Last night, Sarah Connor was in jail, and an FBI agent tried various tactics to get her to collaborate in the search for John. And meanwhile, our sense that Cameron was hiding something spiked up massively. And John Henry, Catherine Weaver's baby A.I., started to act a lot weirder. It all culminated when Cameron bust Sarah Connor out of prison, and took her and John to Zeira Corp. There, a confrontation about Catherine Weaver's A.I. project got cut short when Skynet attacked. Then John Henry absconded with Cameron's chip, with John and Catherine Weaver in hot pursuit.

So I really liked the scenes between Sarah Connor and the FBI agent played by Josh Malina, where he's trying to get her to cooperate. I assume the stuff where he says "I believe you" is a ruse, but I'll never be sure - and that's really intriguing. I can only hope that his character recurs in season three, and we get to see whether he really believes her, and whether Cameron's unstoppable jail-break affected his opinion.

(And a few commenters pointed out that I forgot to mention the dangling plot line that Danny Dyson, son of Miles, has been missing for a few months. Working for Skynet?)

We got to see Sarah at her absolute best: stoic, resolute and yet compassionate. She was great, talking to the priest from the season opener, about how something wants to see the world burn. Her interplay with the FBI guy and Ellison is also really sharp, and she doesn't even flinch when Catherine Weaver tries to cut her down to size with that "I wasn't talking to you" thing.

I was also really glad that John tells her he loves her. I don't think we've heard him say that before, and it made me like John a lot better. Too bad he couldn't hear her say she loved him too.

Most of last night's mysteries involved Cameron, in one way or another. Most of all, she definitely seemed to know what Ellison was talking about when he delivered the message, "Will you join us?" But she didn't want John to know. (Did Future John even know about that submarine mission?) In any case, that message changes Cameron's priorities massively, from protecting John Connor to getting to ZeiraCorp. Rescuing Sarah Connor from the prison is just a means to convince John Connor to go to ZeiraCorp. with her, since Connor can get her inside.

(That sequence where Cameron cuts herself open and gets John to inspect her insides seems like she was testing her readiness for the jail and ZeiraCorp. missions. But maybe it was something else?)

And yes, it seems almost certain that Catherine Weaver was the liquid metal Terminator on board the submarine. Was she letting Cameron know she'd changed her mind? It seemed like it.

In any case, Cameron quickly defaulted to Plan B after hearing Ellison's message. And something to do with Plan B involved cutting her own head and letting John Henry take her chip. I've rewatched the last few minutes several times, and it seems like John Henry somehow "ports" himself to Cameron's chip and installs it in his "Beastwizard" body. And leaves Cameron either erased or inside his old hardware.

But this leaves me with several questions:

• You'd need a third pair of hands to complete that operation. John Henry can't place Cameron's chip inside Beastwizard's body without disconnecting himself from it first, right? So a third person would have needed to disconnect John Henry and install the chip, and then effect the transfer. Who was this? Murch?
• Murch's song and dance, earlier in the episode, about how changing just one little fan wire "tweaked" John Henry, seems significant. If he's so tied to that collection of hardware, then what's left of John Henry now that he's been ported? Is he even still John Henry any more? Can one Terminator chip really hold that sophisticated an A.I. anyway?
• On a related note, Cameron's speech about how her body and her software are designed for only one purpose - killing humans - seems eerily significant. Now that John Henry is fully installed in a body with such deep-rooted programming, who's to say some of it won't rub off?

Also, of course, John Henry's behavior in this episode definitely seemed "tweaked." What was up with him repeating everything Catherine Weaver says, and even speaking at the same time as her one time. "We'll see." It seems spooky, and not the same old childlike John Henry. On the other hand, I loved John Henry killing the Umber Hulk and learning to cheat at Dungeons And Dragons.

Another reason why John Henry might seem a bit tweaked: in this interview a couple months ago, Garret Dillhaunt talks about how John Henry eventually meets an A.I. as strong as himself (i.e., Skynet), and he gets attacked - and how that forces him to change the way he operates and reconsider his place in the world:

So why does John Henry feel the need to run to the future anyway? Isn't he a lot safer in that basement? True, a Skynet hunter/killer did attack, but it seemed to be under control. (Maybe.)

Meanwhile, Catherine Weaver is either very sincere about joining forces with John Connor at last, or pulling a very elaborate scam.

That ending all happened very suddenly, but it seemed like John Connor is determined to get Cameron's chip back because he has feelings for her after all. (Or because she's a vital strategic asset.) Weaver wants to go chasing after John Henry because he's her baby. So with hardly any discussion, they go whizzing off to the future together, leaving a dazed Sarah Connor and Ellison behind.

It's a future where Derek Reese hasn't traveled back in time, and is therefore alive. So is Kyle Reese, who also hasn't traveled back in time. And to complete the trifecta, Alison from Palmdale, the human whose body and memories were used to create Cameron, is there as well. None of them knows who John Connor is. It seems like, by jumping forward in time, John skipped over all the stuff where he grows up, goes through Judgment Day, steps up to lead the resistance, and helps them hold their own against Skynet. None of that has happened in this timeline, because John jumped forward.

So in a way, both John Connor and John Henry are stripped of their messianic trappings by being jumped forward. John Connor is just another punk kid in a resistance bunker, surrounded by people who are important to him but who suddenly don't want to live and die for him any more. As for John Henry? Wherever he is, he's just another Terminator now, in a future landscape full of Terminators.

It's a pretty poetic ending to the season, and leaves me dying to know what happens next. As the end to the series itself, though - it's almost unthinkable. Let's hope we get another year (or five) of this show. What did you guys think?

Oh, and meanwhile, they showed this preview of Terminator Salvation, which was almost entirely old footage. But there are a few new snippets here and there:

I've been a huge fan of T:SCC since its beginnings, but last night's episode felt like a whole new level. It was the first time I really thought this show might go down in history as one of the best science fiction shows of all time. We're approaching Battlestar Galactica/The Prisoner levels of greatness. If the show gets a third season - which seems unlikely, since its ratings took a dive again, after a few weeks of positive trends - we could be looking at a whole new era of brilliance.

You know a show is doing something right when the startling twists, like a character dying or another character getting arrested in a high-profile way, aren't the thing your brain buzzes about afterwards. For me, it was the scene above: John Henry knows he's surrounded by robots. He's seen two robots fighting, and he's known for some time that Catherine Weaver is not human. He's learned to lie, and he's learning to sacrifice human life when necessary. But at the same time, the survival of the human race may depend on him. And then Weaver hits us with the really big left turn: instead of being Abel to Skynet's Cain, John Henry may actually be God. (Which would mean that Skynet is in competition with a third A.I.? And John Henry is going to judge them both? That would make sense, if this competing A.I. sent Catherine Weaver back from the future to create John Henry. And yet, the mind boggles.)

I can already see how this might turn out: John Henry is the potential savior of humanity, an A.I. with a conscience, however flawed. And now he's on John Connor's radar, which means he and his pet Terminator are going to do their level best to wipe him out. If Connor succeeds, he may be dooming humanity to the same fate he's been struggling to prevent all these years.

So yes, Derek died last night - my favorite character on the show - and it was done in a way television deaths never happen. Randomly, without fanfare, and in the middle of an episode. Just when you least expect it, in other words. It's set up, very slightly, by the scene in the graveyard where he and John talk, once again, about how everyone dies for John. (Which is also well handled, because at this point, it's a conversation Derek and John have had so often, they don't even need to go over it again.) But of course, in the end, Derek doesn't die for John. If anything, he dies for Savannah Weaver. It was a great death, but at the same time, I'm going to miss Derek if this show comes back without him.

