"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - September 15, 2008 episode

Sarah and Derek are still concerned about Cameron, whether she's going to flip her switch and want to kill John again, but Cameron is actually mad at John for risking so much to fix her. Sarah suggests that John go to school, to put some kind of normalcy back in his life. But when John is at his locker at school, he looks around at all the other kids with their carefree conversations, and he knows that he is nothing like them, and the isolation shows in his face. (This completely reminded me of Buffy.) At lunch later, he is approached by Riley, a pretty blonde, who strikes up a conversation with him. (The husband pointed out that in the scenes with Riley, John no longer has a triple-scratch on his cheek that he had when he was opening his locker. Someone needed to keep track of continuity a bit better.)

Meanwhile, Sarah, Derek and Cameron are looking at a new house to rent and are being shown the house by the woman next door, who happens to be very pregnant. She offers to let Cameron touch her belly, which Cameron does. I wondered if she did a scan of the baby and whether that might come up sometime later. They have just settled into the new house, and Sarah is enjoying a rare moment of peace, which is shattered, literally, when a man crashes through the window. He had been shown earlier arriving naked in the familiar ball of light used for time travel, and he had a bullet in him when he arrived. Sarah deduces that he was sent by adult John, and he manages to sputter a warning about Greenway and a power plant in two days before he dies. Derek mentions that the power plant had been held by Skynet but the resistance had taken it back and used the power for all their operations.

Ellison goes to see Charlie and meets his wife Michelle. (When she first opened the door, I had a complete flashback. In that shot, she looked *so much* like Linda Hamilton to me.) She tells him that she found a gun after Charlie had left for work, and when Charlie returns, he wants to know what's going on. Charlie tells Michelle everything, including that Sarah is alive and about the terminators, which she finds hard to believe. Ellison tells them that they're in danger and that they need to leave, so they pack up and head out.

Meanwhile, Sarah and Cameron have managed to get temp jobs at the power plant. Sarah later manages to strike up a conversation with Greenway and then tracks him down at a local bar, where Greenway opens up to her about his cancer and not being a very popular fellow with his co-workers. Sarah finds out later from Derek and Cameron that he had stopped a previous test because of safety concerns, and he has already expressed doubt about the next test to be imminently run. There is a danger of a leak, and if the test is run, there could be widespread radiation contamination, which would help Skynet. However, if the test is stopped, there's a good chance that the plant will be shut down, which means that it wouldn't be available for the resistance to take over and use later. Rock, hard place.

Cameron has been on a mission of her own. In her skimpy outfit, she sidles up to some company security guards playing at a pool table and asks to join them. As one of them takes the opportunity to get close to her, she scans his badge and later reproduces it, giving Sarah access to the entire facility. She ends up following the big boss to a door outside a chamber with radioactive material, but when the boss catches her, she has to cover and is told to don a suit to help. She is only in the chamber for a few minutes before fear gets the better of her, but when she exits, she is told that she is contaminated. She is told later that she was actually fine and that it was some kind of "malfunction" and knows that the boss purposely subjected her to an unnecessary decontamination scrub/hose down. Meanwhile, it gave the audience a chance to see her mostly naked.

John has been talking to Riley a bit more, and he seemed entirely too trusting considering what just happened with Cameron and that he's been on the run and has to be on the lookout all the time his entire life. He invites her back to the house, and both Sarah and Cameron are none too pleased to see her there. John rebels against everything he's been taught and insists that Riley stays, and she ends up staying the night. The next morning when John awakens, Riley is already up and has made him a robot out of something like Legos to protect him. Ironic, huh? I don't know whether to believe she's innocent or if something is up with her.

The next day, Sarah notices a complete change in Greenway, and when she sees that he doesn't have the scar on his arm that he had shown her the night before, she realizes something is wrong, just as Derek arrives at Greenway's house and finds his house ransacked and him dead, hanging from the ceiling. The fake Greenway takes the necessary steps to make the reactor unstable, but Cameron is sent to stop him. There's a fairly spectacular fight scene between the two of them, and ultimately, Cameron defeats him, revealing an exo-skeleton underneath, which she hides in a radioactive barrel.

During the chase, Sarah ran unprotected into the radioactive room, but Cameron declares that she's clear. She's still worried though, especially since Greenway had talked about his cancer, and more so because Cameron had previously told her that in a different timeline, she had died of cancer. She's worried that her foray into the room might be the trigger for cancer, but she doesn't get any answers about her future out of Cameron because Cameron doesn't know. Cameron has her own concerns - she doesn't know if she'll turn back into the bad terminator, and her behaviour isn't 100% the same as before - she still has moments where something doesn't seem quite right.

Sarah finds evidence of blood on a post outside the house, and she makes her way to a shed, inside which she finds writing in blood. At least it seemed like blood. I'm guessing that guy from the future used his blood to write all that stuff down, though a lot of it was difficult to decipher. I guess we'll find out more next week or somewhere down the line.

Meanwhile, there's a press conference that because of the previous day's events, seven power plants have made a deal with a company that uses automatic switches so that they can have better control, but it's revealed that the head of the company isn't quite who or what he seems when he gets into his car and then morphs back into Catherine Weaver before driving off.

I was excited to notice that Greenway was played by Paul Schulze, who played Ryan Chappelle on "24". I loved him. And Chappelle's death was just killer.