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This episode at first appears like it's going be all Rashomon on us, with "Sarah's story" and "John's story" and "Cameron's story," etc., except it ain't no Rashomon. The characters aren't telling different versions of the same event; their stories just complement each others', filling in the blanks.
It starts really slowly, with John sneaking out to see Riley while Sarah scowls all over the place, and her mood isn't improved when Chrome Artie shows up. Cameron has tried to make John see reason when it comes to Riley by -- showing off her own body? OK…
John heads to Mexico for a too-much too-soon date with Riley, which is kinda ruined when Chrome Artie shows up (with Sarah in the trunk), and he gets WAY literal with the Day of the Dead celebrations.
See, John's gotten himself in trouble with the authorities after getting in a fight with someone who recognized him from when he used to live there with his mother, and the police attention draws Ellison into the fray as well, and, since he feels like he owes Sarah for the time she saved his life, he helps the Connors (Derek and Cameron manage to get their asses south of the border, too) lure Chrome Artie into a trap and they shoot him a bunch of times, take his chip and bury him. For some reason, none of this makes Riley run screaming as fast as her legs will take her. Congratulations, John: you're no longer the dumbest one of the group.
Want more? The full recap starts right below! A title screen informs us that this is "Sarah's Story," so we're going to get some kind of multiple-perspectives thing? All Rashomon and shit? Or like that X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully tell their stories, and we see their differing perspectives, like for Scully, Luke Wilson was a suave southern sheriff while for Mulder he was a bucktoothed hillbilly? No. It's not going to be that good.Sarah's outside the Connor Compound hammering together some sort of structure -- probably a machine-gun turret to be added, A-Team-style, to a Connor Car, when John and Riley come outside, John taking pictures of the ridiculous bike helmet that Riley has on. He tells her it's to keep cars from playing ping-pong with her head. Riley spots "Mrs. Baum" and thanks her for having her over, and Sarah can barely muster a smile in response, like don't make her feel TOO welcome, Sarah.
John and Riley continue to coo at each other all awkward teenagers in love-style. John, major player that he is, offers to text her again, and Riley suggests he call her. Like, you know, with his voice. And then they tell each other to "be safe," like maybe John should put a condom on, and then Riley rides away.
John strolls back over to his mom and says, "I bought her a helmet," and Sarah blankly calls that responsible, adding, "You think it'll stop a bullet?" which I seem to remember my mom asking similar questions upon meeting girlfriends of mine. "Why, you gonna take a shot at her?" which is kind of funny, except the odds of Riley getting shot at are pretty damn good if she keeps hanging out at the Connors', and Sarah reminds John of this, so he stomps off. "You care about this girl?" Sarah calls after him. He says he does. "Then leave her alone," says Sarah. John walks away, passing Cameron, who tells Sarah she'll talk to him. "John's not listening," says Sarah. "He's always listening," says Cameron. Sarah looks at her, and Cameron sashays off the path after John.
The day, Sarah's sticking a safe in the floor of the living room, like there goes the damage deposit with the big gaping hole in the floor. Cameron comes in and says, "I was going to suggest a safe," and Sarah busts on her for not suggesting it before they got robbed. Cameron grabs some keys off the table and says she's going to "restock the supply drop" which, if Cameron weren't a Terminator, I'd probably assume was code for "buying Tampax." "We've been using a lot of ammunition," says Cameron, and Sarah wryly notes that business has been booming. She asks where John is, and Cameron says he's still up in his room. Sarah seems remarkably surprised at the prospect of a sixteen-year-old boy not getting out of his bed unless forcibly removed, and Cameron gives her a little lecture on the fucked-up circadian rhythms of the teenage male. "How late were you up talking to him?" asks Sarah, and Cameron says, "Not late," adding John won't be seeing Riley anymore.
"John's not stupid," is her only explanation. "I don't like the way he responds to you," says Sarah, displaying again a remarkable ignorance of the teenage male. "You got what you wanted," says Cameron, and walks off.
And now, back to the safe. Sarah's got her arm all the way down the hole in the floor up to her shoulder, and her concentration is enough for her to be surprised by someone picking her up and tossing her against the room. It's Chrome Artie, who grabs her by the ankle and drags her over to the staircase where he picks her up with one hand and carries her.
