Give me your three dots and nobody will be hurt.Yay!  It’s our mid-season finale, featuring the return of the voiceover!  We see Sarah driving through the desert, lost in a daydream.  Sarah’s daydreams are far more complex and complicated than my own, and feature thoughts about a Conquistador who traveled to the New World in 1490.  He was captured and enslaved by locals, but learned their ways and became a healer after a spiritual journey to the desert.  Eventually, the Conquistador even became an object of worship by his adopted culture.  The desert had transformed him.  He wasn’t the first to trip on acid have a spiritual experience in the desert, and he won’t be the last.  Foreshadow, much, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?  I’m thinking the desert will be featuring prominently in this episode.

What, no “previouslies” this week?  How are we supposed to know about the infamous three dots and how important they are?  Maybe this means the three dots have gone bye-bye.  Be still, my beating heart!  As we open, Derek’s walking through an abandoned warehouse, talking tersely to Sarah Connor on a cell phone.  Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Derek talk in a non-terse manner.  Suddenly he hears a cry of pain, and goes charging into a small room.  Inside, a teenage girl hovers worriedly over a v.v. pregnant woman, who’s bleeding from a gunshot wound.  But they’re in luck – Sarah sent Derek here to help.  The woman, Ann, is shot through the lung, and her breath is making really awful, rasping noises that sound rather like a bagful of angry wet raccoons.  Derek sets her up with a ghettofabulous chest tube to keep her breathing.  A Terminator has been tracking preggo Ann Fields and her family for six months.  “How’d it find you?” Derek asks.  “How do you know Sarah?”  Guess Sarah wasn’t so into providing details before she sent him on this little mission, eh? 

Guess what?  It’s the third week in a row that Sarah Connor’s been obsessing over those three dots the dying Resistance fighter left on her wall.  And I gotta tell ya, it’s starting to get a smidge annoying.  Yadda yadda written in blood, blah blah symbolism.  Yawn.  Can we please get off of the dots and onto something interesting?  Hello?  Anyone?  Beuller?  John and Sarah give up their three-dot internet search and decide to call it a night.  Sarah hands some laundry off to Cameron.  She never sleeps, so she might as well do some midnight chores, right?  Hee!  Cameron almost looks pouty.  Ah, but did you really think the most efficient killing machine in the world would sit around folding underpants all night long?  Think again.  Cameron, it seems, is leading a secret double life.  She shows up at a library, and the night shift Librarian’s face lights up like he ate a glowstick.  He clearly knows Cameron, and has hung out with her regularly.  She brings him a bag of his favorite doughnuts, and he asks about her trip to Mexico.  Which, according to Cam, was “a bummer.”  Hmmm.  I might not say “bummer” so much as “batshit insane shoot-‘em-up.”  But hey, it’s possible that Cameron and I have different standards.

That sneaky Ellison!  Last week he dug Chromardi up, forked his body over to Catherine the redheaded Terminator, and then lied to John and Cameron about it.  While John bought the story, Cameron clearly did not.  ‘Cuz Ellison’s woken out of a sound sleep… to find Cam plunging a steel rod into his lawn.  Hee!  She’s testing it for buried objects.  As I ponder how funny it would be if Cam hit a water main right about now, she flatly and creepily instructs Ellison to “Go back to bed.”  Meanwhile, Sarah and Derek are also at work, breaking into a computer company called Dakara Systems.  Dakara has a logo that looks like the three dots on written in blood on the wall.  Our heroes swipe a bunch of hard drives, and back at the house, John’s analysis shows they’re designed for an AI.  But while the programming structure’s there, it’s missing a key element required to create an artificial intelligence - storage space.  Sarah’s convinced that this company is trouble ‘cuz of their logo.  “Everything on that wall has meant something,” she notes.  Y’know, she’s right.  That dead Resistance fighter was like the DaVinci of drawing on walls with blood.  John does some research on Dakara Systems and finds out they’re looking for investors, so he makes Sarah an appointment to pose as a rich MILF with plenty o’ cash.

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. 

