The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 8 & 9

The WGA strike really took its toll on this show as it ends in a cliffhanger and with unresolved questions. Most of episode 8 centered on decoding the T-888 chip that Cameron kept from an earlier episode and Cromatie’s attempts to find John through the school system.

The hacked T-888 chip reveals that the terminator known as Vick was sent back in time to monitor a Barbara Chamberlain to develop the ARTIE, which would have been an automated system that monitored traffic in Los Angeles. Vick was revealed to have married Barbara and actively encouraged her to develop the programme while secretly removing opposition such as a Jennifer Peck.

They learn that ARTIE would be the nerve centre for Skynet should it ever come into contact with that programme. With this in mind, Sarah decides to have John create a virus that would be uploaded to ARTIE, which was stored in City Hall. Derek and Sarah manage to break into the building and upload the virus, but it fails and they are almost caught by the police.

While John continues to scour Vick’s CPU for memories, the CPU manages to reactivate and almost takes over his computer. However, they manage to stop it before it sends out a signal to other terminators alerting them of John Connor.

Cameron later suggests they use her CPU and hack into the city network so she can go in and disable the system from within. John extracts the CPU from Cameron’s head and gets her CPU to successfully hack the system.

We later learn that Vick had killed Barbara after he had gotten her to successfully finish the ARTIE programme. Cromartie searches every school district for John but Cameron uses Norris to pose as John to throw him off. Sarah then makes a call to buy the Turk.

Episode 9 opens with a flashback of Derek and Kyle Reese playing baseball on 2011 just before Judgment Day starts. In the present, Agent Ellison pays a visit to Charley Dixon asking him about Sarah Connor. He tells him that he seems to believe in her claims but Charley tells him that an agent by the name of Kester has already stopped by asking the same things. Charley later visits Sarah about Ellison and is told to get away from her to save himself.

Sarah and Cameron go to a local internet cafe to look for a Sarkisian, who then offers to meet them in the cafe. In a nearby computer, he offers to sell the Turk for $500,000 and demands they meet him near a park by an ATM. Meanwhile a British man and his goon stop by Carlos’s house to ask them about Sarah Connor and Enrique and kill Carlos’s friends when he refuses. It is implied that they extract the information before killing Carlos. After returning from the park, Sarah and Derek find the British henchman at their home and raises the price to $20,000,000 and demands the money in 24 hours. He also mentions that one of his goons is following John in his field trip to the museum.

Agent Ellison goes to investigate Kester and learns that he is in the FBI database with a resemblance to George Laslow. Meanwhile, Cromartie as Kester is looking for files on Sarah Connor at the same FBI office. Using these strange pieces of information, Agent Ellison manages to convince his superior that Kester is the same person who killed two people in less than 36 hours, had plastic surgery to resemble Laslow, killed Laslow and later got himself into the FBI database. With this in mind, Ellison is able to assemble an FBI tactical team to go after Cromartie. Charley Dixon later hears about the raid from his radio and tries to get there before its too late.

The raid goes horribly wrong with most of the FBI agents except for Ellison being killed and with Cromartie suffering minor damage. Charley arrives just in time to evade Cromartie before finding Ellison and surveying the damage.

While at the museum, John seems upset that no one notices his birthday while talking to Cameron. At the museum, Cameron notices a man following John but is stopped by her teacher from pursuing him. She later manages to kill the goon and stuff him in his Mercedes CLS after the field trip ended and brings the car back to their safehouse. At the safehouse, they examine the corpse and Sarah has Cameron impersonate the dead goon when the British man calls them. He agrees to meet him back at the hideout, but the group has no idea where it is until Carlos’s girlfriend shows up and gives them the location.

It turns out the hideout was the backroom of the Internet cafe and they go after the British man. Cameron, Derek and Sarah pursue the man while John tries looking for anything related to the Turk, but finds the man’s daughter. The British guy later takes John hostage with Sarah in a standoff, but Derek brings in the little girl as a hostage. While comforting the girl, Derek shoots the British guy in the head and we later learn that the father is actually the clerk in the Internet cafe. After taking the dead man’s hard drive, they return to the safehouse.

