, but metal." "Have you shared this with anybody?" she wonders. He hasn't and he shouldn't.

John Henry tells Weaver that he knows he is made of coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Curiously, he has also discovered that Weaver and ZeiraCorp have been buying up coltan reserves all over the world. During the "coltan" internet search, John Henry stumbled upon an audio recording discussing "sixteen tons of coltan" from the Desert Heat and Air company warehouse (after Sarah's gunfight). Weaver's curiosity is piqued. When he asks Weaver what she was doing she tells him that "everything I do, I do for you."

Felicia operates on Sarah's wound with an arthroscope. Unfortunately, this means she needs to put Sarah under and take her gun. With Kyle by her side, she does.

John and Cameron talk to Riley's doctor and learn that she's missing. They're searching for her. John wants to find her, but Cameron stops him. They don't need to find her.

In her hotel room, Jesse lectures Riley but learns that it was all an act. There was a girl in high school that killed herself that John regretted he couldn't save. It was all for his benefit. Riley wants to stay with Jesse, but Jesse will only let her an hour.

At the factory in the warehouse, employees are packing everything up and are surprised by Weaver and her liquid metal blades. She struts through the entire factory, slicing each employee, one by one! Last but not least, an EXPLOSION. And from the fire and the flames emerge the liquid metal T-1001 in her white dress. Catherine Weaver.

Both the Deputy and Officer listen to Eileen's murder on the recording device. They immediately realize that the sound of the ammunition isn't from Sarah's gun but is the same type of gun that put a bullet in her. Outside, an explosion. They run out to find Sarah's exploded Jeep! Distracted, Derek takes his chance inside and burns the file and takes the Deputy's laptop.

Felicia's able to remove the bullet from Sarah's leg while Sarah dreams of Kyle Reese and a post-apocalyptic, burnt tree. In her fantasy Kyle tells her that him and Derek used to visit the tree. He digs up a box which contains her photo, the polaroid John gives him in the future. He kisses her one last time, her one true love...

Sarah wakes when Derek shows up. But Felicia thinks he's been abusing her and holds him at gunpoint. But Derek pulls his weapon out too as the Deputy shows up. Felicia tells the Deputy to go away, but he won't listen. It quickly becomes clear that this is the man that was abusing her. Felicia shoots and kills the Deputy which surprises even herself. Derek grabs Sarah to hit the road... Sarah tells Felicia to let the police believe that she's done this...

"Sarah, was anything you said the truth?" Felicia asks.
"I got shot."

On the road, Derek drives Sarah out of the desert. She decides she finally wants to explain to Derek about John and Kyle but he doesn't need an explanation. In the distance they spot something -- a huge cloud of fuming smoke coming from where the warehouse once stood....

Sarah drives down a long sprawling desert road, her mind wandering...

...to the long-ago past. It's waitress Sarah-- unaffected. This is Sarah before John, before machines and the apocalypse. But she catches a glimpse of something -- a machine? -- in the mirror.

Back in reality, Sarah wanders through a UFO convention and to an "Experiencers" meeting. Sarah tells the hypnotherapist, Barbara Morris, that she's joined them because there have been reports of people seeing UFOs in the shape of the three-dots. Sarah confesses that she's been having nightmares about it. "Are they nightmares or are they memories?"

Sarah lurks around a Demonstrator exhibiting photos of potential California drones. He tells Sarah that some witnesses have reported seeing the three-dots on the haul of the spaceship. It's all in the blogs of "Abraham," an anonymous writer working on a secret project with a hyper alloy (similar to coltan) until he disappeared recently.

But someone has information on Abraham -- a convention goer, Eileen. And so Sarah follows her...

John is finally redoing his previously juvenile bedroom. Sarah calls and tells him not to wait up for her. Riley shows up cheerily and with smoothies. She confesses that she flipped out at her foster mom earlier. When Cameron enters and is surprised (and disappointed?) to find Riley, John sends her away, asking the machine to go out and get more paint...

Meanwhile, Riley flashes back to her past in the future. She's savage, a mess, a lonely tunnel rat struggling to survive. Nearby, a group of resistance soldiers hover... amongst them, Jesse. Comfortingly, she approaches Riley.

Eileen brings Sarah to a trailer in the middle of the desert; it's Eileen's. She shows Sarah surveillance photos -- all of drone sightings. Turns out, Abraham's real name is Alan Park and he's a scientist that specialized in Light Detection and Ranging -- an optical remote sensing technology used for robots. Eileen's kept track of sightings of both drones and Abraham. Sarah plans to start with the most recent sighting of Abraham.

City street. Time bubble. Jesse and Riley, naked, vulnerable, scoot through the rain. We follow a montage of clips flashing back to their arrival. Riley first stepping foot in the hotel room, her first shower, touching everything...

As Riley helps John scrape off the old wallpaper, he spots a bruise on her face. "Who did that to you?" But she takes off.

"The answer's still no. I can't do what you're asking," Ellison tells Weaver. They're back in The Turk's room, the familiar face of John Henry staring back at them. Weaver believes that Ellison is needed to teach John Henry right from wrong.

Sarah and Eileen reconvene at Abraham's last known location -- a local diner. Sarah's search for her reality reminds her of her past -- this time, not the innocent waitress, but the rugged Pescadero mental patient. No fate. At the diner Sarah discovers something very surprising about Eileen -- she's not exactly who she says she is. She's Abraham. Eileen is actually Alan Park.

Back at Eileen's trailer, she tells Sarah about her past as Alan Park. Her story is all true -- but her life was in danger and she needed to hide, so she took on the life of Eileen. She used to work for an anonymous company to develop this progressive technology, but she knew nothing about the company -- not even where the office was. When she started blogging to find out if anyone knew anything about this sort of technology, strange, threatening things started happening to her...

Sarah wants proof. Eileen has a piece of the technology, the metal. "Where is it?" In a storage facility. And they're off.

Before leaving, Riley checks her bruise in the mirror in John's bathroom. She flashes back to:

Jesse and her in the car. She's still uncomfortable with her mission and wonders why Jesse picked her. But Jesse tells her the time for this conversation has passed as we realize they're outside John Connor's high school. Months ago. And out Riley goes, right past an unknowing, still innocent John, before he killed Sarkissian and Cameron went bad...

Riley tries to leave the Connor house but is surprised by Cameron. "What happened to your face?" Riley avoids it but it's clear Cameron knows she's lying. Cameron grabs her wrist under the guise of looking at her star tattoo. "I'm thinking of getting one," she tells Riley scarily before John appears. Cameron tells them she's thinking of getting a tattoo of a tiger or wolf before she tells John that "we need to talk."

Distraught, Ellison goes to his Pastor for guidance. He confesses that his relationship with his ex-wife Lila broke up when she terminated her pregnancy after September 11th. "Does this have something to do with the child?"

Eileen and Sarah search through her storage unit but everything is gone. As they exit, Sarah and Eileen are shot at by a man in cowboy boots waiting for them on a motorcycle. Sarah fires back but the motorcycle gets away...

Back in the trailer, Sarah wants the truth. Eileen claims she's told her everything. Even the name on her checks led to a shell company -- she's tried everything she knows to find out about who she was working for. Eileen explains that a blacked out van picked her up every morning and drove her to the office/facility. She never really knew where she was. Sarah thinks she knows how to help her remember -- Barbara, the hypnotherapist from the convention.

Riley flashes back again, this time to:

Jesse's hotel room. Much more recent than her other's. Riley confesses she screwed up and had nowhere else to turn. She got kicked out of her foster home because she hit her foster mom. She needs someone to talk to who understands what's coming. She needs Jesse.

Coldly, Jesse slaps her (hence the bruise). "I'm not your friend. I'm not your mother. And you are here to keep John Connor away from her. Go finish your job."

Cameron tells John that Riley's lying, but she's not sure what. John tells Cameron to stay away from her.

John tries to talk to Riley through the bathroom door but doesn't get a response. When he instructs Cameron to open it, they find Riley inside, on the floor, bleeding from a self-inflicted cut in her wrist. A suicide attempt, but is she dead?

Ellison plays chess with John Henry and talks about mortality and the value of human life. "Am I God's child? John Henry asks, a new era dawning for James Ellison....

Sarah and Eileen interrupt Dr. Morris with their hypnotherapy emergency in the middle of a group session. Sarah secretly bugs Eileen before her memory-recall session (and listens and records it outside in the car).

Eileen visually describes the memory of her old life. She delves into the daily routine and what the daily drive felt like. Everyday, the same thing, ending at a factory at the end of a dirt road. And then.. they're interrupted: Motorcycle boots. Sarah hears it all --- bang, bang, bang -- gunshots. She bolts in, but is not in time; they're both dead and he's gone.

Sarah follows Eileen's instructions anyways. She reenacts the daily journey, eventually leading her to the factory at the end of the dirt road. Channeling her inner warrior, Sarah enters, gun in hand...

Inside, an office. Only a non-threatening, bald office worker. But that doesn't matter to her; Sarah wants answers. And now. "Where's the metal?" He's only an employee - Ed Winston of Desert Heat and Air -- and he has no idea what she's talking about. She finds his employee ID and his kid's baseball mitt; his story checks out.

"What in the warehouse?" But he doesn't know because he claims his boss rents it out to another company. And just as Sarah lets her guard down ever so slightly, Winston steps out from behind the desk and pulls a gun on her. MOTORCYCLE BOOTS.

He shoots her, landing a bullet in Sarah's leg. But she fights back, wrestling him on top of her. With him in reach, she does what's necessary and shoots him at point blank rage through the chest. He falls. Has Sarah Connor killed her first man?

Sarah crawls towards the door, both her warrior, Pescadero-self, and her old waitress-self, guiding her...

And then outside, just out the door, she sees it: three bright dots in the sky, coming towards her, blinding her. Slowly, methodically. It's three-dots forming a haul, just like in Eileen's pictures. Just like in Sarah's dreams. But what is it? Could it really be an alien drone? Or possibly one of Skynet's H/K's? Is it even real?

With the light of the machine blinding her, Sarah's eyes close, giving into the pain...

...as we FADE TO WHITE.

See you in February, friends...

Valentine's Day card

Derek and Sarah have split up -- she's "hunting" a machine, he's looking for them. He finds them in an abandoned garage: Anne Fields, pregnant and bullet ridden, and her teenage daughter, Lauren. We flash to the future:

Where people have died in an underground bunker. Gas mask pulled over his face, Derek finds families -- mothers, children -- all apocalyptic survivors, now gone. It's heartbreaking.

Back in the present, Lauren turns her gun on Derek. "Sarah Connor sent me," he confirms. "I'm here to help." She relents. Anne struggles for both her life and that of her still unborn child. Lauren informs him that the Terminator has been tracking them for six months, ever since they met Sarah Connor. We flash back:

Six months earlier. Anne, David, and Lauren Fields are startled to find a gun-toting Sarah Connor and Cameron in their cabin. "I'm here to help" Sarah insists. "I need to get you out of here now, someone is coming." John calls, distracting Sarah momentarily, as Lauren surprises her with a gun.

"Who are you? What are you doing here? David asks.

Sarah explains it all -- the apocalypse, Skynet, cyborgs, the bloody list on her basement wall. "I have a target list. Your name is on it. A machine is coming to kill you..." Cameron defuses the situation by taking back the Fields's gun. Sarah and Cameron pile them into their van and drive off...

...before crashing into a pickup truck, driven by none other than the machine after them. Cameron fights it off as Sarah runs them back to their cabin. Sarah glances back ever so slightly before leaving Cameron for safety.

Back in the present, Derek's got Anne hooked up to an IV. Lauren explains that they were on the road, outside a motel, when the machine found them. As David tried to stop it, Lauren and Anne escaped for their lives, unsure of his fate. "She told us to call if it came back." She being Sarah. In the future:

Sick and bedridden Derek is injected with something... by Lauren Fields. Clearly there's more to this family than meets the eye...