Upstairs, he throws her against the floor and then walks into John's room, presumably, although the primary colours on the bed and the sky-blue walls and ceiling (complete with clouds) aren't exactly the decor I was expecting from cranky pants John. Chrome Artie hauls Sarah into the room and points a gun at her head. "Where is he?" he asks. "Check under the bed," says Sarah, like maybe she's hoping Chrome Artie will get distracted by John's Penthouse stash. "You don't know," says Chrome Artie, as he clutches her throat until she blacks out.
We're onto Cameron's story, now, as she stares at Riley and John saying goodnight to each other. We revisit her conversation with Sarah outside the house, and then we watch Cameron sashay down the hall to John's room. Outside his door, she takes off her leather jacket and drops it on the floor before entering his room in shorts and tank top. "You busy?" she asks John, who, staring at her, takes a moment to say no. "Did you change?" he asks. She says it's hot out. "Since when do you feel heat?" he asks, and she simply says, "I feel heat," as she folds her mile-long legs in half in order to lie down on the bed beside him.
John asks if her plan is for Riley to see them in bed together and be scarred for the rest of her life, and since all they're doing is just LYING THERE, I think he's getting ahead of himself somewhat, and Cameron says she waited until Riley was gone. "And then you and Mom high-fived," says John, whose cranky attitude towards everyone really wore out its welcome in, oh, let's say T2.
"You bring danger into Riley's life," says Cameron. "I know that. I'm not stupid," says John. Yeah, well, does Riley know the danger? No? Then you're selfish too. "But sometimes you do stupid things," says Cameron, and I think by "sometimes" she means "EVERY SINGLE TIME." His explanation is for her not to worry about it because "sometimes humans do stupid things," and maybe the counter-argument should be that John's stupid things could result in, you know, the ERADICATION OF ALL HUMANITY. Cameron says she understands more than he thinks. For John, it's just an excuse to keep seeing Riley, even if everyone thinks it's a bad idea. "I understand it's a bad idea ... and I understand that being John Connor can be lonely."
He asks her how she knows that, and she tells him that they talk about it a lot (in the future).
After a while, John says he needs to get some sleep. Cameron sits up. Cameron, he didn't say "leave." "And Riley?" she asks. "I know. I know," is John's response. Yeah, it makes total sense that a machine would take "I know. I know" to mean "I'm not going to see Riley anymore."
So the day, after the chit-chat with Sarah about the floor safe, Cameron gets in an SUV and drives off.
At the supply dump, Cameron sees the lock hanging on its hasp on the sliding bolt, unshoulders her backpack and enters with her gun drawn, to find Derek. "It's you," she says. They lower their weapons, and he asks if she's been stealing his supplies. "We needed to make a small bomb," she says, and Derek bitches about the supply drop being built by his people for his people. What a bio-racist! "John was supposed to ask," says Cameron, brushing past him. "John needs to get his head in the game," snaps Derek. And then they bicker at each other over how Derek doesn't spend much time at the house, and Derek doesn't have a bed, blah blah blah, until Derek's cellphone rings. He looks at the number on the screen -- , for what it's worth. "Who's that?" asks Cameron. Derek just ducks outside the door. Cameron takes out her own cellphone, and dials the number, gets a recording of a man speaking Spanish. She hangs up as Derek comes back in, saying he got an alarm code from John: he's in trouble.
So what's John's story? Well, we pick up with him, breathing heavier than we saw him previously, lying in bed, telling Cameron he needs to get some sleep. Only after Cameron leaves, he gets up, grabs a duffel bag "hidden" in the bathtub, and gets on his cellphone. "I'll be there in a few minutes," he says, and then heads out the back door.
So we're on the bus now with Riley and John, and he's making eyes at her, completely creeping her out, and she jokes that her foster parents gave her a rape whistle for moments like this one, so he starts telling her about living in Mexico, in a place called Dejalo, for a year and a half when he was a kid, and that's where they're going. She asks if he ran the id
ea past his mom, because she doesn't like surprises, and is this a revenge fantasy, and blah blah blah, and I'd just like to say that if I wanted to watch Dawson's Creek or or whatever shit teen soap is all the rage these days, I'm perfectly capable of choosing to watch that shit on my own, but this show has FUTURISTIC KILLING MACHINES, and that's what we want to see. Then John tells her he booked the honeymoon suite, and she's surprised/shocked/thinks he's kidding, and he tries to make a suave face at her, which really consists of him squinting, and I think his makeup is a lot different this episode.
