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Sarah's apparently checked herself into a sleep clinic because all her fears about the end of the world mean she's not sleeping. When she does manage to catch a little shut-eye, she's apparently dreaming about investigating a company with links to Desert Heat and Air. She goes to check it out, and winds up being kidnapped by Winston, the dude she shot at Desert Heat and Air, who's intent on extracting information from her.
Not that things are much better at the sleep clinic. Weird things seem to be going on -- furtive nighttime injections of her roommate, who winds up dying in a fire while sleeping, and there's also the cagey doctor. There's a friendly custodian who likes to make dream catchers for the patients who need them, plus he has a coyote tattoo, and Sarah sees a coyote in the parking lot of the company linked to Desert Heat and Air in her dream. So a reluctant John helps her investigate, and they find an observation room with all kinds of sinister machines observing the sleeping humans. The cagey doctor is actually a terminator. Quite the coincidence, huh? Well, not really, because it turns out the sleep clinic stuff is the actual dream, while the reality is that Sarah has really been captured by Winston. So she has to kill him, for real this time. And god knows how long she's going to moan about having had to kill the guy. Get over it, Sarah. And why not let Cameron help you a little bit more, since killing is the entire reason for her existence? The only opponent Cameron faces in this episode is a stubborn vending machine (well, she also faces off against Sarah's pancake-making abilities). There's also no Derek, no Weaver, no Ellison, no Riley, no Jesse, no Chrome Artie, no nothing.
Tip for Sarah if you actually are having sleeping problems: watch this episode, and you'll be out like a light in no time.
Discuss this episode in the TSCC forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks about TSCC when he has No Prior Knowledge!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We're back to hearing Sarah's voiceovers, as she starts telling us about midnight being the "witching hour," if you believe in that sort of thing, which is when a portal opens to another world and we're visited by demons and "dark spirits of the shadowlands" and drunken college buddy phone calls and the like. The demons visit us and lie on us when we cannot move, and take from us what is most precious to us: our lives, our love, our sleep, our iPods.
Sarah's driving along in the middle of the night, and she stops in a deserted parking lot in an industrial area. She calls John to tell him that she's checking out a place called Western Iron and Metal, which she says supplies specialty metal tooling equipment to Desert Heat and Air. Ah. She somehow found out about this place by watching endless surveillance footage from Charm Acres. She wants him to get on the Interwebs and find out who owns it. "I'm on it," he says, except you know he's just going to play World of Warcraft all night.
Sarah goes to jimmy open the door, when a rustling nearby startles her. She gets out her gun and goes to check it out. It's a coyote! Moving in slow motion! She stares at it for a few moments, I assume because she's waiting for it to speak to her in Johnny Cash's voice, which is just long enough for a guy in a ski mask to show up and Taser her. She twitches on the ground, and we fade into Sarah waking up in a bed, electrodes on her head.
So none of that just happened? This episode is going to have a bunch of dream sequences? Wow. That's "awesome." What actually is awesome is the sexy doctor in Sarah's room, who tells her that she was having another nightmare. Sarah tries to bug out of there, but the doctor tells her she hasn't been there long enough for the clinic to get enough data to prescribe a treatment for her insomnia, as the first night only establishes a baseline: "You go home now, things will only get worse," says the doctor, who adds that if Sarah thinks her lack of sleep is bad now, she should try going two or three years without it. She's off to get some coffee -- decaf only in this place.
