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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 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)...
...which is when Sarah wakes up.
She wakes up, not being strangled by a Terminator, but to a shirtless Dean Winters. This is, clearly, much preferable to being strangled by a futuristic killing machine. Dean, er, "Charley Dixon," asks if she's okay, and accepts at face value her response that she is, ignoring her all-around shiftiness to say the "guy at the store" said any woman would be lucky to have the ring that Sarah is now apparently sporting, so they make out for a little bit, and then he spills the "secret" (she says she doesn't like secrets, so I assume he knows everything about her, right?) that John helped him pick out the ring, and she says she loves him, and then they kiss some more, and she sadly and totally suspiciously says, "Always remember that," and then he goes to get ready for his early shift at the Bye-Bye Fiancée Factory.
The on-screen graphic tells us it's Aug. 24, 1999, in West Fork, Nebraska (note to Sufjan Stevens -- you're cool and everything, but Springsteen already owns that state, so leave that one off your list). Sarah sits on her son's bed, and he jerks awake, startled to see her there, and gives her hell for it, saying it's freaky. He tells her she's going to be late for work, but she doesn't move, so he asks what's going on. "We can't stay here, John," she says. "It's not safe." He sits up in bed (behind him are era-appropriate, if a little dated, posters for Rage Against The Machine and the Dropkick Murphys' first record). He complains that they're safe, that it's been two years, and school starts in three weeks. "You're scared. He gave you a ring, and now you're freaking out." That's his theory, backing it up by reminding his mother that she loves Charley. "Listen, the cops will never find us. We're safe." She shoves him back on the bed and orders him to never say that: "No one is ever safe." He gives up, and she says, "Half an hour. One bag. Plus the guns. I'll make pancakes." Angry, paranoid pancakes.
While Sarah's former fiancé forlornly looks at the ring (take it to the pawn shop, pal), Sarah voice-overs the Connor family rules while she and John hit the road: "Keep your head down. Keep your eyes up. Resist the urge to be seen as something important or special. Know your exits." The MacEachern family rules are a little more relaxed, but then again, my siblings and I aren't, as far as we know, responsible for humanity's future. (And if we are, nice knowing ya, humanity.)
A confused cop looks at a picture of Sarah and, baffled, says she's not missing, the way he explained. "Right, she's not missing, she left," agrees an annoyed Dean, and the cop tries to explain that people leave. "You don't know her," says Dean.
"I could say the same to you, Mr. Dixon," says a tall dude, striding into the room and flashing his FBI badge, and he starts quizzing Dixon about his relationship with Sarah. Does this FBI guy just hang out at the West Fork police department? Because the cop didn't exactly put out an APB on a runaway fiancée here. Or had the FBI agent already tracked the Connors to West Fork? And if so, how the hell big do they expect us to think West Fork is that he hasn't located them within West Fork? Oh, hang on -- just going to affix a sticky note to my computer that reads, "IT'S NOT A DOCUMENTARY." That should help.
FBI Guy tells Dixon about Skynet and Miles Dyson -- well, the version in which Sarah Connor escaped from a mental hospital and killed Dyson. Dixon isn't sure what to believe, since FBI Guy has a picture of Sarah in a file and everything! I don't believe my fiancée would do something like that, but then again, you do have a picture of her, and it's in a file folder and everything. "Why would she do that?" he asks. "Well, you know, Mr. Dixon," says FBI Guy (Agent James Ellison), "it's the robots. The ones from the future. The ones Skynet sent to kill her son." The "Luke Skywalker type" leading a "scrappy band of rebels." Dixon angrily says that John is like a son to him. "I came down here for help! You can't really be asking me this!" Ellison dials it down a notch to tell Dixon that he just wants to impress upon him how badly the U.S. government wants to find his fiancée, "because she's a deluded, dangerous Grade-A Whack-A-Mole who killed a man because she believes that in the future he'll invent a computer system that declares war on the world." Dixon stands there, seething. "So let's begin with her name," says FBI Guy, who says he already understands that it's not Connor.
Wait, "Whack-A-Mole"?
