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Sarah ate a few too many questionable enchiladas when the gang was south of the border, down Mexico way, and she’s throwing up and having nightmares revolving around her son, Chrome Artie, and groups of three. So she goes to see Dr. Sherman, who’s not super-impressed, because she vanished after coming to see him earlier, plus she’s not being entirely forthcoming now. Plus, listening to other people talk about their dreams is wicked boring.
The exciting parts of the episode revolve around John and Cameron going back to Mexico to thermite Chrome Artie’s metal ass, only when they dig him up, he’s not there. Maybe they buried him in the Pet Sematary? They go to see Ellison, who’s the only other person who knows Chrome Artie was there, but they’re convinced Ellison doesn’t know what happened (after Cameron tosses him around and almost strangles him). Thing is, though, he lied, and dug up the body, and he presents it to Catherine Weaver so they can learn how to fight the future.
Jesse has captured a dude, Charlie Fischer, played by Richard Schiff, who she says is a “grey” from the future: a human who works for Skynet. She beats on him and can’t believe Derek doesn’t remember the guy from the future. She goes to get proof, in the form of the younger version of Charlie, so it’s kind of like one of those retirement plan commercials. Eventually, after more beatings and torture, old Charles Fischer admits that he is who he says he was, but he’s not back on a mission, but as a reward for helping Skynet.
Derek, enraged, is about to shoot younger Fischer, but Jesse kills older Fischer instead. Still, Derek still doesn’t remember the questioning and torture he suffered at the hands of Fischer and his Terminator captors in the future, so maybe he changed the future enough so that Jesse came back from a slightly different future? Which of course means he’s going to have to go back to 1955 and make sure his parents kiss at the dance.
Want more? The full recap starts right below! Oh, god. Why do we have dream sequences? Why do television shows think dream sequences are any more interesting on TV than they are when the office basketcase bends your ear by telling you about the "crazy" dream she had last night? Why?In this case, Sarah's the one having the dream, in which there's an open grave, and she's watching herself to Cameron, both of them in pink dresses, and Cameron's watering the ground. It's like Little House on the Fucked-Up Prairie. Cameron's watering a cactus, and then three cacti are sprouting and growing as fast as anything in Super Mario Bros., and then suddenly John is standing there, and the cacti, now fully grown, turn to metal, and one wraps its arms around John.
Sarah jerks awake in the back of a truck. She tells John, who's driving, that she's going to be sick, which is probably due to all the bouncing and jouncing they're doing, all the better to show off the handling and suspension on the gleaming specimen of a vehicle from a company that pays a lot of money to this show.
John stops the truck, and Sarah hurtles from the back to hurl her cookies all over the ground. John and Cameron get out as well. "What's wrong with her?" asks Cameron, looking awfully disgusted. She asks if Sarah's pregnant. "Why in hell would you even ask that?" snaps John, and Cameron explains that Kacy vomited in the morning when she was pregnant. "Was"? Please tell me she's finally squeezed that thing out. Sarah says it's just a bug, or stomach flu. Luckily, for exposition's sake, they've stopped near a sign that says "Tijuana 39," and John says they'll be home soon. He goes to help his mom get back in the truck, but she's spotted an upended turtle near a wheel on the truck, and she rights it, moving it to a safer spot. Cameron watches.
Later, back at the Connor Compound (is this the same place? shouldn't they move?), Sarah's asleep in bed. She wakes as John comes in with some medicine, and he asks how she feels. "How do I look?" she asks, and he says, "Like crap," like way to cheer your mother up, and she jokes that she wishes she felt that good. And in comes Cameron with a tray of "rehydration fluid," which Sarah should check to make sure isn't Pennzoil. Cameron tells her to drink one cup every half-hour or right after she vomits.
Sarah tries to sit up, and John won't let her, even though she wants to go back to Mexico with the thermite to dispose of Chrome Artie once and for all. John points out that the body is buried in a hole in the Mexican desert and the chip has been obliterated. He's about to say he thinks that they're safe, when Cameron interrupts to say that they're not. John says she's starting to sound just like Sarah. "She's right," says Sarah.