As soon as she's gone, Sarah hears the telltale scrape of a cigarette lighter coming from behind the closed-off curtain around the other bed in the room. She opens the curtain, startling the woman near the window, who throws something out the window and flicks closed the Zippo, which she stuffs into her bra, underneath the Karate Kid gis they're both wearing, like maybe they're going to fight the Cobra Kai together. Which would at least be some goddamn action."I'm your roommate, Dana," says the woman, in a British accent, who says she checked in last night whilst Sarah was kicking and thrashing in her bed. Sarah asks her about the lighter, and Dana plays dumb for a moment then admits she's trying to quit smoking, but it's hard because of her chronic fatigue, which is related to her eating disorder, which is why she had her stomach stapled, and meanwhile Sarah is thinking "sorry I asked" and Dana is saying something about how she can't give up all her vices: "Girl's gotta sin sometime." "Hence the smoking," says Sarah. "And the younger men," adds Dana, who then lights up (smile-wise, not cigarette-wise) when John Connor strolls into the room. "Hey, tiger!" burbles Dana, and Sarah makes that nonplussed Sarah face of hers. John says it's visiting time, and Cameron's down in the cafeteria. Sarah starts to leave with him, and Dana holds up her lighter and stage-whispers to Sarah that they should keep this a secret.
So how much fun must it be to be in a cafeteria with Cameron, the Dietitianator 3000, telling John that he needs a carbohydrate that's at least 15 percent of his recommended daily intake. She puts some blueberry pancakes on the plate, and John laments that they won't be as good as hers. Cameron smiles at him. "You make pancakes?" says Sarah, looking a little distressed about it. Cameron says she added a teaspoon of vanilla to Sarah's own recipe. "I don't have a recipe," says Sarah. "On the box," explains Cameron. So I guess Sarah's been found out as not actually having a pancake recipe. I hope they go somewhere with this!
Outside having breakfast, Cameron's doing her best to blend in with the family by not actually eating with them but in fact standing guard, sizing everyone up. John picks at his food; his mom asks if it's not as good as Cameron's, and he says it's "not as good as food" and promises to bring Sarah something tomorrow.
He asks if they've figured out what's wrong with her yet, and she starts whining again about how she shouldn't be here, and John's telling her that it's necessary. "You haven't slept in two weeks. You fell down the stairs. If you don't take care of yourself, something worse might happen." He tells her he needs her to get better. And they look at Cameron, and he tells her not to forget that Sarah's not her, which I'm sure is important for John to keep in mind, masturbation-fantasy-wise.
So John and Cameron leave, and Sarah sits there and watches as some guy comes out to clean up tables. On the back of his right arm is a tattoo of a couple of black bars, and on the back of his neck is a coyote. thing we know, we see Sarah lying in bed, electrodes on her scalp, tossing and turning...
...and now she's in the back of a dramatically lit van, with tinny music coming through from the front (which is blocked off by wire mesh). The driver eventually stops and gets out, and then comes around and opens the back door. It's the formerly late Winston from Desert Heat and Air. "I killed you," a stunned Sarah tells him. "And I killed you. One of us is gonna have to step it up," he says, and climbs into the back of the van with her.
So Winston's eating sunflower seeds, and asks if she wants to know who he is, and then goes off on a tangent about how people always ask that question when he takes the blindfold off. Psychiatrists think that naming something gives you power over it, which is bullshit, says Winston, who admits he forgot that Sarah already knows him, and then reminds her she found them with the help of a cross-dresser and hypnotherapist, which he "didn't see coming."
So he wants to know who she's working with, despite her claim that she works alone, because someone blew up their factory while she was in the hospital, and he asks if she was talking to her accomplice on the phone earlier. Your boyfriend, hmm? Client? He smacks her across the face, and she tells him to come closer and she'll tell him the name, and since he doesn't want to get his face bitten off he readies an injection for her, warning her that she'll be talking by the time he's finished eating his sunflower seeds (half of them are on the floor). As for the injection? "Special recipe," says the guy. You know, like Cameron's pancakes (hint-hint)!
And now we're back to the sleep clinic, where Sarah's startled awake by the sight of the doctor readying a big syringe, which appears to be oozing out gel. The doctor asks if the gel is too cold, and then says something about people not liking the electrodes at first because they feel like Frankenstein. But Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster!
