Previously on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – A gangster named Sarkissian, played by James Urbaniak of Venture Bros. fame, set a bomb in the Connor’s SUV. He stole “The Turk,” a computer AI that the Connors held and believe could be the first step to building SkyNet. Cameron, the terminator programmed to protect John, started the car up and blew herself up very well.

And now your recap of the second season premiere! Warning: This is a recap, full of spoilery goodness. Especially the stuff at the end.

The second season starts up seconds after last year’s (de facto) season finale. Cameron is offline and scratched up very well. John and Sarah run to their home’s front door to see what happened but one of Sarkissian’s men is at the door and attacks her. John runs for the back door but Sarkissian himself is waiting for him, and the Connors are held hostage at gunpoint.

Cameron breaks out of the wreckage, limping and damaged, but still very functional. She rips some shrapnel out of the back of her head and staggers to the Connor home. Sarkissian has his man douse the house with gasoline.

Upstairs, John watches as Sarkissian’s henchmen beats his mother. The thug tears apart the house looking for a hard drive the Connors have (I can’t recall what info it had on it but it’s important) and finds it under Sarah’s bed. But then Cameron enters and kills him. The thug drops his lighter and the house erupts in flames. Cameron makes her way upstairs where we see that somehow John has killed Sarkissian.

We see Cameron’s POV and she targets John with a “Terminate” order! She aims her gun but the gas containers downstairs explode, knocking her down. John and Sarah escape by jumping out the window, rolling down the roof, and staggering away from their destroyed house.

We then cut to Agent Ellison, the sole survivor of the FBI massacre. Ellison lead a large squad of agents to arrest Cromartie (a Terminator hunting John) at his apartment residence (technically the residence of Lazlo, an actor who he is impersonating), but the Terminator killed them all, leaving Ellison alive for as yet unspoken reasons. Charlie Dixon, Sarah’s ex and an EMT, heard the call and showed up to help. The scene now has several first responders and additional FBI agents. Ellison identifies the recent corpse of Lazlo, saying it was him that did all the damage. He probably doesn’t think the FBI will believe in the whole robot killer thing he’s beginning to uncover.

Sarah and John are in a car, running away. She keeps asking if he’s ok. He has an injured leg, but he tells her to stop worrying – too late. Sarah isn’t paying enough attention to the road and they have a fender bender. The Connors flee from the accident. The damaged Cameron slowly stalks the streets hunting for John.

Charlie goes to check on Sarah and John, but the fire department is there putting out the fire to the house. He comes across Derek Reese, John’s uncle, impersonating an EMT and also investigating the scene. Derek has the hard drive and explains what the Turk is to Charlie. Then they hear over the radio about the car accident and figure it is likely John and Sarah.

We then cut to ZeiraCorp, where its CEO, Cathryn Weaver, is purchasing the Turk from one of Sarkissian’s men, Mr. Walsh.

Cameron enters a store and uses some baby wipes and a staple gun to put her face back together. She sees Charlie and Derek go by and leaves.

Sarah and John are both injured on the streets and Sarah says they need to get off the street and hole up. They find a church in a Latino neighborhood. They ask the priest for sanctuary and the priest agrees to let them rest for a while.

A short scene in the ambulance with Derek and Charlie: Charlie claims he is happily married and only wants to make sure John and Sarah are ok. “So you say,” says the never-trusting Derek.

Cameron picks up John’s trail of blood on the sidewalk.

Weaver tells Walsh that his money will be deposited and then monologues that when programmed properly, computers are the most loyal and dependable things in the world and that it’s rare to come across a disobedient computer.

At the church, Sarah keeps pressing John on whether he’s alright but he’s terse and short with her. Sarah says Cameron has gone bad. John agrees and is angry. He says that Cameron knows everything about them and that they will have to kill her. He is clearly not happy with this.

Ellison is being debriefed at his FBI headquarters. He says that he had no idea Lazlo was capable of what he did. He can’t offer any real details on how things went down. Ellison is then ordered to take six months of paid leave.

