"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" - September 29, 2008 episode

Sarah is leaving in her truck, but she encounters Casey at the mailbox, who says she's in pain and is bleeding, so Sarah takes her to the hospital. Tests are being run on Casey and her baby, and Casey says that Sarah doesn't have to stay with her, but Sarah chooses to stay. Sarah asks about the father of the baby, and Casey says he got freaked out when she got pregnant. Later, a male visitor comes by, and Sarah is introduced to Trevor, who Casey later identifies as the baby's father. It comes to light that Casey is actually the one who's scared because Trevor is a police officer with the LAPD, and she's uneasy with raising her baby around that. Sarah offers her some comfort by telling her that John's father died before she even knew she was pregnant with John, and she made it through, so Casey can too.

John and Cameron are out shopping, and he tells her to do the grocery shopping while he does electronics shopping, and they'll meet up afterward. While in the store, though, Cameron finds herself having flashbacks, flashbacks of memories, and the flashbacks are disturbing to her, making her almost catatonic at times. After she runs into a bin of melons and has no reaction, the police are eventually called. They suspect she might be on drugs or something, and she has no ID on her, so she's taken to a holding cell. She is released at the same time as another girl - Jodi - and when Jodi sees that the only personal belonging being returned to Cameron is a huge wad of cash, she immediately gets Cameron to leave with her.

Jodi and Cameron are having a snack at a fast food joint when Jodi is approached by a guy who pushes her around and asks about his money and laptop, which Jodi denies any knowledge of. When he finally hits her hard enough to draw blood, Cameron tries to intervene, but ultimately, she hands over the wad of cash so that he'll go away. Jodi takes Cameron to a shelter where Jodi often stays, and they both sign in.

Part of the requirement of staying at the shelter is speaking to one of the counselors, and as Cameron is talking to her, more flashbacks happen. Cameron has realized that she is actually Alison Young, from Palmdale. She calls on the phone to who she thinks is her mother, but the woman says she doesn't have a daughter - yet. The woman is very pregnant, and it's clear she is in fact pregnant with Alison, but Alison is crushed that her mother doesn't even acknowledge her existence. Jodi cheers her up by engaging her in a game of foos ball, and Cameron playing and smiling and laughing is the vision that John sees when he's finally able to track her down. When John tries to get her to leave, though, she doesn't recognize him and insists that she's Alison. He tries to tell her that she's a machine and that something's wrong with her chip again, but he can fix it, but she freaks out. John is then forced to leave when she gets upset.

John's appearance seems to have triggered something in Cameron because she's acting more robotic again, not like the girl she was when she was just with Jodi. She also has a meeting with the counselor where she says she's a machine from the future who's going to kill John Connor, and that prompts the counselor to call the police. But when the police arrive, both Cameron and Jodi are gone.

Jodi and Cameron go to a house where Jodi says she used to babysit and the people were rich. She looks for a key, but Cameron just shoves the door open, breaking the lock. Jodi says she watched when the woman opened the safe, so she knows how to get in, but in the stash of jewelry, Cameron recognizes a pair of earrings that match the necklace Jodi was wearing which Jodi had then put around Cameron's neck. Jodi eventually admits that the house belongs to her parents, and that she had quit school, and her parents disowned her. She also admits that most of what she had told Cameron was a lie. Cameron apparently doesn't take well to lies. When John comes into the house, he sees Jodi crumpled on the floor, but she's not dead. Cameron and John leave before the police arrive in answer to the triggered silent alarm.

Meanwhile, snippets of Cameron's flashbacks/memories have been shown in pieces, and it turns out that Alison Young was a resistance fighter under John Connor who was captured and interrogated by the terminators. Much of her imprisonment seemed to be on an old aircraft carrier, but her repeated attempts to escape fail. Alison eventually comes face-to-face with a terminator - who is the exact image of her, like Cameron. Cameron tells Alison that most of the machines will not stop until the humans are extinct, but there are some who don't feel that way. Cameron says that she admires John Connor, and she wants to meet him because they just want peace. After a raid on some of her fellow resistance fighters, Cameron asks what Alison's bracelet is really for, since Alison had said it was from her sister, and yet they found many others with the same bracelet. Cameron then figures out that it's a sign, a sort of secret code that would let her into the protected tunnels, and if Cameron had gone without the bracelet on, they would have known she wasn't real. Cameron is angry at Alison for lying to her, and Alison says she will never help Cameron get to John, but Cameron breaks her neck and takes her bracelet before leaving.

Ellison is still considering taking the job offered by Catherine, and he meets with her again in her office to discuss further. Catherine says that her husband was killed in a plane crash, and when Ellison refers to the machines as being evil, Catherine disputes that point and almost says that machines are perfect because unlike humans, they don't panic. Ellison later has his ex-wife, who's also in the FBI, do a background check on Catherine, which turns up nothing. Ellison ultimately agrees to work for Catherine.


This was a rather odd episode, not at all what I expected based on the trailers. It was interesting to learn about Alison, and I'd actually like to know more about her, so we'll see if that happens. Hopefully, we'll also learn about how Cameron manages to infiltrate the resistance and ultimately, how John manages to reprogram her. The whole episode seemed to be about the multitude of lies that people tell and the many and varied reasons for telling those lies. It was the most uneventful episode for Sarah yet. Hope she enjoyed the break, because I doubt she'll have any more calm days like this one.