And the doctor's got something to show Sarah, and takes her into the observation room, which features a bunch of computers displaying incomprehensible data. And the doctor says something about Sarah's night terrors (which Sarah says she never told her about, but the doctor says she didn't have to), which can cause brain tumors, or, put another way... "cancer," says Sarah, which the doctor says, near as they can tell, Sarah doesn't have. She also doesn't have any sleep apnea or any other disorders, so the doctor figures whatever's wrong with her is in her mind. She asks if Sarah's ever tried therapy, because it can help to talk problems out. "Didn't take," says Sarah, neglecting to mention that the therapist is DEAD now. How about diazepam? "Don't like drugs," says Sarah.
"Speaking of drugs," says the doctor, as she spies Dana walking by. Then she asks Sarah if her roommate has been smoking again. Nothing like asking a patient to rat on another patient, hey?
In the room itself, an irritated doctor yanks open the curtains to Dana's window while grumbling about how she doesn't want to be anybody's mother, because she's got two kids of her own. She finds a cigarette butt on the windowsill. "Did you know about this?" she snaps at Sarah, like it's SARAH'S fault. The doctor then gripes that, in addition to the obvious hazards, cigarettes are also a stimulant, so it's not going to be helping Dana's sleeping. Sarah says she gave up cigarettes years ago as she's already got too much excitement in her life, and the doctor kinda chuckles and says "Don't we all." Then she has to go "file a report" on this cigarette butt, which seems a bit of a stretch, and she says she'll be back to attach Sarah's electrodes later. Sarah looks absolutely thrilled at the prospect.
She strolls over to her window to check out the dreamcatcher, which for anyone who doesn't know is a hoop with a woven net decorated with feathers. Dana strolls in to tell Sarah what it is, and explain that it's supposed to catch nightmares. Hector made one for her too, she says, and Sarah's all, Hector? And Dana explains she's talking about the cleaning guy: "You know, papi chulo with the neck tattoo?" she says, and then complains about "Nurse Ratched" smacking her on the bum for the cigarette, and now she's got some sleeping pills. "The good stuff," she whispers.
Then Dana asks what kind of dreams Sarah's been having, like falling, being chased, teeth falling out, etc., and Sarah says "being chased should cover it," and Dana says that means she's running away from something she doesn't want to deal with. Meanwhile, Dana dreams of being burned alive, and since I can barely keep my eyes open at this point I just have to say SOUNDS GOOD TO ME. Sarah figures it's her anxiety over quitting smoking, and Dana thinks it could be she was a witch in another life. "They say if you die in your dreams, you die in real life," says Sarah. Yeah, they said that in Nightmare on Elm Street, Sarah. Doesn't make it true. Dana says she's died a thousand times. "Of all the nightmares it's caught, I'm surprised it hasn't spilled them out all over the bed," she says, then asks if the bad guys ever catch Sarah.
Which is when we snap back to Sarah all twitchy on the pavement, and then in the back of the van with Winston again. She slowly comes to. "That's quite a collection," says Winston, nibbling on his sunflower seeds. "Bullet wounds, stabbings... emergency C-section." Sarah looks down, sees her fly is undone. Oh, gross. She snaps them up while Winston figures that by how old her C-section scar is, her son must be 15 or 20 by now. "They'll kill you, you know," says Sarah, telling him that Kaliba (which owns Desert Heat and Air, remember) will kill him like they killed 30 people at their factory. "Why would anyone blow up their own factory?" he says, and Sarah says it's to hide what they were building. Which was? "The end," says Sarah. "You are very dramatic," says Winston. Sarah tries a different tack, telling him that Diana thought he was a good man: "What do you think she'd say if she saw you now?" Winston thinks about it for a couple of seconds, coming to a slow burn. "You leave my wife out of this, you crazy bitch," he says, and then grabs her, throwing her against the side of the van and then slamming her to the floor. He handcuffs her hands behind her back, and then grabs the syringe, which has fallen to the floor, only she manages to roll over and kick him in the chest, knocking him backwards, and then he falls forward, and the rule of television/movies states that bad guys will always fall on their own syringes, which is what happens here. As Sarah manages to work her manacled hands around to her front, Winston slumps to the floor. He tries to pull out his gun, but he's too weak.