Cameron finds the church and before entering stares at the painting outside of Jesus. She lies to the priest that she was in a car accident with her mother and brother and asks if he’s seen them, but the priest tells her he hasn’t. Cameron says she’s going to look around anyway, and follows the blood trail to a baptismal bath. She sees something inside and reaches for it, but is electrocuted. John and Sarah set a trap. The run to her, knowing they have two minutes before terminators reboot. John hacks at her scalp and tries desperately to pry out her main cpu, but there just isn’t enough time and they give up and run. John and Sarah carjack an SUV and race away, going off the main roads and down the water canals. Just as they near an exit from a tunnel to the main canal, Cameron steps in their path and she sideswipes them, knocking herself down but flipping the car high in the air, leaving it to crash upended.

Sarah is trapped in the upended car and tells John to run. John struggles to get out of the car as Cameron approaches and is able to get away. Cameron walks up to Sarah, half out of the car, and tells her, “Call to him.” Shades of the T-1000 from T2. Sarah refuses, so Cameron steps on Sarah’s damaged ribs, causing her to scream. Sarah says John won’t come and Cameron agrees and stalks off to get him.

John escapes to a warehouse of some sort. He hides behind one of several big rigs housed there, but Cameron methodically searches for him. John sneaks into one of the trucks and begins to hotwire it. Just as he gets it started, he pops up to see Cameron standing right in front of the truck. Then a second truck bursts through the garage door. Sarah is driving it and slams into Cameron, trapping her between the two trucks. John jumps through the shattered window and slides down the hood, screwdriver in hand. This time he’s ready. As he pries at her CPU, Cameron yells to him that she ran a test and she’s ok now. She says she’s good now. In desperation (?) Cameron says that she loves John and please not to do this. John is emotionally conflicted but removes the CPU, shutting her down.

Derek and Charlie catch up to John and Sarah and Charlie patches them up. Sarah says she’s not sure who Sarkissian sold the Turk to. John talks to Derek about Cameron, saying he wants to bring her back. He thinks she’s different. Derek is highly dubious. Sarah tells John she’s proud of him and how he handled himself today. She says that he can try to fix Cameron, but John says they should burn her and move on. Sarah is relieved and tells him that what Cameron said was a trick because they can’t have feelings. John says he’s not ready to agree with that (and after what he saw Arnold’s T-800 learn in T2, that makes sense).

At a scrap yard, the team has laid Cameron’s body over a pile of thermite. John has the cpu in his hand. He asks for the flare. Then John surprises everyone by putting the chip back in Cameron’s head. She reactivates and tells John that her mission is not to kill him. Needing to know for sure, he hands her his gun. From Cameron’s POV, we see her target John with a terminate order, but then override the order. She hands the weapon back to John.

Outside, Cromartie walks up to Ellison. Ellison tells him that if he left him alive to follow him to Sarah, he’ll never lead him there. “We’ll see,” says Cromartie, and then he walks away.

Weaver has gathered the heads of various departments to tell them they will be giving her some of their top men with which she is starting a new division, called “Babylon.” She claims it will change the world. One employee is incredibly reluctant to help.

Cameron talks to Sarah and asks her if she believes in Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Sarah asks if Cameron does. Cameron answers that her programming doesn’t allow for that. Sarah says she thinks she’s the same. Cameron tells Sarah not to ever let John do that again if she goes bad.

Sarah goes to talk to John, who is in the bathroom with the door closed. She tells John that the important thing about today is that they’re still alive. She wishes him a happy birthday. Inside, John has cut his hair very short and stares at his beaten-up mug in the mirror.

At ZeiraCorp, two of the managers Weaver was talking to are in the men’s room. One is really angry that Weaver is taking his top men. The other guy reminds him that she’s got the company in great shape and leaves. The guy who refuses to help goes up to the urinal… and it melts. The urinal and wall melt and form into a liquid metal figure, becoming Cathryn Weaver. Weaver is a T-1000! She turns her finger into a knife and impales the poor bastard.

What a return! I would have liked to have had more of the family dynamic, including Derek, but this was an action-packed episode that just kept the Connors on the run the entire time. And for an action-show, it was pretty well done. It set up all the key relationships.

Not much gunplay or fighting between robots. A few great car stunts. Definitely a tense, well-paced ep. I would give it 3 out of 5 terminator heads but that shocking last scene bumps it up. I think I’ll give them 3 and a half out of five terminator heads!

photo credit: metaphorge