Episode Report Card Daniel: B | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 01.12.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Sarah Connor is finding out how hard it is to have a love life when you're a single mom, especially when the fate of all mankind rests on your teenage son's shoulders and an evil computer intelligence keeps sending killer cyborgs from the future to murder him, and you're being pursued by the government for the events of T2. Fearing commitment even more than murderous robots, Sarah blows off her fiancé to go back on the run with John, just when he's started to feel safe.
The first few days of school might not be too bad, considering the knockout new love interest for John. In the minus column, though, is the teacher who turns out to be another Terminator who shoots up the school (and is subsequently elected to the National Substitute Teachers' Hall of Fame). John's new lady friend Cameron turns out to be a Terminator, which is obvious to anyone who saw all the advertising with her half-naked robot torso, sent back from the year 2027, which is actually two years earlier than the year Arnie and Michael Biehn came from in the original movie. Which might mean that she doesn't have the bad breath and body odor innovations that supposedly made it so hard to tell Arnie was a robot.
Apparently, despite Miles Dyson's death, Skynet goes online and turns the future apocalyptic. So rather than fleeing, Sarah, John, and Cameron decide to fight to stop Skynet from ever happening (which would mean that the resistance would never have been necessary, which would mean that no Terminators would ever have sent back, which would mean...well, worrying about the time paradox is going to prove entirely futile with this show). They enlist the aid of Miles Dyson's widow as they flee, and make their way to a bank that has been staffed, apparently, by a good Terminator or whatever since the 1960s, and has left behind a whole lot of futuristic technology that's good enough to nuke the bad Terminator of the Week, as well as to catapult them eight years into the future, to "where it all begins," and they can begin, again, to take down Skynet. Looks like they're also going to run into Sarah's old FBI nemesis, as well as her former fiancé, who's moved-on-but-obviously-not-really. In the closing scene, John wows the crowd with a blistering guitar solo in the middle of "Johnny B. Goode," which somehow ensures he'll be born. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We open on the familiar close-up of a highway's dotted line rolling by like a vertical Morse code. Picking up in style where T2 left off, the voice-over begins: "There are those who believe that a child in the womb shares his mother's dreams. Her love for him. Her hopes for his future." It's frightening to imagine that the pressure to become a doctor starts when you're a zygote, but there you have it. This, for anyone new to the characters (and, I suppose, unable to make a reasonable assumption from this show's title), is Sarah Connor. She knows what her son John's fate is: it's "tied to the fate of millions." Would he understand why she's so hard? Would he still reach for her if the only dream she's ever shared with him was a nightmare? Will he still love her tomorrow?
She's driving down an empty stretch of highway in a station wagon, and pulls up in front of what is supposedly a library, but is clearly a school. She runs inside; fortunately her voice-over is still able to continue asking rhetorical questions. She pops into the library and yells, "John, now!" A dark-haired lad who is fortunately not Edward Furlong (and not just because dude would be in his thirties now) snaps to, and the two of them head out the doors. He asks her if the cops "made her at the diner." She doesn't know.
The answer lies outside: what is presumably the entire West Fork police department has surrounded the school, guns drawn. "Yes, definitely," amends Sarah.
A cop over a speaker orders them to drop whatever they're carrying. Or they'll start firing on a building full of teenagers? Nevertheless, the Connors surrender, and are handcuffed and dumped into separate police cars.
Then Sarah sees him: a big dude walking dare-I-say robotically towards the parked police cars. He's wearing sunglasses. He seems intent. The cop in the back seat is more intent on leering at Sarah's waitress skirt riding halfway up her thighs. This doesn't go unnoticed by her, and she asks him to fix it for her. He leans forward obligingly, already mentally composing his letter to Penthouse, and gets head-butted into oblivion. From the next car, a shocked John reacts like he's never seen his mom pummel a cop before. Meanwhile, Intently Walking Dude has planted himself in front of the lead police car, and pulls out a shotgun. The cops in the car have the reaction times of sloths on formaldehyde, and die where they sit. He tosses the gun aside and pulls out to what look to my non-gun-enthusiast eyes like Uzis, and starts laying waste to the rest of the patrol cars. He fires a million rounds, but only succeeds in providing Sarah, who's freed herself using the lecherous cop's keys, a broken window to escape out the back seat, and she pulls John out as well. They take cover between some cars until the Terminator has fired off all his rounds, and Sarah orders John to run, which he does. The Terminator pulls out a pistol and aims it at the fleeing John, and Sarah grabs a dead cop's gun and fires several shots, hitting the Terminator in the face. No cool liquid metal self-repairing bullet holes for the television show, it appears, but the Terminator does get some of those cool metal scrapes on his face. He spares Sarah the briefest of glances, and then calmly fires a shot into John's back.
So, unless this version of the Terminator universe has the cyborgs succeeding within the first few minutes, it appears we're opening with a dream sequence. Sarah screams, and runs over to cradle her son's dead body. The Terminator approaches, and Sarah yells for him to kill her, saying nothing matters anymore. He amiably agrees, saying "only the boy" mattered. "The future is ours, and it begins now," he says. With that, a bright light fills the sky, from a mushroom cloud in the distance. Behind the Terminator, the school disintegrates, and the blast burns the human right off his metal skeleton. John and Sarah are unburned. The grinning cyborg strides over to John and Sarah (looking a million times more realistic than in the first movie, thank god)...