For John’s birthday, Derek takes John out for some ice cream to have him watch his younger self and Kyle play baseball on a sunny day in a park. There John meets a younger version of his father and Derek reveals that he knew John was his nephew because he had Kyle’s eyes and because Kyle was interested in women like Sarah. After the trip to the park, John hacks the hard drives to learn that there was another buyer for the Turk before Sarah and the British man they killed was not Sarkisian. It turns out that the clerk in the Internet cafe was the Sarkisian and he planted a car bomb in Sarah’s car, which blew up when Cameron started it.

The episode ends with Cameron being blown up, the Turk still at large, and Ellison surviving Cromartie. It was unfortunate that the WGA strike went as long as it did which meant that the full 13 episodes were never produced. This cliffhanger ending could suggest that Cameron does survive the attack to come back in endoskeleton form in episode 10 to find and interrogate Sarkisian and the heroes wind up dealing with a batch of seedy underworld types just to find the Turk with Cromartie after them.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 6

Charley manages to save Derek’s life as he flashes back to the final moments of the Future War while recovering. In his flashbacks, we learn that John Connor has sent Derek and Kyle out on a diversionary mission to get them out of danger from their local base, which was going to be attacked by the machines. Kyle manages to evade the machines, but Derek and his team are captured by the terminators and brought to a safehouse to be tortured for information. Eventually the machines leave their safehouse once someone gave out the location of their base.

During his captivity, one of the resistance fighters confides to him that his name is not William Wisher and that he is the one who created Skynet. It turns out that this person is the same Andy Sarah Connor considered killing in the present. Derek keeps slipping in and out of consciousness in the present, but is given a blood transfusion by John to stabilise his condition. Charley starts suspecting that Derek may be John’s father until Sarah assures him that it is someone else.

Derek and his team return to find almost everyone killed, and a burnt picture of Sarah Connor. It is implied that the battle was basically Kyle Reese’s flashback from the first “Terminator” movie where Sarah’s picture gets burned during the battle. Later, they are met by another tech com regiment who brings them to another base. During the process, he is informed that John Connor and Kyle went with a team to destroy a research facility and Kyle became MIA in the process. It is again suggested that John had sent Kyle back in time as shown in the first terminator movie. Once he arrives at the new base, Derek panics when he sees Cameron until he is reassured that it is a reprogrammed terminator, which is a project John initiated to change the tide of war.

Derek also remembers a reprogrammed terminator going rogue and killing several soldiers before it was stopped by Cameron. Finally, he is summoned by John Connor to go back in time with a team and await further instructions. It becomes clear that Derek has intentions of creating a safehouse and killing Andy once he finds him.

In the present, Charley is shown the remains of the deactivated terminator from the last episode and he is clearly frightened but now understand why Sarah and John left him. Cameron then prepares to destroy all traces of the terminator by first extracting the flesh before incinerating the endoskeleton with thermite. Sarah then orders Cameron to find the missing arm from the last battle and to destroy all pieces of the T-888, but Cameron secretly keeps a piece of the T-888’s CPU for some reason.

After stabilising Derek’s condition, Charley bids Sarah farewell but not before informing her that an FBI agent had visited him asking about her. Derek regains consciousness in the present and John informs him that Kyle was sent back to the past to protect him. He also tells him he died a hero. The episode ends by revealing that Derek is in fact the one who killed Andy with previews showing Agent Ellison showing the T-888’s severed hand to a scientist, Sarah finding a tape, and Cameron acting strange.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 5

Brian Austin Green is Derek Reese, Kyle Reese’s brother and John Connor’s uncle in “Queen’s Gambit”. The episode begins with Sarah Connor thinking about her time in Central America and John’s interest in chess. The scene then returns to the present where Sarah getts a call from Andy who invites Sarah to watch his rebuilt Turk play in the SoCal chess tournament. Meanwhile John and Cameron start dealing with the death of the girl from the earlier episode.