Let me just start off by saying that this show consistently brings it, week in, week out.  In fact, it’s seriously so good, sometimes I have a hard time finding the snark.  This episode is no exception.  We start off with “Sarah’s story.”  She’s rattling some tools and pretending not to eavesdrop as John says goodnight to Riley.  These two are as flirty as Bill Clinton at a Sorority convention, but somehow their relationship still seems to be platonic… at least so far.  Once Riley leaves, Sarah tells John that if he cares about her, he’ll give her up.  Y’know, since her association with him causes her likelihood to get Terminated to increase by approximately 473839065%.  John goes grumping off, and Cameron says she’ll talk to him.  The next morning, Sarah’s tool-rattling results in a homemade safe, which she’s installing in the floor.  Yeah, I’m sure the actual owners of the house will appreciate the foot-square hole you just sawed into the hardwood.  Anyhoo, Cameron’s off to restock an ammo drop, but she tells Sarah that she convinced John to give Riley up.  “I don’t like the way he responds to you,” Sarah pouts says.  “You got what you wanted,” Cameron replies.  She leaves, and Sarah bends down to install the safe… and suddenly Chromardi is behind her!  He violently drags her through the house, up to John’s room, but when he kicks in the door, John’s not there.  “Where is he?” Chromardi asks.  When he realizes that Sarah honestly doesn’t know, he knocks her unconscious.   

Terminator on the RoofFirst off: ginormous props to the awesome Feste!  Thanks so much for the kickass substitute recap!  I owe you.  Currently, on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Former FBI Agent James Ellison is having a nice, calm evening at home.  He’s just minding his own beeswax, eatin’ his TV dinner.  Then there’s a knock at the door.  Y’know, I’m not sure why Terminators bother to knock.  They’re going to bust that door down, anyway.  The door goes flying in, and Ellison stares up in shock at… himself?  Ellison’s Terminator doppelganger stands menacingly over him, aiming a pistol at his chest.  There’s nowhere to run.  Ellison’s toast.  And then… a fist goes straight through the Terminator’s chest, ripping out its CPU!  Wide-eyed, Ellison comes face-to-face with his savior.  Chromardi!?!?  Ellison wants to know why the eff Chromardi would kill another Terminator to save him.  “Skynet does not believe in you like I do,” Chromardi intones.  “You will lead me to the Connors.”  Wow.  It's nice for somebody to have faith in you and everything, Ellison, but that's a little depressing.

Emo meets martyrdom. Now with helpful hints about the preventing the apocalypse!

Greetings, TSCC fans!  I am your intrepid substitute recapper, Feste.  Nova is off on a well-deserved vacation, but she'll be sorry she missed Brian Austin Green's wicked hot bod this episode.

The episode begins, as usual, in medias res: Sarah and Cameron are snooping in the dark in someone's house.  Over this, Sarah's voiceover tells us about her father, a vet who never spoke about the horrors he faced overseas.  "Ever vigilant, ever silent," she says.  "I never thought I'd follow in his footsteps."  Don't let it get out that you're a daddy's girl, Sarah.  Later, in the getaway vehicle driven by John, Sarah spouts awkward exposition about Dr. Boyd Sherman, child psychologist and family therapist, who was one of the names painted in blood on their garage wall by the resistance fighter (see photo).  You know, the one who had about 30 seconds of screentime and one line, but who provided the key plot device for the entire season.  John, who seems to have gotten up on the grouchy side of the bed, wants to know Sherman's relationship to Skynet, and whether he's someone they're supposed to protect.  That is, apparently, the question.

Don't mess with the girlsAttention, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles fans.  The following recap, unlike the episode that inspired it, will not be sponsored by the 2009 Dodge Ram.  Apparently Dodge didn’t think it’s already painfully obvious attempt at product placement was working, so they decided to get a lot little more blatant about it.  They might as well add a tagline reading “BUY A DODGE RAM RIGHT NOW OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED” to the opening credits.  I think it might be time to invent a drinking game.  Take a shot every time Dodge’s giant, gas-guzzling behemoth of an unnecessary truck takes up more than ¾ of the TV screen!  Dude, we’d all be frakkin’ plastered before the night was over.

Allison? From Palmdale?Question: why is it that a show about bimbos throwing themselves at a short, moronic, giant-clock wearing, fugly dude with a mouthful of gold teeth can get renewed for 38596035 seasons, but awesome, deep, emotionally moving sci-fi shows are always on the endangered species list?  I read that if Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ ratings don’t pick up, the evil PTB over at Fox will give it the axe.  It’s enough to make this recapper cry.  This show so deserves to be on the air, and tonight’s episode proved it.  Twisty storyline.  Interesting character development.  Cool special effects.  Gut-wrenching acting.  So if you’re a fan of T:TSCC, tell your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers to change the channel from whatever crap they’re watching on Mondays at 8 PM (Dancing With the Stars?  Really?  Do you honestly enjoy watching Cloris Leachman’s wattle jiggle around a dance floor?).  I’d hate to see yet another awesome sci-fi show get cut down in its prime.