So everyone's all dressed up with makeup and skull masks in the town square, because it's the Day of the Dead, and there are like ten people in the whole friggin' town, and they chat about how she used to watch him at school... and hey, yeah. School. Did they give up on that? Or does he still go but it's kind of like Homer Simpson's sporadic attendance record at the nuclear power plant?
At the hotel (looks like he did book the honeymoon suite), John fixes the Jacuzzi so they can enjoy the soothing power of bubbles (both of them are clothed, just so you know), and they chat about John living here, and he says sometimes he wished they'd have stayed here, away from everybody, which makes sense, since Dejalo appears to have a total of 12 people in it. "People suck," says Riley, helpfully. "Not just people," says John, like what's Riley supposed to make of that? John hates dogs? Riley starts blathering about not expecting to give a damn after meeting someone, because who's got the time? "I don't like getting attached to people," she says, which I'm sure is just what John "I booked the honeymoon suite" Connor wants to hear. He doesn't have any kind of reaction, so Riley cheers up enough to ask him why they were living in Mexico. He hesitates, so Riley says he's trying to think of either a joke or a lie, and he denies it. "Yes, you are! You have a tell!" she says. "I just don't want to sit around and talk about my messed-up childhood," he snaps. Well, good thing you didn't bring her specifically to your childhood HOME, douchebag! He says he just wants them to enjoy themselves. "Fine, enjoy yourself, John," she snaps, adding that she's sure they're not the only couple to find themselves in a honeymoon suite without knowing the first thing about each other. After a moment, he says, "You're right. People suck." Well, YOU do, anyway. So she smiles and hops in the water.
So it's later, at a restaurant, and John's impressing Riley with his command of Spanish, and he jokes that they serve a killer Thanksgiving buffet here, and they congratulate each other for getting to know each other NORMALLY, and I would really like people to start shooting soon. She's about to tell him what his "tell" is when some pushy old dude with a little camera snaps their picture and then starts expounding on the wonders of the digital age, and how he can e-mail them a photo. John gets testy with the camera-happy entrepreneur and offers him five bucks to delete the photos. Buddy's just about to accept when he recognizes John -- "You're Sarah Connor's son," he says, to John's chagrin and Riley's amazement. Well, he did used to live there. John tries to pretend -- really unconvincingly, too -- that Buddy has the wrong guy, and then excuses himself to speak to the guy privately, off to the side, behind a beaded curtain, which, you know, ain't exactly soundproof.
"I remember when the Connors left Dejalo. And I remember the stories that were told after you were gone," says the cameraman. John still tries to pretend he's someone else, so the shutterbug gets right to it: "These are pictures you wouldn't want the authorities to see," he says. John asks him how much. "Everything you've got," says the guy.
But this guy didn't count on Riley being an idiot; suddenly, she grabs the camera from his hands, which touches off a near riot in the bar. John yells for her to run, and she tries, but she winds up grabbed by a couple of Mexican police officers who happen to be at the bar (one of whom, kinda hilariously, doesn't appear to have bothered to get off his barstool to help stop the crazy gringos). John races outside, where the Day of the Dead parade is in half-assed swing, but he's got to stop and turn around, because he realizes girls don't sleep with guys who run away leaving them to deal with police in a foreign country. Or, at least, they shouldn't.
So John's being questioned by the cop and what appears to be a superior officer. John's story is that they're just tourists, which is true, except this makes the cop suspicious, because what, Cancun's not good enough for them? John says the guy with the camera just got bumped and he and Riley were running away because they thought a fight was going to break out. He admits to being 16, says he wasn't drinking, says his mother and uncle don't know where he is.