The former, familiar nuclear power plant has become Serrano Point Resistance Base -- 2027. Derek confers with General Perry about a mission. Skynet hit Eagle Rock Bunker with a bioweapon that killed everyone inside -- save for one survivor. And she must be rescued. Derek volunteers, knowing full and well that this is a suicide mission...

"He's not out there, you know. Your brother Kyle," General Perry reminds Derek. "Now either you learn to live with that or you die from it." As Derek marches off on his destiny, we're back with him:

In the present. Lauren watches over Anne, asleep. Derek inquires as to how the machine found them. Lauren tells him she called a friend -- Roger. "So you broke the rules?" Six months earlier...

Sarah helps the Fields back into their cabin. Anne takes care of David and his newly sprained ankle. "What the hell was that?" A Terminator. Sarah informs them that they're stuck where they are -- the only road out is blocked. "No one gets left behind." Sarah goes on, "I need to know which one of you that thing is after." She lists possible connections to the usual things -- computers, technology, etc. But no, no connection. "It's a mistake, we're normal people," Anne insists.

But Sarah's determined to be proactive anyways. She searches the shed for flashlights and wires -- she plans to set a trap (electricity connected to the front door handle). When Lauren meets her in the shed, Sarah deduces that something's up. And she's right -- Lauren tells Sarah that her father has a secret.

Sarah accuses David of working with a cybernetics company. He reluctantly tells her that the tech company is one of his clients. "It's just business. Banking." Eventually, David admits that his business with the company isn't exactly legal. As the Fields family fight, Sarah spots something in the distance out the window.

Inside the nearly destroyed Eagle Rock Bunker in 2027, Derek investigates. Weapon in hand, gas mask attached to his face, it's the same scene we saw earlier -- motionless bodies, apocalyptic survivors now dead by a Skynet bio-weapon. He calls out but can't find any survivors. Only bodies. He panics, barely able to contain himself. It's a Derek we haven't seen before. He stares at his gun -- a standoff -- could he really be contemplating ending it all? No Kyle, no hope, no reason to live. But he's interrupted...

"Excuse me?" Jesse. "Your fly's open." And thanks to her perfect timing, Derek and Jesse meet for the first time.

Anne awakens to Derek in the present. He's trying to re-stitch her up. She wonders why he let Lauren go outside on her own with the machine on the loose. "Your kid will be fine," he insists. But "she hasn't been a kid for months," Anne tells him. Derek admits that he knows she is protecting Anne -- it certainly wasn't Lauren that called Roger and incited the machine again. We flash back to:

Sarah smashing up the the Fields' cabin wall. She's wiring up the door handle for the trap while David and Anne fight over his legal business adventures. She exits and Sarah follows her...

Anne's tries the phone but hangs up when she sees Sarah. After spotting a wedding photo on their nightstand, Anne confesses that their family isn't as perfect as they first came across. Lauren spots someone outside and calls out: it's not Cameron or the machine, it's Roger... from the next property over. But what's he doing there? "He's coming to see me, okay?" Anne admits, and we fall back into the present...

Yes, Anne called Roger, not Lauren. But he's dead now. And probably David too. She knows that Lauren matters, as does her unborn baby.

We pick back up with the standoff between Derek and Jesse in the future. Weapons drawn, she asks if he sent the signal -- he didn't. But the signal confirms that someone is still alive inside the bunker, and together they must find her. Jesse tells Derek where she heard the signal -- her station, a nuclear submarine captained by a reprogrammed Terminator. "You got metal running a sub," Derek barely hides is disgust. "Well you find me a sub commander who survived J-Day and I'll switch him in," she retorts. Hardly the machine-loathing Jesse we know now...

Gas mask against their faces, Derek and Jesse head back in the bunker and find more dead people, bodies piled everywhere. Then, a knock at a door. Behind it...?

In the present, Anne is screaming in pain. She apologizes to Lauren, as we flash back:

Six months earlier. David confronts Anne about her affair with Roger, their fight broken up by Sarah Connor -- she means business. As Roger tries to talk them out of listening to Sarah, Cameron comes flying through the window! With the Fields' barking dog going crazy, they know it's coming...

Gun in hand, David goes to confront it -- after all, he's the one it wants. But through the machine's T-vision we soon realize that he is not the one it wants... he is not the machine's target. There's not time and Sarah needs to know who's lying to her -- what doesn't she know. Quickly she learns that Anne's pregnant, but David doesn't know. Sarah temporarily stashes Lauren in a closet in attempt to sneak Anne out of the house and get her to Roger's car.

With Derek, Anne's pain is worsening. "What is this about?" Lauren asks. "It's about your mother and your baby sister, they need you right now," he tells her. But with the mention of a baby sister, Lauren's suspicions are confirmed -- Derek, too, is from the future. "Your sister's name is Sydney and I knew her."

And behind that door in the devastated wasteland that is Eagle Rock Bunker -- Sydney Fields, the lone survivor of Skynet's bio-weapon. "Those gas masks, they won't help. You're already infected," she informs Derek and Jesse.

Derek, Jesse, and Sydney wait for nightfall to make their escape. Jesse hopes that when they get to Serrano Point they can cure the infection. She gives Sydney some food, prompting Derek to surprise -- "You guys are growing food again" Yes they are.

With Jesse's health deteriorating, Derek knows they can't wait for nightfall. He makes the brash decision to leave now. Sydney confirms his suspicions that Jesse doesn't have much time, she's got the symptoms. We return to:

Present day. Anne is even worse for the wear. As Derek tells Anne the importance of her daughter, Sydney, Anne convulses, and we flash back even further to:

Lauren in the closet. Six months earlier still. Surprised by Roger, Cameron knocks him to the ground unconscious and heads out with Lauren. Meanwhile, Sarah and Anne run from the machine and meet up with David, Lauren, and Cameron and hop in David's car. As they drive off, the machine chases behind them...

Anne is fully dilated -- the baby can't wait. Lauren is forced to deliver her own sister while Derek keeps Anne calm. After little baby Sydney's birth, Anne's consciousness fades and she closes her eyes one last time.

In the future, Derek and Sydney carry a fading Jesse through Serrano Point. They've made it back, but at what price? Derek, too, is infected. General Perry sends Derek and Jesse to isolation, where they're placed in comfortable beds to deal with the infection. "You're ready for it." Jesse ponders. But Derek's not. He's not ready to die, despite nearly giving it all up before she found him earlier. Now he has her. Once again we see Derek injected with something -- it's a virus to rid them of infection. As she injects him with it, Lauren smiles. "Thank you for saving my sister."

With Anne gone, Derek gives Lauren the hard truth -- this isn't going to be easy. "I've been where you are."

"Does it ever end?" Lauren wonders.
"I don't know. We're trying."

Derek invites Lauren (and the baby) to stay with them. Lauren rocks the baby -- a woman with a sudden new mission. A new life. No, it isn't likely she'll be staying with the Connors anytime soon.

Six months earlier, a temporarily safe Lauren questions Sarah Connor while her parents work things out. "I don't know if they get it." Lauren squeezes in next to them, a family reborn, if only for now...

In the present, Derek gets back in contact with Sarah on the phone. She's sure she's stopped the machine; he's secured the baby -- she's fine. When he returns to Lauren, Derek realizes she's taken off, leaving the body of her mother behind.

It's New Years Eve 1921, in a busy speakeasy in Los Angeles. Suddenly a fire breaks out -- commotion all around. People struggle to get to the exits, as we...

Land in the present. Late night at the Connor house where John searches the internet for more information on the three-dots. He tells Sarah that he's found hundreds of companies with three-dots in the logo but none of them sound like they'd bring the end of the world. "Keep looking," she tells him.

"Tomorrow." John's headed to sleep. Sarah hands off the laundry to Cameron: "You never sleep."

Somewhere on a college campus, Cameron buzzes at a door. A wheelchair-bound grad student greets her -- she's brought him doughnuts. "You never forget." As she enters, it's clear these two know each other well.

In the library, the grad student, Eric, questions Cameron about the most recent in her life like a friend who's familiar with her "normal" world. He asks about her trip to Mexico, John's girlfriend, the Connor house robbery. Clearly, he's attracted to her. Cameron notices he's not eating his doughnuts and asks if he has any books on artillery. After all she's a computer, an ever-growing database of information.

While Eric gets the book for her, Cameron glances at the old photos on the mantle. One catches her eye -- an old black and white of a man on a street, looking upwards. She knows him. "Not unless you're about, oh, a hundred and ten years old." He tells her the photo's from the famous New Years Eve speakeasy fire in 1921, as she imagines:

1921. Outside the speakeasy, firefighters douse the building with water. Bodies accumulated on the street, a woman cries on the curb, and the man from the photo paces through the smoke and ash methodically and glances up. He is a machine. In 1921. "I need to know what happened to him," Cameron insists.

John's awoken by his ringing cell phone. It's Riley. "John can you come get me?" she pleads desperately. He seems annoyed, but reluctantly agrees to go pick her up.

Back at the campus library Eric shows Cameron slides of periodicals from the time of the fire. We learn that Eric is in the wheelchair after suffering from bone cancer, but he's now in remission. Still, he's cold. On a slide they find a surprising photo of the Terminator, Myron Stark, with silent film star Rudolph Valentino outside the premiere of his film, The Sheik! We flash to:

The Sheik premiere -- the red carpet. Stark (the Terminator) compliments Valentino on his film. Back in the library, Cameron points out that Stark is actually looking at someone other than Valentino in the photo -- Rupert Chandler, the caption tells us.

Cameron wants to search the city and county records for more information on Stark, but Eric warns her that they are in the basement and it's locked up (she can't be allowed in right now). She heads down there anyways...

John enters a house party looking for Riley. He stumbles into the kitchen where he meets the home's host, Mike, a jerk from John's old high school. Riley shows up and is surprisingly alright and ready to party. But John is annoyed, after all she sounded like she was in trouble. Reluctantly, he agrees to stay.

An annoyed Eric finds Cameron in the basement going through the records. He's angry that he let's her in after hours whenever she wants and now she's broken his trust. He really needs this job but she insists that she really needs the information from the files. As he stumbles to return everything to its place, he falls out of his wheelchair. Eric rejects Cameron's offer of help.

Back upstairs, Cameron apologizes to Eric, insisting that she's sorry because they're friends and she doesn't have a lot of friends. Cameron couldn't have found any record of Myron Stark from before the fire. Eric suggests that maybe he was an immigrant pursuing the American dream. Either that or he robbed banks.... as Cameron imagines:

1921. Myron Stark exits a bank, Tommy gun in hand, firing away...

Cameron wants to see police records: yes, he did rob banks. It was an effective strategy. Days after the heist, Stark bought land all around Los Angeles and built houses. Stark took on Rupert Chandler, one of Los Angeles's big construction moguls of the time, in business and came out ahead. Eric tells Cameron that Fred Jeffers, Chandler's main man, went missing back in 1925 and was never found.

Eric is surprised to stumble upon a gun in Cameron's stuff. He tells her that he's seen cuts on her face before. "Sometimes I get into fights." He wonders why they're going to all this trouble -- why Myron Stark is so important? "He was doing something and I need to find out what it was." To distract him, Cameron shows Eric a little fun and teaches him to fire the gun in the library.

Riley plays video games with Mike and some others at the party. She hands it off to John who is clearly not invested in it. John decides to leave -- "this was a mistake" -- and Riley tells him she's coming with him. But when Mike claims Riley stole his lighter, he starts pushing on her, inciting a fight. John takes him down, punching his face in before she pulls him off and they leave.

Cameron and Eric watch a news report from 1985 -- a witness found the long-missing car of Fred Jeffers off a cliff on Mulholland Drive. Cameron imagines Stark confronting Jeffers in his car, throwing him over the edge...

Eric reads that Jeffers's death was the start of a bad time for Rupert Chandler, that continued with the death of his only son that New Years Eve in the fire... as Cameron imagines:

1921. Again, the street outside the speakeasy, post-fire. Chandler's boy, indeed, dead on the sidewalk. There must be a connection.

