In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
Cameron's figured out that Chrome Artie is still "alive," because in the grainy cell phone video shot from inside a car at night, she's able to magnify a section of screen well enough to see Artie's skull, eyes ablaze. Piece that with the news of a stolen shipment of coltan (which is a metal used to make Terminators even awesomer), and the Connor Crew gets the idea to attack Chrome Artie while he's (they assume) vulnerable. Well, it's John's idea, and Sarah's not wild about it. But he ignores her, and things go pear-shaped, since the one responsible for the coltan theft is not Chrome Artie (who's still caught up in a totally different show: Extreme Terminator Makeover, forcing a plastic surgeon to make him look like some poor schmuck who leaves half-eaten Hot Pockets around the house). But since there is enough coltan to make 500-plus little baby Terminators, John wants to, you know, be a hero and destroy it, or get rid of it.
Only he winds up getting himself accidentally kidnapped, and gets taken to the future site of a Terminator factory (Cameron's own birthplace, actually!), and locked inside a blast shelter with a sleeping Terminator standing sentinel. John has to get the key to the blast doors from around the dormant Terminator's neck. He does it, which is one more reason why he's the future leader of the human resistance and I'm not: if I had to do that, there would have been a lot more pants-shitting. The doors open; Cameron fights the new guy, wins, and locks him inside the blast shelter; and they dump the coltan in a lake (except for one piece that Cameron takes with her, which could be her parents, after all).
Meanwhile, Ellison is still trying to piece together all these murder scenes with crazy not-blood blood. He's being completely undermined by one of his colleagues, who I'm guessing will turn out to be a Terminator from the Office Douchebag series. "Come with me if you want to spend all day in meetings working on spreadsheets and filling out paperwork." Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Dr. David Lyman, a plastic surgeon, sits at his desk taking oral notes on one of his patients, when he hears a noise. "Hello?" he says, and gets up to investigate. He walks through the hallway of his deserted clinic, and finally finds the Homeless Snake Eyes, cycling through a computer file of, presumably, patients. "You can't be in here," says the doctor, and not, "Also, those are confidential." Sarah starts in with a voice-over, reflecting on telling John the story of the Golem of Prague, although it might have helped if someone told her not to pronounce it "Gollum." Homeless Snake Eyes has settled on some dude played by Garrett Dillahunt (his analysis of Dillahunt's facial structure is that it appears to be a "92% match"), recently seen as Jesus in the awesomely titled The Book of Daniel, as well as appearing in No Country For Old Men. Also, if Peter Krause ever needs someone to portray his brother, Dillahunt should get that role every time.
"You do reconstructive surgery?" says Snake Eyes in his electronicky voice. Lyman: yep, just come back on Monday. "I need reconstructive surgery," no-duhs Snake Eyes. Lyman tells Snake Eyes to leave now, or he'll call the police. Snake Eyes turns to face Lyman; he's taken his goggles off, and we can see his creepy, unnatural skin. But it's not all bad; based on his new look, he's going to be starring in White Chicks 2.
As Sarah's voice-over tells us about how John the big baby couldn't sleep for a week after the Golem story ends with the Golem killing everybody, Sarah looks at John in his room, on his computer, browser on a tribute page for Jordon Cowan, also known as She Bangs. The top entry reads, "too bad you were hot!" Hee! The entry reads, "We were just a [sic] sharing a yogurt yesterday" like maybe she went to school with Super Mario. Just as John starts typing his own entry ("I'm sorry") Sarah strolls in to say he's up a little late. Noticing his homework, she understands his insomnia, since she could never get her head around covalent and ionic bonding either. Her real reason for coming in is to ask if he wants to talk about whatever's bothering him. But he won't admit that anything is bothering him, so Sarah talks about how there's a memorial service for Jordon this week. That'll be fun. Let's hope the guy who yelled "Jump!" and the "too bad you were hot!" guy can show up to pay their respects in person. Sarah asks if John's planning to go, and he snaps off some garbage about how "plans are for people in control of their own lives." Sarah, instead of smacking him, says she doesn't want him to blame himself. "Who said I blame myself?" says John, glaring at Cameron, who's just walked in with the news that Chrome Artie is there. Not there there, but now there. You know?