It's interesting that Skynet sent humans to kill the Connors, but then it anted up and sent a Terminator after Savannah. Maybe because it knew that Savannah's mom was one of the high-end Terminators herself? I'm left wondering if this is Future Skynet, or Present Skynet, orchestrating this new wave of destruction. It was Present Skynet that launched the worm that attacked John Henry last week, so it's implied that Present Skynet is also behind the other mayhem. As John Henry was wondering about his "brother," I was wondering what Skynet would make of such a powerful A.I. being hooked up to a human avatar - in some ways, it seems like a major downgrade, forcing all that intelligence to interact through such a narrow-bandwidth portal.

The new and improved, smarter John Connor - the one who figured out Riley's secret - was in full effect last night, tracking down Savannah in time to save her, and then figuring out who/what John Henry was and what Cromartie's body was doing, before Sarah or Cameron did. Sarah was on the verge of walking into a major trap - even worse than the one she actually did walk into - before John realized that Zeira Corp. was creating a Skynet-esque A.I., and Catherine Weaver was at the center of all this. (Although Cameron was right - they never should have let Ellison get away with stealing Beastwizard's body. I loved her "I don't want to kill everybody. Just him.")

Speaking of Ellison, he apparently still doesn't know that Catherine Weaver is a Terminator, but he definitely has an inkling about what she's up to - or what she's apparently up to. He's become quite a slippery character, handling a suspicious cop with ease. And look at the way he played Sarah Connor - "Oh my. I was just minding my own business, and wherever I turn, there you are." Ellison is in this up to his neck, but he still manages to act like he's just passing through. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had called the cops to come get Sarah Connor - since he knows what she would do to John Henry - and then lied about it to John. For all his Bible thumping, he's a bit of a cynic, and maybe that's the point: John Henry needs a dash of realism mixed in with his ethics.

(Oh, and I loved the whole thing about Savannah's teacher thinking John Henry is a MySpace predator.)

The conversation between the cop and Catherine Weaver, about her pet eel, was pretty revealing. It seemed like the cop was trying to size up Weaver, and everything he found out about her eel applied to her too. She stays in hiding, she only attacks when provoked. (Or when someone tries to pee on her.) She's willing to kill her own kind, when necessary.

As for Sarah herself, she seemed even harder hit by the deaths of Charley and Derek than John was. She's lost weight - which could be due to stress, instead of cancer - and even now that her breast lump turned out to be a false alarm, she's still contemplating her own mortality. With Derek and Charley both out of the picture, John is running out of protectors if anything happens to Sarah - which, of course, it just did. (Of course, one of the promo stills from next week's episode shows Sarah and John entering Zeira Corp. with James Ellison, so she's not staying locked up forever.) Too late, Sarah is realizing that John's going to be left alone with Cameron - the fate Jesse tried so hard to prevent. Maybe Jesse was right after all?

Last Friday's Terminator episode, "To The Lighthouse," started off slow and moody, but then it pretty much exploded with action and, more importantly, with revelations.

Sarah Connor decides she can no longer trust either Derek or Cameron, in the wake of the Jesse/Riley fiasco. So she sends them to the wrong safehouse, while she and John go to a lighthouse that only she and her ex, Charley, know about. Meanwhile, Cameron tells Derek that Jesse had been pregnant with his child on that nuclear submarine, but she had a miscarriage. And someone (or something) has hacked John Henry, supposedly the most advanced A.I. on the planet.

I've occasionally chafed at the show's insistence on making Sarah out to be a paranoid psychopath with occasional delusions, but that strand of the story definitely paid off on Friday. In a huge way. Sarah's paranoia leads her to cut herself and John off from their strongest allies, leaving them vulnerable to attack. Sometimes paranoia isn't a good survival trait — even if they really are out to get you. At the same time, Sarah's sense of self-sacrifice leads her to avoid getting her breast lump checked out for far too long — and then it turns out not to be a lump at all, but a tracking device. I really did not see that coming at all. At that point, kick-ass Sarah returns, with the best use of a defib ever. Actually, two of the best uses.

Meanwhile, I'm definitely getting more sold on this version of John, after the most recent couple of episodes. Check out the clip above — he knows Charley is sacrificing his own life for him, and there's nothing he can do about it. All he can do is accept the life of another father figure, one more line in the long list of men who've died for him. And get the hell out of Dodge. The flashbacks of Young John and Sarah in the jungle reinforce quite how much he was learning, from early on, to think like a soldier. Oh, and I liked all the bonding between Charley and John, and Charley trying to help John deal with his grief over Riley's death.

I pretty much always love any time Cameron and Derek have to team up, so that was pretty much pure win for me. And Camron's idea of "teaching Derek a lesson" by making him confront the loss of a child he didn't even know he had. And then later, she rescues him, because he might be useful. Even though Derek doesn't trust or like the pet Terminator, I always feel like Derek and Cameron understand each other in a way that nobody understands either of them. Maybe because they're both from the future.

And then there was all the great stuff around John Henry getting hacked, and how it all plays into Ellison's religious beliefs. First all the talk about John Henry's "daemons," and then his message "Oh God Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me", and finally his "death" and resurrection. Given that John Henry is almost godlike in his abilities, it's pretty spooky.

And then there's the big reveal at the end, that there's another A.I. like John Henry, and it's searching for its "brother." And the other A.I. has ties to Miles Dyson and Cyberdyne — making it a much more likely candidate to be Skynet. Or maybe the two A.I.s, combined, turn into Skynet? In any case, this "brother" A.I. appears to be connected to the people who attack John, Sarah and Derek at the end of the episode. And since it got that tracking device into Sarah's breast, it's also linked up to the people who were running that factory, building Hunter-Killers.

It all seems to be leading up to a pretty explosive finish, and yet almost all of the pieces come out of the slow character study the show's already done on its major players. I can't wait to see how it turns out. What did you think?

So it turns out Terminator's future war against Skynet is as much a metal-versus-metal battle as a flesh-versus-metal one. And maybe that's because of the changes our heroes have made to the timeline?

In Friday's episode, John Connor figures out the truth about Jesse — but Jesse also finds out the truth about John Connor. Neither one of them likes what he/she sees, and it's almost like they're both looking into a dark mirror.

John reveals that he knew for a while that Riley was from the future, but he didn't do anything to save her, probably because he wanted to have it all: be John Connor and get to enjoy a regular relationship. And then he tells Jesse that even if her plan had worked and Cameron had killed Riley, he still wouldn't have gotten rid of his pet Terminator. She's just too useful, and John is already becoming more ruthless in the desperate fight to stop Skynet.

And then Derek tells John what he probably already knows: everybody, in that future battle, looks up to John Connor and gives their lives for John Connor. But they don't agree with everything he does, and they don't all love him or even like him. That's part of what being the leader is about, and you have to turn off parts of yourself to do it. Yes, like a machine.

Meanwhile, we see the tail end of all of the flashbacks/forwards to Jesse's submarine mission, where she realized the machines are keeping too many secrets from the humans. And she stopped trusting those machines so much. Those submarine scenes were brutal and psychotic. And it seems like that liquid metal Terminator had a mission of its own — to deliver a message to John Connor that "they" won't join him. Is this a rogue splinter group from Skynet? Could the liquid metal Terminator actually be Catherine Weaver?

And speaking of Weaver, she's already making plans to wipe out former FBI Agent Ellison, as John Henry/Beastwizard discovers. It seems like a weird way to go about things — bring in a guy to teach John Henry the value of human life, and then kill that guy callously. But maybe John Henry wasn't supposed to find out?