John drives Riley to a secluded spot on Mulholland and parks the car. John confronts Riley about her hot and cold behavior (pretending to be in trouble, flirting with Mike, etc), and she responds that she was just trying to get his attention like any teenage girl. He questions her why she even likes him, the loner weirdo... In their heart to heart, John reveals a lot about himself and his family -- that Sarah was in a mental institution, that she was once engaged and that his wife died when he helped tried to help them. John doesn't think he should be around people, it's dangerous...

At the library, Cameron interrupts Eric in the bathroom. She believes Stark killed Rupert Chandler's son.

Cameron carries Eric up the stairs and into the film vault to check out a documentary with an interview with a flapper who was at the speakeasy during the fire. Watching Ruby Demarco's interview, Cameron quickly realizes the speakeasy fire was actually an accident...

...electricity from a time bubble! Stark's time bubble! As he grabs clothes, Stark exits again into the ashy street and looks up.

Cameron exits the library and looks up at the sky. She's figured out what he was looking at -- the placement of the stars as it relates to the date. Stark was calculating what year he had wrongly traveled to! "Myron Stark was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Back in the library, Cameron reads Chandler's kid's eulogy, where he talks of his dream to build Pico Tower. With his death, he plans on planting a memorial garden and leaving the property undeveloped. "That can't be right," Eric insists, "there is a Pico Tower in downtown LA." Someone built it anyways. Cameron imagines:

Stark offering Chandler money for the Pico Tower property on the red carpet of The Sheik premiere. "That land's not for sale." But Myron Stark bought it anyways. And designed the Tower. "It's about the building." Eric figures out that Stark disappeared two weeks before the property opened.

Cameron wonders what's happened at Pico Tower since it opened. Anything important on any New Years Eve? "Not that I can see," Eric responds. He tells her they had to close and retrofit after the last earthquake. He's not sure when they're reopening.

Cameron breaks into the Pico Tower which she discovers is reopening on New Years Eve 2010 with an event with the Governor! She checks out the place, imagining the grand reopening and the assassination of the Governor!

Cameron checks the walls and discovers STARK! Powered down with his Tommy Gun, Cameron accidentally awakens him, fighting him throughout the building and down the elevator shaft before pulling the chord so that the elevator demolishes him...

Back in the library, Eric discovers that Cameron has returned with bruises. She announces that she's come back to tell him that his cancer is back. He didn't eat his doughnuts, he's lost weight, and he had trouble pulling the trigger on the gun. She's actually been examining him throughout the night. Eric erupts at her. "No wonder you don't have any friends."

"You have no idea what it's like to have something inside of you that's damaged," he tells her. But she does and replies that "it's like a bomb waiting to go off..." Eric sends her away.

Night has given way to morning as John slips back in to the house, hoping to remain undetected. Cameron approaches, laundry in hand and questions him: "Where were you all night?" She wipes lipstick off his collar and knows immediately that he was with Riley. But he doesn't know about her secret night out...

The next night. Cameron buzzes the library door but Eric doesn't answer. It's a female grad student. "Is Eric here? He works the night shift. He lets me in." But the female grad student doesn't know who Eric is. Cameron offers her doughnuts, and as the female grad student let's her in, we know a new possible adventure awaits Cameron...

After all, she's a machine. She never sleeps.

James Ellison is digging up a grave -- Cromartie's grave. As he brushes the dirt off the machine's face, his eyes open... it's all been a dream. Or has it?

He hears the exact same digging noise coming from his backyard. Upon investigation, he finds Cameron! "Go back to bed," she exclaims. Clearly, she didn't believe him.

Downtown Los Angeles. Sarah and Derek leave the truck with the valet out front a nice restaurant. In the same building, they sneak into the offices of DAKARA SYSTEMS -- a tech company who's logo is the three-dot symbol. They grab the hard drives out of the company's computers and bring them home to...

John. But there isn't much on the hard drives. He does uncover that Dakara Systems has a design for an AI, but lacks the appropriate server to run it.

Derek believes Sarah's chasing shadows, but Sarah insists that there's something to the three-dots. Were the three bloody fingerprints on the wall the same symbol she's been dreaming about or just that -- bloody fingerprints on a wall? Derek reiterates that Dakara's design isn't The Turk. Sarah's barking up the wrong tree...

Meanwhile, Cameron returns home with the news that Cromartie's body isn't buried in Ellison's yard.

In the morning, Sarah wakes to find John slaving away at the computer. He's been up all night looking at Dakara's hard drives and found that the company is looking for startup money. Investors. And he's put together a cover story and pulled research for her. John recognizes that it's a small program right now, but "so was Cyberdyne once." And Andy Goode's Turk.

Jesse hops out of the shower to find her surveillance photos of the Connors spread out on her bed. And a pissed off Derek. "You've got thirty seconds. Go." Jesse tells him that she was sent back to find him. Derek's angry she lied to him, but she's equally as angry that he didn't tell her that he was living with them: Sarah, John, Cameron.

Jesse reveals that she's come back to stop Cameron -- in the future John's making questionable decisions and getting people killed. Cameron has taken over; he only listens to her. "Imagine if he spends the next twenty years with her." Jesse has come back to save John Connor.

Police have taken over ZeiraCorp. Ellison talks to the Lead Detective and learns that there's been a death in the building. The heat wave blew a transformer over the weekend and someone got trapped in the elevator and overheated to death. But who?

"His name is Dr. Boyd Sherman," Weaver reveals. She informs Ellison that Sherman's been consulting on the project in the basement: Babylon. She's open and honest with him, explaining that Babylon is an artificial intelligence. Over the weekend the AI borrowed power for itself from the ZeiraCorp building, effectively shutting down the rest of the place and trapping Sherman in the basement lab. Weaver's AI has access to the building's power in order to help it grow... but what were it's intentions? That is what they must find out.

Dressed up and undercover, Sarah and Cameron meet Alex Agagi and his son, Xander, at Dakara Systems. Alex explains that Xander is the mastermind behind the technology -- dubbed "Emma." The Air Force is interested in this technology.

While Cameron and Xander talk, Alex tells Sarah that he'd do anything for his son. "Tell me what you need," Sarah asks. But they need more than Sarah has.

John goes to visit Riley at her foster home where he meets her foster parents. Upstairs in her room, John tries to open up to her about his life, his destiny. "Back in Mexico, I promised to explain everything. The truth." But John goes on, "But the truth is, there's nothing I can explain. Nothing I can say." Riley is understanding, but John freaks out and leaves anyways...

Back at the Connor house, Sarah and Cameron go through the evidence: an AI, the three dots, an the United States Air Force. It must add up to something. But Cameron insists that it isn't the Turk -- Xander doesn't play Chess, he prefers the game Go. Sarah knows this could still be a piece of the puzzle like Barbara Chamberlin's street lights program, but Cameron reminds her that Dakara has no money so they'll miss the Air Force's deadline. "They'll find the money, everything they need," Sarah knows. Because Judgement Day happens.

Riley browses shirts at a clothing store. Then, from behind her: "Cute top. You wanted to talk?" It's Jesse.

Jesse pulls Riley into one of the store's dressing rooms. There's a clear familiarity between these two, frequent touching, almost sisterly. Riley informs Jesse that John almost opened up to her today but then... nothing. John left. Jesse encourages her to get closer to him, to be his rock. "I don't think I can do this anymore," Riley confesses to Jesse. Jesse recognizes that Riley may have developed real feelings for John now but reminds her there's no way out, nowhere to go. "You can do this. You have to do this."

John and Derek unload the truck. Derek tells John even he has been seeing the three dots everywhere now. Because it's easy to think you're seeing things if you are looking for them. John defends Sarah, but Derek isn't talk about her.

Derek knows how crazy their whole purpose to stop Skynet can make them. He wants to make sure John's head is in the game. That he's seeing clearly, that he remembers. "I remember. I always remember," John insists. Does he?

Sarah joins Alex for coffee and talk about parenting, music, and Dakara. He brings up the chess tournament that the Air Force sponsored -- Andy Goode's chess tournament. The winning team -- the Japanese -- developed a tiny microchip and now want to license it to Dakara. But he needs a deposit. Half a million dollars. "It's the future," says Alex.

Murch shows Ellison around the basement workroom that holds the Babylon AI -- otherwise known as the Turk. Ellison quickly learns that the AI broke the rules when taking power away from the building, a first. He asks about the computer's feelings for Dr. Sherman, but Murch doesn't think it's even possible that the AI knew it was killing Sherman when it stole the building's power.

Cameron doesn't think they have enough money to buy the Japanese chip for Dakara. "What would be enough?" Sarah wonders. Everything. The Connors' entire stash of diamonds and cash.

Sarah and Cameron join Alex, Xander, and the Japanese representative, Minamoto, for dinner and the big exchange. Sarah pays him out in cash and receives the chip.

Riley comes home to find her foster siblings arguing. When they try to get her involved, she flips. Riley blows up at them all, screaming that "it's all gonna burn and you're gonna be nothing but bleached skulls." It's a heavy moment. Riley then shoves her Foster Mom across the room before running off...

With his father, Sarah and Cameron in tow, Xander tests the Japanese chip and quickly learns that it's useless. Cameron confirms that the chip is an older design that is disguised to appear more advanced. They've all been had.

Alex tells Sarah that he'll make it right. He'll pay her back. But Sarah says she'll talk to Minamoto. She doesn't care that he's a Yakuza gangster. She's not afraid. Sarah gets a text message that her targets been acquired and exits...

Ellison reports to Weaver that Murch couldn't guess as to the AI's intent. "Why did you ask him?" she retorts. "Ask the Babylon AI. Ask John Henry." The AI's name, compliments of Dr. Sherman himself.

And so they do. Murch explains that John Henry communicates through images and binary code but has voice recognition. It's able to identify Ellison and Sherman and recognize what happened to Sherman -- as the computer sees it, Sherman went offline.

Weaver and Ellison learn that John Henry attempted to call the paramedics for help, but not until after Sherman's death. John Henry doesn't not understand death or feelings. "You taught it procedures, you taught it rules, but it's got no ethics, no morals," Ellison recognizes. "Someone killed the man and it wasn't John Henry."

Before he leaves Weaver asks him what he would teach it? "You want to teach it commands? Start with the first ten."

Sarah, Derek, and Cameron force their way into a crappy apartment and interrupt Minamoto's poker game. Sarah kicks him to the ground at gunpoint and demands answers. Shades of crazy reminiscent of her stint in the nut house, Sarah gets Minamoto to admit that he isn't real -- he's just an actor hired by Alex.

Sarah expresses that they all need to deeper. Everything adds up. "Listen to yourself," Derek says. "Whatever you've needed it to be, that's what it is." He knows she's been played. But she's not done yet.

Sarah surprises Alex at Dakara Systems. She attacks him, beating him half to death, tossing him across the room, threatening him for answers. Alex admits that he's a con artist, but his son doesn't know. "The three-dots?" she asks. "It's just a logo, you crazy bitch," he screams before Sarah hits him again and drags him out of the room.

Sarah holds a bloody Alex in front of Xander (held by Cameron) and threatens him to admit the truth. He does and Sarah gets her money back before leaving...

Jesse returns to her room at the hotel to find Derek waiting. "John Connor's my nephew," he admits to her, knowing very well that very few other people know that. Derek's very clear -- he plans to stop Skynet. He wants to know everything and tells her that now is her time to come clean about everything. But she doesn't. She doesn't mention Riley.

Exhausted, Sarah returns home to John.

Then, Riley shows up at the Connor house. "I reject your rejection," she announces charmingly. And as they head off, she recomposes herself, and we see a hint of the truth and pain in her eyes...

Sarah faces off with the bathroom mirror. Upon close inspection, blood on her face. In the shape of three dots. It isn't over, not by a long shot. Sarah smashes the mirror in anger, closer to crazy than we've seen her since Pescadero...