Cameron explains that she monitors the media for threats ("I don't sleep," she reminds everyone). She appears to accomplish this not by using Google Alerts, but by actually buying newspapers. Sarah checks out a headline about a fire at the Port of Oakland being blamed on arson. Because of the fire, a large shipment of coltan had to be rerouted to Los Angeles, and that's bad, because coltan will be a big ingredient in the endoskeleton alloy for Skynet's Terminators.
Sarah doesn't see how that connects to Chrome Artie, so Sarah shows her (after a brief inability to switch inputs from Video 1 to Video 2 on the television). We watch the grainy cell phone video shot when the Connor Crew jumped forward in time and were all naked on the bridge. Cameron implausibly is able to blow up and enhance the background well enough for us to see Chrome Artie's grinning skull. "It's just the head," says Sarah, who I'd like to point out is familiar with being attacked by mere fragments of Terminators. I'd also like to point out that nothing not living is supposed to be able to pass through, right? Anyone? "His chip is intact. We're programmed to repair ourselves," says Cameron, who says Artie might need coltan for a missing piece, and then he will continue with his mission to hunt and kill. "I know what his mission is," snaps Sarah. Fortunately, Sarah's got a plan!
...And that plan is to run. They still have some money from the safe house, so they'll set up across the border, "off the grid." Shouldn't they always be off the grid anyway? John gets pissed, because Sarah said they weren't going to run anymore. "In fact, isn't that the premise of this entire series? In how many episodes are we going to have this debate?" he yells at her. Or maybe that was me. John wants to "hack the port schedule" or whatever so they'll know when the coltan container comes in, and wait for Artie, so they can get him while he's vulnerable. Sarah considers it. "The ship comes in tonight?" she asks Cameron ("5 AM" is the answer), and it's just like when you were a kid and you bug your parents for something, and Mom says no a hundred times, and then finally looks at your father and says, "Maybe we could think about going to Disneyland this summer." Except family trips don't usually involve shotguns and C-4.
Over to the docks we go. Here's hoping John didn't stay up too late hacking his whatchamajigger to find the coltan, since it appears they could have just shown up and looked for the big crates with COLTAN stenciled on the side. A crew loads the coltan onto the back of a truck in a warehouse while Cameron skulks around in the shadows. Nearby, John and Sarah are getting the C-4 charges ready. Cameron comes back to report that there's no sign of Chrome Artie yet.
Sarah starts setting the charges by the warehouse entrance, figuring that Chrome Artie will have to go through there.
Just then, some dude with mirrored sunglasses and '80s-boy-band blond hair comes stomping up, carrying a gun. He's definitely walking robotically. He hasn't seen Sarah, who whisper-asks Cameron if that's Chrome Artie. No answer, so Sarah ridiculously pulls her shotgun on the guy, who doesn't appear at all surprised, just points his gun at her. Cameron jumps him, and flings him into some barrels, knocking him out. Cameron strides over and picks him up briefly to make sure he's out. "He'll survive," she says. "He's human," says Sarah. "Not a very strong one," says Cameron. How unfortunate for this guy that he WALKS LIKE A ROBOT.
This little battle has apparently failed to attract the attention of the guys loading the truck like twenty feet away. The truck starts up, and drives off. And only then does the Connor Crew notice three other guys knocked out and tied up nearby. Sarah asks Cameron if Chrome Artie could have people working with him: "Does that happen?" Because Sarah would have no idea if Terminators ever work with humans, I guess. Fortunately for Sarah, Cameron's not built for sarcasm and merely says, "You work with me." "We have to follow that truck," says Sarah.
Yes, we follow the truck to another warehouse, where it gets moved from one truck to another truck via forklift. "If that's the stuff you're made of, no wonder you're so dense," says John, and Cameron fails to detect the insult and instead says that coltan's used because of its heat resistance, not its density, and John and Sarah share a smile while Cameron rattles off the history of Terminator-making materials and how Terminators made with coltan have a much higher melting point. "You know what I love about you guys?" says Sarah wryly. "Even when you've evolved into the ultimate indestructible killing machine, you're not above self-examination and improvement." Again, Cameron takes Sarah at face value, and thanks her. "Please shut up," says Sarah, transitioning nicely from passive-aggressive to aggressive-bitchy.
