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?

Human Lab Rats

Humans are penned up in cages, for what we can assume from previous plot leaks are experiments. In the trailer, you can see one poor soul frantically climbing out of the pen with dozens of humans below. If you look directly over his shoulder you can see his robot prison guard, which up close looks like this...

THE T-600

T4 director McG has explained that he is interested in exploring the in between periods of Skynet's experimentation. McG called the T-600 a, "bigger, grimier, nastier version that preceded the T-800....they're easier to spot but they pack a mini gun and carry kick ass fire power. They're eight-foot tall killers that prowl the badlands looking for anything with a heartbeat to terminate." And from the looks of this giant with a cannon for an arm, this very well could be the T-600.

THE HARVESTER

A giant metal hand breaks through the ceiling and pulls out this puny human. It doesn't appear that it wants to harm the human, but capture him. So it could be an easy guess that this is a first look at the "Harvesters" as McG calls them, or the robots that are sent out to collect human specimens for robots to run experiments on.

HYDROBOT

Here's a closer look at the Hydrobots that patrol the waters of our future. The crew spent some time filming inside water tanks so it should be interesting how much the Hydro bots are utilized.

Terminator Dog Fighting?

At first glance in the trailer I thought this was a dead body, now I think there's a lady in the flight suit, a female pilot that ran into trouble with one of the Aerostat robots that patrol the skies of the future.

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.