“Polly want a chemical-free, sterilized cracker?” - Louise Baltimore, Millennium

by Melissa Voelker
It is time to find out if the second Reese sent back through time by John Connor will live a bit longer than his brother. He’s in pretty bad shape, but with Charley Dixon’s help they may be able to keep him breathing for a while. At least long enough for him to have some flashbacks (or would they be flash-forwards?) to growing up after the robotocalypse.

We are finally introduced to the series version of Kyle Reese, father of mankind’s savior, and he seems, um, really young. Too young to be doing the horizontal mambo with Sarah Connor, but maybe that is just me. He and his (younger? older? this dude really does look YOUNG) brother Derek seem to have a pretty solid relationship, considering they were born and raised as human slaves and are now living in dirty tunnels surviving just barely as rebel soldiers. They are sent off on a mission together and things turn sour, just before they are separated and Derek ends up as luggage in the back of a truck.

Back (this could get very confusing very fast) in the present, Dixon tries to reconnect with his ex-fiancée. He tells her he never really believed she was blown up in that bank explosion. She tells him she never really wanted to leave him but had no choice. Of course trying to explain the entire situation would just make him more confused then ever, even though he is making those caring, puppy dog eyes than men make when they want a woman to believe they will understand. Sarah gives him the lowdown on Judgment Day and SkyNet and the whole shebang, and he does his best to believe. The body of a dead terminator helps a bit, I’m sure.

Derek in the future (as opposed to Derek passed out a bloody mess on Sarah’s kitchen table) wakes up in chains. A terminator laser brands his arm with the telltale SkyNet work camp barcode, which is a bit confusing as I thought they got those when they were younger. But moving on, he and another prisoner strike up some chitchat as they lay tied down to the floor. The other guy asks if he is the Reese that helped John Connor escape a work camp once upon a time, but Derek lets him know that wasn’t him. Then Other Guy starts asking questions about Connor, like is he maybe just a crazy person and not the savior they all have believed him to be? Derek in the future changes the subject, while Derek in the past starts hemorrhaging in his lungs and Cameron points out he is drowning in his own blood.

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Dixon once again manages to keep him alive, but things don’t look so good. He has lost alot of blood and needs a transfusion of his very rare blood type. Sarah suggests dropping him off anonymously at an ER (so last week she was going to kidnap a doctor to save him, and now she wants to dump him at the first hospital she can find?), while Cameron is more about the just letting him die plan. John asks Dixon to test his blood to see if he is a match, since he is (secretly) related to him and all. Sarah takes him aside for some mother-son conversation, and for once tells him he did a good thing, bringing Dixon to Derek’s aid. But when he wants to tell Derek the truth that they are family she tells him Nay-Nay.

In the flash-forward again, Derek learns a startling truth from someone else tied up with him. This guy, all scraggly and dirty looking, is the AI computer building Andy that Sarah couldn’t bring herself to kill in the past/present. He starts babbling to Derek, though whether or not it is crazy babbling it is hard to tell. He tells Derek that he is responsible for SkyNet, that he helped build the computers that brought about the robotocalypse. Hrm, maybe it is a good thing someone killed him off after the chess tournament, if his ramblings are true. Of course, now that he has been killed in the past/present, he wouldn’t be around to talk to Derek in the future, and couldn’t be responsible for helping to build SkyNet. So, um, yeah. My brain hurts a little.

John turns out to be the same blood type as Derek and able to give him the transfusion he desperately needs. Dixon starts putting two and two together but just as Sarah may fully explain about Kyle and John and Sarah, Derek wakes up enough to attack Present John and demand to know what Future John did with his brother. And boy does Present John want to tell him. But not before another flash-forward to the bizarre house where Derek and the others are chained down for no reason that has become apparent so far. Derek and some of the others manage to escape and make it back to their tunnel/hovel place, but its been burned out and it looks like there are no survivors. When another rebel party shows up they get a few answers as to what happened, but not the one Derek wants most, like what happened to his brother.

Dixon finishes his mathematical equation after Derek wakes screaming about Kyle and figures out that Kyle was John’s father. For once Sarah just admits the truth, which is a bit refreshing considering how much dancing around the truth she normally does. Not that this makes Dixon feel any better, as it becomes pretty clear to him that he and Sarah never really stood a chance together. He goes out for some air and runs into Cameron destroying a terminator in the garage. She freaks him out more than a little bit, which just makes me feel even sorrier for him then I did before. He is having a very tough day, what with all this robotocalypse stuff that has been shoved in his face in the last few hours.

Flash-forward Derek has rejoined the Connor resistance at a very weird time, when robots have been reprogrammed as allies and his brother has gone missing and no one will tell him why. He runs into Cameron in the rebel compound and it does not look like they will become friends any time soon, even after she saves him from another killer robot. She is on the human side now, even if he can’t accept it. But maybe he is right not to, as back in the past/present she is doing some shifty looking things. Instead of destroying every last bit of the terminator in Sarah’s garage, she has kept the brain chip. Hrm, could she be turning bad guy?

Dixon and Sarah say some goodbyes, and for one shining moment she sounds like she has a clue, when she says her fate was already set long before they met and can’t be changed. But then she dashes all of that by following up with that she is trying to save John’s fate. Blah. She isn’t the only one with delusions of saving the future, however, as it looks like flash-forward Derek has been given his time travel orders. Only instead of just creating a safe house and gathering intel like he has been told to do, he has plans that include killing Past Andy, just in case his blabbering about being responsible for SkyNet really was true (and I’m thinking it wasn’t.) I guess Derek lied when he told Sarah he wasn’t the one that murdered Andy after the chess tourney.

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For a show that started out relatively strong but quickly became little better than above average, I’m not terribly surprised that it has now degenerated into irritating and ridiculous. It was bad enough that now multiple groups of humans and terminators are being sent back through time for various reasons, and that Sarah never once stops to think about the fact that if she destroys SkyNet before Judgment Day her son could never exist (for reasons I’ve gone on about several times before.) Now the writers have made the time travel business so muddied and impossible that is has become a tad ludicrous. If Derek Reese came back in time and shot Andy making him dead before Judgment Day, there is no way he could have built SkyNet or met Derek while chained to the floor in that weird prison. If Andy had been responsible for SkyNet than killing him would have stopped Judgment Day, in which case John Connor never would have existed to send Kyle Reese back in time so Sarah Connor never would have - and on and on. And if Andy hadn’t been responsible for SkyNet so Judgment Day still happened, Derek still wouldn’t have met him in that shack and wouldn’t have had flash-forwards of meeting him there - and so on and so on.

This has become a confusing mess and so far the writers for the show have done nothing to clear any of this up, let alone acknowledge they have created this mess to begin with. It feels like they are either hoping their audiences will be too dumb to notice how ridiculous all of the time travel business is, or they just don’t care enough about their viewers to give them a show that makes sense. In either case, it is certainly turning me off toward this series.

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About Melissa: By day a mild-mannered tv station receptionist, by night a fighter of crime and corruption in the dirty streets of Spokane, WA . . . or maybe not so much. More like a hyperactive, anal-retentive daytime receptionist and a melodramatic, hyperactive nighttime fangirl who only wishes she could be a fighter of crime and champion of justice (except that would lead to getting my super costume all dirty and I hate doing laundry.) Though my intent has always been to write bestselling novels and live a life of wealth and luxury, putting my talents for snarkiness and word doodling together while letting my geek flag fly suits me just fine - for now.