Are you guys finished? Can you get back to saving the world now? In the warehouse, one of the dudes is spray-painting military tags on a Jeep, and one guy, presumably the leader, says they have to get moving. The underlings gripe about getting paid, but shuffle off somewhere, presumably out of sight, since the guy just picks up another crate of coltan with his bare hands and moves it into the back of the truck. Well, there's your Terminator. "He's not damaged at all," says Sarah. Cameron does her analysis thing, which you'd think she already would have done on all those guys, and confirms that it's not Chrome Artie. "Another one?" says Sarah, who really should be getting used to this by now. She wants to know why this Terminator has "all this," since she thought Terminators were just made to hunt and kill. "They perform whatever missions they're programmed for," says Cameron. Yeah, Sarah, like, FOR EXAMPLE, protecting your son. But this only raises another question: just what is this mission?
We're back at the plastic surgeon's office, only this time it's a crime scene. And Ellison's there, because, he tells the detective, the weird not-blood blood has shown up again. Dr. David Lyman is dead on the floor, which is where the office manager found him this morning. The weird blood was found in a drain. Other than that, the place is clean. "Nothing missing. No motive. Zip," says the detective. Ellison explains the not-blood connection to the other crime scenes. "It's not natural," says Ellison, who adds that he sleeps better at night when things are natural. One of the detectives has something: videotape of a patient at the clinic Friday night. He's in Homeless Snake Eyes' clothes, but his skin condition has improved quite a bit -- he looks like Garrett Dillahunt! The patient is identified as George Lazlo, whose nose and chin were done by the clinic a while ago.
Back at the warehouse, the Connor Crew is considering their options. John figures they should blow up the C-4 when the truck leaves the warehouse. You're never going to believe this, but Sarah would rather step back, since they don't know what the story is here. "So we run, in other words," snaps John. Even Cameron's assessment is that it's too dangerous, but John's not hearing it: "It's war! War is dangerous!" He wonders how many future enemy soldiers are contained in that truckload of metal; he wants to get on the truck and track it to wherever it's going, which is probably where they're going to build the soldiers. But Mom still isn't budging, and uses John's full name, so you know she means business. "If you die, they win," she points out. She and Cameron get in the truck, leaving John by himself. Not really the brightest move. In the truck, Cameron says her estimate, from the volume of the coltan shipment, is that there's enough metal for five hundred and thirty endoskeletons. Sarah looks like she might be having second thoughts, and glances back towards the warehouse -- where she sees John wriggling through the open window.
She jumps out of the truck and tries to stop him, but Cameron stops her, since if the Terminator sees them, it'll find John, so they just watch from the window as John sneaks onto the back of the truck, and wedges his BlackBerry into one of the crates. The only problem is that, as he's trying to sneak out, one of the coltan thieves hops up in the back of the truck (and he's armed, too) while another one rolls down the truck's back door. John shrinks back out of sight, while Sarah looks on, horrified. But before she can do anything to help, some guy behind them wants to know (using his gun for emphasis) just what the hell they're doing there. Sarah slowly approaches him and asks if he's seen a dachshund puppy around. He seems bewildered (probably amazed that that's the best lie she could come up with) and lowers his guard enough for Sarah to knock him out. Unfortunately, by the time they finish dealing with him, the truck is already leaving the warehouse, with the Terminator following in a Hummer. So she's lost John. But on the bright side, her "I told you so" speech later on will be entirely justified.