And then we're back in the sleep clinic, with Sarah waking up in time to see Dr. von Bulow finishing injecting a sleeping Dana with something before quietly walking out the door. Sarah pulls the electrodes off her head and gets up, and walks over to Dana's bed and tries to wake her. Dana, who's wearing some kind of mask apparatus over her nose, doesn't stir. Sarah pulls her clothes down a little bit to see the red injection mark on Dana's skin.
So Sarah follows Dr. Feelgood down the hallway, past the useless little security station, and spots her getting into an elevator. Sarah opts for the stairs. Here's hoping you're going to the same floor!
The doctor gets off on the ground floor and makes her way to a door with a security keypad, and she's punching in a code when she seems to hear something nearby. She goes into the stairwell -- which used to be right by the elevator but apparently is now practically on the other side of the building -- and checks things out. Nothing there. She goes back into the hallway, having failed to spot Sarah wedging herself between the walls, underneath another flight of stairs. Seems a lot more difficult (and would have taken longer to do) than quickly racing up a flight of stairs. What is she, Spider-Man? Plus, from the angle we're now looking at, I think the doctor ought to have been able to see Sarah's ass hanging out.
So the morning, light flooding in to Sarah's room wakes her up. The doctor's there, irritatedly telling Sarah that her electrodes came off last night. "Did you take them off?" she asks. Sarah says she doesn't remember, and the doctor asks if she's a sleepwalker. Sarah says it's happened once or twice, while glancing over to see Dana still sleeping, and the doctor says she didn't mention that during her intake, and Sarah says it must have slipped her mind, and the surly doctor asks again about Sarah getting up but Sarah has no idea. The doctor stares at her for a few moments (she should get all up in Sarah's face like Larry David does when he's trying to figure out if someone is lying) and then leaves.
Down in the lounge, Cameron's examining a Salvador Dali print of a person with their eyes and mouth covered over, like what a truly relaxing image to show people who have sleeping disorders, and then she gives us a little lesson on Dali exploring the subconscious, and she asks John if his dreams are like this, and he turns around, and he can't very well say that most of his dreams do involve Cameron, but he says something about how it's really about what gets stuck in your head. And meanwhile the chips ("Let's" brand potato chips. Betcha can't eat just one!) he's trying to get out of the vending machine get stuck. Cameron asks him what it's like to dream, and John says it's like being in a play or a movie that looks real and feels real. "How do you know it's not real?" she says. "Sometimes you don't," he says, and then goes back to moaning about his chips being stuck ("You and me are done, professionally," he tells it), so Cameron comes over, examines the machine and moves to hit it, freaking John out, only she just lightly hits it, making the machine cough up all kinds of goodies, not just John's chips. The Arthur Fonzarellinator 3000. Sarah strolls in and says, "John!" and John goes to see what she wants, while Cameron stays behind to fend off the advances of the lovestruck vending machine.
Outside on the patio, Sarah tells John that something weird is going on here, because she woke up and the doctor was giving her roommate an injection. Surprisingly, John is unconvinced that a doctor giving a patient an injection at a medical clinic is suspicious. "She was passed out when she gave her the injection. She'd already taken sleeping pills." John, not entirely seriously, asks if she thinks the doctor is the "angel of death," and he's completely dismissive, and John's just lucky she's in a sleep clinic and not the crazy house with the way he treats her. Further evidence that crazy stuff is going on? After giving her the injection, the doctor went into another room. In the basement! That's when they both see Dana greeting some guy on the patio, and he's brought her a bunch of sunflowers. She seems okay now, points out John. She's not though, says Sarah, no one is.
And then he asks if she slept, so she thinks he thinks she's making it up, and he calls her a mess, and she tells him not to be fooled by anyone's face. "You don't know what's behind anyone's face," she says, and then he asks if they're talking about the guy at the factory, and she doesn't want to talk about it, and he asks if that's the guy in her nightmares, and I swear to god if this show gets canceled I'd better not hear any blame being given to the Friday night death timeslot without anyone acknowledging long, boring scenes like this.
