Come on, Eileen

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Sarah's three-dot obsession is taking her to such unlikely places as a Simpsons convention, where she stares at the liver spots on the scalp of Mr. Burns, and then to a UFO convention, one of those places where "experiencers" talk about getting probed, and believers tell people not to believe anything they read in newspapers but to believe everything they read on sketchy crackpot websites. She's there because of an exhibit on "California drones," which seem to feature the three dots. The authority on the California drones is one "Abraham," a blogger who vanished mysteriously six months ago, but a woman, Eileen, at the conference tells Sarah she's got some information. Sarah is the only one surprised to find out Eileen is actually Abraham (real name Alan) in disguise, and he tells some tale of working on a secret government project involving strange metal technology, but when he started blogging about it, his life appeared to be in jeopardy. He's got some sort of proof stored in a safe, only it's gone when he and Sarah go to retrieve it. Worse luck, someone on a motorcyle almost Uzis them to death. They go to a hypnotherapist so Alan can remember the directions to the secret lab, only he and the therapist are killed. So Sarah, who was naturally recording the hypnosis session, follows the directions and they lead her to a windowless warehouse where the sole employee claims to be an air-conditioner installer. Then he shoots Sarah. She ups the ante by killing him, and weakly crawls outside where, perhaps drug-induced, perhaps delirium-induced, perhaps cancer-induced, she sees the three dots on the underside of what looks an awful lot like a Hunter-Killer.

Hey, why wasn't Cameron along on this mission? Oh, that's right: she had to protect John who was PAINTING HIS ROOM and arguing with Riley over the mysterious bruise she's suffered. We see flashbacks that place Riley in the future as a Dickensian orphaned waif recruited by Jesse (who gave her the bruise by smacking her when she wanted out of the infiltration of the Connor Clan -- her assignment is to keep John as far away from Sarah as possible). Cameron's really suspicious of Riley, but she could just be acting bitchy because Riley didn't bring her a Peachy Keen smoothie. Ellison is getting to know the new Chrome Artie. Weaver wants him to teach Chrome Artie right from wrong, so Ellison plays chess and talks religion, which is a great move. Who ever gets worked up over misinterpreted religious teaching? Oh, and I checked. "Fall finale" actually means "criminally boring that may make you not miss us during two months off."

Want more? The full recap starts right below! Oh, terrific. The "previously on" scenes tonight are very Riley-centric, which can only mean one thing: the episode following suit. So I'm already in a crabby mood as we kick things off with Sarah starring in an SUV commercial and blathering on about some explorer named Cabeza de Vaca who was captured and then learned his captor's ways and became a healer and was freed, and I could probably learn all about this over on the H channel, but since I am watching a show about killer robots from the future, I'd much rather people start making with the bullets. I know it's going to relate, and I know it's all deep. I can get deep and relatable elsewhere.

So Sarah's going to a UFO convention, and there are reasonable looking displays of things like alien skulls, because yes, I'm sure alien visitors will one day prove to have our exact same bone structure except for the size of the cranium.

And a woman at some crackpot seminar is talking about the world being pulled out from under her feet, and some woman standing at a lectern with a cheap poster that says "Flying saucers have landed" on it. "I don't know what's real and what's not," she says. The woman at the lectern says what "Eileen" is feeling is very common among "experiencers" such as her. Yeah, not knowing what's real and what isn't? Sounds about right. And then the woman asks "miss fly on the wall" (that would be Sarah Connor) what she's doing here, and says there have been reports of UFOs with a pattern of three dots, and she needs to know what it means. "It's important to you," says the lecturer, because those are some amazing deductive skills. "I've been having nightmares," says Sarah. "Are they nightmares or are they memories?" asks the lecturer all mysteriously, and Sarah, instead of saying, "No, they're NIGHTMARES!" just says her son's lost faith in her. "He's never doubted me before," she says, and the lecturer says if there's something they understand her, it's doubt.