After the commercial break, Sarah and Cameron seem to have found some office, in which Cameron's using a computer to track John's cell phone signal (yet she couldn't switch Video 1 to Video 2). There's a problem, though: the jouncing and bumping in the truck shakes John's BlackBerry loose, and it falls to the floor, shattering its face. The guard comes over to investigate, and gets conked on the head with a slab of coltan wielded by John, and he's out. But so is the cell phone signal, making Sarah frantic, and she smacks the computer. Cameron says breaking the computer won't help. "I lost John!" yells Sarah. Cameron says, "I understand." "How can you possibly understand?" says Sarah. "Without John, your life has no purpose." Oh. She understands completely. Sarah prattles on about how she shouldn't have let John talk her into this, that it was too soon for this... "Is it? The world ends in four years," says Cameron, like THANK YOU FOR LIFTING OUR SPIRITS, CAMERON. Back in the truck, John's managed to lift up the rear door enough to reach the outside lock to pick it, but can't pull it off.
Agent Ellison is lost in thought over the case, looking at clinic pictures of George Lazlo and comparing them with the surveillance footage. Agent Brassy comes in to playfully bust his chops, but he wows her with his intense diligence. Handing over a picture of Lazlo, he asks if this guy came up in her investigation of the Pico murders. Nope. And instead of being impressed and or inspired that Ellison actually feels a need to SOLVE a case once in a while, Brassy says, "Crank up the Sugar Ray and call Monica Lewinsky because it's 1999 again." Wow. How lame to automatically reference Monica Lewinsky for 1999. I mean, "uh..."
Anyway, Brassy teases Ellison about wanting to impress the higher-ups, and then inspires him by saying, "This case is a dog," and "You're not young," but before she can inspire him right into hanging himself, another agent -- this would be a young agent -- named Stewart (Ellison doesn't look super-jazzed to see him) strolls into the office to ask about someone Ellison's got waiting in an interrogation room. George Lazlo.
Ellison strolls down the hall with Stewart, who asks what this is about. "It's about my case," says Ellison, in a tone clearly meaning, "Back off." Stopping outside the interrogation room, Ellison and Stewart look in on Lazlo, just sitting there. Ellison asks if Lazlo looks like a killer to Stewart. "Everyone looks like a killer to me," says Stewart, summing up overzealous U.S. law enforcement pretty nicely.
On to the interrogation: Lazlo is an actor, but is kind of testy when Ellison wants to know if he's been in anything he might have seen. "It's been slow," says Lazlo, who wants to know what this is about (and clearly doesn't want to reveal his porn-studded résumé). Ellison says there are six people dead, perhaps by someone looking to change his identity. "So is that why you had the work? Chin, nose? You kill the doctor to cover your tracks?" says Ellison. Right, because there was such a difference in the before-and-after PhotoShopped pictures of Garrett Dillahunt. A witness is going to be unable to pick Lazlo out of a lineup, because if Lazlo turns his head to the side, there's less of a bump in his nose and his chin is slightly more defined.
Lazlo doesn't say anything, and in strolls "Delores," who's going to take a blood sample (if Lazlo consents, right?). "If you're not my guy, you're out of here in an hour, tops," says Ellison, and Lazlo wordlessly presents his arm to Delores, but keeps staring at Ellison. Delores briefly has trouble finding a vein. Oh, and then she does. Nice little half-second of tension there. "You guys are a bunch of fascists, you know that?" says Lazlo. Ellison is untroubled by the accusation.
Elsewhere, the warehouse guard comes to, strapped to a chair, Sarah and Cameron watching him. Before he gets the mistaken idea that he's in a Penthouse letter come to life, Sarah slugs him hard across the face a few times, ordering him to tell them where the truck went or she'll beat him to death. "If you beat him to death, he won't be able to tell us anything," points out Cameron. But the guard says he's not going to tell them anything anyway. Sarah brandishes a big knife, which doesn't scare the guard at all, saying Sarah doesn't have "the stones." Well, we're going to see how big his stones are; Sarah uses the knife to cut his bonds, and then jams the Rambo knife into a nearby desk. "You can go. If you can get past her," says Sarah, and stands aside. The guard stands up, looks around. Cameron merely cocks her head.
Cut immediately to a very frightened-looking guard driving Sarah and Cameron down the highway in a Humvee. The guard glances back at Cameron, who smirks at him. Aw! I wanted to see the ass-kicking! Sarah's reading a map. "McGuire gunnery range? This place is the size of L.A. County! Where exactly are they?" The guard doesn't answer. "She's talking to you," says Cameron. The guard tells the women the convoy was headed to a decommissioned arms depot in a corner of the range. But he doesn't know anything; he was just supposed to guard the warehouse and clean up afterwards. Meanwhile, up ahead, the convoy arrives at the depot, with the Terminator showing his ID to the iPod-wearing guard, who lets them in.