Meanwhile, Derek's tooling around town when his cellphone rings. It's Jesse, standing all artfully posed, holding a gun. She says she needs to see him, and tells him to bring a gun, as if Derek goes anywhere without one. When he shows up, at some kind of shipping container storage warehouse, she launches into some story about eating lunch at the mall, and rattles off some nearly unintelligible aside about being unable to stop eating bad Chinese food, when she looked up and saw him. "Who?" asks Derek. He doesn't ask if she's always had this suddenly prominent accent. "Fisher. Fisher!" says Jesse. Derek doesn't know who that is. "Charles Fisher," says Jesse, and Derek still doesn't know what she's talking about, like COULD WE MOVE THIS ALONG, PLEASE, and she opens one of the containers to show him some poor guy duct-taped to a chair, gagged, and says he was sent from the future and is working with the machines. "And he's gonna die," she says. Derek just stares at the guy.
Elsewhere, John and Cameron are driving around, because that's all anyone does on this show anymore, is drive around and wait to get shot at, and Cameron is somehow royally pissing John off by sticking her foot out the window. She says she's learning how it feels to "get away from it all," and he goes off on her about how she doesn't have any emotions, and can't feel the wind through her hair, or toes. Looking somewhat hurt, Cameron says John doesn't understand how they work. "I have sensation. I feel. I wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't feel," she says.
Back in the shipping container, Derek's going over Jesse's story, about hitting this guy with a brick. We should have seen that instead of the dream sequence! She says this guy is a grey, and asks if Derek remembers the greys, and if he can do so succinctly for the viewers, and Derek explains that greys were traitors who worked for Skynet, helping the T-888s act more human. Jesse says this guy is one of them, at the top of the list. They talk off the duct tape over his mouth, and he frantically tells Derek that his name is Paul Stewart, and that he's not who she says he is. And if you thought he looked familiar before, you've probably recognized him after the duct tape came off as ... well, that guy from The West Wing. I never watched the show, but I remember him from commercials. "For your sake, brother, I hope you're right," says Derek.
After the commercial break, Derek's studying the guy's license, which does indeed say Paul Stewart, and he says he repairs watches in Pasadena. "What are you doing here, Fischer?" snaps Jesse. While the poor guy protests that he's just Paul Stewart off Blackburn Avenue, Jesse gets angrier and angrier, and smacks him one, and has to be restrained by Derek to keep from doing more damage to him. Derek sits in front of the guy (Richard Schiff! Thank you, opening credits!) and asks if he knows him. "No! I don't know you, I don't know her!" says Paul. Derek heads outside with Jesse so she can be all cranky about how Derek doesn't believe her. He says he knows the greys, because they caught four of them, but they're not going to do anything to this guy until they're sure of who or what he is. "He is who I say he is," says Jesse, quietly. "I want to hear him say it," says Derek. Jesse says he will, and grabs her jacket. "I'll show you," she says, stomping off.
Sarah wakes up in bed to the crackling hiss of a baby monitor on the night stand. She gets up and slowly starts walking through the house. Oh, great. Another dream sequence. She's got on her Laura Ingalls Wilder dress again, and slowly makes her way into the Connor Compound's maternity ward, with row upon row of bassinets, each filled with blankets wrapped around a couple of turtles. Well, except for one, which is empty.
She turns and sees Cameron sitting in a rocking chair, nursing. Then Cameron's staring adoringly at the turtle in her palm, and it seems like she's going to give it to Sarah, and then walks past her to give it to Chrome Artie instead. Yet another reason I hate dream sequences. They make it easy to make misleading promos.
Sarah raises her gun, but suddenly it's real life again (or is it?) and she's outside, pointing the gun at her own reflection in the window. Now she's in the kitchen, pondering, looking at a picture with three dots drawn in a triangular pattern on a notepad. God, I hope we're done with the dream sequence now.