Weaver's been thinking about what Ellison said. He's right about John Henry. As she brings him down to the basement, Weaver tells Ellison the tale of John Henry, one he's familiar with. "John Henry defeated the machine, but he couldn't stop progress." She brings him down to the basement workroom...

...to meet the new and improved John Henry: Cromartie! Or rather, his body.

With the look of horror and history in James Ellison's eyes, John Henry casts a glance up at him.

"Hello, Mr. Ellison. My name is John Henry. How are you today?"

We're back in the Mexican desert, at Cromartie's grave to be specific. Sarah looks in. Cameron waters three cacti which grow rapidly. What? As the cacti turn to metal and wrap around John, Sarah WAKES UP.

In the car. On the way back from Mexico. She's going to be sick. Outside the car, Sarah throws up. Before getting back in the car, Sarah sees a baby turtle on it's back -- she flips it over and it sets it out of the road.

Back in bed at the Connor house, Sarah's worse for the wear. Sarah tells John they have to go back to Mexico to retrieve Cromartie's body and burn it, but he knows she's in no shape to go anywhere.

Derek gets an emergency call from Jesse: "I need to see you. Now. Bring a gun." He goes to meet her at a shipping container facility. There, Jesse tells him about a man she spotted at the mall this morning -- Charles Fischer -- but Derek doesn't know who he is. "You know him. Charles Fischer, sent back from the future and he works for the machines." Jesse has him bound up. She plans to kill him.

Cameron and John drive back to Mexico together to retrieve Cromartie's body. She tells John that she is "feeling what it's like to get away from it all," but he insists that she doesn't have feelings. "I'm not sure you understand how we work." She goes on to tell him that she has sensation and that she can feel... but is this just more of her leading him on? Pulling him away from Riley?

Jesse tells Derek about Fischer. She explains that in the future, he is a Grey -- human traitors that work for Skynet and teach the machines to act more human. But the man bound up denies that he is Fischer and has no clue what she's talking about. He claims to be Paul Stewart, but Derek isn't sure what to believe...

Derek checks the man's ID. His license confirms his name is Paul Stewart and he tells them he works on watches. "What are you doing here, Fischer?" Jesse asks before she slaps him. She wants to know why Skynet sent him back but the man continues to deny that he is Fischer. Derek interrogates him as he pleads for his life.

Outside the shipping container, Derek talks with Jesse. He doesn't remember anyone called Fischer, but Jesse reminds him that Fischer was the worst of the Greys, the one they never caught. "You really don't remember?" Derek thinks that if this man really is who Jesse says he is, they better find out why Skynet sent him back. He wants to hear the man admit everything. Jesse has a plan to prove it.

Sarah's eyes open in bed to a strange sound on babies crying on a baby monitor. She follows the noise through the house, leading her into a room -- full of baby cradles. Clearly she's dreaming. Each cradle is full of three turtles (setup in the same shape as the cacti in her dream earlier). Sarah turns around to find Cameron nursing a turtle. Cameron hands the baby turtle off to Cromartie, a manifestation of Sarah's worst nightmare...

...as Sarah wakes with her gun drawn, alarms blaring, facing off with her own reflection. Sarah contemplates the set of three's -- the cacti, the turtles, drawing the triangular design on paper. What does it mean? What does it represent?

Cameron and John dig up Cromartie's body, but only find his boot. With his chip destroyed, someone came and beat them to Cromartie. "There's only one other person who knew about this," John confirms.

Derek frees the bound-up man's hands and offers him a burger. He takes time to interrogate the man without Jesse. While sitting with him, Derek spots a tattoo on the man's arm -- a clock with no hands. "So what'd they get you for? It's prison ink." The man denies that he ever went to jail, but Derek doesn't believe him. He knows the tattoo means 'till the end of time -- life sentence. Derek ties the prisoner's hands back up.

John and Cameron drive back from Mexico. Derek checks in with Cameron and sends her a picture of the man tied up; she doesn't recognize him.

Sarah stops by to visit Dr. Sherman, the therapist from the bloody list on the wall. He remembers her, but reminds her that she came to him a month ago for help and he hasn't heard from her since. She tells him she has an emergency, but he suggests she make an appointment. Sarah bombards him with the news of her nightmares and sleep walking. "Where are you walking to?" He invites her in to talk...

John and Cameron stake out Ellison's house. In the car, Cameron asks John about the turtle and why Sarah flipped it over in Mexico. "She was helping it." But why? John explains to her that when people see something or someone that's in pain or trouble, you try and help them. "Empathy?" Cameron asks. She knows that not everyone would turn the turtle over... but she also explains to John that it wasn't a threat and they (the machines) weren't built to be cruel.

As Ellison arrives home, Cameron and John break in. She pins him against the sofa, asking about Cromartie's body. Ellison is as surprised as they are -- "What could I possibly want it for?" Cameron believes he's lying. She throws him around the house, but he continues to deny that he knows anything. John tells Cameron to let him go, but when she does she flips him over like the turtle. Before he leaves, John finds the polaroid of his mother, younger, made famous by Kyle Reese. He takes it with him...

Jesse returns to the shipping container with another person, bag in a head. "I brought proof." It's a Charles Fischer, present-day and younger, with a matching mole! Jesse binds him up too. Young Charlie Fischer tells Jesse that he doesn't know why he's there, he's just a technician. But the other man still denies that he is Charles Fischer from the future...

Jesse and Derek reconvene outside the container. Derek reiterates that they need to find out what he's doing here. They can't just kill him. Quite a long way from the guy that shot and killed Andy Goode without hesitation... perhaps his time here is getting to him? Jesse agrees that he's been sent by Skynet for a reason. She encourages Derek to beat him down until he talks. But Derek's got another idea; he grabs a pair of pliers and begins plucking off the finger nails of the younger Charlie Fischer, one-by-one...

..."Stop it, stop it, stop it. My name is Charles Fischer." Jesse was right. Derek inquires as to why he's here. Charles Fischer tells him he wasn't sent back on a mission. This is his reward from Skynet -- when the bombs dropped he was locked up in prison and survived. After Judgement Day he was given a choice -- teach them everything he learned inside prison or be killed. "What'd you learn?" "I learned what makes people tick."

Dr. Sherman asks Sarah what she was doing in Mexico. She claims it was a family vacation, but he clearly knows something traumatic happened since last she saw them. He believes that dreams tend to mirror the central conflict in reality and correctly deduces that the central conflict in her life is her relationship with John. He needs her to be honest --- honest about the three dots in her life. Sherman believes that the three dots in her dreams represent her, John, and Cameron...

Older Charles Fischer and younger Charlie Fischer speak privately. It's an odd meeting where the younger Charlie Fischer encourages him to tell them everything he knows.

Jesse still believes Charles Fischer is playing with them, making them believe that he's weak. She insists they need to kill him. "What did he do, what did he do to you?" Jesse explains that prisoners were taken to a place where he tortured them in front of an audience of machines -- teaching them how to get to them. "How long did it go on?" Weeks, months, she insists. We see Fischer torturing Jesse, breaking her down, all in front of this audience of machines.

"How'd you get out?" Derek asks her. "I don't know. You never told me." AH! Turns out it wasn't actually Jesse Fischer used as the example, but Derek.

Derek beats up Fischer. "You remember, you remember now." Fischer mocks him. But Derek doesn't remember, Jesse does and that's good enough for him. As Derek sets to kill Young Fischer to stop any of it from happening, Jesse takes out the older one instead.

John returns home to find Sarah resting on the couch. She asks him if he recognizes the three-dot symbol, but it doesn't mean anything to him. She explains that she keeps seeing it in her dreams. John tells her that Cromartie's body is gone and that Ellison doesn't have it. "Cromartie was in my dreams. It's connected, it's all connected," Sarah insists. Sarah feels guilty for leading Cromartie to John; she tells him about the boy in the bowling alley and how she made a mistake by letting him go. "We are not murderers," John believes. But Sarah knows the boy is dead anyways...

After burying Fischer's body, Derek and Jesse wonders about young Fischer. Even she knows that he's not the monster that the older Fischer became. "Do you remember any of it?" she asks. But he doesn't. Nothing. It's strange to Jesse because Derek was obsessed with finding him, ending him. "It's a trauma, you've blocked it," Jesse believes. But Derek's not sure. Maybe the future's changed slightly, things he's done in the present may have effected the future...

"Do you think there's a version of the future where we're not together?" Jesse asks. "No."

As young Charlie Fischer heads to work the next day, he's scans himself in and is greeted by the FBI. In an interrogation room, he's told that he broke into the building late at night two nights ago, but he denies it. There was an unauthorized access to the computer networking system, but he knows nothing about it. "Fischer" installed a backdoor program into the system that the Feds can't uninstall. And as we know that it wasn't this Fischer, we realize that the older one's secured his own fate... in prison.

Ellison meets Weaver outside a warehouse. He pops open his trunk and presents her with Cromartie's body. "We need to learn how they work. How to find them. How to stop them." It's up to them.

Back in Sarah's dream, she climbs down a ladder into an underground tunnel. She turns and curiously finds herself at Dr. Sherman's door. He's waiting for her. "What am I doing here?" But he doesn't know. And even in her dream she knows she should get back to work...

FLASHLIGHT. Sarah, awake, illuminates the bloody list on her basement wall. And there it is. Next to "Greenway," Sherman," and all the others -- three bloody fingerprints in the shape of the three-dot symbol. But what can it mean?

Sarah's Story
Sarah builds something while John walks Riley out. Sarah expresses her concern over his relationship with Riley, but as per usual, doesn't get through to him. Meanwhile, Cameron tells Sarah she'll talk to John.

Sarah's finished constructing the safe. Cameron leaves to restock the ammunition supply. She tells Sarah that John won't be seeing Riley anymore -- John's not stupid. Sarah doesn't like the way he responds to Cameron, but she got what she wanted.

Cameron drives off and Sarah looks up to find -- Cromartie! Right smack in front of her. He tosses her across the room, pulls her upstairs to John's room. He kicks down the door and they both realize John's not there! Where did he go?

Cameron's Story
We're back earlier as John walks Riley out -- only this time we see that Cameron's watching them from the porch above.

Surprisingly, Cameron sheds some clothes before entering John's room, clearly aware of John's weakness for her. Jumping in bed with him, Cameron and John talk about Riley. She reiterates that he brings danger into Riley's life, but also that she understands that being John Connor can be lonely. It's an intimate moment, one where she gets him to agree that it isn't a good idea for him to see Riley anymore...

Cameron tells Sarah that John won't be seeing Riley anymore and exits. Cameron finds the lock open on the storage unit with the ammunition. Inside? Derek. It's his drop point. When Derek's phone rings, Cameron glances the number and calls it from her own phone; someone speaking Spanish answers. Derek tells her that it's an alarm code from John, he's in trouble.

John's Story
We're back with John and Cameron in bed. He agrees with her that it isn't a good idea for him to see Riley anymore and Cameron exits. "Yeah right." John was only playing along with Cameron to get her off his back -- he didn't actually mean it! He grabs a bag, calls Riley, and sneaks out of the house...

John and Riley are en route to Mexico, a town that he lived in when he was a kid. In Dejalo, they wander through the village amidst the people dressed up for Dia De Los Muertos -- the Mexican Day of the Dead. Inside their hotel suite, Riley presses John for details on his childhood but he squirms out of the conversation.

When they hit up a local cantina, a local man takes their photo and even recognizes John as John Connor. He blackmails him for everything he's got, but a fight breaks out when Riley tries to rescue them from the situation and they run to escape-- but the Mexican Cops grab them before they can get away! Uh-oh, no bueno.

The police question John In the Mexican station, but the Chief tells him he'll let them go if John's mother or uncle comes to pick him up. Call them. He dials Derek and leaves the emergency code. But when he dials Sarah and enters the code, he doesn't get it back -- because it's NOT SARAH! Fear flushes over his face as he realizes what's going on...