Cromartie pays a visit to Charley Dixon to ask him about Sarah Connor’s whereabouts. Charley tells him that he has moved on and he remembered Sarah and John dying in a bank explosion. Cromartie as an FBI agent then hands him a business card and explains himself in an awkward fashion. Later that night Charley and his wife have a fight over his feelings for Sarah Connor to which he confesses meeting John earlier.

John becomes interested in a girl in high school but he is warned by Morris that the girl he likes has baggage and an abusive father. Cameron undergoes grief consoling and does not express any feelings towards the girl’s suicide.

Meanwhile, Sarah is at the tournament and learns that Andy has partnered with a Russian chessmaster to get the revised Turk working. John and Cameron make it to the tournament with a backup plan to kill Andy should his machine win the chess match. Fortunately Andy’s machine loses but he is found dead by Sarah just as a shady individual leaves the tournament. Believing the shady person to be the killer, Sarah tracks him down and fights him but backs off when he is caught by the police.

John hacks into the LAPD database and learns that the man is one of their resistance sleeper agents. Cameron adds that he is one of John’s best soldiers and Sarah plans on visiting him with a disguise. At the same time, a local T-888 finds the resistance fighter’s location and picks a fight with some cops to get arrested in the same jail. The first person to meet with the fight is Agent Ellison, who presents him with evidence of his comrade’s death and with deaths that are connected to the synthetic blood found in each crime scene. The man tells him that they are all going to die and Ellison tries to convince the local police to move him into federal custody.

Later Sarah manages to get into the jail posing as the man’s defence lawyer. The fighter tells her that he was not the one who killed Andy and that the Turk has gone missing; presumably with the Russian who also has military connections. He later advises Sarah to leave so she will not be targeted by the local T-888 who will kill him and then says that she looks better than in the picture. She asks about the picture since she only knows Kyle has it and he tells her that he is Derek Reese of the Reese brothers.

With this new piece of information, Sarah picks up John and Cameron from school with a plan to break Derek out during his prison transfer. Just as he is transferred, the T-888 breaks out of his cell to kill Derek at his cell before realising he was transferred out. Cameron stops the prison van and takes it over with Sarah as Derek continues to freak out over the terminator. The T-888 then shows up and Cameron fights it while Sarah continues driving out of danger. In this fight Cameron manages to sever the T-888’s hand but she is later knocked out. Just as the T-888 shoots Derek, Cameron knocks it out and proceeds to remove its CPU with household tools to “kill” it.

They then bring Derek back to their safehouse where he is in critical condition. Sarah wants to kidnap a doctor to save him but John objects until he learns that he is his future uncle. Sarah does what she can but it is no use until John comes back with Charley Dixon, who is shocked to see Sarah.

Agent Ellison investigates the breakout and is amazed that a short girl managed to successfully break his prisoner out. He then notices the T-888’s severed hand lying in the sidewalk from the earlier fight.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 4

In “Heavy Metal,” John Connor is still upset at being prevented from saving his classmate from suicide. At the same time, Cameron learns that Cromartie has survived the time warp and is secretly rebuilding. She presents Sarah and John with video showing Cromartie’s skull and news reports of coltan being smuggled into Los Angeles. John convinces Sarah that they should prepare to blow up the shipments to stop Cromartie.

Meanwhile Cromartie breaks into a plastic surgeon’s office to have reconstructive surgery to resemble a man who matches his “bone” structure. He later kills the surgeon after staying at his clinic to recover only to leave a crime scene for Agent Ellison. Based on the strange evidence and the trail of mystery blood, Ellison believes that all of these murders are connected and begins to investigate after security footage was found showing Cromartie’s presence.

