Sarah, John and Cameron are still in 2007. Their ultimate goal, as Sarah’s voiceover tells us, is to stop Skynet from ever being created. You know, that droning voiceover by Linda Hamilton used to bug me a little bit, but Lena Headey’s isn’t quite so irritating, for some reason.
Anyway, what they really need right now is new identities. So Sarah goes to see Enrique, her old pal who taught her and John the ways of heavy artillery. Enrique’s not in the business anymore, but when Sarah and Cameron learn he snitched on a cellmate years ago, Cameron shoots him point blank, leaving Sarah shell-shocked at the loss of her friend. They can’t take a chance on his loyalty, Cameron explains, and Sarah wasn’t strong enough to kill him.
But back to the new identities. Enrique’s nephew, Carlos, is happy to supply the necessary paperwork – for $20K. John, Sarah and Cameron find the cash at a safe-house for Skynet work camp prisoners (all dead). Apparently, there are scads of terminators with specific jobs roaming all over the place. Sarah and Cameron encounter one, who takes them on a chase involving a wild motorcycle stunt by Sarah and Cameron being hit head-on by a car.
Meanwhile, John is sick of being cooped up in the house waiting for his new identity, so he ventures out to a mall, does an Internet search on a store demo computer (which projects his search onto a giant screen behind him – pay attention, John!), and tracks down Sarah’s former fiance, now a cop. He’s understandably disturbed to see John standing in his living room, but when he reaches out to him, John slugs him and runs off. No one can be trusted.
And now, my awards for:
Most Disturbing Scene: A terminator breaks into a house to retrieve his head from a guy who found it near a junkyard. The terminator is wearing someone else’s (human) head, plopped on top of his shiny body. Yeah. Nice.
Most Interesting Allegory: Sarah calls Cameron “Tin Man,” a reference to The Wizard of Oz. Ok, so we get that Cameron needs a heart. But also, when John was a kid, Sarah used to read The Wizard of Oz to him over and over in different languages. Cameron tells Sarah that Future John said it was one of his favorite things from childhood.
Best Sociopolitical Statement: The subject of 9/11 comes up, and Sarah (in voiceover) says if she’d been alive when it happened, she would have thought the country had failed.
Best Line: “Just move the food around and the turkey will reveal itself to you,” Sarah tells John, as he rifles through the fridge looking for sandwich material. Gee, that sounds like something I’d tell MY kids. Guess the leader of mankind isn’t so different from my own kids.
Best Stunt: While running from a terminator, Sarah tosses an unconscious Cameron out the window of an apartment several stories high. The girl quickly reboots and is back in action. She can fight, but then, we found that out in Serenity.
Saddest Plot Twist: Sarah learns from Cameron that she died of cancer two years earlier. Ok, so we knew that tidbit from the third Terminator movie, but could she be changing her future? Because the end of this episode finds her in a doctor’s office having blood drawn. Hmmm…