So at this point it's pretty obvious that all of this time travel and heroic future-hacking has led to some unpredictable outcomes. John Connor traces his dependence on machines all the way back to Terminator 2, when he bonded with the hacked T-800 and wondered afterwards why his future self didn't send another human instead of a machine. (Answer: machines are expendable.)

And all of their attempts, since then, to avert Skynet have possibly made matters worse. The more we see of Jesse's version of the future, the nastier it looks. And Derek Reese realizes it's a future that he helped to shape, by killing "Billy Wisher" aka Andy Goode, among other things. (If Derek hadn't killed Andy Goode, would John Henry still have fallen into the hands of Catherine Weaver? I can't remember how that went down.)

And yet, in a way, it seems like a pretty logical outcome that the war against Skynet would eventually become a war between machines. The machines are just so much better at wholesale destruction. You're left wondering if John Connor is even still in control, or if he's only a figurehead now. (Of course, maybe having Cameron around throughout his teenage and young-adult years will make him less keen to depend on her kind later.)

Anyway, this episode was chock full of great character bits, especially the look on Sarah's face when John said, "I'm sorry I doubted you," and she realized he was talking to the Terminator, not to her. Sarah's attempt at playing a mind game with Cameron was also terrific, and so was the conversation between Sarah and John about the little hippie town where there were kids named Sequoia and Sage and whatnot. "I was getting in fights every day." "You won those fights." "That's one way of looking at it." It's nice to feel like they really do have a history together.

And yes, John Connor was pretty badass in the episode. He definitely made some strides towards convincing me that he's going to turn into the all-important future leader of humanity and savior of the human race. I still don't entirely buy Thomas Dekker's performance — he still seems petulant when he's shooting for resolute — but it's getting way better and there's a definite progression happening now. He had a lot of heavy lifting to do this time around, and he carried it off pretty well. (Including crying on his mom's lap at the end.) The episode's MVP, of course, was Brian Austin Green. As always. If he'd had any more screen time, he'd have stolen the whole episode.

What did you guys think?

Last Friday's Terminator episode was an odd beast. It was the first half of a two-parter, dealing with flashbacks to Jesse's life in the future, on board a nuclear submarine captained by a reprogrammed Terminator. But it also felt like the second half of the "Riley gets killed" storyline. Neither story quite took flight this week, but they both show a lot of promise. Much, naturally, depends on next week's conclusion to the submarine story.

In a nutshell, the circumstantial evidence is looking bad for Cameron, Summer Glau's Terminator. She's lied about hoarding spare parts from other Terminators, which could help speed up the creation of killer robots in this timeline. She's acted shifty and mysterious about her nocturnal activities. And it's not as if she wouldn't have killed John's girlfriend Riley, in the right circumstances. Her innocence is pretty much accidental.

Meanwhile, and in a probably related development, Jesse - who actually did kill Riley - is picking bar fights with Naval officers and flashing back to her future days on a nuclear sub. Das Boot is one of my favorite movies, and I'm a sucker for claustrophobic underwater epics, so all of those scenes were pretty much pure awesome in my book. Also, the actor who's playing the Terminator sub captain could give Glau and Garret Dillahunt a run for their money. He seemed genuinely emotionless, but smooth and good at handling people.

And speaking of Dillahunt, he got a bit more to do this week. His Terminator body has been hooked up to a baby A.I. that may become Skynet, and this week he decided to play a game of Hide And Seek with Catherine Weaver's daughter, Savannah. The "let's play a game" part wasn't quite as creepy or scary as I was expecting, and the most interesting part was actually the contrasting reactions of Ellison and Catherine Weaver to the dilemma. Ellison was horrified, while Weaver was sort of amused and intrigued, since the child actually means nothing to her except part of her public cover.

I was mulling over what to say about this episode, because a lot of stuff feels like it might pay off terrifically in the coming weeks. But it's hard to evaluate on its own merits.

I guess the most interesting thing is that all three segments of the episode were about people who've become dependent, in different ways, on machines, and they're not sure how much to trust them. It's a theme of the series, in general, but it seemed especially strong in this episode. John Connor can't bear to let go of Cameron - she's his bodyguard, but also in some weird way his security blanket. Even if he did think she killed Riley, he might not be able to blow up her brain. As for John Henry, he temporarily has power because he's the only one who knows where Savannah is. But it's also clear he's becoming more powerful and indispensible in general, and the lives of Ellison and everyone else around him are just toys in his hands. The metaphor of being trapped under the waves, a few centimeters from hull breach, in the hands of a "scrubbed triple eight" is sort of self-explanatory, and brings it all together nicely.

I think the main reason why I didn't love this episode quite as much as I wanted to has to do with Thomas Dekker. I feel like a broken record, but his portrayal of John Connor has never quite clicked for me, in the midst of an amazing ensemble cast. And this time around, he really had to carry the show. We had to believe he was a guy whose girlfriend - whom he at least liked, even if he didn't love her - was brutally murdered. And all the evidence points to the robot he's become friends with. His grief, his anger, and his pain needed to lift this episode up, and I just wasn't seeing it. It's really just a matter of personal taste, I guess.

What did you think?

We've all been praying fervently for Rileys death for almost six months now, and it's finally here. And yet the show actually managed to make me care, amazingly enough. The scene in the garage/barn thingy, where Riley manages to talk Cameron out of killing her by repeating Cameron's cover story ("You're his sister") over and over was actually pretty impressive, and reminded me of the one other time Riley was awesome: the episode where Beastwizard comes to the Connor house and she faces him down.

I actually found myself wishing Riley would just come clean with John, when he asked if there was anything she had to tell him. (And it might have actually made John perversely care about her more, once he knew what she'd been through, and realized she was another link with the future.) And I was actually a little sad that Riley was dead. Okay, not really.

And the full craziness of Jesse's plan was also terrific, and made a lot more sense than the vague "seduce John away from Cameron" plan we'd been privy to before. I'm still not sure it'll work, but the psycho way Cameron was acting this episode certainly doesn't help her case when she insists she didn't kill Riley. (Plus Cameron came close to killing Riley so many times, it's not like she wouldn't have done it.)

And I liked the fact that the Killer Robot From The Future in this episode was actually Jesse, not Cameron — Cameron was framed, man. Jesse may not be a Terminator, but she's robotic and ruthless in her desire to get her own way, almost as if she's been socialized to become Terminator-esque.

Mythos stuff:

In the clip above, Jesse says something about how weird it is to be in the past, where Sarah's running around and "the metal is alive and well." Does something happen to Cameron in Jesse's future? I can't quite make out what she's saying at that point.

I thought it was interesting that Uncle Derek makes such a big point about how "his" Judgement Day is April 21, 2011, but Jesse's is probably some other date, since she came back from an alternate future. (I wonder if hers is sooner than that, and that's why she's so convinced it can't be stopped.) Every time Cameron says something about "Future John" in this episode, I can't help wondering about that. Even if Cameron is telling the strict truth, her "Future John" is not the future of this John. The present-day John, on the show, could easily know stuff that Cameron's "Future John" will never know and could never know.

Cameron's chip malfunction is getting more interesting all the time. I don't think there's anything wrong with her hand, and her twitchy acting is spot-on. The scariest thing about Terminators has always been the fact that they're so relentless and unstoppable. So it's kind of awesome that in this episode, Cameron's indecision is even scarier. "What am I going to do with you?" Turns out a Terminator that can't make up its mind is actually more alarming than a Terminator who knows what it wants — because we never quite know what Cameron will do next.

