Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Complications (Episode 209)

Um… did Sarah Connor convert to Mormonism?  Because that’s sure as heck what it looks like.  As we open, she and Cameron are both wearing pink prairie dresses that appear to have come straight out of an episode of Big Love.  The suddenly-frumpy duo is in the desert where they buried Chromardi.  Fortunately, it becomes apparent that this is a dream sequence when Cameron pours a watering can over the grave.  Three cactus plants grow quickly from the ground, and suddenly John’s there.  The gleaming metallic cacti wrap him in their arm-like limbs, and an anvil labeled “SYMBOLISM” falls out of the sky and hits me squarely in the forehead.  Although I have to wonder what the prairie dresses mean.  Oh well.  At least Sarah wasn’t rockin’ a Mormon Pompadour. 

Sarah wakes from the dream to find herself in the backseat of the product placementmobile.  She, John and Cameron are on the way back to the States, but Sarah’s feeling feverish.  John pulls over so that she can be sick next to the road.  Urgh.  I hate it when people barf on TV.  I try to go through life avoiding vomit in any form.  Before they get back in the car, Sarah sees a tortoise, helplessly turned on its back near the tire.  Carefully, she uprights it and places it by the side of the road.  Why did I mention this?  Because later, another anvil, this one labeled “TORTOISE SYMBOLISM” is going to fall out of the sky and knock me unconscious. 

Back home, Sarah’s sweaty and full-blown sick, but she wants to go straight back and burn Chromardi’s body – even though the chip’s been destroyed.  John insists that she stay put; he and Cameron will take care of it.  Meanwhile, Derek gets a call from Jesse.  He finds her in a warehouse full of boxcars.  Inside one of said boxcars, Jesse has tied an old man tied to a chair with duct tape.   Apparently in the future, there’s something called a “Gray” – a traitorous human who works for Skynet.  And according to Jesse, this man is Charles Fisher, the most evil, notorious Gray of all.  The scared-looking, rumpled old duffer in the boxcar says it’s a mistake.  His name is Paul Stewart, and he’s a watchmaker.  Jesse ain’t buyin’ it.  She slaps Paul/Fisher around, asking what he’s doing in this time period.  Hey Jesse!  I could ask you the same thing.  Even as the beatdown continues, the man insists that his name is Paul Stewart.  Eventually Derek grabs Jesse and physically hauls her away.  She’s absolutely convinced it’s Fisher, but Derek doesn’t even seem to know who she’s talking about.  They have to figure out who he really is.  “I want to hear him admit to it,” Derek says.  “He will,” replies Jesse ominously.     

Cameron and John are on the road again, and there’s more philosophical talk about what Terminators can and cannot experience.  “I can feel,” Cameron declares.  “I wouldn’t be worth much if I couldn’t feel.”  Hee!  That reminds me of that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Tasha Yar asked Data if he was “fully functional.”  Ahem.  Yes, I’ve been a geek for a v.v. long time.  Meanwhile, Sarah’s having more fever dreams.  This time she walks through the house in her Mormon dress, into a nursery full of hospital bassinets.  Each of the bassinets has three tortoises in it, except for one, which is empty.  Hello, tortoise anvil!  Over in the corner Sarah sees Cameron, breastfeeding the missing tortoise.  Cameron stands up and walks past Sarah toward the door, handing the tortoise to Chromardi!  Suddenly, Sarah wakes up and discovers that she’s been sleepwalking.  She sits down at the table and draws a picture of three dots.  Come to think of it, seems like each dream has had three somethings in it.