George Lazlo is at home, examining his poor little puncture wound. "Your tax dollars at work," he gripes, as he swigs beer and gets a freshly nuked Hot Pocket from the microwave. There's a knock at the door. "What, you need more blood?" he yells as he walks to the door. He's shocked by who's standing there, but we don't see just yet. What we do see is someone grab Lazlo by the throat and carry him through the house (Lazlo drops the beer and the Hot Pocket, so at least he'll avoid the diarrhea later). And now, in front of the mirror, we see that George Lazlo is being held by...George Lazlo. The real George Lazlo starts screaming. The George Lazlo Tribute imitates him for a moment (getting the voice down, I presume) and then slams the Non-Famous Original into the mirror, killing him.
As the truck slows to a stop, John looks over at the still-unconscious guard. Two more guards stroll around to the back of the truck. "Didn't you lock it?" says one, noticing that the padlock is open. The other guy says he did. When they open the door and the guard inside doesn't immediately jump out to greet him, instead of CHECKING THE TRUCK, they assume that, because this guy had been threatening to bail all week, he must have opened the lock from inside the truck, gotten out, then closed the door and chained it again, while the truck was rolling down the highway. So they stomp off somewhere. Well, that's all mighty fortunate for John, as it gives him a chance to hop out of the truck and see where he is. There are blue barrels and giant machinery and a big sign with the radiation symbol and "FALLOUT SHELTER" on it. So, not Chuck E. Cheese, notes a disappointed John, who hides in the corner and waits. ["It's more sanitary where he is." -- Sars]
Ellison for some reason is presenting what he knows about the case to a room full of fellow agents and superiors. "Six victims," he notes, that come from six different worlds. "What's the connection?" he asks, presumably rhetorically, but the -- let's call him the director -- says, essentially, "Um, none?" and says that the victims from Agent Brassy's case were just drug dealers. Ellison says there's a blood match (which I do imagine ought to prove just a little more troubling to more agents than just Ellison) and brings up a picture of Lazlo on the overhead projector. And this is where Stewart's cock-blocking -- I mean case-blocking begins. He stands up (egregiously calling Ellison "Jim" -- "James", Ellison icily corrects him) and says the blood sample cleared Lazlo.
But Ellison's theory is that whoever killed Dr. Lyman was in the office for two days. He figures the killer had Lyman make him look like Lazlo. But what about scars, and bruising? asks Agent Brassy. Hyperbaric oxygen chamber plus makeup, says Ellison. Yeah, but wouldn't he still have to heal like Wolverine? "Actually," begins Stewart, standing up again. If he ever shows up on the TWoP bulletin boards, he's going to get warned for tone SO FAST. Stewart explains that he asked the nurse about all this, and their anesthesia levels were unchanged over the weekend, and it'd be impossible for someone to spend four or five hours under the knife like that. "You can't take that kind of pain," says Stewart. Ellison looks like he'd be willing to at least test that theory out on Stewart himself. The director doesn't seem to be too concerned about Stewart investigating Ellison's case without Ellison's knowledge, just wants to make sure Ellison got a release from Lazlo for the blood sample. But since we don't know anything of Ellison's investigation prior to Sarah and John jumping ahead in time, I'm willing to accept that the director might himself have assigned Stewart to keep an eye on Ellison.
Outside the meeting, Stewart's all collegial, "Sorry, man," before adding, "But facts are facts." Yeah, and facts usually get shared between agents before presenting to the big boss. Agent Brassy sympathizes, but also notes that things don't add up. Ellison says that's only because they don't have all the numbers yet. "No one expects anything from you on this," says Agent Brassy, once again doing her best to keep Ellison's morale up. She wants to know why he's rocking the boat. "The last time I had a case where this many things didn't add up, three people blew themselves up in a bank," he says. Will he feel better or worse when he inevitably finds out those three people are still alive? "I just...feel it, Greta," he says, which Agent Brassy manages to turn into a masturbation joke. Glad we had this chat, GRETA.
