"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - September 8, 2008 episode - season premiere

The second season begins immediately after the ending of the first season. Cameron is sitting in the truck, obviously damaged. Her memory is going through the last things she saw - walking toward the truck, opening the door, putting the keys in the ignition, seeing the men, starting the engine, and then a fireball when the car exploded. With the following all done in slow mo and accompanied by a song, Sarah and John hear the explosion and head for the door, with Sarah grabbing a gun on the way. But as Sarah approaches the door, it swings open wide from the other side, knocking her to the ground. The men Cameron had seen have made their way to the house and restrain Sarah and John upstairs. One of the men attacks Sarah while John is forced to watch, with his hands bound behind his back. Another man is ransacking the room and finally finds what they're looking for - the hard drive that they had taken, which had been hidden between two of the mattresses.

Meanwhile, Cameron has re-booted, and her system registers that there is a malfunction, but she hobbles to the house. She comes up behind one of the attackers and takes him out, taking his gun in the process. Unbeknownst to her, however, the lighter he was using that fell to the ground is still lit, and a container of fuel has been knocked over and is then ignited, with the fire making its way to the water heater. Cameron gets to the bedroom upstairs - to find that Sarah and Cameron have taken out their attacker. Cameron locks on John, and her program identifies him, as well as her mission - to terminate him. She raises her gun and is about to shoot him, with Sarah trying to protect John, but the explosion from downstairs knocks Cameron off-balance, and Sarah takes the opportunity to get herself and John out the window and down the roof. They manage to get a truck, but Sarah isn't paying attention and crashes into another car, and the two take off on foot, ending up at a Spanish-language church, where Sarah asks for sanctuary. Sarah wants to talk about what happened, but John doesn't, but Sarah says they have to talk about Cameron. John is worried because Cameron knows all their information - their identities, where they go, who they see, what their contingency plans are. Sarah says that they have to kill her. John angrily says that he knows, unwilling to think about what he has to do.

After a little fix-up job, Cameron is back on John's trail. She identifies the trail of blood on the ground as John's and follows the trail to the church. She tells the priest that she's looking for her mother and brother who were in the accident with her. The priest says no one is there. Cameron sees the blood trail and follows it to a tank of water. As she reaches in, Sarah and John are watching from behind a curtain, and they turn the electricity on, which shocks Cameron. Sarah and John race to her, knowing they only have two minutes until she reboots. John tries to remove the covering on her head, but he has difficulty at first. Once he manages to do that, he tries to use a screwdriver to get at her core to remove it, but they aren't able to get it done in time, so just as Cameron is done rebooting and is awakening, they run.

They commandeer another car, but their path is inadvertently blocked by other vehicles and obstacles, and when they run into Cameron, she is able to deflect and flip the car as it hits her. John wakes up first, but Sarah is too hurt, and they notice Cameron stirring. Sarah instructs John to run. At first, he is reluctant to leave her, but soon, Sarah's indoctrination to save himself at all costs kicks in, and he flees, leaving her. Cameron comes up to Sarah and tells Sarah to call to John, but Sarah refuses. Cameron then puts a boot on Sarah and steps down, causing Sarah to scream. John hears her and stops momentarily but keeps going. Sarah tells Cameron that John won't come back, and Sarah understands that and goes after John.

Cameron catches up with John in a building, and John manages to hot-wire a truck before Cameron can locate him, but as soon as he pops up in the driver's seat, she is waiting for him and flings a wrench at him, crashing through the front window pane. Just as it seems that John is contemplating running her over with the truck, another truck comes in the opposite direction, driven by Sarah, and Cameron is crushed between the two trucks. Sarah keeps Cameron trapped there while John retrieves a screwdriver and starts to unhook the flap on her head covering her core. As he gets closer and closer, she changes and tells him that she has run a test, and she's all better now, that she's sorry for what she did, but she's fine now. She doesn't want to disappear and begs and pleads for him to stop, even crying, and telling him that she loves him and that he loves her. Her words momentarily stop John as Sarah is screaming at him to continue, and ultimately, he does take out her core.

Meanwhile, Sarah's ex-fiance Charlie had arrived to find Ellison alive next to a pool of dead agents. The real Laszlo is found in his room, and Ellison identifies him as the man who killed all of the agents. Charlie knows that's not true because he saw Cromartie leave but he keeps quiet. Charlie ends up meeting up with Derek, John's uncle, and when they hear the call come in about the car crash, they head to the location, where Charlie says it's being reported that a woman and a teenage boy were seen leaving the vehicle. During this time, Ellison has been filing his report that it was indeed the actor who had done all of the killing, and though his superiors don't quite seem to believe him, he attests to the truth of what he wrote, and above his objections, he is put on a mandatory six-week leave.

