By Daniel
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The Terminator crew visits a doctor whose name is on one of those lists of people who need to be either assassinated or protected from assassination. To figure out which it is, they start seeing him as patients, which would have been a good idea anyway. And this is where Catherine Weaver takes her "daughter" Savannah, because a little girl can tell the difference between her smiling, loving human mommy, and the humorless automaton who is now looking after her. Weaver's got her own problems -- the AI program her company's working on seems to be on the fritz, just displaying random images, but it turns out it's actually behaving like a bored child with not enough to do. It's telling jokes! Only jokes that a little kid would tell. Real cornball old jokes. Hey, here's a joke: "What do you call a fish with no eyes? Fsh!
Derek gets a blast from the past -- and a roll in the hay -- from an old girlfriend who's come from the future. Not to help protect John, not on some other mission -- she's actually AWOL from the war. Derek's disgusted by that, but not so disgusted that, as I've mentioned, he doesn't do her -- and the surveillance photos she hides under the bed indicate she's not being honest anyway.
There's another visitor from the future, this one a woman terminator who kills the receptionist in Sherman's office and tries to take her place, only she has the bad luck to show up for work at the exact same time Sarah shows up. They fight, and Cameron manages to literally twist the Terminator into a pretzel, shape. Generally Terminators are stronger than that, so it's clear the show just thought it would be cool to hire a contortionist for the fight scene.
And John's not kidding about really wanting to continue with the therapy. He's freaked out from what happened in the first episode of the season -- and the suspicions of many are confirmed. John's the one who killed that guy in the season opener, not Sarah. I wish it had been Sarah. She'd probably be moping a lot less about it.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!While Sarah and Cameron creep through someone's house at night (Cameron even checking out the medicine cabinet -- how rude!), Sarah voiceovers some as-far-as-I-know new information about her dad, who slept with a gun under his pillow, and how he never talked about the war he fought. Timeline-wise, we're talking Vietnam, I suppose. "I never thought I'd follow in his footsteps," she says. Sarah and Cameron bolt when the homeowner comes out in his bathrobe, wondering if anyone's there.
Then there is a commercial for a certain auto company, which just kind of happens to star John and Sarah and Cameron, who have no idea what they're supposed to be doing with Dr. Boyd Sherman, child psychologist, whose name was one of the ones on the wall.
Over at that crazy offices where you just might get an icepick through the eye for urinating on your co-worker, there is some kind of photo shoot going involving Catherine Weaver, who is amazing the photographer to move her head exactly the quarter-inch or half-inch he demands. Unfortunately, when he asks for a "warmer" smile -- well, it would be like a shark for one.
The photographer's assistant tries to cajole Catherine's daughter Savannah to join Mommy for the photo shoot, but Savannah refuses, and when Catherine calmly tries to talk to her, Savannah wets herself (and the floor) and runs away. Careful, kid! God knows you don't want to get that on Mommy. Everyone at the photo shoot stares at Catherine.
Later, Catherine tries to get some parenting advice from the assistant, only blows it by referring to Savannah as an "it." The assistant admits that she had some troubles with her own child (Catherine positively perks up when she says, "Some days I wanted to kill him") but she took him to see someone, a miracle worker. Savannah isn't Helen Keller, lady. Besides, the problem's clearly Catherine, who despite having passed easily for human for god knows how long, is for some reason moving more robotically and taking things more literally than we've seen before.
So the Terminator family is going to see Dr. Boyd Sherman, pretending to be a dysfunctional family, I suppose, with Sarah pretending to not think counseling is necessary (although it's clear later that she really doesn't think it's necessary), and Cameron slips a bug under the doctor's lamp when he's not looking. The doctor suggests meeting individually if they're to continue, and John's all over it, somewhat to Sarah's surprise. But they're already letting the doctor think the family's all torn up over the war death of John's father. I mean, they kind of are, but obviously not in the way that they're presenting it here, and ... anyway. Let's just say Tony Soprano is a piece of cake for an analyst compared with this bunch. And Sarah is rather clumsily asking questions of Sherman, finding out that he's a counselor who's seeing more and more veterans back from the Iraq war.