Elsewhere, some other basement-dweller is pontificating about the "California drones" that have been spotted all over the state. The pictures are of some kind of circular craft that he claims is some alien thing, and Sarah says, "Alien, not military?" and the guy says these things are far beyond the capability of the military. How he knows this, given that he and the rest of the conspiracy freakshow there assume that the government covers everything up, I have no idea. Another diagram suggests the three dots are centre points of three different parts of the spacecraft. He tells Sarah about the "Abraham blogs," which were written by someone claiming to be a scientist working on some secret government project involving some kind crazy metal that could withstand fire and explosions and gingivitis and whatever else. Sarah asks where she can find Abraham, and Buddy says he posted a few times and then disappeared. "Think someone killed him?" she asks, which turns Buddy to stone because now he thinks she's just out to watch the freakshow, and he has a temper tantrum and goes stomping off.

"Interested in Abraham?" says a voice from behind Sarah. It's Eileen. Come on, Eileen!

So Sarah's driving again and risking lives by talking on her cellphone with John to tell him she's following up a lead, some blogger who may have been working with endoskeleton metal, and John cracks wise about how reliable bloggers are. "Why do you have to be so sarcastic?" says Sarah, her voice practically cracking. You can tell she's tired of having this same fight with him. He tells her to be careful, and she hangs up without saying goodbye.

John's stripping the child's wallpaper from the walls of his bedroom, and here comes Riley to annoy us all, but at least she's bringing smoothies. She's not quite her bright chipper self, and John asks her about it, and she says she flipped out on her foster mom, because they don't know how good they have it, and everyone at school is the same way. "They complain about every little thing. It's like one big whineathon," and I hope it's just coincidence that "one big whineathon" is generally how I'm tempted to write up John's story every week. "You're so lucky your mom's home-schooling you." "Yeah, it's been awesome," says John.

Here comes Cameron! Maybe she'll shoot something! No, she's coming to complain that Riley didn't bring her a smoothie. "I didn't know you were here," says Riley. "I'm always here," says Cameron, which isn't even true, and John can't get Cameron out of there fast enough, so he asks her to go get some more paint, and she tells him what he's got there will be sufficient, and she goes into the other room, staring Riley down the entire time.

And this clears up the lingering doubt I had about Riley actually being from the future: here she is as some filthy waif rummaging through people's things in one of the resistance's underground bunkers. There's Jesse, spotting her and tracking her down. Jesse brushes the hair off her face. "You're a pretty girl," she says. Like Riley's a parrot.

Eileen and Sarah pull up at a Slipstream trailer in the middle of nowhere. Sarah asks if Abraham is going to be cool with this. "Abraham doesn't live here. I do," says Eileen, adding that if Sarah's interested in Abraham, she's going to want to see this. They go inside, and the walls are covered with the same pictures the guy at the UFO conference had. Sarah drove all this way for this?

After the commercial break, Sarah has already figured out that "Abraham is a pseudonym." No, he put his own name on the blog that reveals military secrets. "Alan Park" is his real name, and he graduated from MIT specializing in Lidar, which is "light detection and ranging," which Sarah already knows, and its primary application is in robots. And then they have some tea and talk about the solitude of the desert, and how Eileen loves the solitude, most of the time.

Then it's back to business, with Eileen showing Sarah a map displaying drone sightings, and Abraham sightings. She points one out that's the most recent. "Then that's where we'll start," says Sarah.

Oh no! It's one of those deserted, windswept alleys that attract bright electrical balls that deposit humans or Terminators. In this case, it's Riley and Jesse. And then, having scored clothes, they're in a hotel room where Riley kind of oversells the skittish-waif-who's-never-seen-towels-before. And I realize Riley was filthy when Jesse found her, but she couldn't have at least WASHED before she went back to the past? But then we wouldn't get the dramatic shower scene with all the dirt and grime running off Riley down the drain. And then Jesse brushing Riley's hair and tucking Riley into bed.