I love the fact that the show hammers home what gun nuts these people are. Uncle Derek can tell at a glance that the sights on his gun are off kilter, and John knows the intricate details of state gun laws by heart.

All in all, a pretty solid episode, and one which seems to set up some pretty interesting developments in weeks to come. It's also an arc episode, that'll mean nothing to viewers unless they've seen all the previous episodes that set up Jesse's motivation for wanting to make John less dependent on Cameron. But for those of us who've been following the show closely, it felt like a welcome payoff. What did you think?

Maybe it's the jet-lag from my New Zealand flight talking, but the latest Sarah Connor Chronicles episode left me almost totally cold. It was another crazy melodrama-fest, but this time around I just couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people. Even Summer Glau was less interesting to watch than usual. I just couldn't get myself to care about whether Zoe loves Henry.

I got what this episode was trying to do: Sarah Connor wants to get some leads on the mysterious factory where she saw the flying saucer/Skynet drone, and so she drags her posse to the funeral for all the factory workers. And along the way, she has to confront the fact that she killed one of the factory guys after he shot her, while she makes nice with the guy's widow. And meanwhile, in a neatly parallel storyline, Shirley Manson's Terminator tries to simulate human grief on the anniversary of her "husband's" death. (The husband of the woman she killed and replaced, Catherine Weaver.)

There were some really awesome moments. I really did like Sarah trying to comfort the widow of that security guard, while having flashbacks to shooting him. And I loved Sarah proudly owning the "terrorist" label. And the scene between Brian Austin Green and Shirley Manson's cleanup guy, where BAG gives the guy a lift, was terrific.

But all in all, the episode felt a bit lifeless. (Sorry if that's in poor taste for an episode about funerals.)

Here's what worries me: we've been told, over and over, that the Sarah Connor Chronicles is getting more serialized for the rest of season two. That means fewer Terminator-of-the-week episodes and more ongoing arc stuff. It sounds terrific in theory, especially for a show that has so many dangling loose ends and cool stuff waiting to happen. (And which may not get another season to play with them in.)

But arc-based storytelling only works if you feel like we're getting somewhere. Even the merest hint that the show is treading water can be deadly. This is the second episode since Sarah found that factory (in the midseason finale) and it felt a little too incremental for my liking. Sure, the episode did end with another glimpse of that Skynet drone, and we saw it going into the evil mullet guy's truck. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is actually going somewhere cool.

About that ending, though: I'm even more confused than ever. So Shirley Manson sent the bald guy to track down Zoe's dad - mullet guy - because she suspected he was still alive and was a loose end. And then mullet guy killed bald guy, right? So presumably mullet guy isn't operating on Shirley Manson's instructions when he loads the Skynet drone into his truck at the end? Is this another indication that Shirley's goals and Skynet's are no longer sympatico?

This is still one of my favorite shows, and I'm still really excited to see where it's going, especially with some of the the hints people have dropped about what's coming next. But I can't help feeling it's not a good time for the show to be having too many slow, melodramatic episodes.

Again, it could be the jetlag talking. What did you guys think?

If you missed last night's episode — if you're one of those people who calls yourself a science fiction lover but disdains this show — you missed out. We followed the same dysfunctional family, the Fields clan, through three different time frames. First, there was the present, where Sarah and Cameron rescue the Fieldses from a Terminator that's there to kill one of them. (And along the way we discover that Mr. Fields is doing illegal dealings with a cybernetics company, and Mrs. Fields is having an affair with a douchebag next door.) And then, six months from now, Mr. Fields is dead and Mrs. Fields is dying of a gunshot wound while giving birth to the douchebag's baby. And finally, in the year 2027, the baby grows up to have the crucial immunity to a deadly pathogen unleashed by the killer cyborgs.

I'm a sucker for that kind of family drama, where an outside threat suddenly stirs up all sorts of secrets. (Except for the Fields' daughter, who apparently isn't a lesbian after all, to the great disappointment of one of my friends who was watching this episode with us.) Sure enough, a certain amount of melodrama is built into the format, but I don't mind melodrama with killer robots. And it works pretty well here — you can see in the clip above, just as the drama is verging on ridiculous ("Your core is a slut!") suddenly, you get a moment of genuine pathos and nobility, when Mr. Fields volunteers to die for his family (in vain, it turns out.)

All of the regular cast members were on pretty much top form here. Sarah was once again the right kind of psycho — psycho and competent, crazy with a purpose. The way Derek refers to her — "Until Sarah Connor walks through that door, this is the safest place to be" — was just note perfect. And Derek was once again totally magnetic, remembering his first meeting with Jesse, keeping the slightly bratty Fields girl in check, and not even taking any guff from the dying pregnant lady. Cameron got a few great moments too — I love the moment where Sarah and Cameron both say "no" simultaneously to bringing the dog along. Jesse was back to being her awesome sarcastic self.

I wish I could say that my love for last night's episode had nothing to do with the absence of John Connor and his cat fancy girl. Honestly, the best I can say, though, is that I admire this show for trying lots of different stuff with its format. This week's episode was about as different from last week's as you can get. Well, actually, they were both a bit melodramatic, but this one felt more like a horror movie, and less like a teen romance. (And of course, last week's 1920s segments were unlike anything the show's ever done, or will likely ever do.) Even when this show stumbles, I appreciate the inventiveness.

The other thing that was bold about this episode was the way it tossed you in the deep end with Derek and the pregnant Mrs. Fields — and then tossed you in the deep end again, with Sarah and the Fields bunch under attack. It's not a show that seems desperate to pander to new viewers — which may be why it seems to be stuck fluctuating in the 5.2-5.9 million range.

If, as seems pretty likely, this is the last season for Sarah Connor, the Terminator franchise will still have benefited massively from all of the new ideas it's brought up. I could get smacked around for asking this, but was this the first time we've seen Skynet using biological warfare? Also, I really want to see an episode all about the reprogrammed T-888 captaining a submarine — especially if Beastwizard can play the tinny in question.

Other random stuff:

Poor Charles Barkley. I guess the Terminator got him.

Sarah got to be a role model to a young person without us having to hear about how she's a terrible mom. Yay.

I loved the whole digression about rabbits from Jesse. Nice shout-out to the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence.

I got stupidly misty when Derek said he wasn't waiting to die, he was waiting for Jesse. Awww.

What did you think?

Think about it: the best episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles have been the weird one-offs that didn't actually tie in to anything much. Like the I-married-a-Terminator episode in season one, where we get to see a woman's marriage to a deadly robot unfold through the robot's eyes. Or the military academy story and the torturer-from-the-future episode, earlier this season. Those are the episodes where you get the impression the writers sat down and thought, "We're making a show about time-traveling and robots. What are some of the crazy things we can do with that premise?"

Last night's episode wasn't quite as satisfying as either of the three I mentioned above. The 1920s plot felt a little bit slight, and didn't make much sense if you thought about it for a while. (If the Terminator just wanted to kill one guy in 2010, did it really need to make sure a particular building was built?) But it was still super fun, and all the 1920s sequences were a blast. Plus it was great to see the mystery unraveling.

And meanwhile, the whole relationship between Summer Glau's bot and the cancer-stricken librarian was pretty great. This episode was mostly great for all the extra dimensions it managed to bring to Summer's character, without humanizing her at all. She's curious about stuff, perhaps because knowledge has strategic value for its own sake. She discovers the thing about the 1920s Terminator because she's doing research on other stuff. She seems genuinely concerned about the librarian guy, maybe just because he's an asset to her. And as always, she gets a gleam in her eye when she's talking about mayhem and killing. (The scene where she tells her friend about the trip to Mexico and the break-in is pretty fantastic. Plus, the bit where she teaches him to fire a gun.)