So she outlines the dream for him, with the guy, and the van, and the questioning, and John tells her it's not real. "He's in my head. I can't get him out." John tells her she did what she had to do; she defended herself. "I'm not supposed to defend myself. I'm supposed to defend you," she says. Well, you're not really able to defend John if you're dead, Sarah.
The doctor shows up (closed captioning says her name is Hobson, so that's good enough for me) and says it's naptime, and Sarah and John stare at each other as the Hobson leads her away.
And now Sarah's all electroded up and we go into her head and we get some quick-cut flashbacks, kind of like, "Previously on Sarah's nightmare!" scenes, and then Winston is still sitting on the floor of the van, asking Sarah what his wife wore to his funeral. "Black," says Sarah, like NO KIDDING, SARAH, and Winston asks if she wore her hair down or back, and Sarah says it was down, and she wore pearl earrings. Winston says he bought those for her birthday, and Sarah compliments his salary, like how rude is that, and Winston says it was the best part of the job. Sarah asks him what the worst part was. I know! I bet nobody ever cleaned the break room! "Well, you saw the tapes," says Winston. "First one was the hardest." Sarah asks him about his neighbor, Frank, whose son played lacrosse. Winston says Frank borrowed his lawnmower every Friday, and never cleaned the bag. "Why would they want him dead?" asks Sarah. Geez, weren't you listening? Frank never cleaned the bag! This one was all Winston! Winston says Frank kept the books, handled the overseas business. "So your bosses were foreign," says Sarah. Winston says they fixed him up and put him in a private clinic after she shot him. "I thought it was because they were being kind. And then I realized they were just patching me up so I could do my job." Sarah asks him what that is. "Like I said. First one was the hardest," he says. Sarah tells him he was her first, which surprises him. "I just figured a badass gal like yourself..." "Never," says Sarah, shaking her head. Shit, yeah. Her son killed someone before she did. "Glad I didn't break your streak," says Winston. You might want to knock on some wood there, fella. Sarah offers to help him and his wife disappear. "They'll slaughter us," says Winston. Sarah says there are ways to keep them off the trail. She suggests ditching the van and checking into the most expensive hotel he can find, since they'll expect the opposite. "You have my phone. When I get back to my people I'll call you. But we have to move fast so they don't know what's happening," she says. She offers him her wrists so he can free her. After a moment, he puts his gun away and unlocks her handcuffs.
She hops out the back of the van, and starts running. They're in some kind of (of course) abandoned warehouse, and she runs until she comes to a locked-up fence. No way through. Winston grabs her from behind. "Didn't see that coming, huh?" he says, and drags her away.
Sarah wakes up in the sleep clinic to the sound of a fire alarm, not to the raging bonfire in the bed to her. "Dana?" she says. It does look like there's a body in the bed. Hobson comes in with a couple of orderlies, who drag her out of the room, while she yells, "She's in there!" over and over again.
Sarah calls John so she can say she told him so, about how there are weird things going on, and she tells him that her roommate died in a fire last night. So John now thinks she should come home, only now apparently that's a stupid idea. But John's completely distracted, because Cameron just walked by, for no reason that we're privy to, in red underwear.
Dr. Hobson is addressing a group of patients and staff, telling them that despite the rumour that Dana didn't pull through, she is in fact alive, albeit in critical condition. Given that it was such a traumatic event, she understands if any patients want to discontinue their treatment, but she lets them know that observing their sleeping patterns after such a stressful event could be very helpful. (Translation: no refunds.) "Whatever you choose, we fully support your decision," she says.
Hobson catches up with "Ms. Baum" in the hallway, and says she heard she decided to stay. Sarah confirms it. Hobson warns her that all the stress has likely elevated her cortisol levels, which will likely make it harder to sleep tonight, so she's got a couple of diazepam for her, and she deposits a couple of little blue pills into Sarah's palm. "Better take them now," advises Hobson, who helpfully has a water bottle with her. Sarah puts the pills in her mouth and takes a swig of water (sip your slurp!) and naturally, after Hobson leaves, pulls the pills out from under her tongue.