Elsewhere, Cameron and Sarah's prisoner is shitting himself standing in the middle of a field, while Cameron gingerly walks away from him. "You can't leave me here!" he wails. "Would have been faster to kill him. Sometimes you seem inefficient," Cameron calls to Sarah, who's waiting in the truck. This is as Cameron walks past the red MINEFIELD sign. Ah. Right by the side of the road like that? Really? "I'm not for you to understand," says Sarah, who says she sometimes does stupid, illogical, inefficient things. "Get used to it," she says as Cameron gets in the Humvee. They drive off, leaving the guard to...die, I guess. Wow. Cold. I like it.
Back at the fallout shelter, John watches as the two guards have brought their boss back to the truck, saying their partner bailed, and had been bitching about money all week. "Then I wanna thank you for your service," says their employer, who calmly lifts up his gun and shoots both of them in the head. "I KNEW we should have gotten up a union!" yells one of them before he dies. John seems rather stunned that a Terminator could just kill people like that. The Terminator takes a key on a chain around his neck and sticks it in a panel near the door. The massive shelter doors slide closed, and the lights go off, leaving only the emergency power lights on. More dramatic! And then, the Terminator just stands in front of the door. Not moving. John watches him. He's gotta be wondering if he's going to have to wait for the four years in here before the resistance starts.
Sarah and Cameron drive the hummer right into Depot 37. But there's no one there. "Did that guy lie to you?" Sarah asks Cameron, who says no, adding that this is where the factory will be where she'll be made, along with many others. Right over there, behind those giant blast doors. Cameron says in the future, coltan is rare, much of it getting destroyed in the bombing, so they must be stockpiling it in the bomb shelters where it'll be safe. Here's an idea: send back a Terminator to tell Skynet, "Hey, lay off blowing up the coltan."
Inside the bunker, John is still watching the silent Terminator. But the guard he conked out in the back of the truck is now awake, and pointing a gun at him. John almost immediately calms the guy down and says he's just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and tells "Mike" that the Terminator (whom Mike calls "Carter") shot Mike's two compadres. "He'll kill us if he finds us, so we need to get out." "Carter killed them?" says Mike, and John says that since Mike's worked with Carter, he must have noticed how Carter seems kind of off? Like how he seems like he'd just as soon kill you as look at you? And how he's always talking about what a bitch time travel is? And how Carter goes to the Minit-Lube every three months for a checkup, but he walks instead of taking a car? Mike is all, "Now that you mention it, he is always talking about how he and his fellow cyborgs are going to need this coltan to crush the human resistance twenty years from now," and he stomps off to confront Carter.
John scurries off to hide while Mike points his gun at Carter and demands his money (and the shares of his dead buddies). Carter doesn't respond, until Mike pushes him, toppling him over (Carter breaks his fall with the knuckles of his fists). Uh oh. There go the red eyes. Better get scarce, Mike. Carter grabs Mike by the throat, and reduces his demand from money to, you know, just opening the door. "Thank you for your service," says Carter. See, no hard feelings! So why does Mike have a fire a bullet into Carter's face? Not that it does anything other than give Carter a cool metallic scar over one eye. Oh, and Mike gets his neck snapped.
And now, back to the wall. Carter goes motionless again. John fishes a coin out of his pocket and tosses it to see if there's any reaction. There's none, but then I probably wouldn't move for anything other than paper money either. Sufficiently convinced Carter's not going to snap his spine, John spots a phone in some sort of control room. "Oh, God, please," he whispers as he picks it up. Fortunately, there's a dial tone.
Outside, Sarah and Cameron have pretty much given up. "It's not your fault," says Cameron. "Maybe it's yours," says Sarah, who then bitches that maybe if Cameron had let John try to save Jordon, or at least let him think he had a choice, he wouldn't have "gone off the reservation." Even though one of the strict family rules is "keep your head down," right, Sarah? "John does these things," says Cameron. "Not the John I know," says Sarah. Again, what? Let's just assume that this is the distraught mother talking, and not a moron. "The John I know," says Cameron.