After a brief shot of Sarah gassing up while watching for lethal robots and John sleeping in the car, we see Ellison typing some new information into the Sarah Connor file. Guess she was going by "Sarah Reese." Taking the last name of someone else arrested over the course of your, um, "Whack-A-Mole" adventures ain't exactly a fugitive masterstroke. And on a computer screen in some dingy, warehouse-y setting, a shadowy figure takes notice as the Sarah Connor information is transmitted to his computer screen. Reflected in the monitor, his head snaps to, and a red light blinks on in his eye.
Red Valley, New Mexico, Sept. 6. We're at what appears to be a high school. Why Sarah doesn't just home-school John and be done with it, I have no idea. John's literally keeping his head down in class while the teacher drones on about his rules, like anyone remembers all the minutiae of individual teachers' laws after the first day of school. "What's your name?" asks a brunette behind him, who kind of has an old-school classic beauty about her. Like a less worn-out Rose McGowan, is what I'm saying. "John," says John. "Cameron," she likewises. I can only assume the choice of name for her is a nice tribute to Mike Cameron, who was responsible for functional props during the making of Terminator 2. The two of them earn a light rebuke from the teacher for talking, as well as titters from the rest of the class. So much for not calling attention to yourself.
Outside, Cameron grills John about whether he just moved here ("Sucks for you," she teases) and what his parents do. Her dad sells tractors, his dad sells insurance. Her mom stays at home, his mom...well, he doesn't say. "I really gotta get to the class, so..." he says. So maybe I'll see you around? she says. And he is more noncommittal than probably any teenage boy Summer Glau has ever spoken to.
The new Connor house is some rundown, unassuming place on the outskirts of town (although I get the sense the entire town is outskirts) and John stomps in and doesn't say a word to Sarah, who's painting a wall, before going into his room.
Sarah barges in, and finds her son listening to Incubus, which understandably makes her concerned. I hope "we don't listen to the overwrought vocals and lyrics of the lead singer of Incubus" is one of the family rules. She starts picking up his room, and he finally rips off his headphones and complains that this is a hick town. More so than West Fork? "We've been in worse places," she says, and he gripes that he's got all the wrong clothes, and that he needs to get different shirts, and everybody wears cowboy boots. "I hate cowboy boots," he whines. Looking at her, presumably to see her reaction, he bitches that the computers are "from the fifties." "'Their computers'? I thought we agreed," she says, suddenly pissed. He protests that they "changed his class," and she says the last thing they need is for him to get caught hacking. He complains about knowing the rules because they're tattooed on the inside of his eyeballs, which sounds kind of excessive, so she softens and asks if he met any pretty girls. He says he didn't, and in defense of Summer Glau, that means one of four things: he's a) very forgetful; b) very gay; c) very hard to please; or d) holding out on his mom. John and Sarah smile at each other, because she gets that he's holding out, and he knows she knows.
Know who else thinks this is a hick town? Agent Ellison, judging from the disdainful look he gives the truck sent to the small airfield, driven by a deputy who says, "The sheriff's detachment'll hustle you around on your business here, whatever that is, he didn't say." "He doesn't know," is Ellison's only explanation. The deputy nods and stares off into the distance, because it's like that, and that's the way it is.
Cameron quietly sits to John in a science lab. John watches her before speaking, and tells her he lied yesterday, about his dad selling insurance. "He's dead. He was a soldier. He was killed on a mission." Cameron says she's sorry, and the floodgates really open up as John says he has to go home right after school, since his mom's "really uptight" and he's all she's got. "Thank you for explaining. It'll be our secret," she says, and then smiles, which manages to set off the fire alarm -- no, wait, it's the school bell. The teacher strides in and curtly says, "Mr. Ferguson is ill today. My name is Cromartie." A girl snottily asks if that's his only name, like "Madonna," and Cromartie deadpans, "Madonna? Why? No," and the class titters. Not that they aren't still planning the usual pranks for subs (of course, they'll abandon any such plans in few minutes). Cameron does not laugh, but stares at Cromartie, who sits and starts calling attendance. As he reads down the egregiously non-alphabetized list, he also, unseen by the students, stabs a letter opener into his thigh and pulls it up his leg. "Cameron Phillips," he says, and has to repeat himself before Cameron, still staring, says, "Here." on his handwritten list is John Reese: "Do we have a John Reese?" he asks, reaching into the jagged slit in his pants. John raises his hand. "Excellent," says Chrome Artie (TM Vaeran), who withdraws a handgun from inside his leg and starts firing. The way the kids react, you'd think the students had never had a substitute teacher shoot at them before. Chrome Artie, now striding into the rows of desks, fires a few more shots, but Cameron very deliberately stands in front of John and takes the bullets, and falls. John stares at her for a few minutes, before diving through a classroom window. Chrome Artie slowly follows, and the students all get a nice look at his leg's working machinery through the rip in his pants. Chrome Artie pauses. "Class dismissed," he says, before continuing on. I'm amused that the Witty Quip programming seems to override his Kill John Connor programming.