So in the present day Riley's helping John scrape the wallpaper off the walls and listening to him talk about how this wallpaper is his mom's subconscious way of keeping him a kid, and he goes to pull a flake of paper out of her hair and she recoils and he sees she's hiding a bruise on her left temple. He demands to know who did it to her, but she wants him to drop it, and he asks if it was her stepfather: "I'll kick his ass!" says John, and oddly enough the laugh track didn't kick in at that point. Riley runs off, telling John to leave it alone.

Weaver is trying to cajole Ellison into teaching John Henry right from wrong (via the former Chrome Artie) since his religious faith and paternal instinct makes him such a good candidate, and Dr. Sherman isn't around anymore, and Ellison makes the very good point that Dr. Sherman isn't around because JOHN HENRY KILLED HIM, and Weaver says, "It wasn't murder. You said so yourself," which I'm sure will be great comfort to him when John Henry bakes him alive or whatever. Ellison's scared of what happens when John Henry realizes just how powerful it is. "Cows are more powerful than humans. I'd still rather be the farmer with a gun," says Weaver, which makes almost no sense whatsoever.

Sarah and Eileen are in some UFO-themed diner, which really just consists of aluminum pie plates hanging from the ceiling, and Eileen says Abraham was seen here a week ago, according to an anonymous posting in a UFO chat room, and this would be the point where if I were Sarah I'd cut my losses and just get up and leave, and Sarah's not really into nutjob UFO web sites, and she just wants to talk to Abraham, and Eileen excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Sarah looks around at the pink-uniformed waitresses for a moment, and then is startled to see herself in a white tanktop sitting in the booth, across the table. She's carved "NO FATE" into the table and is spinning a knife around. So Sarah gets up and stomps into the women's room to demand Eileen take her to Abraham. And since he's taking off his wig and washing off his makeup, it looks like he's doing just that.

So apparently Sarah waits until they get all the way back to Eileen's (actually, Allan Park's) trailer for an explanation. Allan explains his life was in danger and he needed to hide. He says a few years after MIT he went to work for an aerospace company, and it was there he was approached by a firm that needed his expertise with lidar. And let's just get this out of the way now: since this is supposed to be a man pretending to be a woman, wouldn't it have made more sense to cast a man and dress him up as a woman, rather than cast a woman to play a man dressing as a woman? Does that make too much sense? Anyway, Allan says the company treated them well, but he has no idea what the project was because everyone signed non-disclosure agreements and everyone was working in isolation, and he had access to technology he'd never seen before. So, in a really BRILLIANT move for someone working on something so clearly top-secret, he started BLOGGING about it in the hopes that someone could tell him what he was dealing with. Then strange things started to happen: his apartment was broken into, his brakes were cut, and that's when he took all his money out of the bank and went into hiding. "Some disguise," says Sarah, and Allan says he couldn't take the risk. "You took a risk with me," points out Sarah, and Allan says something vague about how she seemed to know something he didn't about it. Yeah, you know who else might know something you don't about it, Allan? The people TRYING TO KILL YOU. Sarah asks if he's got any proof, and Allan admits to stealing a piece of it that he's got stored in a safe, so Sarah wants to saddle up. "It's not safe," he says. Sarah shows him her gun. "It never is," she answers.

And while Riley stares into the mirror at the bathroom of the Connor Compound, we flash back to her and Jesse sitting in a car talking about whether she's ready for this, and Riley stares at her nail polish and worries that it's too bright, and the makeup woman told her she was an "autumn." "I've never even seen autumn," says Riley. Jesse could not be less interested in what Riley's blathering on about than if she were me. Riley wonders why Jesse chose her; she's always meant to ask. "But you didn't," says Jesse, barely listening, too busy scanning the school parking lot. Anyway, it's too late now for this conversation, because there's John Connor standing nearby, only it's pre-haircut, which explains why he has what appears to be a muskrat pelt on his head. Riley gets out of the car and follows him as he walks away all mopey and wearing an animal carcass.