Plus, it seems more likely that Summer is on "our" side, even if her agenda is more complicated than just protecting John. She goes out of her way to find out about Myron Stark and then dig him out, so she can deactivate him.

Really, the less said about this episode's "B" plot, the better. I honestly didn't even understand what was supposed to be happening about half the time. Riley the cat-fancy girl even admits to John that she's kind of a manipulative skank, and he just keeps on letting himself be manipulated. "We do that kind of thing to guys we like." Umm... eww?

At least they finally made out. I think I get what we're supposed to be seeing here — John senses a kindred spirit in Riley because she's as messed up as he is, coming from foster homes and bad situations, yadda yadda. Unfortunately, none of that comes across on the screen at all. I'm still mildly curious to see what Riley's secret agenda is, after last week's revelations, but I'd like to find out sooner rather than later.

As for the rest of the cast? Well, Brian Austin Green was on top form, tearing a hole in the screen with his raw charisma and then sending sparks flying into your mouth like pop rocks. Oh wait. There was no BAG. In fact, it was pretty much a week off for almost everyone, which was definitely a cause for grouchiness. The show found an ingenious solution to the whole batshit-Sarah-Connor issue, by sidelining the show's title character. It wouldn't have been bad, except that Cat Fancy rushed into the void left by all those other characters.

Other stuff that jumped out at me:

In the Terminator universe, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the governor of California! Instead it's someone named Mark Wyman. In-joke? The only Mark Wyman I can find is an astrophysicist.

Apparently video games really do lead to real-life violence.

I liked the whole sequence where John watches soul-patch boy be mean to his mom, and maybe some small piece of John's self-absorbed little heart is thinking that he should be nicer to Sarah.

Is there a website somewhere that's tracking all the Wizard Of Oz references in this show? There was another one last night.

What did you guys think?

It's a bad sign when the only women who talk sense are robots. In last night's episode, Sarah Connor continued to come unhinged, after her breakdown in the Mexican episode and her weird dreams last week. She decided three random smudges were the crucial clues to the end of the world, and went on a wild robot chase throughout a maelstrom of Japanese cliches. (Sake, yakuza, toasts, nerdboys, Go, etc.) Sarah's been a little bit loony throughout this show, but it seems to be a building theme. And this was the first time she was crazy AND wrong. Until now, she's been crazy but right about everything. The whole wild-eyed, mirror smashing thing is a lot harder to take when she's also chasing phantoms.

Meanwhile, it turned out that Jesse (BSG's Stephanie Jacobsen) really is up to something nefarious: trying to fix John Connor up with Riley the crazy girl. I would be more excited about this plotline if it didn't involve Riley saying things like, "Have you ever noticed how many mirrors there are in the world?" or "Your skull will be bleached!" Sadly, I can't help noticing that Jacbosen's acting is a lot less thrilling when she's trying to be all lesbonic with Riley than when she's acting opposite Brian Austin Green.

The show's two female robots, Summer Glau and Shirley "Garbage" Manson, were like the only voices of reason this time around. Summer tried to warn us, again and again, that Sarah Connor's crazy quest was crazy. Meanwhile, Manson actually sounded plausible as she talked about trying to teach her murderous little A.I. some morality — until we found out she'd hooked it up to the killer Terminator whom we all know as Beastwizard.

Basically, the men on the show, John Connor and Derek Reese, were just left scratching their heads the whole time while the women acted nuts or robotic. You just have to humor these chicks when they go around investing in tech start-ups or spying on your nephew.

Even the women who are robots are just going to lead the men astray. Like Shirley, who is probably trying to steer FBI Agent Ellison towards moral turpitude and the befouling of his soul, or a grunge fashion revival, or something. And Summer Glau, who we're told is going to mess up John Connor's head in the future by making him too dependent on her robotic guidance.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed last night's episode, and I'm super excited to see where this is going. Is there more to Jesse's plan than just getting John Connor laid so he'll be less of an assbag in the future? Is Ellison really going to be able to teach Baby Skynet some good-old Bible school morals? Or is hooking Baby Skynet up to Beastwizard really going to make it go berzerk faster? Does Derek really trust Jesse or is he just keeping tabs on her? Is John Connor really becoming too dependent on Summer Glau's Terminator, and how do you prevent that?

I just wanted to sound the yellow alert — part of what I loved about this show was its competent female characters, and they're not very much in evidence lately. When I interviewed series producer Josh Friedman at Comic-Con, I asked him how you build up John Connor without tearing down Sarah Connor. Friedman responded, "I don't know that you don't."

I'm down with storylines that show John Connor stepping up and becoming the unfuckwittable resistance leader. My favorite episode this season so far was the "military school" one, where John showed actual leadership. But I'm not so much down with stories where John's main act of rebellion against his mom is dating Riley the "OMG fish being eatenz" chick. And I'd like to see his mom still kicking some ass and being awesome, even as John becomes more of a future leader. I'm very intrigued by the theme of John depending on robots too much, but I think you can build up that theme and show him becoming a future leader at the same time.

The other thing that was really bugging me last night was this show's reliance on random macguffins. The chess-playing program ("The Turk") and the bloody mural that the dying future guy had time to scrawl are both feeling a bit contrived, honestly. I understand that there has to be a way to make the stop-Skynet plot last longer, but at this point we're all just waiting to see Sarah Connor face off with Shirley Manson. If Sarah hasn't become completely bug-fuck insane by then, of course.

In last night's episode, there were three main plot strands. The two minor ones: the body of the dead Terminator has gone missing and John Connor and his pet Terminator are searching for it, and Sarah Connor is having crazy dreams. And then the major one: Jesse (BSG's Stephanie Jacobsen) has found Charlie Fisher, the guy who collaborated with the machines and tortured people in the future.

The two minor plotlines were so-so — the best part about them was the business with the turtles. Sarah faces the Blade Runner test — she sees a turtle on its back — and she passes with flying colors. Summer doesn't quite understand why you'd bother, and thus she beats the crap out of former FBI Agent Ellison. Meanwhile, Sarah is having weird surreal dreams about turtles and motherhood and wearing a weird prairie dress, and she has an unhelpful session with Skynet's therapist.

But the major plotline was pure win, as you can see from that clip above. Jesse needs to prove to Derek that she's really captured a Skynet collaborator from the future, and hasn't just kidnapped some random innocent guy. So she finds the present-day Charlie Fisher, a young, callow guy who used to be Warren on Buffy. The scene where the old Charlie tells the young Charlie he has no clue who he is utterly rules.

And then the final twist opens a whole can of worms that adds whole layers to every part of the show: In Jesse's version of the future, Derek was tortured and broken down mercilessly by Charlie. But Derek doesn't remember these events, because he comes from a different version of the future. The only possible explanation: Derek has changed the future since he came back in time, but not necessarily for the better. Between the time Derek traveled back and the time Jesse came back to join him, he's changed things enough that Skynet's empire of torture has gotten big and powerful enough to ensnare Derek. Both Charlie and Jesse "remember" this same future, because they both came back more recently than Derek.

What's the change that Derek made, that led to him later being captured and tortured? Was it the nuclear power plant he inadvertantly handed over to Skynet? Or something else?