John's sent to join Riley in holding as they run his name through Interpol -- both names, actually.

After a night in the slammer, Riley gets a guard's attention and tells him that she needs to be moved -- John's crazy and has been threatening her safety. Gaining the guard's trust, she gets him to unlock the cell and John knocks him out! But bullets fly out in the police station as John and Riley run for daylight in an escape...

Sarah's Story
Tied up in the back of Cromartie's car as he drives towards Mexico, Sarah notices a photo of Cameron. "She hasn't been careful, she's made mistakes." He knows that Cameron has damage to her chip. Sarah learns that the boy she let go from the bowling alley told Cromartie where to find the Connors -- she should have killed him.

Sarah gets herself untied and manages to throw herself out of the car, but Cromartie picks her back up and shoves her in the trunk. We stay with her in the trunk as Sarah twists a soda can to cut herself free and we hear the familiar sounds of the Mexican village followed by gunshots. Sarah calls out for help and as the car takes off she accidently cuts her hand. She kicks at the backseat to call attention to herself. Finally, the trunk opens -- it's James Ellison. Followed by John, right behind him. What the...?

Ellison's Story
Out running, Ellison gets a call from an old pier at the FBI -- seems that a kid named "John Connor" popped up in the system after being arrested in Mexico. Since it was the same name as the kid in Ellison's cold case, he figured he'd want to know.

It's later and Ellison uses his old badge to talk to the Dejalo Police Chief about his prisoner John Connor. The Chief is familiar with the cold case -- Ellison's just looking for closure. The Chief exits and Ellison watches as Cromartie brutally murders everyone in the station! Ellison braces for cover before spotting John and Riley. He grabs John and tells him he's there to help him.

Outside the station Riley runs for her life. John calls out for her to jump in the (Cromartie's) car and Ellison speeds the three of them away, Cromartie in hot pursuit, firing away...

They drive away while John searches for ammunition for Cromartie's gun left in the car. When Riley feels a kick coming from the trunk, they pull over and open it up to find Sarah. Methodically, Cromartie approaches in a stolen cop car as Sarah grabs the three of them and takes off.

Sarah pulls the metal from the soda can out of her hand as she converses with Ellison. "Why you here?" John was flagged by the FBI. He came to help. He admits that Cromartie's been watching him. "And you still came to Mexico?" Sarah asks. But she led Cromartie to John this time. Though Sarah has a hard time believing that Ellison's just there to help, he reminds her that he owes her one for saving his life at Silberman's cabin.

John tells Riley that she has to go. He promises to call her and explain things when they get back to LA. Sarah gives her directions to the bus -- "get her out of here" -- and calls Derek and Cameron for help. Derek tells her that they're there already, they're at the jail...

Derek's Story
Derek and Cameron survey the aftermath of Cromartie's carnage, aware that the machine's also in Mexico. They enter the police station, searching for John. Sarah calls.

Cromartie's Story
We're back with Cromartie when he enters the Mexican jail. "I'm going to need to see John Connor" as he shoots up the place. Cops fight back, but he's too much for them. Cromartie learns that John's already gone and makes it outside just in time to see them pulling away in his car. He chases after them, firing away...

Cromartie paces through the village and spots a familiar face -- James Ellison. Our T-888 follows Ellison into a local church. "Have you come to repent?" Ellison asks Cromartie. "I'm looking for John Connor." Quickly we realize it's a trap; Sarah and Derek are perched at windows above. Ellison has indeed fulfilled his destiny and led Cromartie to the Connors - just not in the way Cromartie anticipated.

They fire at him from both directions, blowing holes into his endoskeleton frame, spread in all directions like Jesus on the cross. Cameron enters from behind and shoots into his skull, knocking him down. From Cromartie's T-Vision, the group gathers above him as John Connor delivers the final blow -- rendering this killing machine useless.

Finally, after so long, they have stopped Cromartie.

Cromartie is tossed into a pit and covered with dirt until they can return soon to destroy it. Ellison asks Sarah what's next but she has no intention of including him in their mission to stop Skynet; it's too dangerous. Ellison confesses that he wants to know his role in all this. What else is there to know?

"This is it. There's nothing else behind the curtain. This is what I do, it's all I do. You already know why I do it."

And as Ellison comes to the grim realization that they can't help him get back everything he's lost in the journey, Sarah savagely destroys Cromartie's chip. John takes Sarah into his arms, distraught like he's never seen her. Ellison walks away, briefly turning back...

Even with this small victory against Skynet, it's not over. It'll never be over. And they all know it.

James Ellison, alone at home. There's a knock on the door. "James Ellison?" Ellison stares at himself -- or rather, a robotic version of himself. As he looks the end in the eye, Terminator Ellison is destroyed by... Cromartie?

...Yes, Cromartie still believes Ellison will lead him to John Connor.

Sarah, John, and Cameron return home to find their house burglarized. They scan the place and quickly discover the robbers must have been human (they even took some of their food!). IDs, credit cards, diamonds, Cameron's leather jacket -- all gone.

Derek wakes to his cell phone. He's spent the night in Jesse's hotel room. Sarah briefs him on the robbery. Derek tells her to head downtown and that he'll call with an exact location in half an hour.

Sarah wonders why the alarm system failed, but Cameron tells her that Riley climbed out John's window. John recklessly turned off the alarm for her -- she was supposed to turn it back on. Even Kacy stops by and is surprised to find the house in shambles. As Sarah and Cameron head to meet Derek, John's left to clean up the place. Sarah calls the credit card companies to report the missing cards.

At the halfway house Cameron spent time with Jody at, the Social Worker is visited by a surprise guest -- Cromartie -- fresh on the trail from the county records. He inquires about Cameron and meets Jody, who promises to help him find her. Jody asks if he's also looking for her brother, John Baum. "John Baum?" Uh-oh.

Back at Ellison's place, the police pay him a visit -- to arrest him. He's being held for the murder of one Peter Myers. Huh?

Derek takes Sarah and Cameron to his diamond fence, Moishe. Cameron identifies some of their diamonds in Moishe's collection. They ask for a name -- he says he'll do them a favor for Jesse. The name? "Walter Ostrowski." Outside, Sarah asks Derek who Jesse is, but he lies.

Jody rides with Cromartie, trying to find out who he really is. She asks him if he's going to hurt Cameron and John. "She try to kill you too?" Yes.

John and Riley shop for groceries to replace the stolen food. Meanwhile, Cromartie and Jody enter the store too! Jody knows it's the place where Cameron was arrested. The four almost cross paths, but miss each other by seconds...

At the police station, Ellison is identified as the perp in a lineup. He's then questioned by a detective. Among the questions, the detective asks Ellison why he stole the victim's clothes? We quickly know it wasn't this James Ellison, but the Terminator...

Sarah and Cameron find Ostrowski at his office, but he runs from them. They catch up with him outside and while threatening him, realize he had nothing to do with the robbery. In fact, they were used to do Moishe's bidding!

Sarah threatens Moishe for real information and gets him to admit he bought the diamonds from Tristan Dewitt.

Impatient, Jody waits for Cromartie as he goes door to door looking for John Connor. Annoyed with her, Cromartie shoves Jody out of the car and drives off.

Derek stops by to see Jesse, who is lounging outside by the hotel pool. He fills her in on Moishe; she says she'll have a talk with him. Derek wonders how long Jesse plans on keeping this up...

Cromartie shows up at Kacy's house (next door to the Connors), but she's immediately suspicious of his strange behavior and story when he claims Cameron is his "niece." As he approaches the Connor house, she calls...

...John, who's just gotten home with Riley. Thanks to Kacy's warning, John spots Cromartie at the door. John plans his escape but Riley says she'll "get rid of him." Cromartie pushes his way past her and into the house, while John grabs the shotgun. Finally convinced, Cromartie leaves the Connor house...

Sarah and Cameron visit Tristan Dewitt's parents and learn that he's a wasted bum who works at Saturn Video on La Brea.

Ellison's visited in jail by Catherine Weaver. She deduces correctly that it was another Ellison, a robotic one, that killed the man. She tells him she'll handle it.

Riley asks John about Cromartie and the story with him, but he doesn't give her real details.

Meanwhile, Sarah and Cameron head off to find Tristan Dewitt. She tells Sarah the story of the Brothers of Nablus. The credit card company calls Sarah and tells her that their card was used at a bowling alley in Van Nuys...

...but the report pops up on Cromartie's computer as well!

The detective that questioned Ellison earlier questions the witness again. The detective confirms that James Ellison appeared from an energy bubble and we quickly realize the detective is probably not the detective, but rather the T-1001...

At the empty bowling alley, Tristan Dewitt and his thug friends are surprised by Cameron and Sarah. Sarah realizes there is an extra pair of shows and goes off in search of the last person...

Cameron shoots them all and kills them. Sarah just looks on, knowing this time that Cameron made the right strategic move. Sarah finds the last one in the bathroom and it's just a scared, teenage boy. She threatens him but leaves him alive.

The detective lets Ellison go free -- claims the judge threw out the crazy witness's statement (who claimed to see an energy bubble spit out a naked man). Outside, the detective morphs into Catherine Weaver...

Derek shows up, gun pointed, at Moishe's place. There he finds Jesse, who has killed Moishe and his men. They collect the rest of the diamonds.

Ellison sits in his car, perched outside his ex-wife's house. She spots him, pays him a visit. He tells her he misses his old life, but she doesn't understand. She invites him in for coffee with her new husband, but he passes.

Sarah and Cameron return home to find John and a cleaned house. Sarah tells him that he can't bring people there anymore, especially Riley. Cameron reinforces that she's a security risk, but John reminds Cameron that Riley isn't the one that tried to kill him. John claims that they're just jealous of Riley, but Sarah says her job is to protect him. She wishes it were different. "Then why didn't you protect me when I was killing Sarkissian?" John asks...

Ellison stops by to see Weaver in her office. He believes he's being tested. "Like Job?" she asks.

Cromartie arrives at the bowling alley to find Tristan and the rest of the dead men. Cromartie's got the teenage boy from the bathroom tied up, questioning him about Sarah and the credit cards and the Connor house...

"She said she'd kill me."
"I promise you. She won't..."

...and we know things don't look good for the boy or the Connors.

GET EPISODE 6 PODCAST
with writer Denise The and EP Josh Friedman
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)

---

Flashlights. Sarah and Cameron somewhere they're not supposed to be. Investigating. A man calls out "anyone here?" But they're gone.

Dr. Boyd Sherman. That's the man but what's his connection to Skynet? As John drives Cameron and Sarah back, we learn that Sherman's name was on the bloody list left on the wall by the dying resistance fighter.

Meanwhile, Catherine Weaver poses for a photo shoot in her office. She tries to get Savannah, her daughter, to join her in the photos, but Savannah's resistant. After Catherine scares her daughter away, she questions her assistant about her own experiences parenting. The assistant offers up the number of her family therapist...

...Dr. Boyd Sherman, whom is coincidentally meeting with the Baums: Sarah, John, and Cameron. As he talks to them and plans for individual meetings, Cameron bugs the office. Sherman and John plan for their first session tomorrow.

In the lobby at ZeiraCorp, Ellison is suspiciously restricted from an elevator with Catherine Weaver and Murch. We follow them below ground to a secret control room, The Turk's playroom! Andy Goode's once Chess-playing machine has evolved and can communicate now through images. But Murch tells Weaver that there's a problem -- the AI keeps showing unsolicited images and they don't know why or what it's trying to say.

Sherman meets with a very hesitant Savannah Weaver. When Catherine exits the room, Savannah shows Sherman what's really the matter -- she's scared of her mother.

Derek returns home to the Connor house suspiciously late. He doubled back on Sherman's house. Sarah tells him that they still need his patient files. Then, upstairs... a gunshot!

...cleaning his gun, John accidentally shot it off. Or was it an accident?