Back at the Connor Compound, Riley puts some more makeup on the bruise, then heads out into the hall, where Cameron is hanging out waiting for her. Cameron asks Riley where she got that bruise, and Riley makes up a story about falling into a door that's rather obviously a lie, and she moves to get past Cameron, who wants to look at her star tattoo on her right wrist. "It's tight," says Cameron, gripping Riley's wrist to look at it. John shows up just in time for Cameron and Riley to act all cryptic about it, and Cameron announces she's just thinking about getting a tattoo. "We need to talk," says Cameron, and John glances at Riley, who takes the opportunity to bugger off.

So Ellison's outside church, where apparently he's been a no-show lately, judging from the mild admonishment he gets from the priest, I'm assuming, who chats with him, and Ellison talks about how he came from a big family, so when he and Lila were talking about starting a family, he wanted four to five kids, while she wanted three, maybe four, and the priest points out to Captain Mathematics here that there appears to be some overlap there. But not only that, Lila graduated from the academy on Sept. 1, 2001, and then ten days later certain events made her not want to bring any children into the world. Look, I was disappointed in the Bob Dylan album released that day too, but that's no reason not to have a family. Understandable reaction, says the priest. But the problem, Ellison tells him, is that she was already pregnant. "I didn't find out until after she'd terminated it," he says. LILA'S A TERMINATOR TOO? I did NOT see that coming! The priest says when Ellison called today and said he wanted guidance, was it about Lila? Ellison says no. Was it about the child? Ellison says he doesn't know. Well, good thing we've spent the last couple of minutes moping about it. This is all time that could have been spent killing things and shooting at things.

So Sarah and Allan are at the warehouse where Allan's got this safe with the extra-secure "plastic tarp over top" option, and he opens up the safe and there's nothing in there but an empty envelope. "It's gone!" he says, and he swears to Sarah that it was there, and Sarah's all, I'm OUT of here, and stomps off, Allan chasing. Outside the warehouse, some black-clad motorcycle rider revs up and pulls out an Uzi, or some kind of handheld submachine gun. Sarah pulls Allan down and gets her own gun out to fire a few shots when the biker makes another pass. The driver flips off the bike but quickly gets back on and speeds off.

So back at the trailer (yeah, THAT'S a smart move), Sarah and Allan yell at each other, with Sarah saying she wants the truth and Allan insisting that he doesn't know anything. "You're a fake," Sarah says, and Allan calls her the exact same thing: "You're a mother. You're a seeker. You're a soldier. You're everything," and I find myself hitting fast-forward. "I'm a man who lives as a woman. You're a woman who lives --" he starts, but he never gets to finish it because Sarah's got her gun pointed right at him. Eventually, he shuts up about how he was almost killed.

Maybe if he had been killed, we wouldn't have to listen to more blah-blah about how despite everything that's happened, he doesn't hate the people he worked for, because he used to be a cog in a machine but now he's doing something he believes in, or whatever. Honestly, I can barely keep my eyes open at this point. "Eileen" says the old Allan Park is dead. "I was a waitress. They killed her too," says Sarah. Now we're just killing time. She asks about the lab Allan worked at, and he says he has no idea where it is, since they picked everyone up in a windowless van to take them to and from work every day. Sarah says she thinks she knows someone who might be able to help, and she hands over a pamphlet for Dr. Barbara Morris the "hypno-regression therapist," the lecturer at the UFO conference.

So now Ri

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ley is ... back in the bathroom at the Connor Compound? At any rate, she flashes back to visiting Jesse at the hotel because she needed someone to talk to. "Phones. That's why we have phones," says an extremely pissed Jesse. A distraught Riley says she got kicked out of her foster home because she hit her foster mom. She thinks that instead of going into another foster home, she and Jesse can get a place together. "I'll just tell John that I quit school, and then we can be together," she says. This would be when Jesse hauls off and smacks. "I'm not here to babysit you. And you're not here to feel sorry for yourself," she snaps. She lectures a shocked Riley on how she's here to do a job: keep John away from her. "Go do your job," she says. You know, I assumed she meant Sarah, but given that she doesn't say Sarah's name, it could be Jesse's referring to an even tougher bodyguard...