Outside, John races into the parking lot, while Chrome Artie fires bullet after bullet from the Nev-R-Empty clip on his automatic. It's a good thing he has so many bullets, because he's a terrible shot. But he doesn't screw around: he decides the best way to get past a school bus isn't to go around it, but to flip it on its side and climb on top of it, the better to scan the general area.
Over at some diner, an incredibly up-to-the-second newscast is reporting gunfire at Crestview High School. Sarah, waiting tables, has to make a split-second decision over whether her son is more important than making sure table twelve gets its pigs in a blanket.
Back at Terminator High, Chrome Artie has flipped over to infrared, and spots John crouching behind a car. He hops off the bus and starts towards John, firing the entire way. He catches up with John, huddling between two parked cars, and slowly raises the gun. Before he can fire (although he'd probably miss), he's smacked by a speeding truck. We hear squealing tires as the truck reverses, and stops in front of John. Cameron kicks open the passenger door, and an entire audience says in unison, "Come with me if you want to live." John thinks about it for a moment (probably something along the lines of "she drives like Billy Joel but she's pretty hot") and jumps in. As they drive off, we see Chrome Artie getting to his feet. John looks at the bullet holes on her chest (at least, I presume that's what he's looking at in that area) and she looks back at him, all, "My ocular sensors are up here."
After the commercial break, Sarah is scanning the madness at the school with all the emergency responders on scene, using binoculars. Suddenly, Chrome Artie jumps in front of her, and lifts her with one hand, throwing her backward. His face is scratched all metallicky! He grabs her by the throat. "Where is he? What have you done with him?" she yells. He cocks his head. Sarah realizes Chrome Artie doesn't know where John is, and tries to put a bullet in her head to prevent him from finding out, but Chrome says he's going to use Sarah to find John. Just then, Sarah's cell phone rings, and Chrome answers, using Sarah's voice, to calm John down and tell him to go to the house. John hangs up, looking concerned, and hops in the truck. Chrome slams Sarah's head into the ground, knocking her out.
Chrome Artie carries Sarah into the house -- wait, how did he know where they lived? If he already knew, why didn't he just go after John there instead of at the school? Anyway, he carries a still unconscious Sarah into the house and plops her down in an easy chair, waking her up, just in time to hear the back door open. It's someone with a hood covering his face, but we hear John's voice, so it must be him! Chrome Artie fires a few bullets into him, freaking Sarah out. When he walks over to confirm the kill, turns out it's Cameron. "Neat trick. You like?" says Cameron, in John's voice. Sarah takes advantage of the momentary confusion to break through the wall she was painting earlier into a hidden cache of guns; she whips out a shotgun and pumps a few rounds into Chrome, distracting him enough for Cameron to get up and start wrasslin'. The two Terminators throw each other around the house, through walls and railings, effectively ending any chance the Connors have of getting their damage deposit back. Sarah fires off a few more shots, and Chrome fires back, but Sarah ducks behind the easy chair, since bullets can't penetrate plaid upholstery.
While the Terminators slug it out, John comes running in and almost gets a shell in the face from Mom. She grabs him: "time you do what you're trained to do. You run!" she says, like SORRY I SAVED YOUR LIFE, MA, and they run out the door.