Cameron listens to Sherman's session with Savannah. Savannah tells Sherman that she "wants her old Mommy back." Outside, Catherine watches them play, not comprehending this very human interaction.

Meanwhile, John enters Sherman's office too! Sherman asks Weaver about her strongest memories from childhood. "Why do you ask?" He believes the death of Savannah's father has taken a real toll on her. "Well, we can't make her grow faster, can we?" Weaver asks. Sherman tells the T-1001 that she needs to work on her relationship with her daughter. In the waiting room, John bonds with Savannah when Weaver walks right by him, not knowing she just passed by John freaking Connor!

Derek hangs out at his normal spot in the park, watching people. Oddly, he feels someone watching him. Someone familiar? He chases the girl, following her all the way to the Alistair Grand Hotel... "Jesse?" And she kisses him. Someone familiar, indeed.

Jesse has traveled back in time -- but why? There's an obvious sexual chemistry between them. She tells Derek that Connor didn't send her back, she found a way back herself. Jesse tells Derek that there's metal everywhere now -- John has stationed them in every base -- and she doesn't trust them. Jesse came back to be with Derek: "When everything ends, I want to be with you." But he's got other plans...

John sits in with Sherman, who likens him to a war vet because he checked all the exits when he entered the room. Sherman asks about the burn on his face (from the gun shrapnel), but John lies and Sherman knows it. As Sherman talks to him, John flashes back to the attic -- Sarkissian holding Sarah and John hostage.

Cameron gives Sarah some facts on teen suicide, when Sherman pulls her aside. He tells her that he wants to see John again. He asks her if she knows of any violence in his past -- again, more flashes of fighting with Sarkissian in the attic.

The T-1001 watches old footage of an interview with the very real, very pregnant Catherine Weaver and her husband pre-plane crash. She's learning about her, absorbing her memories!

In the Turk's playroom, Murch tells her that it's still acting up -- it's showing the same series of pictures and equations over and over. He suggests maybe considering scrapping the project, but she rejects that idea.

Back in her office, she finds Savannah watching the old interview footage. T-1001 Weaver make an attempt to connect with "her" daughter... creepy...

John finds Sarah working out in the garage. He wonders when he's going back to Sherman, but she doesn't think they should. Apparently, the patient list was a bust -- the files were encoded. He pushes to go back -- after all, Sherman's name was on the list. Sarah reminds him there's no time table on the list and Sherman might not be important right now. Cameron suggests that maybe Sherman's name is on the list because he helps John. "What makes you think John needs help?" Sarah wonders. "What makes you think I don't?" he rebuffs. but then quickly pulls back.

Parked, a city bus driver sleeps at the wheel. Suddenly, a burst of blue electrical current. Uh-oh. With the precision of like a machine, a naked redheaded Terminator girl kills the driver, takes his clothes, and walks off into the distance.

Derek tells Sarah a story about a friend in the future who wanted to kill himself. Both agree John is not suicide, but also know that he is changing; watching Sarah kill Sarakissian really took a toll on him. More flashes of Sarah and John in the attic, fighting back.

Sherman's secretary enters her car. In the rearview mirror she catches a glimpse of the redhead Terminator girl, which we know means the end of her.

Ellison enters the ZeiraCorp elevator with Murch. Awkward silence, as Ellison inquires about the floor below (the Turk's playroom). "I'm going to have to ask you to get off on this floor," says Murch as he swipes his super secret key.

In her office, Weaver tells Sherman about the Turk. "I'm still a little fuzzy why you called me here." She is impressed with the way he's been helping Savannah and thinks he could be of use on the Turk. She shows him the images and equation but Sherman starts laughing -- he tells her the Turk is telling a joke!

Why is a math book so sad? Sherman tells her the AI is advanced -- it recognizes humor. It's like a gifted child that's grown bored. Because it has so many problems.

Sarah listens to Cameron's bugged session of Sherman and John, never more aware of John's pain.

Derek goes to see Jesse at the hotel. He was thinking about the time they met -- the time she saved him from killing himself! It wasn't a "friend" he was telling Sarah about, it was him. Passionately, Derek kisses her, as they fall into bed...

...but when Derek gets out of bed, Jesse shoves some photos under her bed, out of sight... photos of Derek with John freaking Connor. What the...?

Weaver shows Ellison a giant lego castle she built for Savannah. He asks her about the basement, but she just tells him there's high security for good reason -- "We're building something."

John meets with Sherman again -- this time pulling out Cameron's bug to talk in private. John tells him the basics on Sarkissian -- someone broke into their house on his birthday. Flashes to Sarkissian and John fighting. But John can't open up about the rest. Sherman tells John it's not his job to protect his parent.

As Cameron enters the office, she does so at the exact same time as the redhead machine. They exchange glances, suspicious, before the fighting begins! It's an all-out bash that throws them into an elevator, where Cameron destroys the machine completely. When Cameron pulls out it's chip, it self-destructs in her hand...

...at the Connor house, they talk about the machine. "It was there for Dr. Sherman." But to kill him or protect him? Cameron tells them about the chip -- Skynet is advancing! They clearly don't want John reprogramming machines in the future.

Sherman and Weaver talk about Savannah. She's very impressed with his work -- but he's impressed with the improvements she's made to her relationship with Savannah. She offers him a consulting job helping her team with the Turk.

John examines the destroyed Terminator, as Catherine invites Savannah on to her lap in her office. Derek and Jesse evaluate their lives -- apart -- as Cameron reads the pamphlet on suicide and examines the disintegrated chip.

And we're back in Sherman's office once more. He's with Sarah, as she flashes once more to Sarkissian in the attic. But it is John choking him, ending him, as Sarah just looks on...

No, she couldn't protect him then.

GET EPISODE 5 PODCAST
with writers Ash Miller and Zack Stentz
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)

---

On a suburban patio, a man grills. "Martin Bedell?" a Terminator asks. Oh, crap.

Derek shows John and Sarah a newspaper article on the death of Martin Bedell. He explains that a man named Martin Bedell is one of Connor's best soldiers in the future -- a trained military man who will help John put the resistance together. Skynet has obviously sent back a machine to track and kill all possible Martin Bedells (like they did with Sarah Connor originally).

John confirms that there are two other Martin Bedells currently in Los Angeles -- and in fact, figures out that one is at Presidio Alto Military Prep School. As in "P. Alto." As in, one of the names on the Connors' bloody wall.

Derek and John head out to Presidio Alto. Sarah and Cameron will go after the other Martin Bedell and try and stop the T-888 before it gets to Presidio Alto. And so John and Derek take off (in their all-new 2009 Dodge Ram!)...

Ellison looks at file on the nuclear power plant meltdown. Weaver has asked him to look into it -- find out what really happened there. She has an interest in it and believes that the meltdown was not an accident. Weaver shows Ellison a triple eight's eye that she has acquired -- and he's off to find out what really happened at Serrano Point.

At Presidio Alto, Derek remembers the war -- particularly a mission involving his brother, Kyle, and Martin Bedell. He enrolls John at the school and gets offered a job filling in for the week (after all, he is a veteran).

A kid's video game is interrupted by the doorbell. "Martin Bedell?" the same Terminator asks. Oh, crap. But Sarah grabs him and throws him off to the side as the T-888 shoots! Sarah and Marty run out of the house and jump in the jeep, driven by Sarah. The Terminator jumps on the roof. Sarah shoots him, but he's still coming...

Nelson briefs Ellison at Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant. He shows him the valve that Greenway ripped open (and Cameron later closed) and tells him that the truth clearly wasn't reported. Nelson reveals that there's a new plan for the plant to go back online -- in August 2009 -- completely automated.

At Presidio Alto, Derek finds some strange tar in the woods while John goes shooting at the gun range. After he helps a kid unjam a gun, he meets cadet captain Martin Bedell.

John and Bedell go running in the woods and stumble upon Derek. He remembers Bedell in the future and immediately recognizes him.

Sarah and Cameron hide Marty at the Connor house. She tries to find him clothes but he immediately recognizes it isn't her stuff and that she doesn't know much about acting like a mother. Marty wants to call his mom -- she was supposed to get him a book for his book report. But Cameron threatens him with the truth before Sarah makes her put him down.

With Marty asleep, Cameron tells Sarah they made a tactical error. She believes they should have not run and killed the Terminator when they had the chance. But Sarah tells Cameron that the boy is too important to risk.

Derek addresses the students. As the new TAC he is responsible for making sure they are all doing okay. But when asked about the war and if he's "got a lot of kills" by one of the students, Derek explains the the realism of the war and of death. War is no game.

Underground in the future, Bedell explains the mission to Derek, Kyle, and a scrappy band of resistance soldiers. Back in the present, he watches John and Bedell in the cafeteria at lunch. Bedell lets John in on a secret -- he met a girl and had decided to leave the military school to be with her.

Derek tells John that the T-888 is going to come from the woods -- it's the least secure place on campus. John confesses that Bedell plans on quitting school, but Derek insist he won't. It isn't written that way. "He doesn't have a choice?" John wonders. Not unlike his own life...

Marty watches his parents' desperate plea on the news. After all, they think he's missing. Sarah tries to comfort him but he's upset and is worried about his book report. Sarah offers to help. Cameron suggests The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. "It was John's favorite." Meanwhile, Sarah and Cameron make plans because the machine won't stop. She sends Cameron back to Marty's house to protect his parents.

Ellison visits the Busted Atom -- Serrano Point's bar where Sarah met up with Greenway. Ellison inquires about Greenway when he spots a picture. In the back corner of the picture, a reflection: Sarah Connor. Not exactly what he was expecting to find, but finally, some confirmation...

Derek and John begin setting the trap in the woods: a speed bump to slow it down. Derek tells John a story of Kyle's humanity, even in the future. Not unlike John Connor now.

Ellison briefs Weaver on what he found in the power plant. "So you agree it was a machine, as I thought?" she asks. "Two machines," he responds to her surprise. She wonders where they came from and why they fought, but Ellison doesn't know. He relays that he's not the only one asking questions. He tells her that Nelson wants answers, which will complicate the plant reopening. She agrees that he is not good news for either of them.

Back at the Busted Atom, Nelson drinks and meets a beautiful woman... who takes him outside the bar for a little action. In the moment, she kisses him with her GIANT LIQUID TONGUE! As she morphs into Catherine Weaver, Nelson drops dead...

Cameron tells Sarah that the FBI have moved Marty's parents. If it was her, she'd switch targets and go after the other Bedell. Sarah sends her to the military academy to wait for him to get there. Sarah calls and warns Derek that the machine is headed their way. Also, Cameron's on her way there too.

Sarah helps Marty with his book report on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Sarah apologizes to Marty, tells him this wasn't the plan. He thanks her for saving his life -- something she rarely hears in her life.

Bedell sets up an obstacle course exercise for the cadets in the woods. But Derek arrives with a new plan -- a faux exercise and way to trap and kill the machine. Back in the future, Derek sees that Kyle is trapped by the machines, his life hanging in the balance. There's only one way, one person who can save him...

Marty and Sarah read The Wizard of Oz as the cadets hover in the woods at dark. The machine arrives, and Pyle signals to the rest of the group. Derek sets up at a distance and fires his rifle at the T-888, hitting him, blinding one eye, but not knocking him down. The Terminator chases after Derek...

John sets off the detonator, knocking the machine down but not killing him. It spots Bedell, who falls within his range. Faced with Bedell's impending death, John does the only thing he can -- he diverts the machine's attention. "Hey! Look over here! It's me, Connor! John Connor!" Mission priority override.

John runs, followed by the Terminator. He lures him across a plank, when Derek shoots him again, knocking him into the tar below. Derek blows off it's face as John lights the tar and the machine burns up and right in front of Bedell...

...and behind them, hidden, is Cameron. Watching.

Sarah says goodbye to Marty and puts him on the bus home. Meanwhile, John and Derek pack up the truck. Bedell asks them what he's supposed to do now -- stay here and act like he doesn't know the end of the world is coming? It's familiar to John. "It matters. It all matters." Off Bedell, a new understanding.