El Capitan makes John a deal, placing a phone in front of him: if they come to pick him up, he'll let John off with a warning. John tries Derek first, gets the voicemail, and he pushes a couple of buttons before hanging up. , he tries Sarah, who answers (we only hear her voice), sounding oddly insincerely happy to hear from him, and asks where he is. John pushes a couple of buttons on the phone, and the music starts to swell as he realizes that his mom's not giving him the appropriate signal. He tries again. No dice, and he hangs up, telling the cops she didn't answer. El Capitan tells the deputy to put John in holding, and to run his name through Interpol. Deputy el Genius asks John which name he should use: the real one or the fake one on his passport. Use "Bob Loblaw", just to see what turns up!
So the guard shows John back to the cell, with Riley there waiting. Well, that'll save valuable time when it comes to conjugal visits. The morning, John's sleeping, and Riley, whispering, frantically calls the guard over. She tells him she needs his help, saying the guy is a total psycho and keeps putting the moves on her. It's a lame story because, as the guard points out, the two of them came in together. Riley appeals to his fatherly sense of compassion by saying her own father warned her about this guy, and "he was totally right." She says she just wants to call her family and let them know where she is. The guard, who I guess is as stupid as he looks, moves to unlock the door, which is when he's grabbed by John through the bars, who yanks him against the cell three times, knocking him out. Man, good thing that worked. "Lo siento, senor," says John as he and Riley get out of the cell. "No matter what happens, when you see daylight, you run," he tells her.
Back to Sarah's story, now, where she's in the back seat of Chrome Artie's ride as he's cruising to Mexico. He tells her that her strategy has changed since the last time they met; he tried to kill her then. "Now I'm going to kill you," she says. On the floor of the backseat are scattered documents. They shift, and Sarah sees a picture of Cameron.
Chrome Artie glances back. "She hasn't been careful. She's made mistakes. Not as many as you, but enough." Sarah wants to know how he found them, and Chrome Artie tells her the boy at the bowling alley told him. "You should have killed him," he says. Hey, constructive criticism is always welcome. "I'm not a murderer," says Sarah. "Who is?" asks Chrome Artie, so it's good that his rhetoric capabilities are completely up to date.
Sarah manages to free her duct taped feet, and she launches herself out of the backseat, over the trunk and rolls to a hard landing. Great idea! Now Chrome Artie will be slightly later in getting to his destination! That'll teach him! Artie stops the car, gets out, hauls Sarah up and tosses her in the trunk.
Well, that might have been the object of her plan, because she quickly finds a pop can to worry in half, so she can use a jagged edge to cut the duct tape binding her wrists. Outside, we can hear Latin music.
The
car stops, and then there are muffled shouts, and then the sound of gunfire. The car revs up again and Sarah tries using the can on the lock, and there's more gunfire, and the car stops suddenly, surprising her and -- oh, OW -- sending a jagged chunk of pop can under the skin of her palm, and a few shots give the trunk some much-needed ventilation, daylight streaming in fresh holes. Sarah starts kicking the back seat. The car stops again, and Sarah gets ready. The trunk opens, and Sarah's prepared to attack a futuristic killing machine with half a pop can. Only it's James Ellison standing there. He introduces himself formally, and then holds out his hand. "I need you to come with me," he says. Yeah, "Come with me if you want to live" is much cooler. And there's John standing there! Hi, honey!
Time for Ellison's story. He's out for a jog, trying to leave all his personal demons behind him (good luck with that!). His cellphone rings, a call from Agent Carlson. He listens for a moment. "Mexico," he says. He asks if anyone is looking into it at the Bureau. The response appears to be negative, as he says, "Connor case has been cold since '99, I know." He tells Carlson to e-mail it over, and he'll take a look.
A picture of John Connor shows up on Ellison's screen, and he gets back on the phone to say it does look like him. "John Connor. God rest his soul."
Cut immediately to Ellison showing his identification to El Capitan, and saying John Connor matches the name of a fugitive of his. "The domestic terrorism case," says El Capitan, who's all up on the details of foreign terrorism cases that are almost a year old. Ellison's similarly impressed, except El Capitan says the case came up when they ran John's name. 'Course, Ellison's fugitive would be 24 by now, if not already dead. "I'd be grateful for just a visual identification, to help bring me some closure," says Ellison. "You have traveled an awful long way for closure," says El Capitan. Ellison says that if the prisoner is who Ellison thinks he is, then he's in lot of danger. "And yes, I've traveled a long way.
