In case you haven’t heard yet, FOX picked up Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for a full second season. If FOX believes in a show with not-amazing ratings, I encourage you to give it a shot. This is a rare case of something being better than it should be.

We begin with Sarah and Cameron searching someone’s home at night. They have to leave when the owner investigates. Talking with John as he drives them all home, we learn that the home is that of Dr. Boyd Sherman, a child psychologist. He was on their list of names that the dying resistance soldier left them, but they couldn’t find any link to SkyNet before they had to run off. John theorizes that if there isn’t any evidence that he’s working on something to create SkyNet, he could be a target.

Over at ZeiraCorp, Catherine Weaver is having a photo shoot in her office. She follows the cameraman’s direction with robotic perfection. He suggests some photos with her daughter, Savannah, but Savannah is reluctant and in fact, scared. She runs away and we can see that she actually peed herself. Obviously she is aware that Catherine is not her real mother on some level.

Later, Ellison stops by to talk to Weaver, but security won’t let him on the same elevator with her. She goes below ground level with an employee to a department working on an A.I. The employees report that it keeps showing seemingly random images and has been slowing down, taking longer to do less complex tasks. They’re confused by its actions.

Sarah, John, and Cameron meet with Dr. Sherman for a family counseling session. Sarah asks him to let them know a bit about himself. He was a military vet that got into helping kids and families. He seems like a really caring person. While he’s distracted, Cameron slips a bug under a lamp. Sherman can tell none of the Connors are very forthcoming about themselves as a group and that they might really need help and suggests meeting them individually. John accepts and volunteers to go first, to Sarah’s mild surprise.

Back at home, Derek returns from a run and Cameron notes that it took him 6 hours. Sarah and Derek talk about Sherman and decide they’ll go through his old patient files. They hear a gun go off and everyone rushes to John’s room. John says that he was cleaning his gun and thought it was cleared and accidentally shot it off. He got a small burn on his jaw from a hot shell casing.

Weaver ends up taking Savannah to Dr. Boyd as well. Dr. Boyd quickly realizes Savannah is dealing with trauma and is scared. Weaver wants to observe everything, but Boyd asks her to leave the room. Once she does, Dr. Boyd is able to get Savannah to open up and reveal that she is scared and misses her other mommy.

John arrives at the waiting room and barely misses Weaver when Dr. Boyd pulls her aside to speak with her. Savannah waits in the room with John, trying to tie her shows. John helps her with the rabbit in the hole lesson. Dr. Boyd, meanwhile, instructs Weaver to remind Savannah that she may have lost her father, but that she still has her mother. Weaver and John again just miss one another as she leaves the office and calls for Savannah to follow her.

Derek is hanging out in the park. He hears something suspicious and runs after the sound, chasing after a womane. Eventually he follows the woman to a hotel and catches up with her. Her name is Jessie and Derek knows her – intimately as it turns out, because they start making out. She was sent back by Connor but won’t reveal why. Derek explains that he was sent back to set up a safe house and wait. Jessie is not quite as loyal to John it seems, because she says that he has a lot of terminators working for him in the future and does not like it. She seems to indicate that she basically has run away.

At Dr. Boyd’s office, John is slowly drawn out a bit. Boyd can tell John acts like a veteran for some reason. John doesn’t open up completely, lying about the burn on his cheek, saying he got it cooking but Boyd can tell he’s making a lie up on the spot. He doesn’t push him on it. He says that John is in a safe place, but John knows the bug is in the room (we see Cameron listening in) and says nowhere is safe.

Catherine is in her office, watching old family videos of the real Catherine Weaver with her late husband. The real Weaver is pregnant in the videos. She’s interrupted with a request to come down to the A.I. department. Her employee says that it’s not doing what they ask and he wants to consider scrapping the program and starting over. Weaver snaps that maybe she should scrap him instead. When she gets back to her office, Savannah is watching the videos and thinks her father stroking Weaver is him trying to hug her as a baby. It’s a very genuine moment that works.

John talks to his mother while she works out on a punching bag. Sarah thinks Dr. Boyd is a dead end because his patient files are encoded. Cameron posits that Boyd could be on the list because he is one of John’s allies in the future. Sarah asks what makes her think John would need help, to which John replies what makes her think he doesn’t?

Evening in the city, a time traveler appears inside a parked bus. The bus driver is napping. He wakes up to see a woman who promptly kills him and takes his clothes. She’s a terminator. She goes on to kill Dr. Boyd’s receptionist.

Weaver has Dr. Boyd visit ZeiraCorp. She asks for his help interpreting the images the A.I. is showing. He starts laughing, figuring it out right away. He explains that it’s showing a riddle: “Why is a math book so sad? Because it has so many problems.” He explains that it takes several years for people to learn a sense of humor. He says it’s the sign of something bored trying to entertain itself.

Derek visits Jessie again. Derek thanks her for a time in the past when she saved him from killing himself. It’s the same story he told John earlier but from a different perspective – worried that John might have been suicidal he told him about a fellow soldier that did kill himself one day. Jessie and Derek sleep together and she then asks him to get her a drink. When he gets up, she slides surveillance photos of the Connor family under the bed.

Ellison meets with Weaver. She asks how his robo-hunt is going and he replies that it sounds ridiculous when she puts it like that. He asks her his own question of what’s going on downstairs. Weaver only tells him that they are building something.

John has another meeting with Dr. Boyd. He removes the bug. When it goes dead, Cameron gets out of the car outside and heads in to check on him. She enters the building alongside the other terminator-lady. The get in the elevator and push the same button in the same manner. A beat, and they recognize what each other are and begin to battle.

Meanwhile, John talks to Dr. Boyd and says his mother doesn’t want him coming. He tells the story from the season premier where she and John were attacked by Sarkissian and his man. He simplifies it to say it was just a thief. In flashbacks, we finally see that it wasn’t Sarah that killed them, but John who broke free first and killed them with his bare hands.

Dr. Boyd offers him a point of view that he should try to remember that he doesn’t have to act like a soldier. His mother should be protecting him and he gets to be a kid. John’s answer: “…no.”

The terminators continue to battle, pausing only when some others get on their elevator. A little kid notices they are damaged but no one else is paying attention. Once they exit, Cameron gets the upper hand and wrestles the other terminator to the ground, twisting her into a disfigured pretzel (and destroying the processing chip, killing it).

Back at the Connor household, John examines its brain chip and explains that it’s damaged beyond being able to access its files. Cameron explains that this is the point in time when SkyNet begins installing self-destructs within terminators so that John can’t reprogram them.

Weaver meets with Dr. Boyd one more time. Because he could understand the A.I. she offers him a job. He demurs, saying he doesn’t understand computers but she says what he did is all she needs. He says he has a responsibility to his patients so Weaver counters with a part-time consultant gig. We don’t know if he accepts.

In the final scene, Sarah sits down in Dr. Boyd’s office, to get some therapy herself.

This was a very introspective episode, dealing with themes including trauma and abandoning responsibilities. It’s obvious that Derek is more damaged than we ever assumed when he was first introduced, but now we see that John might also be suicidal. Can he continue to handle the pressures of being responsible for saving the world? Hard to say. I was very impressed with the performances from the little girl, Savannah, and the therapist, Dr. Boyd. Strong supporting players this week.

I give this one 4 out of 5 terminator heads.

photo credit: dklimke