On their way home, Derek tells John the truth of Bedell in the future. On a mission to save Kyle, Bedell volunteers to go in Derek's place; it's a suicide mission and they both know it. Bedell sacrifices himself for Kyle, rescues forty prisoners, including John Connor.

"He died, John. He died for you. We all die for you."

GET EPISODE 4 PODCAST
with Josh Friedman and episode writer Toni Graphia
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)

---

A dark tunnel. Or a hallway. It's hard to tell. But Cameron runs... and runs.. and runs. Lights after her, she pushes her way through a door and into the outside, post-apocalyptic world. But a giant net catches her, trapping her...

...in her mind. Cameron and John park the truck. John checks in with her, they plan to split up. Cameron goes for groceries, John to the electronics store.

Kacy flags down Sarah on her way down the driveway -- she's bleeding. Sarah quickly realizes she has to get her to the hospital.

Cameron's a bit abnormal at the grocery store, even for her. Her T-vision spits in and out and she recalls being trapped in the net -- until she just freezes. Later, a Cop checks her out, asks her name...

...which brings us back to the future. She's being interrogated -- but by whom we can't see. She refuses to give up her name and so a Terminator brands her with a bar code. Finally, she relents and screams out her name: Allison! Allison Young!

Cameron remembers this in the present. In the jail's drunk tank she meets Jody, a local street kid. Confused, Cameron introduces herself as Allison.

Kacy checks out in the hospital but is told she's going to have to stick around for a bit. Sarah stays by Kacy's side.

John looks for Cameron in the grocery store where he learns that Cameron wigged out and was taken by the Cops. Meanwhile, Cameron and Jody are let out with a warning and while given back their belongings, Jody spots Cameron's huge hunk of cash. Jody takes Cameron with her.

Absolutely the last place he wants to be, John checks for Cameron at the police station. But all he learns is that Cameron took off with Jody, who normally hangs out on the Boulevard.

Kacy tells Sarah she's having a boy. She asks Sarah what having John was like. "I was hiking in the jungle." Sarah goes on to lie and tell her that John's father was there. It's a glamorized tale, one that is interrupted by Trevor, Kacy's boyfriend...

As they bond, Sarah checks out the babies in the maternity ward. She checks in with John, who is out asking around for a girl called "Jody." He lies to her and doesn't mention that Cameron is missing.

Weaver and Ellison meet in Catherine's office. As Weaver warns him not to anthropomorphize the machines, she tells him the story of the helicopter crash that killed her late husband. "Human error," she says. Unlike humans, however, machines are neither good nor evil...

In the future, Allison is held in some sort of cell. She's given food but throws it against the wall. Back in the present, Cameron and Jody grab burgers. Cameron compliments Jody's necklace. "I got it at this awesome thrift store in Echo Park." They're then interrupted Jody's confronted by a thug. He claims she stole his stuff and he warns her by punching her in the face. He grabs Cameron and as we wait for her to defend herself, all she does is coil in defense and give him her wad of cash. Huh?

Jody takes Cameron to a halfway house. She tells Cameron that to stay there they have to have an interview with a counselor -- Jody encourages her to lie her way through it. A new bond between the girls, Jody gives Cameron her necklace as a gift.

Ellison stops by to see an old coworker at the Bureau. She's especially friendly and the two seem to have a familiar banter. He asks for her help in checking into Catherine Weaver and ZeiraCorp. He tells her that Weaver offered him a job. The Agent notices that Ellison is different -- he's not wearing his cross. She knows that the massacre really got to him. Her assistant comes in to bring her a file and we learn that she is also Agent Ellison! This is James Ellison's ex-wife, Lila. She promises to look into Weaver for him.

Allison is interrogated in the future as Cameron is questioned by the Social Worker in the present. Allison reveals that she lives in a tunnel and eats garbage. The Interrogator asks about Allison's bracelet -- she reveals that her sister gave it to her for her birthday. As Cameron spots a statue of a tiger, we learn that Allison is from Palmdale.

John is told that Jody hangs out at the halfway house on Yucca. Meanwhile, Kacy tells Sarah about Trevor.

A young woman answers the phone. It's Cameron on the other line, calling her Mom. This woman tells her that she has the wrong number -- but we quickly learn the woman's name is Claire Young and she's pregnant! "Allison: very pretty name.."

Trevor brings Kacy and Sarah food. Kacy's told she can go home tomorrow. Trevor offers to take John out to the shooting range -- turns out, Trevor's a cop! And Sarah's silent alarm goes off...

Lila Ellison tells James that Catherine Weaver checks out. Nothing in her past. But James spots something in her file -- the plane crash that killed Catherine's late husband was due to mechanical failure not human error. Lila suggests James talk to a professional, but he rebuffs her.

John finds Cameron and Jody at the halfway house. She looks oddly happy. John approaches Cameron and wants to take her home, but she doesn't recognize him. She believes she is Allison but John tells her the truth: "You're not Allison. You're not from Palmdale. You're from the future. You're a machine." John knows her chip is messed up, as we flash to...

The future. Again, Allison wanders down a long corridor. She escapes through a doorway and finds cages, a Skynet concentration camp. There are humans, captive. And animals, too. Allison runs through the cages, climbs up a ladder to a deck -- she's on a giant ship in the middle of the ocean! Spotlights blaring, a terrified Allison propels herself hundreds of feet into the ocean but is quickly swallowed up by a huge net and carried back up again...

John tries to take Cameron with him, explaining that he's her brother John Baum, but she throws him against the wall. Security escorts him out of the halfway house, leaving Cameron wondering.

Dropped back into the interrogation room, Allison glances up to meet her interrogator -- it's Cameron! Cameron tells Allison that she wants to get to know her. She knows that John Connor chose her because she's brave, and even claims to admire him and his determination. Cameron explains that the machines are going to kill her and every other human until they're extinct -- but she doesn't want that. Cameron wants them all to live in peace. We learn that Allison was chosen by the machines, as well. She demands that Allison tell her where John's camp is.

Back in the present, Cameron explains to the Social Worker that she believes she is a machine, an infiltrator in the future. She was programmed to find John Connor. "Why's he so important?" She explains that he saves mankind from extinction. The Social Worker asks what she's going to do when she finds John Connor. "I'm going to kill him and hang his head on a pike for all to see."

As John waits outside the halfway house, Cameron wants to know more about Jody and her life. She seems to be becoming more and more like her old self -- machine-like. Our worried Social Worker brings the police in to find Cameron, but both she and Jody are gone!

Trevor questions Sarah suspiciously -- he's never heard of her before and now she's suddenly Kacy's best friend. Sarah questions him back, specifically about his job. Trevor has to take off for work; he asks Sarah to stay the night with Kacy.

Catherine introduces Ellison to her daughter, Savannah! The deadly T-1001 has a daughter!? Ellison tells Weaver he read the official report on the helicopter crash and that it blamed the crash on mechanical failure. She admits that it's not what she told him. He realizes that files don't always reflect what actually happened -- "I think you saw what you saw." "Just as you saw what you saw." Ellison agrees to go to work for Weaver.

Jody and Cameron break in to a suburban home (with John following behind them). When Cameron finds earrings that match the necklace Jody gave her, we quickly realize that this is Jody's parent's house -- everything she has said has been a lie.

Cameron remembers torturing Allison in the future. Allison told Cameron where John's camp is, but Cameron knows she lied about the bracelet. Cameron drops a bunch of identical bracelets in front of her -- "We found these on your friends." It's a pass to enter the camp! Allison planned on sending Cameron to the camp without the bracelet so they would know she was a machine! "I'll never help you get to John Connor," Allison says. Cameron kills Allison and takes the bracelet.

At Jody's house, Cameron interrogates Jody threateningly. Jody says that they have to go because there's a silent alarm. Cameron knows she was going to leave her there to take the blame. Like with Allison in the future, she grabs Jody's throat. As John gets in, we see that Jody isn't dead, she's just hurt. Cameron once again recognizes John and tells him they have to go.

Kacy wakes to find Sarah. Sarah confesses to Kacy that the story of John's birth in the jungle wasn't completely true -- John's father wasn't actually there. "Why did you tell me that story?" Because Sarah wished it was the way things could have been. She implies that Kacy doesn't need Trevor -- she's capable of raising this baby on her own.

John drives Cameron. He asks her about the necklace, but she lies. "I got it at this awesome thrift store in Echo Park."

GET EPISODE 3 PODCAST
with Thomas Dekker and EP John Wirth
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)

---

MUSIC: "Safe Within Your Arms" - Greg Garing

---

Off in the distance, a truck speeds up an empty road.

On their way out of town, Charley Dixon and his wife, Michelle, fill up at a gas station in the middle of the desert. As the truck arrives, Charley heads off to buy Michelle a soda. Michelle screams as Cromartie (revealed to have been in the truck) hops in and takes off with her. Charley chases after them on foot, but can't catch up in time. And just like that, they're gone.

John helps an extremely pregnant Kacy (their new landlord and neighbor) setup cable. On the local news they see a clip of Beast Wizard 7, the low-budget film starring George Laszlo (Cromartie's now-dead alter-ego and b-movie actor).

John comes home to find Cameron calculating the center of their new house. Oddly, Cameron analyzes that the house is moving and that they'll have to repaint in a year. Yeah, she's still not quite back to normal.

Sarah unpacks groceries when John gets a call from Charley Dixon. He doesn't have Sarah's number, so he asks to speak to her. Charley tells Sarah that Cromartie has taken Michelle but Sarah plays doesn't plays coy and doesn't want John to know because he'll want to help. Sarah finds out from Charley where he is and tells him to stay put. She scolds John for giving Charley his number.

Sarah packs up weapons as Cameron "investigates" a bird stuck in the fireplace. Sarah tells her to stay with John today and to not let him out of her sight. Sarah also fills in Derek who warns her it's a ploy, a trap to get to John. Sarah knows this but is going anyways. Derek grabs the guns and jumps in the truck with her...

Chillingly, Michelle is tied up in a chair. Cromartie methodically prepares something -- a device, it seems, that involves a mousetrap. But Michelle spots her cell phone and scoots towards it...

John and Cameron load new computer equipment into the back of their truck in the store parking lot. Riley calls from the Santa Monica Promenade, bored, and wants to hang out. But Cameron won't let John go and when she's distracted, John takes off on his own.

Ellison, rugged without purpose now, watches Beast Wizard 7. He receives a call out of the blue about a job opportunity -- from Catherine Weaver! She invites him for lunch to talk about "who or what" actually killed his colleagues.

Sarah and John meet up with Charley. Derek coldly tells Charley that Cromartie doesn't care about Michelle, it just using her to get to John. Michelle is probably already dead. But Charley's phone rings -- it's Michelle; she's managed to get to her cell. Derek and Sarah want him to test her, make sure it's not Cromartie imitating her voice. He does and she passes. As best she can, she tells him where she is, and they're off...

Michelle begs for her life, but Cromartie sets his trap and tapes her mouth shut.

John and Riley hang out on the Promenade. John tells her that he's not coming back to school, he's going to be home school now. Riley spots Cameron watching them, so they try to ditch her, but she follows...

Sarah, Derek, and Charley reconvene outside the building where Michelle's being held. They enter, search the place, and find Michelle, tied up to a chair set upon mousetraps and a bomb. Sarah demands Michelle not move while Derek double checks the rest of the place. Charley tells Michelle it will be okay, but "it will never be okay," she knows.

Charley announces that Cromartie took off (and killed their car before he did). Sarah realizes that this means it was all a setup -- even the bomb's not real! Sarah immediately calls John -- he tells her he's at the promenade and lies that he's with Cameron. Derek finds a computer that is broadcasting their call... right to Cromartie, who now knows their code!