... who, back at the Connor Compound, is telling John that Riley's lying. "About what?" asks a not-really-giving-a-shit John. Cameron says she doesn't know, but her heart rate was elevated and her hand was perspiring, which John chalks up to Cameron freaking her out as usual. Cameron asks what happened to her face, and John admits that he doesn't know. "I could find out," says Cameron, and John warns her to stay away from Riley. They head back inside, and find the bathroom door locked. John gets Cameron to force it open (need her already, hey?). What they find inside is Riley, unconscious on the floor, bloody wrists. John gathers her in his arms and looks up at Cameron, scared.

So Sarah bursts in on Dr. Morris leading a group therapy session, and insisting she's got an emergency, which is rather rude, but given the topic was "when do you tell a new person in your life that you've been abducted," I think Sarah's doing them a favour by forcing them all to get sunshine. Morris breaks up the group therapy for this "emergency," and when Sarah hugs Allan, she slips something into her purse.

Looks like Ellison's decided to impart some life's wisdom over a game of chess with Chrome Artie. He asks if John Henry ever played chess with Dr. Sherman. No, but they played talking games. Ellison asks John Henry if he misses Dr. Sherman. Henry doesn't reply right away, then acknowledges that he learned from Dr. Sherman, so Sherman's absence slows his growth. His absence is more important than that, says Ellison, who sets about trying to explain the importance of human life. "It matters when we die," says Ellison. Henry asks why it matters, given that everyone dies eventually. Ellison goes on about the sanctity of human life, saying that since god made everything on the plant, "we are god's children." "Am I god's child?" asks Henry, who still has a lot to learn. "That's one of the things I'm here to talk to you about," says Ellison.

So did the hypno-regression therapist get pissed when she found out the emergency was just retrieving directions to a place? Guess not, because she goes to work on Allan, trying to get him to remember the bus ride to the lab. Naturally, Sarah's listening in, which means she hears the last thing said by Dr. Morris: "Can I help you?" There's someone standing in the room. Shots are fired. Sarah bolts from the truck, and maybe she might have been able to help out if she weren't moving in SLOW MOTION. By the time she gets inside, Morris and Allan are both dead, and the sound of a motorcycle revs up and fades away outside.

Fortunately, the hypnosis was completely successful and Sarah manages to find the top secret lab based solely on auditory clues, like "it rains, every day," as Sarah pulls up by a field just as sprinklers come on, spattering her truck. So ANYWAY, she finds this big windowless warehouse and loads up her knapsack with guns and bombs. And despite this place supposedly being intensely private, Sarah thinks it's a great idea to just stroll right up to the door HOLDING A GUN. Oh well. At least we're finally getting to the fireworks factory.

And inside there's a single guy working at a desk. He's somewhat surprised, to put it mildly, to have a gun pulled on him. He says his name is Winston, and claims to install air-conditioning. He pleads with Sarah, saying he's got a wife and son. Sarah asks him what's in the warehouse, and Winston says his boss rents it to another company. Just as Sarah's distracted, ol' Winston with the wife and kid whips out a gun and shoots Sarah in the leg. Instead of staying where he is to finish her off, he comes over to stand right over her, and Sarah manages to wrestle his gun around and shoot him instead. He collapses on top of her and rolls off, and Sarah drags herself towards the door, hallucinating her tanktop self spinning a knife, and her pink-dressed self.

Hauling herself out the door, she rolls onto her back and stares into the sun, which isn't going to help matters. Slowly, the sun is blocked out by the descending underside of a craft that looks remarkably like the diagrams from Allan's trailer. Sarah might not have actually seen one, but to me it looks like a Hunter-Killer.

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