The Terminators crash through the floor, and Summer grabs a ripped-out power line and jams it into Chrome's neck. He jerks and shudders, and we see from his perspective as his electronic display winks out. Hearing the sound of a truck's engine, Cameron bolts, and outside, John and Sarah are briefly surprised when, despite having the pedal floored, Cameron has managed to hop into the back of the truck. Some nifty stunt work has her climb into the cab with the Connor clan. "Did you stop him?" asks Sarah. "One hundred twenty seconds until the system reboots," says Cameron, and she starts launching into her "I was sent here to protect John" speech and Sarah tells her to zip it. Cameron gives a look like, "John wasn't kidding about his mom being uptight." Back at the house, Chrome Artie reboots, clicks the OK box when his screen reminds him that the system did not shut down properly, and gets up.
As dawn starts to break the day, John is sleeping in the truck while Sarah watches a topless Cameron pick bullet fragments out of her scarred body in some kind of abandoned warehouse or factory, while they wait before going across the border -- but if you do that, it won't just be Chrome Artie on your tail, but los federales Terminatos (and Terminatas). "You might want to put those back in the holster," says Sarah wryly, and it takes Cameron a second or two to process that Sarah's talking about her boobs. She obligingly puts her bra back on, and Sarah quizzes her about a few things. She's from the year 2027 (two years earlier than when Kyle Reese and the original Terminator were sent back, it should be noted), has been looking for the Connors for 73 days, and that Skynet missile defense system goes online April 19, 2011 (later than in the movie iterations, presumably due to Sarah's efforts to stop Cyberdyne in T2), declares war on mankind and triggers a nuclear apocalypse two days later. Sarah asks about Miles Dyson, and Cameron says someone else built Skynet, but they don't know who; she wasn't sent here for that, which is the Terminator equivalent of saying, "Sorry, that's not my department." She then tells Sarah that her fiancé went to the police: "You should have changed your alias." Sarah tells her to go to hell (even though she knows Cameron's right), and Cameron concedes that they would have found her anyway: "They always do."
The deputy and Agent Ellison are on scene at the Connors' place, trying to figure out what happened. Well, the deputy is trying to figure out what happened; he's mystified that there was Kevlar in the chair. "What the hell happened here?" he says. Ellison, meanwhile, is acting too cool to even look around the crime scene between pulls on his soda, and says 22 people saw what happened at the school, and 19 of them reported seeing "a shooter with some kind of robot leg." He doesn't really appear to be rethinking the "Sarah Connor is crazy" assessment as much as he seems to think all the witnesses are stupid hicks. But at that very moment, the shooter with some kind of robot leg is using a roll of duct tape to fix said leg.
Back at the warehouse, the Connor Crew is readying to leave (Cameron's working on the engine), and John has a whiny conversation with Mom about how he can't keep running, and how he isn't the messiah everybody thinks he is. He wants Sarah to change the future like she did before, so his speech boils down to: "Mommy, kiss it and make it better." What mother can refuse her son like that? She agrees, and they hug. But someone better toughen John up quick, because damn. Sarah tells Cameron they're not going across the border: they're looking for Skynet.
Cameron's gassing up the truck, and John offers her a chip. She doesn't take one, but instead says that since John apologized back at the school for lying to her, she should apologize too. He tells her it's cool, since she was programmed to get close to him ("Like some hot girl is really gonna try and make friends with the new weird kid," he self-pities). Sarah's coming out of the gas station with a bag of supplies, and she pauses to watch the two of them interact. She shouldn't worry; it's not like John can get Cameron pregnant. (Upcoming clip from sweeps week: Cameron tells John, "I'm pregnant.") "In the future, you have many friends," she says, sounding like a parent reassuring an unpopular child. John asks what model she is, because she seems "different." Cameron helps herself to a chip. "I am," she says, and doesn't even answer his question.
We're off to Los Angeles, where the Connor Crew visits the angry widow of Miles Dyson. Sarah eventually convinces her that she didn't kill Miles, adding that he was a hero. "Then why are you here?" asks Mrs. Dyson. "We're back," says Cameron, by way of explanation. So far, she seems to be from the Cryptic line of Terminators. Her eyes literally flash blue, which is enough to convince Mrs. Dyson. "You told me there'd be no more machines," she says wearily, moving to the living room, and Sarah says they need her help, and wants to know if there was anyone who showed an interest in Miles's work. "There's nobody. It's all gone. You destroyed it all. You and Miles, you destroyed...you destroyed everything," says Tarissa. Cameron rushes in and says they have to go now. But you just got here!