Sarah had called Charlie, so Charlie and Derek are now with Sarah and John and an immobile Cameron. Charlie has already patched up John and is now attending to Sarah. They are all worried about what effect this will all have on John. John says that he knows something malfunctioned with Cameron's chip, and he wants to try to fix it, which Derek absolutely opposes. Sarah says that she knows John wants to help Cameron, but she can't let him do it, so John says that they need to burn her, to destroy the evidence and technology. However, as John is about to light the flare to set her on fire, he says he can't do it and puts the chip and core back in Cameron, after he'd been messing with it previously. Sarah says that she could kill him, and he says there's only one way to find out. As Cameron reboots, her programming identifies John, and her mission still says for her to terminate him, but then, a termination override comes in. John hands her the gun, but she does nothing with it but to hand it back, as her mannerisms return to what they were previously. Later, Cameron tells Sarah that if she ever goes bad again, Sarah should not let John try to bring her back again.

Ellison is standing in front of the burned-out house where Sarah, John and Cameron lived, and he sees Cromartie there, who approaches. Ellison says he'll never lead him to them. Cromartie enigmatically says we'll see.

As all this has been happening, we see Walsh, who is in possession of the Turk, talking to a Scottish woman (Catherine Weaver) on the phone, obviously the person he is going to sell the machine to. He is later at her office to deliver the machine. She has a speech about how computers are all very orderly and take direction absolutely, but what she's looking for is a computer that is willing to cross against the light. She calls a meeting of the department heads of the company and tells them that there is a new project - Babylon - which will require taking various members of each of their teams to form the new group to work on this project. The head of AI complains, but he's told that his department will lose the most people to this project. Later, in the men's room, the AI head is still complaining to another department head, and the AI head says how much he hates the boss lady. When the other man leaves, it turns out they weren't alone. A metal alloy pours from the urinal and forms the shape of the Scottish lady - she is really a T-1000 terminator, and she kills the AI lead.


This was a killer first episode for the beginning of the second season. Even though it started right where the first season left off, I still forgot it was the same day until Sarah wished John a happy birthday. That's right, it was his birthday, and Cameron had been going out to get ice cream or cake or something like that.

I thought it was funny after Ellison formally identified Laszlo as the killer, and Charlie asks him whether they're going to believe that this non-descript actor did all that, but Ellison asks if they'd be more likely to believe that a killing machine from the future did it. Point taken!

Since we've only seen Cameron as the bubbly teen or the confused teen, and we've only seen her terminator side when she's been in defense of John, it was really interesting (and scary) to see her in deadly pursuit of John, especially when she was torturing Sarah. Heck, she even used a staple gun to fix her face! And it really showed how devastating her turn was for John and why he found it so difficult to face and accept her change. And the scene where she's pleading with him was just heartbreaking, watching her words and inflection get to him and make him wonder just for a moment if he was going to be swayed by her effort. It had to kill him to take that core out of her. And then you saw the complete reversion of her speech, her inflection, her mannerisms after John has repaired her chip.

And speaking of killer, that ending was just incredible! When the alloy started to ooze, I had been so indoctrinated into that form of terminators being the norm that I thought it was Cromartie, who was going to now take the place of the AI head. But when it morphed into the Scottish lady, the husband was the one who identified her as being a T-1000. Well, of course. Cromartie was an old-style terminator, with an exo-skeleton - he can't morph. Oh no. The head of the company who now has the Turk and is going to be developing it is a T-1000 terminator? That can't be good.

There were so many parts of this show where I was just riveted to the screen, and usually at a commercial break, I was yelling at the TV over something that had just happened. It was very reminiscent of how I generally watch "24".


So then they showed things that were going to be happening in future episodes, and they showed a new blonde girl - and I couldn't believe my eyes. That's Lily. OK, so her name is really Leven Rambin, and she just recently left "All My Children", where she had played the part of autistic Lily for the past four years, to great acclaim I might add. I hadn't heard that she had gotten this role, so good for her. For the last year of her stint on "All My Children", so also played Lily's edgy, street-smart wise-cracking half-sister Ava, though I was never a fan of that character. I'm really interested to see what she's going to do with this role - Riley - who is apparently someone John meets. David from the original "90210" and Lily from "All My Children", both on a Terminator show. Whodathunk?