He is able to identify the man shown in the security footage and brings him in for question. It turns out that the man was a struggling actor who visited the surgeon to have work done on his chin and nose and has a strong liberal dislike of the authority. Ellison is willing to let the actor go in return for a blood sample due to the lack of evidence against him.

John, Sarah and Cameron make it to the docks where they find some thugs loading coltan into a truck. According to Cameron, coltan is a titanium alloy that can be used to mass produce terminators and speculates that Cromartie may need this metal to repair itself. After scanning the sleeper terminator in charge of the smuggling operation, Cameron concludes that this is not Cromartie’s operation as it is another terminator on a different mission.

This prompts them to leave for further observation, but John decides to sneak back in to plant his blackberry curve into the truck so they can track them. Sarah and Cameron are then confronted with a local security guard, which Sarah knocks out. However, John winds up hiding in the truck when an armed thug decides to ride in the back. John tries to retrieve his blackberry to call Sarah but winds up damaging it in an attempt to knock out the goon, which causes Sarah and Cameron to lose track of him while monitoring him via the Internet.

As a result, Sarah revives and tries interrogating the guard she knocked out but leaves it to Cameron to extract information from him. They later learn that John and the truck are headed towards an decommissioned air force bunker. Meanwhile the truck has made its final stop inside the bunker and John gets out trying to figure out how to reach Sarah while evading the thugs. The hired thugs are puzzled that one of their guys is missing and assume that he must have left over pay. The terminator then appears and kills the guards after they finished their job, closes the bunker and goes into standby mode.

Meanwhile, the actor is still complaining about his mistreatment in his apartment when he is visited by Cromartie. The cyborg later kills the actor after observing his mannerisms and steals his identity. Ellison presents his findings to his peers at the FBI, who later dismiss his assertions and reprimand him for illegally obtaining blood samples from a suspect. He later visits the actor’s apartment to apologise over the incident, where he is met by Cromartie in disguise, and starts to suspect strange behaviour based on Cromartie’s speech patterns and habits.

Sarah and Cameron arrive at the base and we learn that this will be the future site of a terminator factory where Cameron and others are mass produced. Cameron then suggests that this terminator’s mission is to stockpile raw materials and assist in the factory’s construction once judgment day comes and passes. The thug that John knocked out later wakes up and confronts John, who tries to dissuade him from confronting the terminator after pointing out how he killed his friends and to work together. Dismissing John, the thug threatens the terminator and pushes him out of standby mode, which prompts the machine to simply kill him. After seeing another termination John is frightened but sees an old phone, which he uses to call Sarah about his location.

Sarah tells John that he needs to find a way to open the bunker and to run out before the terminator finishes his 15-second reboot. John manages to remove the master key out of the terminator’s neck to open to bunker. While the terminator boots up, Cameron picks a fight with him while John decides to drive the truck containing coltan, but is having trouble because he doesn’t know how to drive manual. Cameron and the terminator fight while John and Sarah struggle to drive the truck out. Eventually they manage to get the truck out and trap the terminator inside the bunker after a long struggle.

Cameron then proceeds to destroy the truck containing the coltan and they all return home with John badly shaken from the day’s adventure.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 3

Episode 3, “The Turk”, deals with Sarah Connor’s conflict with killing a man who could revive Skynet and John’s awkward adjustment into high school.  The episode starts off with Sarah talking about her obsession with the men who developed the atom bomb and her desire to kill them just to stop their destruction.  She wakes up and talks to John about the photos they found from the Techcom bags they took in the last episode.  Later John and Cameron prepare for high school as Sarah meets with Dyson’s wife.

At Miles Dyson’s grave, Sarah meets with his widow to pay their respects with Sarah asking her about some of the photos she found.  Dyson’s wife tells her that one of the men is named Andy and once interned at Cyberdyne before she destroyed it.  She then tracks him down at a cell phone store where she talks to him about buying some blackberries.  Later Andy decides to ask her out for dinner at his place, which she accepts.  While preparing for the date, Sarah thinks about how the OSS planned on killing any Nazi physicists who were researching the atomic bomb.