Outside, Chrome Artie is striding up the driveway with an automatic weapon at his side. He looks at the Crew's truck, decides it's "clean," and turns his attention to the house, pulling up a blueprint.
Inside, Sarah asks for Tarissa's help: "For my son." That must have worked, because just as Chrome Artie is about to head up the steps of the Dysons' palatial house, the sound of an engine revving from inside a nearby garage catches his attention. He stops, and an SUV suddenly breaks down the garage door. Rather than, you know, GETTING OUT OF THE WAY, the Terminator does that confused head-cock thing, and gets bounced off the rear door, cracking the rear window with his head. The SUV peels off, with Chrome shooting at them, blowing out the back window, before he breaks into a run. As he passes the Crew's old truck, Cameron pushes a button on her key fob. Locking it so no one steals the stereo? Close: the truck blows up, catching Artie in the explosion and sending him hurtling through the air. I guess when he scanned the truck, he missed the explosives Cameron planted.
In the Dyson-mobile, the trio discover that Sarah's been hit. And back at the Dyson place, an increasingly banged-up Artie stands up, ever more robotically. If he fails in his mission to kill John Connor, he can probably enter some break-dancing competitions for kicks.
After the commercial break, Sarah drops John off at a drugstore and orders him to get bandages and rubbing alcohol, while she and Cameron find cover around back, in yet another abandoned warehouse/garage/factory/whatever. Sarah readies herself for impromptu surgery from Cameron, which she wants done before John gets back. Her sensitive boy won't be able to handle this? He'll be a big help on the battlefield of the future. Cameron helps Sarah up onto a table and rips her sleeve, while Sarah starts blubbering about how she'll lose her mind if they keep running. "He'll leave me. He'll leave me," she says. Cameron looks on blankly. Sometimes at work I wish I were programmed not to give a shit.
The morning, Sarah wakes up, feeling better. "We need to go," says Cameron, and when Sarah asks, "Where?" Cameron merely says, "I'll show you."
The trio stroll into a bank, where Cameron says she has a "safety deposit box." When did she get it? "1963," says Cameron, without any further explanation, as the three of them pass the bank's cornerstone, upon which a plaque announces the stone was laid in 1963. Banking etiquette must have been different back then, because inside, Cameron grabs the gun of the elderly security guard and yells for everyone to get down on the floor; one of the tellers pushes the silent alarm button, as Cameron orders another one to give her the keys to the safety deposit boxes and cocks the gun to show she's serious. Sarah looks unsure, but has probably realized that asking Cameron anything is only going to produce one of her vague non-answers.
Downstairs, Cameron orders the teller to lock them into the room with the safe-deposit boxes and to move away from the door ("I'll know if you don't," she says, with just a hint of threat). Thusly locked in, Cameron punches in one of the boxes and produces a few key rings from inside it, and tosses a couple to Sarah and John, telling them to use the keys to open the corresponding boxes and put everything they find on the table. "Carefully," she stresses, and John hops to instantly, while Sarah moves a little more slowly, but picks up speed when she recognizes they're assembling some kind of weapon.
Outside, the entire Los Angeles Police Department is mobilizing around the bank. Over in the FBI offices, a colleague flags Agent Ellison down to check out the security feed from the bank robbery. "Don't you know 'em?" asks the other agent. "Less and less all the time," he says. Given that there was a student who was shot several times, whose body disappeared and who is now holding up a bank with two other fugitives, I think his bafflement is entirely understandable.
John asks if the weapon pieces are from the future, and Cameron reminds him that you can't transport anything non-living through time. "You sent someone back to build it," she says, and John looks impressed with himself. Given that Bill and Ted, during the course of their excellent adventure, managed to come up with the idea of sending stuff back in time at convenient moments, he needn't be too smug.