This kind of multi-layered playing with the timeline reminds me of Lost at its best, especially episodes like "The Constant." The characters are becoming rich enough, the mythology dense enough, to justify the kind of mass devotion that Lost inspires too. So why is the Terminator show still struggling with around 5.3 million viewers, below even Chuck?

Off the top of my head, a few ideas, with particular reference to last night's episode.

1) People think they know what it's about, because it's based on a movie franchise. There are plenty of mysteries, but we know how it ends: Judgment Day.

2) Not enough alpha males. Look at last night's episode: three storylines, each featuring a strong woman waving a gun. (Even the feverish Sarah brandished a gun a few times.) In all three storylines, a male character is trying to restrain or understand the woman. By contrast, Lost is chock full 'o' alpha males, who come into conflict with each other.

3) No shippers. There's nobody to ship on this show. Last night's episode didn't even include John's love interest Riley (yay), and Jesse and Derek are an established couple. (With trouble on the horizon, I'm betting.) There are no love triangles, no frustrated lovers. I would like to see a Sarah-Charley Dixon-Agent Ellison triangle, but it's apparently not happening.

4) It's too science fictional. Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof said in a recent interview that their show had been disguised as a regular drama, and then sneaked in scifi ideas over time. Terminator couldn't do that. And last night's episode used time travel in a very different way than "The Constant." Both episodes were great, but "The Constant" was more emotional and relatable, less bleak and tied up with the theory of time travel.

5) It doesn't have as many compelling minor characters. Last night's episode basically featured our leads, plus the two Charlie Fishers and the shrink who doesn't want to be called a shrink. I doubt we'll be seeing Charlie Fisher again, but I do hope we get more insight into the shrink, who's a promising character. Weirdly, for such an epic show, it's much smaller and more intimate than Lost, which has a huge cast.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head. I might do a larger post on that topic at some point, although I'm sure it's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison. In any case, the main thing Lost and T:SCC have in common is that they've both grown on me a lot lately. I liked Sarah Connor's first season, and it had a few really strong episodes, but it's taken off in its second season. Too bad the ratings haven't followed.

Minor observations:

Did Joss Whedon direct this episode? There was a big moment revolving around Summer Glau's feet.

Also, Cameron likes crappy pop music.

This episode made me crave bad food court Chinese food. And cheeseburgers.

Brian Austin Green, still most valuable player.

Who photoshopped that weird picture of Sarah and a dog?

Did older Charles Fisher cause younger Charles Fisher to get sent to prison? I don't really like that kind of circular time-travel logic, but I'll give it a pass.

What did you guys think?

After the episode aired, fans asked the producers, in a live online chat, whether it would really a good idea for a human to sleep with a Terminator. "But it's Summer Glau!" responded writer Dan Thomsen, as if that settled the issue. It was certainly interesting and jarring — are we supposed to think that John's weird snuggly moment with Cameron was what drove him to run away with Riley to Mexico, to get away from all the insanity.

Speaking of insanity, producer Josh Friedman also admitted, in that live chat, that he thinks it's dumb for John to hang around with Riley. Actually, I can see an argument for it: Riley will probably be dead anyway, in a year or two, when Judgement Day hits. So it's not like it'll make that much difference if she dies a bit early, in the next Terminator-related shootout. John should just go around having as much fun as he wants, with any woman who wants him, because they'll all be dead soon. It's the one situation where you can be pretty sure you'll never run into your ex again.

But yeah, John is an idiot. Conveniently idiotic, in this case, since he would have been dead if he hadn't decided to take that impromptu road trip.

This is one episode that probably doesn't stand up to too much close examination, since you'll start to ask why the evil Terminator (known to us humans as Beastwizard) kept Sarah Connor alive when her usefulness was almost certainly over. (I suppose it's just possible he could have used her as bait, or a distraction, for John. But that didn't really work last time, did it?)

It's basically an action-movie episode, and it works super well in that capacity. I really loved the Rashomon-esque thing where we see the same events from a bunch of different perspectives, including Summer and Beastwizard. And the last third of the episode is just basically shooty shooty drivey shooty churchy shooty shooty boom. Which is always a good time. Although how many church showdowns does that make now? I feel like John Woo should sue.

I'm really hoping we're going to get some awesome payoff with the "Cameron's chip has damage" storyline, which came up again last night. Is Cameron getting all seductive and foxy because of chip damage? Is robot sex just a firmware malfunction??

Also, it was great to see Agent Ellison finally team up with the Connors. He's slowly gone from being one of the show's least interesting characters to becoming this fascinating, tragic, cynical religious guy. He and Sarah should totally get together, they have way more romantic chemistry than she has with Charley.

And finally, I'm trying not to feel a tad cheated about the episode's "big death." I really didn't expect it to be Beastwizard, and I'm not even sure he counts as a big death exactly. I was really hoping it would be Riley, since that would have made sense within the context of the episode, and it would have removed the show's weakest subplot.

I will be sad not to see Garret Dillahunt doing that weird sardonic robot-with-a-mean-streak thing, but what more were they going to do with his character? How many more times could he have almost gotten John and then missed? According to the producers, we'll see what "Skynet's next move" is, now that its latest assassination attempt has failed.

The other bad news is, Terminator's ratings stayed flat last night, with around 5.2 million viewers tuning in. Doesn't bode well for when the show moves to the Friday night death slot, along with Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Friedman put a bright face on the move, saying he's happy to be partnered with Joss.

Don't get me wrong — I love a good religious yarn. Piers Plowman? One of my favorite medieval books. Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre series? Ruled. But when science fiction tries to do religious stuff, it often falls flat. You end up with cheesy space gods, or primitive people worshipping high technology. Ron Moore and friends have dabbled in religion, most notably in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica, and it's been a real mixed bag. Sometimes you get great examinations of the conflict between faith and doubt, sometimes cheesy prophecies that make no sense and wacky Gemenon fundamentalists. I just didn't trust Sarah Connor to do it in a non-sledgehammery way.

But I shouldn't have doubted. For one thing, as a million people have pointed out, it's not exactly a coincidence that John Connor's initials are J.C., and Sarah Connor practically has an immaculate conception. (I mean, Kyle Reese technically doesn't exist in 1984 when he fathers John.) For another, religious intrigue is just the sort of crazy twisty metaphysical shit Josh Friedman and the other writers of T:SCC seem to enjoy dipping into.

So in case you missed it, last night Garret Dillahunt's Terminator (aka Beastwizard) got way closer to finding the Connors, which is good because he's reaching his limits of credibility here. First he hooked up with the crazy girl who befriended Summer Glau in the halfway house during her last malfunction. Then he actually tracked down Busy Phillips (yay!) and even got inside the Connors' house. And he finally found a kid who had actually broken into the Connors' house, and started interrogating him. Meanwhile, Sarah Connor and Summer spent the entire episode chasing down those break-in kids, John Connor's new girlfriend proved her mettle in staring down Beastwizard, and James Ellison met his Terminator double, and then got accused of a murder his doppelganger committed. Whew.

So... more about the awesome religious themes. As I mentioned above, it was really nice to see the clash between Summer Glau's Old-Testament kill-them-while-they're-suffering-circumcision-pain attitude, and Sarah's New Testament forgiveness. And then of course Summer turns out to be totally right, because the guy that Sarah allows to live then rats them out to the bad Terminator. Meanwhile James Ellison is being tested... just like Job. (Although maybe he should worry when his evil boss starts to encourage him to think of himself as a BIblical figure. Is she trying to get him to worship Skynet? It sure sounds like it, when she asks who spared him.)