In her room, Hector is examining the burned curtains by Dana's bed when Sarah comes in. "I've been meaning to say thank you. For the dreamcatcher," she says, while he, startled, gets back to sweeping. She asks if he makes them for all the patients. "Just the ones who need it," he says.
Sarah goes and sits on her bed, and tells him Dana used to dream about being burned to death, and Hector says he should have made her a bigger one. Yeah, that's hilarious, Hector. He says she should have taken charge of the things that were in her head, controlled it. "You believe in that?" says Sarah. "Of course I do," says Hector. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT NOW. He turns to go, and Sarah catches a glimpse of the coyote tattoo on the back of his neck. She asks if it has mystical significance: "Does it protect you? Guide you?" None of the above, Sarah: "It's for my girl. She thinks it's sexy."
Back in the van, Winston is saying that most people don't know anything about torture, which must be a heartening thing for Sarah to hear. "It's not the pain that causes people to talk. It's the talking that causes people pain," he says. No, I'm pretty sure it's the exact opposite, Winston, but thanks for your faux-deep observation. Unless you mean, "It's other people talking that causes people pain," then I completely get it. This episode is Exhibit A. He wants her to tell him a story, and I REALLY WISH SOMEONE WOULD TELL A STORY, and she counters by telling him that he told her a story once, back at the warehouse, about his son. "That's when you let me go," says Winston, who thinks it's funny now, because she doesn't seem like the sentimental type.
"Your story, not mine," Sarah reminds him. "Yeah, but you believed it," says Winston. He crawls right up to her. "Because you have a child," he says figuring things out. Things start to click for him. "My story is your story," he tells her, and that's why she gave it back to him when he asked her for one. "You have a son. He's your accomplice," says Winston. He reaches to touch her face, and she recoils, but doesn't say anything. "See? That wasn't so hard," he says, sitting back, pleased with himself.
After the commercial break, Sarah, in the sleep clinic, waits as Dr. Hobson leaves her room, and then pulls down her robe off her shoulder to see the red welt left from the injection.
Back in the van, Winston is still talking about Sarah's son. "He's just a boy," says Sarah. "A boy you'd die to protect," he says. Sarah says any mother would. Any mother would die to defend John Connor? I don't think so! "You'd be surprised," says Winston, who then goes on to talk about how the enemy is like a weed: you leave any part of it underground, it will pop back up where you least expect it, so you have kill the root. "Or in this case..." the head vampire? "... the seed." Sarah says her son isn't alone, so Winston won't get anywhere near him. Winston says he won't have to, because her son will come to her. Sarah says her son is too smart for that, so I guess she must have some other son that we don't know about. Winston intends to make Sarah call her son, and to make his point, he starts choking her, although I've always found that positive reinforcement is far better for motivation than choking someone.
Then he stops. "We don't need to talk anymore," he says. Is that a promise? Sarah vows not to call John, saying she'll die first, and Winston's all, oh, you'd like that.
Sarah's jerked awake by John, who Sarah called sometime after getting the shot, it would seem. He's there to get her out of there, but she says the doctor's just going to keep hurting people if they don't do something about it. So blow up the hospital and call it a day.
Hobson leaves her forbidden chamber of mystery on the ground floor, and then John and Sarah creep out from the stairwell. So much for this sedative the doctor gave Sarah. They head over to the keypad. "Think you can hack the combination?" asks Sarah. "In my sleep," says John. Clue! So beep-boop-beep and they're in, to a room with large monitors on the wall displaying neural images. Brain scans. John checks out one of the desktop computers, and says there are thousands of files. Sarah asks if she's one, and gives John her bracelet so he can get her patient ID number. And sure enough, there she is. A scarred forehead, flat hair -- she looks like a mugshot pulled from thesmokinggun.com. "There's a ton of data on you. It's a whole profile," says John. She tells him to delete it. She's convinced it's a Skynet program, and he tries telling her that it's just a sleep clinic, only she thinks sleep is the perfect cover. She implores him to delete her profile, which takes a few moments of frantic typing.