Meanwhile, John and Cameron start their first day in high school.  Cameron was able to pass through metal detectors with the excuse that she had a large metal plate in her head.  This was also used as an excuse for her odd behaviour.   John had ordered Cameron to pretend to be his younger sister and to not act like his bodyguard.  However, she manages to get herself transferred into every class John is in and gets in his way of meeting a nice girl.

Later in high school, Cameron meets up with a girl who is depressed because of rumours that she was involved with a faculty member.  This girl eventually decides to commit suicide by jumping off a roof after being fed up with all the rumours and for fear of getting in trouble with her parents.  John tries to get to the roof to save her but he is stopped by Cameron despite his direct orders.  As a result the girl manages to commit suicide with John feeling frustrated about remaining “off the grid” since he is expected to be a good heroic man in the near future.

Cromartie (T-88 breaks into a hospital and steals about 20 units of type O blood.  He later breaks into a geneticist’s office and coerces him into synthesising organic tissue for him.  Despite being in a position of certain death, the geneticist agrees to help Cromartie due to his temptation of making a scientific breakthrough with the chemical formula given to him by the terminator.  He manages to synthesise the chemicals and watches as the fleshless terminator bathes in the chemicals before emerging with skin.  However, the synthesis is flawed as Cromatie regained flesh but not without a pair of eyes, which is takes after killing the geneticist and destroying all evidence of his work.

Sarah goes on a dinner date at Andy’s house.  There she learns about Andy’s time in college as a computer science major before dropping out after his father died and his mother went mad.  She later stumbles upon a poster promoting a chess match between a chessmaster and a machine and asks Andy about it.  Andy shows her “The Turk” an artificial intelligence programme he customised to beat chessmasters in every conceivable combination.  His discussion is interrupted when Sarah detects a prowler outside of the house.  We later learn the prowler is a Techcom agent that there have been break-ins in the neighbourhood, implying they are out to destroy the AI platform.  She later leaves and is pressured by John to destroy the platform before it develops into Skynet.

Agent Ellison continues to investigate Enrique’s death and the deaths from the Techcom safehouse.  Because of his failure in apprehending Sarah Connor in 1999, he is treated as a joke by his colleagues.  At the safehouse, he points out that the bullets found were the same bullets used to kill Enrique, which is dismissed by the crime scene team as a just a turf war between druggies who were known by locals for being crazy.  Ellison later visits Carlos asking about his conversations with Enrique and gives him his card in the event he decides to provide evidence.  After running fingerprint checks on the dead Techcom agents, the FBI finds matches with random children scattered in the United States.  Ellison wants to investigate further and is handed the evidence by his confused co-workers.  Agent Ellison later investigates the crime scene where the geneticist was killed with the FBI field agents horrified at the sight of blood and the fact the killer took the dead man’s eyes.

Sarah decides to have another date with Andy to learn more about “The Turk”.  Andy enthusiastically tells her that it was customised by stacking several Xboxes and Playstations together and he is always amazed at how the AI is smart enough to complete chess matches and wishes for the day when it evolves into more.  Sarah then considers killing them on their walk, but she compromises by just burning Andy’s house down.  The episode ends with Sarah talking about how the physicists felt like “Sons of bitches” for developing the atomic bomb when seeing the first atomic test.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Episode 1 & 2

“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is a television series that supposedly takes place between the second Terminator while setting the stage for the fourth Terminator movie. The series starts in 1999 with Sarah and John Connor living in relative peace in obscurity while trying to avoid capture from their actions in “Terminator 2″. Both Sarah and John appear optimistic about the future with Sarah engaged to a local while John lives a typical awkward life as a teenager readjusting to normalcy in high school. There he meets a nice girl who tries befriending him yet things turn for the worse when a T-888 terminator tries to kill John while posing as a substitute teacher. The girl, going as Cameron Philips, saves the day and exposes herself as a Terminator programmed to protect the Connors. A race against time begins with a FBI agent close on the trail of the Connors and the T-888 after them.