Cameron and John are in Mexico, digging up Chrome Artie, except all they find is a boot. "Where's the rest of him?" asks Cameron, and John says he's gone. Cameron, for some reason, thinks it's impossible for the body to be gone, because they destroyed his chip. John heads back to the truck, planning to go after the only other person who knew Chrome Artie was there (which would be Ellison), who he says is the only person "crazy enough" to dig him up. "Crazy enough"? We are talking about Ellison, right?
Back at the shipping container, Derek's brought Paul some food, which he says he's not going to eat. "You a vegetarian?" asks Derek, and Paul points out that he doesn't know what's in that. Derek takes it back, takes a chomp out of it, and gives it back. "Cheeseburger's in that," he says. Yes, and Derek germs, now.
Paul asks where Derek's "friend" is, and Derek grunts "out
," and Paul says he's not who she thinks he is. "I sure hope not," says Derek. "I fix watches," says Paul, and Derek shrugs. So Paul talks about how he used to be an engineer, but he was just a guy in a cubicle with a bunch of other guys in cubicles, so he went to Bern to learn watch repair. "You ever been to Switzerland?" he asks. Derek shrugs and calls it a nice story. "You don't believe me," says Paul. Derek says he's told a few stories himself. "Is she your girlfriend, this um, woman? Do you love her?" asks Paul. Derek smirks, and says it's complicated. Paul makes a funny "oh is it now" face and says he knows complication, because he's a watchmaker. Then he laughs, and says that's a "watch joke," which is nice, because at least that means that there might be someone else who finds that as hilarious as Paul seems to. Derek sits there stony-faced and says Paul should eat.
Maybe he just wants Paul to shut up, because Paul starts going on about how people do crazy things when they're in love. Like taping people to chairs and accusing them of being traitors to the human race from the future? Yeah, I was in love once too. Paul points out that Jesse keeps saying Derek knows him, "and clearly, you don't know me." It looks almost like Derek is buying this -- then he notices a tattoo on Paul's right arm, which looks like a clock face with no hands.
Derek stands up, takes off his jacket, and asks what they got Paul for. Paul doesn't know what he means, so Derek asks: "Where'd you do time?" Paul's all, "you're not listening to me" and Derek says the tattoo is prison ink. Paul says it's a tattoo of a clock because he's a watch dude. "With no hands? It means 'til the end of time.' Life sentence," says Derek. Paul's all, oh yeah? Well, if I got a life sentence, what am I doing here? Lousy revolving-door justice system! Derek takes the cheeseburger away and says lunch is over. He gets out the duct tape and wraps Paul's arm to the chair again.
Cameron and John are apparently back from Mexico already, and Cameron's fiddling with the radio stations while John looks on in amazement. Or he's thinking, "If she puts on that fucking 'I Kissed A Girl' song again, I'm going to yank her chip out and destroy her myself." Her cellphone rings. "It's Derek," says ... well, says Derek. "Is it?" says Cameron. He thinks she's busting on him for not being in better touch, but after she hangs up on him he realizes it's because he didn't beep in with the special Connor Code. He does so, and then tells her he's e-mailing a picture over to her. She gets it, but doesn't know who he is. "He's not in your memory banks or whatever?" like nice "memory banks or whatever," Grampa.
Cameron asks who he is, and Derek says it's just a guy he thought she might know. "He looks hurt," says Cameron, which gets John's interest, and Derek tells her not to worry about it. After she hangs up, John wants to know what's going on, and Cameron puts on an ostensibly reassuring smile and tells him not to worry about it. John really needs to point out more often that he's the boss of her.