Derek then finds a beeping detonator with a wire outside that leads to a cell tower. Cromartie dials his cell phone (the detonator) and blows the tower to smithereens. The massive tower falls into the building, but luckily no one is killed. All cell phone service is down. Quickly they realize that Michelle has been hurt by the falling tower and as she stumbles off, we see a big blood stain on her back.

From the desert Cromartie calls pretending to be Sarah. He tells John to wait at the Santa Monica Pier. Cromartie drives off, coming for him. Meanwhile, John tells Riley he has to go meet his mom at the pier. She tells him she's not afraid of his mom, but he leaves anyways, frustrating her.

Sarah, Derek, Charley, and Michelle plan to trek through the desert to find a car, but Charley doesn't want to leave because Michelle's bleeding out. Michelle says she can walk, no one has to wait on her.

Ellison meets with Catherine Weaver in her office and talk about the FBI massacre. She shows Ellison photographic evidence of a endoskeleton hand involved in a plain crash a few years back and shares that she knows that it was a robot that tried to kill John Connor in Red Valley, NM in 1999. Weaver even knows that a robot was involved in the FBI massacre! She claims to be working on reverse engineering the same technology and wants to hire Ellison to find out about these robots and to even catch one for her.

Cameron surprises Riley in a parking garage. "Where's John?" But John waits for "Sarah" at the crowded Santa Monica Pier, when Cromartie arrives...

Sarah carjacks a cell phone service van and they drive off after John. Michelle struggles to stay alive with Charley's help. He demands Sarah slow down, but she keeps repeating that he should have stayed away. Finally, Sarah stops...

John spots Cromartie and takes off running. The Triple-Eight follows suit, chasing John down the pier. Cameron, too, chases behind. John trades jackets with a fisherman, confusing Cromartie, but is eventually spotted by him. Trapped with nowhere else to run, John dives off the pier and into the ocean, Cromartie firing away at him. Forgetting that he can't swim, Cromartie jumps in after. John barely gets away by skirting out of his jacket, and Cromartie sinks to the bottom of the ocean. John swims up, looks up to Cameron on the pier. "Little help?" he asks.

"I can't swim," Cameron responds. Yeah, neither could Cromartie apparently. And John's safe again. For now.

John and Cameron meet up with Sarah and Derek in an alley in Santa Monica and hop in the van. John's okay, but shaken up. Inside the van he finds some of Michelle's blood and knows not all is well.

Cromartie walks out of the ocean, obviously having followed the ocean floor up to the sand. He's coming and he'll never stop...

Outside the hospital, John comforts Charley. Has Michelle survived? No, as it turns out. Later, Charley is joined by Ellison and others at Michelle's funeral, but neither Connors are in sight. Cromartie is, however, which is exactly why...

Somber, Sarah brings dinner to the table. She sits, quietly reflective, along with John, Derek, and Cameron. No, it will never be okay.

GET EPISODE 2 PODCAST
with EP James Middleton and CoEP/Writer Natalie Chaidez
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)  

---

FLASH! A time bubble. Downtown, a man emerges from the tunnel, shot through the chest, bleeding. He finds clothes and hustles off.

Back in the storefront church. It's the morning after John's birthday and the explosion. Sarah gazes at John as he sleeps, untrusting of Cameron. Derek enters and warns them that it's only a matter of time before she goes bad again.

John questions Cameron. She tells him he can't be trusted anymore because he risked his life to save her. Even she agrees that it was the wrong decision. Sarah instructs John to go to school. It's uneventful and the normalcy will distract him.

But at school, everything seems trivial. John paces through the hallway at Campo de Cahuenga HS, everything so different now. It's all changed. And so John ditches class. Outside, he meets a girl from his English class, Riley. He tests her, makes sure she is who she says she is. Charismatic, Riley convinces him to buy her lunch.

Kacy, eight months pregnant, shows Sarah, Derek, and Cameron around a rental house. She lives next door and is helping the owner who left in a hurry. Sarah says they'll take it. With all the furniture.

James Ellison visits Michelle Dixon, Charley's wife. Michelle confesses that she found a gun in the house earlier. Surprised, Charley enters.

Sarah checks out the new place and takes a moment to herself. But there's no rest for the weary as her window is smashed in and the man from the time bubble enters, barely alive. Sarah and Derek try to revive him, while Cameron guards the perimeter. But "Stop Greenway," "Serrano Point," and "two days" is all he manages to get out before dying. Sarah believes that he must be a Resistance Fighter from the future, but Derek doesn't recognize him. Both strong-headed, Sarah and Derek debate what they're supposed to do - kill Greenway or save him?

Serrano Point Nuclear Power Plant. It's the future war and an H-K flies above the plant. Two soldiers fight to defend the plant, shooting down the H-K. Back in the present, Sarah, Derek, and Cameron case the same spot. In the future, the resistance controls this plant and uses it as one of their key sources of power.

Sarah and Cameron enter the plant, undercover, as janitors. Their new Supervisor shows them through the plant and warns them not to get "crapped up" or contaminated. Cameron identifies Carl Greenway as he passes by.

Much to her confusion, Charley tells Michelle the truth about Sarah Connor and the machines. He promises Michelle that he doesn't love Sarah but she slaps him anyways. Sarah's the least of their problems. Ellison warns the Dixons that they need to leave town immediately.

Riley opens up to John about her past. She, too, has jumped from high school to high school. John explains that his family is moving houses again but he's never seen the place. Recklessly, John invites Riley to come explore the new house with him.

In the Serrano Point control room, Greenway reviews the coolant levels before the test tomorrow. Sarah hits it off with Greenway under the guise of "Karen." She watches him down some pills and follows Greenway and his boss, Nelson, out. Outside, Nelson argues with Greenway about the importance of tomorrow's test going well.

Sarah (as "Karen") cozies up to Greenway at the Busted Atom bar while Cameron hustles some pool players to scan their Serrano Point IDs. Sarah learns that Greenway is the black sheep of the plant because he's suffering from cancer - and even has a scar on his arm to prove it. With them inside, Derek breaks into Greenway's car and is surprised when someone vandalizes the windshield. The guy really isn't popular amongst his co-workers. Turns out, Carl Greenway has a reputation for being overly cautious - and if he stops tomorrow's test because of a problem, the plant will likely shut down and the rest of the employees may lose their job. His boss is pressuring him to ignore the problem with the coolant, but if he does, the plant could melt down. Now it's even more unclear what Sarah, Derek, and Cameron are supposed to do.

John and Riley check out the house and discover his hilariously juvenile new room. Sarah returns home, surprised to meet Riley. She lectures John about safety and bringing someone home, but he blows her off. Instead, John and Riley take off for his room, a new friendship born.

It's the day of the test at Serrano Point. Suspicious, Sarah follows Nelson, the boss, right into a radioactive area! Nelson sends her into the room where Sarah gets crapped up, and is forced to get washed down. Humiliatingly, Nelson hands Sarah back her clothes, as it "turns out" she wasn't actually crapped up. Did he put her through it on purpose?

John and Riley wake up in the morning, surprised to have fallen asleep together. As she takes off for school, John decides he's not going to go. Even though he knows better, John gives Riley his number and instructs her to use the "code."

Ellison sees off Charley and an upset Michelle. Ellison hands him a Bible, while Charley asks him his own plan. "We'll see..."

With the test upon them, Greenway has changed his ways, insisting that "everything is fine." When Sarah notices the scar on his arm has gone missing, she checks in with Derek, inside Greenway's house. There he finds Greenway, hanging. Greenway in the plant has been replaced by a Terminator!

T-Greenway reeks havoc in the plant, busting open a water valve to melt down the plant. Sarah grabs Cameron for help, who is unsure what to do -- she's still glitchy from the jeep explosion! With the plant falling apart and the reactor overheating, Derek hustles to make it over.

Cameron attempts to re-close the water valve, resulting in a fight with T-Greenway, while Sarah and Derek try the manual to fix the problem from the control room. On a closed circuit monitor in the control room, Sarah spots Cameron and T-Greenway fighting, grabs a machine gun from a security officer, and heads after them...

...but to get there she must go back through the radioactive room! In a hurry, she hesitates, but eventually makes her way through it...

And then, through the haze of smoke appears Sarah Connor, machine gun blasting at T-Greenway. Cameron forces him back, causing a firey blaze, and his skin burns off and destroys his endoskeleton. Sarah holds the gun at Cameron, asking her if she's okay. Has the machine reverted again? "I'm okay," replies Cameron. No, she hasn't reverted. Not now at least.

Cameron scans Sarah again for radioactive material. Previously, Cameron told her she dies of cancer. Is this how it happens? Cameron doesn't know. Sarah wonders what she's supposed to do. Is she supposed to wait for the cancer? Just wait for the worst like a time bomb that could go off at anytime? Cameron, too, wonders the same thing about her own fate.

Inside, John warns Cameron not to creep Riley our and tells her he has nothing to prove to her or anyone else. Then, his phone rings. It's Riley, just practicing the "code." John smiles, that bit of normalcy slowly creeping into his life...

Sarah spots blood on the staircase outdoors, a trail left by the Resistance Fighter in the beginning. More on the doorway to the basement. Inside, a wall:

Names, numbers, people, places. All written in blood. A list from the future.

Sarah showers, washing away the day and the radioactive materials. With this list she's more sure of her mission but now even more unsure of her fate...

A press conference is held outside Serrano Point power plant by the CEO of Automite Systems. There he announces that machines will replace workers in the control room of the plant in order to eliminate human error. Entering his car, the CEO morphs into Catherine Weaver, the T-1001!

GET EPISODE 1 PODCAST
with Exec Producers Josh Friedman and John Wirth
(Click "Save file as" to download the mp3)

---

MUSIC: "Samson & Delilah" cover by Shirley Manson & Produced by Bear McCreary

---

Close on a damaged Cameron. From her point of view, we relive the jeep's explosion. Damaged, she struggles to pull herself out of the wreckage, removing a shard of metal from her skull. All the while, Sarkissian and his thug have trapped Sarah and John in the attic, searching for his stolen hard drive. As Cameron kills the thug, she accidentally sets the house ablaze, making it closer to Sarah and John in the attic...

...where she finds Sarkissian. He is dead. Both Sarah and John, traumatized. But who killed him? Damaged chip, Cameron locks on to John -- her programming reverts, and she's instructed to terminate him!

As the blaze nearly takes her out, Sarah throws John out the window and they're off... running, now from their one-time protector, Cameron.

In the aftermath of the FBI massacre, Cromartie leaves Agent Ellison alive, more confused than ever about the machines. Later with police and paramedics at the scene, Ellison and Charley Dixon share the silent secret of what actually happened. Ellison is called in to headquarters to give his report of the incident.

Sarah and John speed through town in a stolen van, and in a moment of distraction, she swerves into another car. Bleeding and hurt, Sarah and John take off on foot, leaving the scene of the accident. Because Cameron is coming...

Hearing the news of the fire on his walkie, Charley turns back and heads to the Connors' house. There he finds Derek Reese, dressed as a fireman to salvage the hard drive. Derek deduces that something went bad in their dealings with Sarkissian. Charley wonders what they were looking for? Andy Goode's the Turk, the chess-playing computer system that will become Skynet and blow up the world.

But the Turk's long gone. It's new owner? Meet Catherine Weaver, stunning but intense CEO of ZeiraCorp. Weaver makes plans to acquire the Turk from her henchman. She then instructs her assistant to call a meeting of her department heads.

Cameron enters a convenience store, cleans her face with baby wipes, and stuns a gawking customer when she staples her face back together. Never a dull moment with this cyborg.

At the scene of Sarah's car accident, Charley tells Derek that a witness saw a woman and teenage boy run off. Probably Sarah and John. But Cameron's also there, still hot on their trail... Meanwhile, an injured Sarah and John make plans to get off the street and find a safe place. They take solace in a small storefront church where she asks for help from the Priest.

Derek inquires as to Charley's plans and his feelings for Sarah. Sarah's one-time fiancee remains dedicated to his new wife, but Derek's skeptical.