John and Cameron dig at Chromardi’s gravesite, but all they find is an unfashionable boot.  John says that only one other person knew about this.  Ellison, perhaps?  As they drive back to LA, Cameron fields a call from Derek, with an emailed photo of Paul/Fisher.  She doesn’t recognize him, and cheerfully tells Derek everything’s okay.  Then she turns up some poppy, perky music on the radio.  Is it just me, or does Cam go through phases where she acts more human than usual?  It kind of creeps me out.  Back in the boxcar, Derek feeds the hostage a cheeseburger.  Paul/Fisher still vehemently denies that he’s from the future.  He gets all chatty Cathy about how he’s a watchmaker, and Derek watches him calculatingly.  As do I.  Something about this guy is just… off.  He’s slippery, like an oil slick.  Derek spots a tattoo on Paul/Fisher’s arm and asks where he got the prison ink.  Apparently a tattoo of a clock with no hands is symbolic for a life sentence.  “If I had a life sentence, what would I be doing here?” asks Mr. Oily.  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Derek replies.  Fun time lunchtime is over.

Sarah goes to see the shrink who shrunk John a couple of eps back, and tells him she’s having nightmares and sleepwalking.  Or rather, being sleepchased.   Perhaps sensing an opportunity to make some serious dough help someone who really needs it, the doc invites her in.  Meanwhile, Cameron and John stake out Ellison’s house.  It’s a good moment for some Cam insights (I love these).  She doesn’t understand why Sarah turned over the tortoise in the desert.  John explains that she was helping it… “because that’s what we do.  When we see something that is in pain or trouble, we try to help it.”  But Cameron says that not everyone would have done the same.  Some people would have left the animal, or crushed it.  And what would a Terminator have done?  “ It didn’t seem like a threat,” Cameron says.  “We’re not built to be cruel.”  Interesting.  Cameron has a concept of empathy toward animals.  When I think about it, a Terminator would likely identify with animals far more than they would humans – animals and machines both tend to get used by humans to further our own purposes.  The Terminators had a tiger in a cage in the future… maybe because they were trying to save it, post Judgment Day?  Anyhoo, enough pondering.  Ellison arrives home, and Cameron and John follow him inside.  He promptly gets choked by Cameron, in an effort to find out where Ellison stashed Chromardi’s body.  Ellison manages to squeak out that he didn’t touch it, and Cameron concludes that he’s lying and tosses him into some furniture.  John, however, thinks Ellison’s telling the truth, and makes Cameron let him go.  On their way out, John spots that photo of his mother in the Jeep; the one he’ll give to his own father in the future.  Ellison had it, and now John takes it back.   

Hurricane Jesse (seriously, she’s pissed off during this entire episode) arrives back at the boxcar with “proof” of the identity of Charles Fisher.  Said “proof” is a v.v. frightened young man named Charlie Fisher.  Dude!  It’s pre-Judgment Day Charles Fisher!  He’s played by that guy who played Warren on Buffy.  Warren got flayed alive after killing Tara.  Right now it’s looking like ol’ Charlie may meet the same fate.  Bummer.  Of course, Charlie has no idea what the eff is going on, because he hasn’t lived through Judgment Day yet.  But get this - he has a tattoo that matches one on Paul/Fisher’s shoulder.   Paul/Fisher, despite the tattoo, istill nsists that he’s not their guy.  Whereupon Jesse starts whailing on him again.   Derek has a better strategy.  He picks up some pliers, and neatly plucks a fingernail right off of young Charlie’s hand.  Yowtch!   Charlie screams bloody murder.  See, according to Derek, some people will take whatever you give them.  They hate themselves, they use that hate to suppress pain.  But we were all loved ourselves once.  Maybe Charles Fisher still loves his younger self.  With that, Derek rips off another fingernail.  And… the tactic works.   “Stop,” says the older man.  “My name is Charles Fisher.  Let him go.”  Finally, the truth!  Fisher claims he’s not in the past on a mission.  He was sent as a reward – a retirement kind of deal.  When the bombs dropped he was in solitary confinement.  He would not have survived if not for the prison walls.  When the Terminators found him, he tought them what he’d learned about what makes people… tick.  At that, Jesse knocks over his chair and starts in with the beatdown, but Derek pulls her away.  That's seriously like the 9087567th time he's had to pull her off of this guy.  You can feel her hatred just radiating off of her.