Good ol' Dr. Sherman walks into his waiting room and doesn't seem super surprised -- or thrilled -- to see Sarah waiting there. "It's possible I have an emergency," she says, and asks if he remembers her. Yeah, the crazy chick with the messed-up son and the automaton daughter who needed help and then disappeared? Yeah, I remember you, he says. "I've had some bad luck with shrinks," she says. He advises her not to call them "shrinks," and tells her to call his assistant (assuming she's still ALIVE) in the morning to make an appointment. "I'm here now," says Sarah, because I guess the doctor should drop everything for her. She starts babbling about the nightmares she's been having, and she's sleepwalking. Dr. Sherman asks where she goes to when she walks, and Sarah, misunderstanding, says she's chasing someone or being chased. He tells her he means, where does she actually go, and she takes a long time to answer. "Out. I get the hell out," she says. Sherman tells her she's here, so she might as well come on in.
Cameron and John are staking out Ellison's place and they decided the stakeout wasn't boring enough without discussing the damn tortoise that Sarah flipped over in Mexico. Cameron doesn't understand why she'd do that, and John says she was just helping it, which is what people do. "Empathy," says Cameron, who points out that not everyone would help it, and that some would actually run over it and crush it. "Yeah, I guess they would," says John, who asks her if that's what she'd do.
Ellison's car pulls into the driveway. "It didn't seem like much of a threat. We're not built for cruelty," she says. "Well, that's one for cyborgs," says John, and Cameron agrees, as they get out of the car to go whale on Ellison.
Inside, Ellison's barely finished shaking off after going to the bathroom when Cameron's hand is around his throat. Then she's throwing him all around his house as John informs him that the body is missing, and they need it so they can destroy it. "What the hell would I want with it?" protests Ellison, which earns him a head-first trip into a corner shelf.
Cameron thinks he's lying, and chucks him into the glass table, shattering it, and he lands on his back. Cameron starts to choke him. John tells him that if Ellison knows where the body is, better say so now. Ellison gasps out that he has no idea. After a few more moments of Cameron's erotic asphyxiation, John tells her to let him go. She does, and after Ellison lies there for a few moments, gasping, she reaches down and flips him back onto his front. John's about to leave when he sees, in the broken detritus of the room, the picture of his mom taken at the gas station before he was born. He looks at Ellison for a moment, and takes the photo with him.
Back at the torture central, Derek's sitting with a groggy Paul, when Jesse comes in, hauling some bound, hooded guy with her. You know, the security in this place is terrible. Derek's all, GREAT, I only bought lunch for THREE, you know. Jesse says Paul doesn't want to tell them who he is, so she brought proof. She takes the hood off the guy, some youngish guy, and she pulls down his shirt collar to reveal a prominent birthmark on his shoulder. She goes over to Paul, and pulls down his collar, revealing the exact same birthmark. Then she punches Paul. She likes doing that.
So now new guy has duct tape on his mouth, at least until Jesse rips it off to ask who he is. The guy, rather scared, says he's name's Charlie Fischer, and he works at SRF -- Seismic Retrofitting. He's just a service technician who has no idea why he's here. "Tell him who you are," Jesse instructs Paul, who says that he's told them who he is, and accuses them of playing a trick on him. "And you're in on it!" he tells Charlie Fischer. "What do you want from me?" he yells at Jesse, who then starts pounding on him some more, which freaks Charlie out more than it does Paul.
Outside, Derek tells Jesse that even if this guy is who she says he is, they need to find out why he's here. Maybe he's AWOL like you, he suggests, and Jesse rejects that, saying he's got to be here for a reason. She nestles her forehead against Derek's temple and gets all Lady Macbeth on him, saying, "You need to beat the hell out of him. You need to get him to talk."
I guess nothing motivates Derek like his old lady getting on his case, because he marches right back in and grabs a pair of pliers or wire cutters or something, goes over to Charlie, grabs a hand, and starts cutting or yanking or something. It appears to be very painful. Even Jesse is looking on in horror, and she's the one who wanted Derek to go all Hostel on his ass. "Don't hurt the boy!" says Paul. Derek prattles on, some nonsense about how "you can beat and beat some people all you want but they hate themselves so much that they just absorb the pain," and eventually Paul admits to being Charlie Fischer. Well, of course he is. It's Richard Schiff, after all. Young Charlie looks on in horror. I'm really going to lose my hair, you can see him thinking. Jesse looks at Derek, all, "You owe me a Coke."
