Episode Report Card Daniel: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Where Did You Sleep Last Night
By Daniel | Season 2 | Episode 16 | Aired on 02.27.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Sarah's apparently checked herself into a sleep clinic because all her fears about the end of the world mean she's not sleeping. When she does manage to catch a little shut-eye, she's apparently dreaming about investigating a company with links to Desert Heat and Air. She goes to check it out, and winds up being kidnapped by Winston, the dude she shot at Desert Heat and Air, who's intent on extracting information from her.
Not that things are much better at the sleep clinic. Weird things seem to be going on -- furtive nighttime injections of her roommate, who winds up dying in a fire while sleeping, and there's also the cagey doctor. There's a friendly custodian who likes to make dream catchers for the patients who need them, plus he has a coyote tattoo, and Sarah sees a coyote in the parking lot of the company linked to Desert Heat and Air in her dream. So a reluctant John helps her investigate, and they find an observation room with all kinds of sinister machines observing the sleeping humans. The cagey doctor is actually a terminator. Quite the coincidence, huh? Well, not really, because it turns out the sleep clinic stuff is the actual dream, while the reality is that Sarah has really been captured by Winston. So she has to kill him, for real this time. And god knows how long she's going to moan about having had to kill the guy. Get over it, Sarah. And why not let Cameron help you a little bit more, since killing is the entire reason for her existence? The only opponent Cameron faces in this episode is a stubborn vending machine (well, she also faces off against Sarah's pancake-making abilities). There's also no Derek, no Weaver, no Ellison, no Riley, no Jesse, no Chrome Artie, no nothing.
Tip for Sarah if you actually are having sleeping problems: watch this episode, and you'll be out like a light in no time.
Discuss this episode in the TSCC forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks about TSCC when he has No Prior Knowledge!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We're back to hearing Sarah's voiceovers, as she starts telling us about midnight being the "witching hour," if you believe in that sort of thing, which is when a portal opens to another world and we're visited by demons and "dark spirits of the shadowlands" and drunken college buddy phone calls and the like. The demons visit us and lie on us when we cannot move, and take from us what is most precious to us: our lives, our love, our sleep, our iPods.
Sarah's driving along in the middle of the night, and she stops in a deserted parking lot in an industrial area. She calls John to tell him that she's checking out a place called Western Iron and Metal, which she says supplies specialty metal tooling equipment to Desert Heat and Air. Ah. She somehow found out about this place by watching endless surveillance footage from Charm Acres. She wants him to get on the Interwebs and find out who owns it. "I'm on it," he says, except you know he's just going to play World of Warcraft all night.
Sarah goes to jimmy open the door, when a rustling nearby startles her. She gets out her gun and goes to check it out. It's a coyote! Moving in slow motion! She stares at it for a few moments, I assume because she's waiting for it to speak to her in Johnny Cash's voice, which is just long enough for a guy in a ski mask to show up and Taser her. She twitches on the ground, and we fade into Sarah waking up in a bed, electrodes on her head.
So none of that just happened? This episode is going to have a bunch of dream sequences? Wow. That's "awesome." What actually is awesome is the sexy doctor in Sarah's room, who tells her that she was having another nightmare. Sarah tries to bug out of there, but the doctor tells her she hasn't been there long enough for the clinic to get enough data to prescribe a treatment for her insomnia, as the first night only establishes a baseline: "You go home now, things will only get worse," says the doctor, who adds that if Sarah thinks her lack of sleep is bad now, she should try going two or three years without it. She's off to get some coffee -- decaf only in this place.
As soon as she's gone, Sarah hears the telltale scrape of a cigarette lighter coming from behind the closed-off curtain around the other bed in the room. She opens the curtain, startling the woman near the window, who throws something out the window and flicks closed the Zippo, which she stuffs into her bra, underneath the Karate Kid gis they're both wearing, like maybe they're going to fight the Cobra Kai together. Which would at least be some goddamn action."I'm your roommate, Dana," says the woman, in a British accent, who says she checked in last night whilst Sarah was kicking and thrashing in her bed. Sarah asks her about the lighter, and Dana plays dumb for a moment then admits she's trying to quit smoking, but it's hard because of her chronic fatigue, which is related to her eating disorder, which is why she had her stomach stapled, and meanwhile Sarah is thinking "sorry I asked" and Dana is saying something about how she can't give up all her vices: "Girl's gotta sin sometime." "Hence the smoking," says Sarah. "And the younger men," adds Dana, who then lights up (smile-wise, not cigarette-wise) when John Connor strolls into the room. "Hey, tiger!" burbles Dana, and Sarah makes that nonplussed Sarah face of hers. John says it's visiting time, and Cameron's down in the cafeteria. Sarah starts to leave with him, and Dana holds up her lighter and stage-whispers to Sarah that they should keep this a secret.