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By Daniel

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While Derek Reese is dying on a kitchen table in the present, twenty years in the future he's just another resistance fighter with a brother named Kyle who likes to tell stories about busting out of prisons with John Connor. Then he's captured with the rest of his squad, where scary and confusing things happen. One of his squad members is an unrecognizable (thanks to his beard) Andy Goode, who confesses that he's responsible for building the computer that gained consciousness and then took over the world. After escaping (well, more like being let go), Derek discovers that the resistance is reprogramming the Terminators; this can be good (like when they look like Cameron), but it can also be bad (like when they go all haywire and kill everybody, which is much worse than when your computer crashes in the middle of a game of Minesweeper). He also finds out his brother has accepted a time-travel mission. Kyle's going back too, with his men, to correct humanity's mistakes before they're ever made. He also comes into contact with either Cameron or a Terminator who looks exactly like Cameron. And so, that is how a young Andy Goode ended up with a bullet in his forehead: from the end of Derek Reese's gun.

And after a blood transfusion from John (whose blood type is either quite a mistake on the part of the writers or HE'S NOT REALLY SARAH'S SON), Charley and Sarah are free to have one of those awkward discussions where you run into an ex-girlfriend and let her know that you never really forgave her for running out on you eight years ago, and then supposedly dying in a bank explosion. Charley is told the truth about who Sarah and John (and Cameron, on T-888 endoskeleton disposal duty this episode) really are. The most implausible thing all episode may be that Charley didn't wind up on the floor in the fetal position. Want more? The full recap starts right below!

We pan through the empty rooms of the Connor Compound, while Sarah's voice-over babbles about the night she met Kyle Reese, and he told her of the apocalypse to come. The Pandora's box opened by humanity, and how Kyle's unborn son was bequeathed what was left in the box after the nightmares escaped: hope. You want to talk about hope? My hope is that eventually this show leaves off with the damn voice-overs already. Hope. Shit.

We move into the kitchen, which has become an ersatz operating room, with Charley the torch-carrying EMT frantically trying to save a bloody and dying Derek. Charley thinks it would be wise, at this particular time, as he tries to extract a bullet that nicked Derek's left lung, to get someone to explain exactly what's happened. I'm hoping he means what's happened to Derek, and not what's happened to the Connor Crew since eight years ago when Sarah and John supposedly blew up a bank. Despite death riding its pale cow right up outside the Connor compound and hitching it to a post outside, Derek is lucid enough to yell that Cameron is metal and a liar. "Sedative, my bag, now!" barks Charley, and Cameron readies a syringe. This only makes Derek spazz off even worse, but Cameron ignores this and is about to plunge the syringe in, when she's stopped by Charley, who seems to be of the opinion that it's probably best not to agitate the bullet-riddled patient. "Do you want him to die?" asks Charley. "If I wanted him to die..." begins Cameron, who is quickly ordered to shut her non-rhetorical-question-understanding hole.

Derek sends John out to his truck for a manual aspirator. Then he inventories all of Derek's problems: bullet wounds, punctures, burns...let's just slap a picture of Derek on the Worst Case Scenario handbook and be done with it. Again, Charley starts to ask what happened, but then thinks better of it, and asks for more light. Sarah brings a lamp over to the table, shining it right in Derek's eyes, which must be nice for him.

What it does is send Derek's mind reeling back to another time when, um, there were lights around. We're underground in what looks suspiciously like the human resistance hideout we first saw way back in the first movie. It's dingy and dark, and there are dogs (like canaries in the coal mine). A mural on one wall reads, "Hang In There, Baby!" but instead of a cute widdle kitten desperately clinging to a tree branch, it features a lion with a Terminator head in its jaws. Well, that's something; the lions are on humanity's side! That's awesome!

Crouched along a corridor are Derek Reese and his compadres, one of whom notices Derek straining his water through a cloth into his canteen and says that doesn't work, calling it an old wives' tale.