El Capitan seems receptive, but they're interrupted by a deputy who comes in and speaks a few words to the captain, who then excuses himself. Ellison sits and waits for a moment, then glances behind him, where, through a window in the captain's office, he can see his old buddy Chrome Artie, moments before Artie starts shooting up the place. Typical ugly American on holidays! Ellison jumps behind the captain's desk and starts looking for a weapon. He doesn't find one, and he crawls to the office door, opening it to find a wounded officer on the floor, just as Riley and John go running past. Outside, Riley's yelling and screaming and running, like you'd think she'd never had something go wrong on vacation before. John and Ellison are quick out the door after her, with John yelling for Riley to get in the car, and the three of them pile into Chrome Artie's ride and peel out, as he comes out of the police station, guns a-blazin'.
They're forced to back up down one alley, with Chrome Artie firing away, and maybe Skynet would have succeeded a long time ago if they'd just sent a Terminator that can actually hit the broad side of the barn. After getting away, they haven't really gone very far before Riley starts whining about feeling something in the back seat, and John yells for Ellison to stop the car, which Ellison does, because John is the boss of him.
And in the trunk they find Sarah, brandishing her pop can. "Sarah Connor? James Ellison. I need you to come with me," he says. Oh. So his suave response actually makes very little sense and was just written that way as a hook for the end of Sarah's story? OK.
Sarah gets out of the trunk, and then they spot Chrome Artie pull up in a truck nearby. "We need to move," says Sarah. Yeah, "move," like the lackadaisical extra jogging less-than-urgently RIGHT BY THE KILLER. Chrome Artie gets out of his truck and starts walking.
So the Connor Crew has found a hideout, I guess? In this tiny little town? Sarah pulls the metal out of her palm. Ellison offers to help, and Sarah snaps that she needs to be able to use it. "I should hope so," says Ellison, who probably knows all about needing his hands in good working order since his divorce. Sarah asks what he's doing in Mexico, and he tells her John was flagged in an FBI computer. She asks if he couldn't have just buried it. "It's been watching me," he says. "'It'?" says Sarah. "Out there. It," says Ellison, jerking his head towards the window. Sarah snaps that he could have led Chrome Artie right to John. "It wasn't me in the trunk," says Ellison, which would be a good point, except it's not like Sarah led Chrome Artie to Mexico by BEING IN THE TRUNK.
Anyway, Ellison says he was coming down to pop John out of jail no questions asked, which Sarah doesn't believe, until Ellison says he felt he owed Sarah one for saving his life back at Silberman's cabin. Sarah shrugs it off, saying it wasn't much. "It was my life," says Ellison. "How do you feel about that now?" she asks him. He doesn't have much of an answer.
Nearby are John and Riley, still on the worst first vacation ever. John tells Riley that she has to go, but he'll call her when he gets back to L.A., and instead of saying, "Yeah, don't worry about it," she pulls a whole "stand by my man" thing. Of course, that's partly because there's a guy out there killing people. "He won't follow you if you run away from me," says John. Yeah. Because Terminators NEVER try to use friends and family to get to their targets, hey, John? Moron. "I don't want to run away from you," says Riley, so I think someone should check to see that she isn't actually technically brain-dead. "Get her out of here," says Sarah, who then goes over to Ellison to ask for his phone. "You have a plan?" he asks. "And a weapon," she says, and he surmises she's talking about Cameron.
Sarah calls Derek, puts in the code, and says she needs him and Cameron, because she and John are in trouble. Derek says they're there already, at the jail.
So it's over to Derek's story now, which ... starts with Cameron and Derek arriving outside the police station with wounded people hobbling about. "Chrome Artie's here," says Cameron. "Then we should stay undercover," says Derek. He says this while skulking around his jeep with his gun drawn, so I guess his cover is "undercover cop whose cover is blown." Cameron just strolls right up to the police station, and Derek follows. Inside, they survey the dead and dying. "I'm looking for John Baum," says Cameron to the captain, who's lying on the floor, bullet wound in the chest. "Yo no sè," he says. Derek wants to get out of there, but Cameron's intent on finding John. "We're no good to him dead," says Derek. "I can't let anything happen to him," says Cameron, heading deeper into the station. Hey, it's the worst prison guard ever. "Escaped or dead?" asks Derek. "Escaped," says the guard, who then asks Derek for a little help, and Derek's idea of a little help is to tell him, "He won't be back."