Cameron brings Sarah and John to a bank which actually houses a time machine in the safe built by a sleeper resistance fighter. Cameron later informs the duo that there are dozens of sleeper agents planted across the past in the hopes of better preparing for Judgment Day and with the resources to assist them in the fight. As the T-888 closes in on the trio, Sarah demands Cameron to take them directly to the fight since she wants to prevent Skynet from taking hold once again. The protagonists manage to warp themselves to Los Angeles circa 2007 but show up naked. Random images of their presence are aired on the late night news with the FBI agent, Sarah’s ex-fiance looking in bewilderment.

Later the main characters find a safehouse and begin readjusting to their life in 2007. Sarah and Cameron go to a resistance safehouse to acquire weapons, fake IDs and money but they are too late as they find their agents dead. They are later attacked by another T-888 model who is simply there to air out any resistance sleeper cells in 2007 but not programmed to kill John Connor. Meanwhile the fried T-888 from the previous episode managed to make it through the time warp without its skin and severed from its head. The head was later found by a trash collector who keeps it as a souvenir while the body was brought to the junkyard. However, the body manages to reboot itself and find its way back to the head. This fleshless T-888 continues to pass itself off by wearing clothes and by covering its head with masks. It is implied that the second T-888 will receive updated objectives should it encounter this fleshless model.

Cameron and Sarah evade the T-888’s attack. We later learn that Cameron was sent back in time by John Connor to protect John and to keep Sarah alive although Sarah finds this absurd since she has some of the best paramilitary training. Cameron later tells her that John became a miserable failure because she died of cancer in 2005, which suggest this show is written with the idea of undoing the mess that was “Terminator 3″. Sarah and Cameron go visit Enrique, her old armourer from T2, to get some fake IDswho tells her but he tells her he retired and to get those items from her nephew Carlos.

Sarah and Cameron go visit Carlos for the fake ID, but they need $20,000 for all of it. Enrique informs Sarah of the high price because of what happened in 9/11, which makes no sense to her. She later learns the gangbangers’ accounts of 9/11, the PATRIOT ACT, the Iraq War, and makes a superficial parallel to Judgment Day. I did find it baffling that neither Cameron nor Sarah bothered to do any research of the world in 2007 AD before venturing out for their mission objectives. Meanwhile, John Connor decides to disobey Sarah’s orders to lay low and visits a local mall and learns from a computer about what the news said about them in 1999 and to check on his mother’s ex. John’s mistake sets up the possibility of more terminators or resistance fighters showing up in 2007 to find them.

John later breaks into the the ex’s house and learns that he is married. He is spotted by the ex-fiance who tries to get close to him but has his arms broken by John out of fear. Later, Sarah and Cameron meet back at the safehouse to get the items from the original resistance cell. They managed to get their items from the safe just before the T-888 spotted them but not before being spotted by a resistance member. In the bag they find weapons, diamonds, and some cash to pay off Carlos. After getting their fake IDs from Carlos, Sarah and Cameron overhear allegations that Enrique was a snitch when Carlos was conversing in Spanish.

Sarah confronts Enrique over these rumours at his house at gunpoint. Enrique continues to reassure Sarah that he was only an informer to help the police find a kidnapper when he was arrested for gun running several years ago and there was nothing more to that. However, Cameron kills him in cold blood on the assumption that he was lying at Sarah’s disgust. We later learn that Enrique did leave a voice message to the FBI agent regarding Sarah Connor. This episode ends with John and Cameron enrolling in high school with Sarah going to a clinic to get diagnosed for cancer.

So far “The Sarah Chronicles” seems a bit cheesy with its mediocre production values and its decision to have River Tam as a female terminator. Nonetheless, I applaud the show’s writers for making an attempt to undo all the mess caused by “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”.