Outside, Chrome Artie has decided to join the party by driving right up to the bank and walking in, because while the entire goddamn police force is staking out the bank, no one thought of cordoning off the area. Artie checks out the SWAT team waiting to make their move, comes to the conclusion that they pose no threat, and walks right through the glass door into the back. The police officers do nothing. Maybe they thought Artie was a hostage negotiator?
In the safe-deposit vault the gang is still putting together its weapons-grade Lego when something pounds the safe wall. Artie pounds away outside while Cameron explains that it took their best engineer eight months to scavenge the parts for the amazing-looking gun being placed in Sarah's hands. "When the isotope solution turns red, fire," says Cameron. Sarah's all, "Uh, 'isotope'? Is this thing nuclear?" No, not really, "explains" Cameron, heading off to another area of the vault. She opens a box that contains an optical scanner that checks out her eyes, triggering the opening of a few more boxes. Which is good, because it's not like Cameron can just punch the doors in.
"The engineer got a job building the vault, so we'd always have a way back home." Inside the bigger boxes is a bunch of old-school machinery and a computer screen with a readout with such encouraging fields as "Current Date" and "Target Date." I think I saw a flux capacitor, but I can't be sure. "You want to stop Skynet? You want to kill Skynet?" asks Cameron. Well, stopping Skynet costs, Sarah. And this is where you start paying. In sweat. Artie has now ripped off enough of the door to stick an arm through and fire off some shots (since he can't hit them when he can see them, he's certainly going to miss when he's firing blind), and then he goes back to punching his way through. The computer says Target Date: 2007, and John really, really wants to follow the pretty Terminator lady into the future. Artie starts peeling the safe door from its frame, just as the isotope solution embedded the gun goes from yellow to red. "Do it!" Sarah yells at Cameron, who engages the whatsit. The familiar blue electrical bubble surrounds the trio as Sarah fires her weapon at Artie, popping his head off like a three-year-old does a dandelion.
The gang reappears in the middle of a busy freeway, sans clothes, causing many cars to swerve or skid to keep from hitting them. John looks as horrified as you can imagine, if you were to find yourself nude with a hot girl and your mom, both of whom are just as naked. Hilariously, it's Cameron who first seems to realize, "Hey, let's get out of here," and leads the three of them off the road and down into a nearby construction site. Sarah lingers long enough for some kid in a car to snap a picture with his cell phone.
The site's flashing roadside sign tells us it's September 2007. "Where are we?" asks Sarah. "Same where. Different when," says Cameron. So in just eight years this area of L.A. went from a busy commercial area to total freeway? That doesn't sound -- oh, right. Time-travel. Killer robots. Changing the future. I'm nitpicking over implausibly efficient rezoning and construction.
A car drives up (into the construction site?) that happens to contains three people. Cameron strolls out to greet them, and fortunately it turns out to be three drunken rapists. I say fortunately, because it could have been a carload of nuns in there, and whoever it was was going to get their asses kicked to provide the Connor Crew with some clothes. Sarah smiles as she watches Cameron kick ass.
After getting dressed, John says, "So this is where it all starts? This is where Skynet begins?" "Somewhere in there," says Cameron. "And no one knows we're here," says John. Sarah shakes her head, and adds: "You're safe." In unison, John and Sarah say, "No one is ever safe." Proud moment for the mother of the leader of the future resistance right there.
Cameron drives while Sarah voice-overs another soliloquy about her son and the future of the world and blah blah blah. Elsewhere, Agent Ellison is working at his desk and not paying attention to the newscaster talking about what he presumes is a college prank, with grainy imagery of Sarah Connor staring into the camera. Somewhat more rapt, however, is Charley, staring at the television while a blonde woman behind him says, "Honey, did you hear me? We're late." Charley's all, yeah, yeah, I heard you, except for the fact the former love of my life, a fugitive from the law, is naked on the television so just HOLD ON.
The voice-over continues as Sarah, John, and Cameron stroll around some house looking like militia members at a compound. Impossibly cute and toned militia members. "And even though we've traveled through time, bent the rules of nature, they will keep coming for him. Keep trying to kill him. But until that day...it's gonna be one hell of a dogfight." In the original pilot, Sarah said it was going to be a "goddamn" dogfight. You can kill all you want, lady, but don't you dare take the Lord's name in vain. This is FOX.