Old Charlie says he's not here on a mission, but as a reward. He says he was locked up in Pelican Bay when the bombs dropped, and when the terminators got their hands on him, it was either tell them everything he knew, or say goodbye. "And what'd you learn?" asks Derek. "I learned what makes people tick," he says. Enraged, Jesse flips the chair over, and Derek has to stop her from beating him to death right there.
Oh, great, just when things are getting interesting, we have to head over to Dr. Sherman's office where we can watch Sarah refuse to be at all forthcoming with any sorts of details about her life that might help him understand where her dreams are coming from. So he can only speak in generalities, and tells her that dreams usually mirror the central conflict in the dreamer, which he guesses would be with John. He also asks about conflict with Cameron, which Sarah says is different, and anyway, she doesn't want to talk about Cameron. Sherman says that's odd, because he thinks this is what the three dots are about, and why she only wants to talk about "one of the dots" is beyond him.
Sarah continues to sit silently. He sighs and stands up. "Nothing is going to happen in here until you decide to be honest." Sarah gets up and stomps out.
Back in the container, Old Charlie has filled in Young Charlie, who seems kinda skeptical. "Judgment Day? Machines?" Old Charlie goes off on how you have no idea what you'd do. He asks Young Charlie what the toughest decision he's had to face has been: Whether to stay with Rebecca or take a chance on Christine, or being worried about getting fired for taking time off for Grandfather's funeral? "You think you know who you are? You don't have a clue," says Old Charlie. Young Charlie wonders why he doesn't just tell them what they want to know. Yeah, really. Seems like he's made a career of that sort of thing. "You're here, you're safe," says Young Charlie. "Safe"? He's getting the crap beaten out of him by people he betrayed!
Speaking of whom, Derek and Jesse are conferring about what to do. Jesse says the guy's just playing games, pretending to be weak. He asks her how she knows, and she says she just does. She says Derek might not remember him, but she does. "He was the worst of them. The worst. He needs to die, Derek."
Derek asks what this guy did to her. From the sound of her? My guess is he dated her for a while and then just stopped calling her.
Jesse says there was a raid on a bunker. Metal was everywhere, and they killed the children and anyone over thirty. They took the prisoners to this place, says Jesse, and we watch as a bound Jesse lies on the table in the middle of a room with Terminators watching through windows, as Old Charlie walks around telling his audience that he will show them how to extract information from people, what makes people tick. This is what my closed captioning says, but I don't hear Old Charlie's words on my television at all. Weird. It certainly explains why Jesse snapped when Old Charlie talked about what makes people tick earlier.
"It was kind of a perverse theatre, like he was teaching them," says Jesse. Derek asks how long it went on. Weeks, months, says Jesse. There were drugs and starvation, she says, and we watch as Old Charlie administers a needle to Jesse's arm. "And he talked to you, for hours, for days, just to break you down. Just to get to your inner ... to get to you." Derek asks how she got out. "I don't know. You never told me," she says. Derek's all, huh? She puts her hands on his hips. "It wasn't me Fischer had, baby. It was you." Derek's stunned, because yeah, you'd think you'd remember that, right? We see a future scene featuring Derek instead of Jesse, who says she can't believe he doesn't remember.
Well, Derek goes marching in again and introduces himself, complete with first lieutenant, 132nd SOC. "Yeah, well, good for you," says Old Charlie. "Not for you," says Derek, and he smacks him one. Old Charlie's all, "Yyyyyeah, I was wondering when you'd remember." Derek says he doesn't, but Jesse does, and that's good enough for him. A single tear rolls down Jesse's cheek, so I guess this is the Oscar reel. Old Charlie asks if Derek's going to kill him now. "Not you," says Derek, taking his gun out and pointing it at Young Charlie. There's a gunshot, but it doesn't come from Derek but from Jesse, who's shot Old Charlie instead. "Oh, thank you!" gasps Young Charlie, who you'd think would still be traumatized
from seeing his future self SHOT TO DEATH, for god's sake.