Sarah tells Shrinky McShrinkerson (I can’t remember his actual name) about her “family vacation” in Mexico, but he knows she’s not giving all the details.  According to Shrinky, dreams mirror our central conflicts.  Is her central conflict her son?  Or maybe her “daughter?”  He thinks the three dots she drew represent the three people in the family, but he can’t help her until she’s honest with him – and herself.  Clearly not prepared for the soul-barin’, Sarah leaves.  When John gets home, she asks him what the three dots might mean, but he thinks she’s just crazy tired.  The body wasn’t there, and Ellison doesn’t have it.  “Chromardi was in my dreams,” Sarah says.  “It’s all connected.”  John:  “Um… Riiiight.”  Next Sarah tells him it was her fault Chromardi found them – she left that boy in the bowling alley.  “We’re not murderers,” replies John gently.  Aw.  I’m glad to see these two getting along better. 

Alone in the boxcar, the two Charles Fishers face each other.  Old Charles starts winding up his younger counterpart.  “You think you know who you are?  You don’t have a clue,” snarls Old Charles.  Meanwhile, Jesse and Derek talk, and we find out the reason for her venom against Fisher.  Apparently in the future, the Terminators will raid a bunker and kill all of the children and everyone over thirty.  They will take prisoners.  We see a vision of Jesse, tied to a table with Fisher looming over her.  Fisher acted as some kind of twisted college professor, teaching his Terminator audience to get information from people.  This perverse theater of starvation, drugs, and Fisher (whom, for some reason, is wearing a tie while he lectures Terminators on torture) talking to break her down went on for weeks, maybe months.  But wait: there's a twist.  Derek was imagining Jesse captured by Fisher, but that' snot how it went down.  "You don't remember?" she asks him.  "It wasn't me he had.  It was you, Derek."  Whoa!  Derek was the one tortured by Fisher?  Why doesn't he know the guy??  Color me confused. Turns out that he doesn't need to remember - Jesse's word is good enough for him.  This time, it's Derek who's using Fisher as a punching bag.  And to punish the guy further, Derek pulls out his gun and aims it at... Young Fisher.  Before he can pull the trigger, though, Jesse shoots Old Fisher instead.  "Thank you," Breathes Young Fisher.  Wow. I can't tell if he was happy he was spared, or happy the monster he'd become was put out of his misery.

Derek buries the old man in the woods, but they let Young Fisher go, in hopes that history won't repeat itself.  Derek still doesn’t remember anything about his time with Fisher, which shocks Jesse - when they first met, revenge on Fisher was all he talked about.  According to Jesse, Derek was a man obsessed.  So did he repress the memory?  Derek has an alternate theory.  Maybe for him... it never happened.  Maybe he and this Jesse come from alternate futures, and in his future, he never met Fisher.  They have been messing with a lot of important events here in the past, so it's not unheard of that they could already have altered the future.  "Do you think there’s a version of the future where we’re not together?" Jesse asks, and Derek takes her hand.  "No," he replies.  But it looks like their hopes for young Charles Fisher are about to be dashed.  He's at work, at a high-tech company where he apparently does menial work but has some level of clearance through a thumbprint access code.  Suddenly the FBI show up, and accuse Fisher of accessing sensitive databases.  Charlie denies that he was even in the building at that time, but they have his thumbprint on file, and "computers don't lie."  Dude!  It was totally Old Fisher, setting his younger self up for the fall!  Not only did Old Fisher ensure that his younger self would land in that prison to survive Judgment Day, he also installed a roving "back door" into the computer system, one that can't be dismantled.

Ellison... is a dirty rotten ^&*#ing liar!  He did steal Chromardi's body... and he's turning it over to Catherine, of all people Terminators!  Ellison, I hardly knew ye.  Meanwhile, Charlie Fisher is tossed in the slammer, his destiny playing out exactly as before.  And Sarah’s back in a dream, climbing a ladder down into Chromardi's grave, wearing her Mormon dress.  She opens a door and walks into Shrinky McShrinkerson's office.  When she awakens, she takes a flashlight down to check out that bloody wall (which has served as inspiration for so many episodes this season - it's a veritable fountain of plot points!).    There, next to the word "Sherman," are Sarah's three dots, composed of bloody fingerprints.  Coincidence?  I think not.