Pretty much every character was clicking this time around, despite — or maybe because of — an overload of conflicts and storylines. Even Riley, John Connor's new girlfriend (Leven Rambin) totally redeemed herself in her confrontation with the Beastwizard. Brian Austin Green didn't get much screen time, but he shone like those stolen diamonds in every scene, including when he finally loses it and yells at Sarah. Awesome.

Random thought: Was anybody else thrown for a loop when Beastwizard referred to himself as having a disagreement with Skynet? We've seen Terminators having their own missions, and therefore agendas, before. But second-guessing Skynet? That's new.

The one sour note was the argument between John and Sarah at the end, which felt like the same argument I'd heard ten times before. And for some reason, with everything else that's happened, I just don't buy that John still feels so freaked out by killing that Russian gangsta dude. I think maybe because the show didn't mention Russian gangsta for like five episodes, and then suddenly his death was a big deal again. Plus how exactly was Sarah supposed to protect John from that? Protecting him from killer robots is really enough of a chore without adding "protecting him from every other life trauma" to the list. Not to mention that John begged her, in the show's pilot to stop Skynet. So any Russian gangsta-related trauma that he endures as a result of that decision is on him, not on her. Luckily, it was a super-brief scene, and maybe that was meant to move that storyline forward, so we won't hear that exact same argument again.

Another thing I liked about last night's episode: it was pretty fast-paced. A lesser show would have said "Hey, this pairing of Garret Dillahunt's Terminator with the crazy girl from the halfway house is pretty cool. Let's keep them together as a sort of wacky good-cop-bad-cop duo for the rest of the episode! Or even a couple of episodes!" Instead, we got just enough of the two of them interacting to be entertaining — and then boom, she's out of the car. Perfect.

So to sum up... one of the show's best episodes ever, and another sign that this is growing to be that rare show that actually transcends the franchise it comes from. (The aforementioned Deep Space Nine is another example.) Too bad it once again showed some ratings attrition. All the nerds who normally watch Chuck decided to watch Big Bang Theory. Proving, in the end, that there really is no God.

So this week, everybody was in therapy — but at least in Brian Austin Green's case, it was physical therapy. And the scenes between BAG and Stephanie Jacobsen really did feel sort of BSG-ish, especially because both characters are having a sort of crisis of faith and wallowing in despair and trauma over the end of the world. This is probably the first time we've really seen Derek Reese interacting a lot with someone else who's come back from the future, so it really is like two veterans getting together.

The most intriguing thing about the BAG-BSG sequences was the idea that the future John Connor is getting more dependent on machines, maybe because the present John is becoming so reliant on Summer Glau's Terminator. Future John has put reprogrammed Terminators into every major bunker — and every now and then, one of them goes haywire and kills a bunch of people. Meanwhile, the latest Terminator that Skynet sent back in time has a chip programmed to self-destruct if tampered with. It makes you wonder if the Connors are slowly but surely losing this game of temporal chess. I really, really hope we get more development of that idea.

Meanwhile, the show's therapist plot was the cue for more mopey acting from Thomas Dekker, but at least this time around he felt like he was getting somewhere. It turns out that John Connor is still dealing with the trauma of killing the skeezy Russian gangster in the season opener. Honestly, if we'd dealt with this in the second episode, instead of having some unfocused sulking for a few episodes. As it was, I felt like I'd just watched some episodes out of order. But at least, now it feels as though the emo-John Connor storyline is going somewhere — plus of course there's the whole controversy over whether John was trying to shoot himself when that gun went off. (I don't really think so, though.)

And honestly, the stuff with Shirley Manson and her two children was pretty great. I liked the parallel between Shirley mothering her flesh-and-blood "daughter," and her trying to raise baby Skynet. And then the parallels between Shirley being a crappy mom and Sarah Connor being a crappy mom. As great as that borderline-abuse clip we ran before was, the rest of the episode pretty much lived up to it. (Although I don't know why Shirley didn't just get her kid a mountain of kiddie antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills and call it a day.)

And then there was the elevator fight, which was silly and loopy — and I'm not sure two Terminators really would have stopped fighting just because there were witnesses — and yet it was still awesome. Especially the robo-pretzel way it ended. I have to say, one reason I root for this show to stay on the air is so Summer Glau will get to do more killer robot acting, instead of going off and starring in some probably very silly ballet with Joss Whedon.

Obviously, any time you get a double dose of Summer Glau, it's going to be a standout episode. This time around, Summer's chip malfunctioned (again!) and she forgot who she was. She started having recovered memories from Alison, the girl whose body/mind she was based on (I guess) and also wound up in a halfway house getting therapy from a well-meaning social worker.

The shadow of violence and trauma hung over everyone in last night's episode, "Alison From Palmdale," and it made for good viewing. It was the sort of episode the Terminator show excels at, where the future is hanging over the present like a horrendous historical atrocity that nobody can forget. Agent Ellison is still totally wrecked thanks to the deaths of all his colleagues in the ill-fated stop-Cromartie operation, and Catherine Weaver wins Ellison's trust by pretending she has similar trauma in her past. (I wonder where she got her "kid"?) Meanwhile, the Connors' landlady, played by Busy Philips, has driven away her policeman boyfriend because she doesn't want so much violence coming close to her kid. (Little does she know.)

I have to admit, I felt this episode rocked mostly because it felt like a throwback to the show's first season, where there were lots of scenes of Cameron in the girls' room at high school, or dealing with human teenagers, or getting asked to the prom. You either like the concept of a Terminator having to try and fit in among humans, or you just don't — it works for me, and I was happy to see it back.

Cameron's new friendship with the wiggy art-school dropout chick was pretty awesome, and I liked the parallels between the Terminator interrogation in the future and Cameron's social-work interview in the past — and how it turned into a parallel with Cameron's interrogation of the art-school skank. You could sort of see Cameron getting more Terminator-ish the more she lived through those memories again, so she stopped identifying with the person being interrogated, and instead started identifying with the interrogator. Great stuff.

My current least favorite character, John Connor, was actually pretty great in this episode, from his whole cute thing of getting Cameron to buy him cheesy poofs to the way he tracked her down. It was a more secure, can-do version of John, one I'm happy to watch any time. I really don't think it's Thomas Dekker's fault that John has been so hard to watch in some episodes. I think it's more the way the character's been written, and I hope we'll get to see more of the competent, assured version of John in the future.

Sadly, it was another low-rated episode, according to the overnight ratings. Sarah Connor isn't alone: fellow Fox show Prison Break got almost identical ratings, and Chuck's season premiere also did really badly compared to last year's episodes. Heroes continued to sink as well. I don't think it's necessarily just that there's something wrong with any of those shows, Sarah Connor included — I think the strike last spring did more damage than anyone realized at the time, and people have just lost interest in a lot of the shows that were on hiatus for so long. Some execs may soon be wishing they'd just settled that strike a lot earlier.

Last night's episode was all about Garret Dillahunt, really. His bad Terminator with the fresh sideburns kidnapped the wife of Sarah Connor's ex and used her to set up an elaborate plan to get to John Connor. (Maybe a little too elaborate, actually.) This gave Garret the chance to go full-on creepy, especially when he rigged Penny from Lost up with a fake bomb and a bunch of mousetraps while soliloquizing about the mousetrap in general. Pretty much everybody in the cast got to shine this time around, especially Dean Winters as Sarah's ex Charley, who managed to pack a lot of subtext and emotion into every moment he was on screen. Lena Headey was also great, especially in the scene where she's having to decide whether to rush to John's aid or stop her stolen van in the slim hope of saving Charley's wife. I love the cold-bitch-who-secretly-cares vibe she was casting Charley's way throughout. And Brian Austin Green continues to be amazing, making us sympathize with him despite his wanting to leave Charley's wife for dead.