Back at the Connor Compound, Derek comes in, waking his mom up on the couch. She hands over her little yellow sketch paper with the three dots, asking him what he thinks it means, explaining that she's been dreaming about it. It's so clearly finger holes for a bowling ball that I don't know what the whole mystery here is. He shrugs off any significance her dreams might have and tells her Chrome Artie's body wasn't there. "Ellison," says Sarah, and John says he doesn't have it. And then the thing I know she's blathering on about how it's her fault that Chrome Artie found them, because of the boy at the bowling alley who she let live (see? Bowling alley! Finger holes on a bowling ball!). "We're not murderers. You're not," he says, consciously or unconsciously implying that he is, or feels like one. "We need to get that body back," she says.
Speaking of bodies, it looks like Derek's disposing of one in the woods, Jesse in the passenger seat of his truck. He gets in. "You don't think he'll ... talk, Young Fischer." "We had to let him go. He's not the monster we just buried," she says, and Derek hopes he doesn't become one. She asks him if he remembers any of it, and he says he doesn't. "It was all we talked about, Derek. What he'd done, how you were going to find him one day. You were obsessed," she says. Finally she chalks it up to him blocking a trauma, but he's got another theory: that he came from a future where it hadn't happened, and she's come from a future where it did.
"Is that possible?" she asks. He says since he's been back he's done things, changed things. "Maybe I changed the future," he says, which is, after all, the reason they're here. Well, that, and it's not a post-apocalyptic war zone. "Do you think there's a version of the future where we're not together?" she says. Derek says "no," scoring major sweetheart points.
Damn, Young Charlie, take a sick day! You're all beat up with a black eye! Young Charlie reports for work at SRF, checking in with the fingerprint and retinal scans, only to be greeting by suits from the FBI Department of Homeland Security.
In an interrogation room, the lead agent says Charlie came in two nights ago and made an unauthorized entry at 4:16 a.m. A very nervous-sounding Charlie says that's a mistake, that he would have no reason to be here at that time. "Computers don't lie, Mr. Fischer," says FBI guy, showing him the log with his name on it. And as the agent explains that at 4:23 a.m. someone made an unauthorized access to a computer networking system, that allows user access to all primary military-industrial computer systems, we watch as Old Charlie walks in, using his thumbprint and retinal scanner. "I'm telling you, this is all a big mistake," says Young Charlie, protesting that he doesn't even know how to get into the computer system, so why would he. "You tell me," says the agent. "Why would you install a roving back door into those computer systems, one that we can't dismantle so far."
Young Charlie, who looks like he might have just a theory as to how this may have happened, says he didn't do anything, so the agent asks him to explain how he got so banged up. Charlie stares at him for a moment. "I don't know if I can," he says. "Try," says the agent.
Elsewhere, Catherine Weaver's sleek black Mercedes pulls up to Ellison's in a parking lot. She gets out and asks what it is he wanted to show her. He opens his trunk, and lifts the tarp off Chrome Artie's bullet-ridden body. "We need to learn how they work. How to fight 'em," he says. We see a shot of Young Charlie telling his story in the storage locker, which is now completely empty, agents scouring it. Then we see Young Charlie in white, in a room with padded walls, and a door closing shut on him. "We can't allow history to repeat itself. Not when we have the power to stop it. It's up to us, now. The two of us," he says. Catherine smiles. "Yes. It is."
Oh, lord. One more dream sequence. Sarah, in a dress, climbs down a ladder into the grave, which has a door in one wall. She walks through, into Dr. Sherman's office. He's sitting there and looks up. She asks what she's doing there. "I don't know. It's a waste of time. You just lie and lie," he says, and she repeats that, the way Cameron might. He asks her if she has things to do, and she says she does. "I should get back to work," she says, and now she's back in the room with the names written in blood on the walls, and she sees it: three dots in a triangular pattern. I STILL say it's a Big Lebowski reference.
Daniel still prefers Sports Night to The West Wing. He can be reached at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
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