Back out in the station entrance, Derek's cellphone rings. It's Sarah, and thus ends Derek's sad little twenty-second entry in the story. "Where the hell's Chrome Artie?"
Yay! It's Chrome Artie's story! They should go back years, like to when Chrome Artie was just, I don't know, a toaster. Making Pop Tarts. Instead, it picks up with Artie in the police station being asked to leave. "I'm gonna need to see John Conner," he tells the captain, right before reaching into his bag, pulling out a gun, and calmly blowing away Dejalo's finest. He stalks through the police station, shooting as he goes. It's not exactly the police station scene from the first movie.
He squats to the prison guard and says he's looking for John Connor. "He's gone," says the guard. "Are there any other exits?" he asks. No, says the guard. So Chrome Artie calmly walks back out the front door, where he sees Ellison, John and Riley pulling away in his car.
After a commercial break, we get to see
the Connor Crew's amazing plan. Chrome Artie's strolling around aimlessly when he sees Ellison walk out to his car. Ellison goes into the trunk for a first aid kit, and then walks back toward a nearby church. Chrome Artie follows.
Inside, Ellison's praying at the altar. Dear God, are you there? It's me, James. Chrome Artie walks up behind him. Ellison opens his eyes but doesn't turn around. "Are you here to repent?" he asks. I'm looking for John Connor, says Chrome Artie. Ellison looks heavenward. "All things are possible to him who believes," he says.
Suddenly, Artie's shot in the head. He looks up; Derek's at a second story window. Artie starts shooting at him, and then starts taking fire from the other side; it's Sarah at the other window. Artie's programming is such that his preference is to stand there, arms extended all biblical-like in the church, taking heavy fire rather than protecting himself. Probably because it's more cinematic to slow it down and set it to some soft mariachi music.
And then, entering from the main doors, is Cameron. She slowly walks down the aisle with a shotgun, like a hillbilly father on his daughter's wedding day. She blasts away at Chrome Artie, taking away half his face, revealing the metal skull underneath, before he collapses.
We get an Artie point-of-view shot, the screen flickering, as the Connor Crew stroll into his field of vision, all standing there looking at him. Yeah, that seems really unwise. It's almost exactly like those scenes in Friday the 13th movies where the teenagers are all, "I think Jason's dead!" "Yeah, so let's all go STAND AROUND THE BODY AND LOOK AT HIM INSTEAD OF GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF THERE." In this case, though, John eventually raises his gun and fires, and the screen goes black.
And then in goes Chrome Artie's body into a hole, with the Crew all pitching in with the shoveling, so I guess it's a good thing the Dejalo Home Depot wasn't closed for the Day of the Dead holiday. Sarah tells Ellison they'll attract less attention if they don't travel together. "Less" attention than bloody firefights in touristy Mexican villas? He asks her what's , and she says they'll come back down with some stuff to destroy the body. He looks at John, and says his name will be on a list. "He's got other names," says Sarah. Yeah. Douchey. McWhiney. Captain Pee-Pants. "Pretend I died again," says Sarah. Ellison says he lost a lot when she "died" the first time: his marriage, his career. "That's a lot to you?" says Sarah. Well, yeah ... I mean, isn't this about helping prevent that from happening to people? Ellison acknowledges that lots of people lost a lot. He just wants to know what his role is. "What happens after this?" "This is it. There is nothing else behind the curtain. This is what I do. It's all I do," she says. She apologizes for what he's lost, but she can't help him get any of it back.
She walks over to Cameron, and asks for the chip. Yeah, don't let Cameron hold on to that stuff. She can't be trusted. Sarah puts the chip on a rock and takes the butt-end of a gun to it, with a ferocity that would be useful in pulverizing not just the chip but the rock underneath it. And she starts to shriek, and the Connor Crew drop their shoveling to turn around and stare. People! The Terminator's not going to bury itself! John runs over to console his mom, and she hugs him, squeezing him and sobbing. John just holds her. Ellison walks away, almost robotically to the extent that I half expected him to morph into Catherine Weaver. He looks over his shoulder, and then keeps on going. Clearly, he's thinking, Date a chick with a kid? Man, I don't know.