Since I already wrote a whole blog post about Thomas Dekker's portrayal of John Connor yesterday, I'll just skip over it today, except to say I hope "Cat Fancy" is still his nickname when he's a big deal resistance leader years from now. It could be the one code the machines never crack — the secret identity of the mysterious Cat Fancy, scourge of Skynet.

Basically, last night's first episode was all about how it takes a Terminator to teach humans the violence behind tenderness.

The Sleeping With The Enemy sequences, where we see through the eyes of a random Terminator who's married a woman in order to get access to the traffic-light system she's beta-testing, were incredibly well done, and super disturbing. And I loved the chat between Lena and Brian Austin Green about whether they'd know if they were married to a machine. It turns out that faking a marriage, even a rollicking sex life with ocean cruises, is way easier than impersonating an FBI agent.

When we've seen through a Terminator's eyes before, it's usually been just a sort of "Kill The Mutherfucker (Y/N)" screen with a grid framing their squirmy victim. But this was way more sophisticated, just like the "infiltration model" whose vision we were seeing through. It definitely lent a bit of weight to the Terminators=Cylons thing the show is starting to have.

The first hour of last night's two-hour Terminator: SCC finale was pure sleaze. From the dorky goth boy who shivers as he talks about crowd-surfing at a Bjork concert, to the double shower incursions (first Garret Dillahunt's Terminator and then Lena Headey both walk in on boys in the shower and stare at them) it was just all kind of crazy. And the moment where John Connor cuts Summer Glau's head open and lovingly rips out her cyber-brain was actually weirdly tender and sweet, and yet ridiculously sexual. (And then when Summer reboots, she catches John giving her the post-coital moon-eyes.)

The second hour was mostly just another one of the show's random who-has-the-chess-playing-computer episodes, where there's a lot of running around and spy drama. I hope the show gets a second season, but I also hope it isn't all about the chess program and which random gangster has it this week. It's already starting to get a bit silly. And wasn't Skynet (the super computer which takes over the world in the future) supposed to be a miiltary project? I know, I know, the military buys the chess computer or something. It's just a bit tenuous.

There were two awesomely random bits in the otherwise serviceable second hour: the Johnny Cash music playing over the lingering ballet of the Terminator tossing dead FBI agents into the swimming pool. And the scene where Brian Austin Green takes his nephew, John Connor, to see John's dad (and BAG) as kids, playing ball in the pre-apocalyptic sunshine.

Altogether, the two episodes back to back made a pretty strong argument for giving the show a second chance next fall. And since the show squeaked into second place behind ABC and did well among 18-to-49-year olds, it's looking a bit more optimistic. Fingers crossed!

This definitely felt like another water-treading episode of Sarah Connor, but at least this time around all the characters felt true, and everybody got a nice bit of character development. Sarah and her pet Terminator Cameron are still searching for the dumb chess-playing computer that may possibly become Skynet, and they have to dispose of the last piece of the Terminator that hunted Brian Austin Green a few weeks ago. And Agent Ellison (now with 1000 times more Bible-thumping, which comes from actor Richard T. Jones' real-life Christianity) runs into Sarah's ex-shrink, now a nutcase himself.

I really liked the stuff about Sarah freaking out in the mental institution, and signing away her right to be John's mom. It makes the present-day wound-up-tight Sarah seem more impressive by comparison, and yet you know she's still freaking out somewhere deep down inside. (But maybe with better drugs now.) When John sees the tape of her relinquishing parenthood, Thomas Dekker's acting actually worked for me this time around. And then when he and Sarah re-bond, I could sort of believe they were related and cared for each other, which was a major weakness in earlier episodes.

Meanwhile, Brian Austin Green continues to be a bad houseguest. He messes up Sarah Connor's bedroom. He fucks around with her guns. He's a paranoid maniac who doesn't trust Sarah's ex-boyfriend or her robot pet. He won't eat his pancakes at the breakfast table like a civilized adult. Was he raised in a barn or something?

I was dreading the Terminator-learns-ballet stuff in advance. It was mercifully brief, but pretty much just as awful as I'd feared. We're obviously supposed to think Cameron (Summer Glau) is growing a "soul" because we see her randomly practicing ballet at the end of the episode. And Sarah's voice-over talks about how if the machines learn to appreciate art and beauty the way we do, they can replace us and become us instead of just wiping us out. It all points to a major weakness in this show, which is that it wants to be Battlestar Galactica. It wants Summer Glau to be like a Cylon, with emotions and a conflicted soul, instead of just a machine with a single purpose. Or at least, it wants to toy with the idea that Summer Glau has a soul.

All in all, this episode was way better than I was expecting, and much better than the last couple of episodes. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for next week's final two episodes, airing back to back. Sadly, the show's ratings continue to drop, and Hollywood insiders are saying a second season still isn't a sure thing.

We liked Sarah Connor a lot more when it was about the female-bonding between Sarah and Cameron, the Terminator played by Summer Glau. When the two of them went around tag-teaming evil robots and nursemaiding their baby rebel leader of the future, it was a pretty great show. Now, all of a sudden, it's a show about random dudes who hang around and talk about how teenage girls are "pretty as a picture" except for their scary insides. (We had a clip of that horrendous moment in yesterday's TV roundup.) When it's not the skancle, it's the whiny stepdad. And that's interspersed with clips of Brian Austin Green and a bunch of other nondescript dudes having male-bonding in the future.

Speaking of which, only Skynet knows what those flash-forwards were actually about. What was in the scary room with the classical music? Glenn Gould? Maybe an evil cyborg version of Glenn Gould? First BAG is hanging out with his future buddies, and they're all teasing Kyle incredibly lamely about how many work slaughterhouses he got John Connor out of. And then they're running around, and there's a big cannon thingy, and then the Terminators nab his friends... and BAG ends up in a prison with the scary room, but he escapes somehow, and then there's more running around. Oh, and the annoying chess guy is there, and he says he built Skynet. The biggest problem with all the future sequences is that the men all look kind of the same and it seems like we're supposed to be able to tell them apart or something.

It really seemed as though the show was trying hard to live up to the "chronic" in its title. We kept rewinding to try and figure out what just happened, and it got more and more mystifying. Also, the subplot about whether Summer Glau is evil is really not promising. Come on, it's Summer Glau. She's on all the posters and stuff. She's not evil, at least not in television terms.

I had some misgivings about whether the Terminator concept could sustain a weekly show, with developing plotlines and ongoing intrigues and stuff. And last night's episode is the second in a row that makes me start thinking my fears were more than justified. And with lukewarm third-place ratings, we may never get to know exactly where Summer Glau falls on the lawful-good-to-chaotic-evil scale.

A lot of last night's Sarah Connor episode felt like we were treading water, with the return of the chess guy, and the FBI guy doing his X-Files routine and Sarah's ex feeling conflicted. And the introduction of Brian Austin Green as John's uncle from the future felt like a step backwards. Most of all, Sarah didn't get to kick much ass last night at all. And let's not even talk about the boring chess metaphor.

But Summer's robo-girl continued to be awesome to watch. Her crazy-girl act on Firefly got super old, but she's great as an almost affectless killing machine. I would happily watch a show that was just Summer's Terminator navigating high-school angst. I don't even care that she doesn't look teenaged. I love scenes like this one, where she's being "counseled" on her feelings about the random blonde girl who killed herself a couple of episodes ago.