The blame game is interrupted by Sarah's cell phone ringing. It's John, wanting to know if she can come pick him up. He explains about the frozen Terminator. Cameron figures Carter has finished his mission, and is in standby mode until he's moved or triggered (and has a reboot time of 15 seconds). John theorizes the trigger is probably the opening of the blast doors. Sarah wants him to open the blast doors, and as soon as the door cracks open, he should run. My closed captioning says, "Cameron will deal with him," but I do not hear her say this. Probably goes without saying anyway. John's staring at the motionless Terminator, and Sarah has to yell at him so he snaps out of it.
John walks over to the door panel, but pushing the buttons does absolutely nothing. John looks over at Carter, the key hanging around his neck like Carter spends a couple of hours on his own after school before his mom gets home. This is where I curl up into a fetal position, but John steels himself and gingerly pulls the chain over Carter's head, inserts the key, and opens the door. Light breaks over Carter's face as we go to commercial.
The door opens and Cameron strides in, picking up Carter and chucking him to the back of the shelter. The flying toasters over his eyeballs turn off, and his eyes turn red. Sarah runs in too, because John did not, as per her orders, come running out of the shelter. He's fired up the truck. She climbs in with him, but he's having a hell of a time throwing the thing into gear. "Step on the clutch! Hard!" she yells, as John grinds the gears into little nubby things.
Meanwhile, Carter's grabbed himself a piece of coltan and is swinging it like a deranged Jack Nicholson on an L.A. freeway. Cameron's getting her hip-hugger-clad ass kicked.
"If you're going to be a hero, you gotta learn how to drive a stick," Sarah snaps, before grabbing the stick herself (John's hand still on it) and throwing the truck into first herself. Well, WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE? For god's sake, woman, you're not in a mall parking lot on a Sunday morning preparing John for his first driving test. And now, because it took so long for the truck to get going, Carter's finished with Cameron and is front of the truck, pushing it and preventing it from leaving the shelter. A shotgun blast to the face from Sarah gets Carter to loosen his grip enough for the truck to move forward, driving over Carter, with a fully recovered Cameron sashaying out beside them, stopping to turn the key and shut the doors. Outside, she hops into the truck with them. "But can't he get out?" says John, whereupon Cameron shows him that she took the key. I think it's worth noting that we didn't see Carter still in the shelter as the doors closed.
Meanwhile, Ellison shows up at the George Lazlo impersonator's place. He spots the not-eaten Hot Pocket on the floor, where the original Lazlo dropped it, and attempts to bond with Lazlo about how awesome Hot Pockets are or whatever. But enough about Hot Pockets! Ellison's there to warn Lazlo that someone maybe trying to steal his identity. "What would they do with that?" asks Lazlo 2.0. "Steal, chat, harm intimidate others, damage the national psyche," suggests Ellison. Awesome. He hands over his card to Lazlo, and says to call him if he sees or hears anything unusual. "Thank you for your help," says Lazlo agreeably, and Ellison seems momentarily taken aback, perhaps since he's not being a called a fascist right at this moment.
Cameron's driving the truck full of coltan down a hill while Sarah voice-overs more blah-blah (I've already started tuning these out) about the golem. Why they didn't just put the truck in neutral and push it down the hill is a mystery to me, but I guess it's cooler to have Cameron punch out the front windshield and then calmly walk on the roof of the truck, hopping off just before it plunges off the cliff and into the ocean. Sarah and John are waiting by the truck, and Sarah asks if he's okay. He says he's fine. "How many times are we going to have this talk?" he says, not unpleasantly. Sarah smiles.
At home, Cameron heads off to a corner of the house, and a grouchy John says he should finish his homework. Sarah says she has to finish her voice-over, in which she's talking about man's pride letting him think that he can control everything he creates (e.g. the Golem, John Connor, Skynet). Meanwhile, in her room, Cameron unwraps the slab of coltan she saved. She looks at it, tilting her head. Looking for a family resemblance? It ain't heavy (metal), it's my brother. In his room, John's hands are shaking. "We animate them with magic, and never truly know what they will do," says Sarah.