Elsewhere, Hobson is alerted by an orderly that the electrodes in Room 22 aren't picking up any data. "Thank you for telling me," says Hobson, rather robotically. That's right. She's acted completely human up until now, but suddenly she's speaking flatly and walking the terminator purposeful walk.
So John's finally deleted Sarah's profile, but now they've got another problem. Someone's beeping on the keypad outside the room. Hey, Sarah, climb up to the ceiling this time!
So Hobson comes in, and she sees just Sarah standing there. Sarah offers a "sleepwalking" excuse, and Hobson says, "Through a locked door?" Sarah's all "sorry" and then stares over at John, who's TRYING to hide behind some computers. She says she'll go back to her room. "Did you know that when a human falls in love the same areas of the brain light up as when a human is intoxicated?" says Hobson. Yeah, here comes the "human" talk. Hobson also says they don't know why humans dream. "Humans like you?" asks Sarah, that cock-eyed optimist. Hobson just smiles. "You drugged me," says Sarah. Hobson says she's experiencing sleep paralysis: "You'll want to move, but you can't." Then she picks Sarah up and throws her against the wall. Sarah falls to the floor and Hobson gets on top and tells Sarah that, believe it or not, her body is actually protecting her right now. She grabs Sarah by the throat, and says Sarah was talking to her boy just now, and orders Sarah to call him. She stands up. "I'd die first," says Sarah, and Hobson knocks her across the mouth, knocking out a couple of teeth. "I'm sure you'd like that, to die. It's never that easy," says Hobson, just like Winston did in the van. She picks up a big computer and lifts it above her head to throw at Sarah, but is shot three times in the chest by John. She falls backward. Sarah takes his gun, and goes and stands right over Hobson's body, because Sarah's been taking notes while watching Friday the 13th movies. Hobson's eyes open, and she grabs the gun and blows John away, and then shoots Sarah right between the eyes. She falls to the floor, dead.
So if you die in your dreams, do you die in real life? Sarah's in the back of the van, handcuffed, and Winston's outside on the phone, saying Sarah's son is the one they want, and they'll give him a little more time to show up. Sarah frantically works at her handcuffs, and ... oh, my god, she's biting into her wrist. She's drawing blood! Her mouth is ringed with her own blood! Then she braces her legs behind her cuffs, and pushes, and -- oh, that crunch sound made my stomach turn.
Outside, Winston's saying he guesses they don't need her anymore. He says they can trace her cellphone to this location even without her alive. "It makes no difference to me. I'll take care of it right now." Sarah's sliding the cuffs off her blood-lubricated left hand, and her thumb -- her thumb's not moving. That can't feel good.
Outside, Winston pulls his gun out of his pants. "Hell, it's what she wants," he says, and he strolls around to the back of the van. He opens the door, and Sarah leaps at him, jabbing the SYRINGE IN HIS EYE. My GOD. We can see it sticking out and everything! He's -- to put it mildly -- surprised, but pulls it together to start scrapping with her, knocking her around a couple of times. They fight for his gun and fall to the ground. Winston gets on top of her and starts to choke her, and Sarah jams her fingers into his non-syringed eye. He lets her go, in agony, and she grabs his gun, and points it at his head. It's a Colt! That's how she'll know the answer to a particular question later on when she's competing on Who Wants to be a Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape Millionaire. "You're real. You're real!" says Sarah. She pulls the trigger, and then Winston is real dead.
Sarah's driving home now, so we go back into voiceover mode. "A spirit sits on a man's chest. She is strong, beautiful. She is here to steal his children. She is here to steal his future. He is paralyzed. The terror in him will burst his heart if he cannot control it. She is a nightmare, a demon woman. The oldest and most enduring story told by man. The witching hour is controlled by witches." And the new Dodge Ram! She stops her shiny new truck, because she sees a coyote. "She is a bad dream. She is a bad bitch."
Discuss this episode in the TSCC forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks about TSCC when he has No Prior Knowledge!