By Melissa Voelker
The second half of Season Two has certainly been different than what I had grown accustomed to in this series. First, there were several very character-driven episodes back to back, and then when the action and adventure returned, it was almost written WELL. I don’t know what happened to make Sarah Connor Chronicles suddenly watchable, but I certainly hope the creators can keep it up for a while. It’s nice to not want to claw my eyes out of my head every moment while watching an episode.
This episode centers around two main things. #1 – The death of John’s sneaky girlfriend Riley that everyone believes was caused by Cameron the GirlBot, and #2 – Agent Ellison’s continuing mission to boldly go where no FBI agent has gone before…or wait, that’s not right, he is just trying to teach moral values to a machine (maybe I was right the first time.) Derek tends to wounds Jessie received under mysterious circumstances, while she has flashbacks to her past-future aboard a submarine set on course for hinky John Connor business. They argue about how to handle the situation with Cameron’s involvement in Riley’s death, trying to determine if they should leave destroying her up to John or not. Everyone knows he has a soft spot for the Metal (as Derek so eloquently calls her), even Sarah. At one point she tells Cameron that she was going to shoot her, but didn’t because it would upset John. Cameron takes a moment to point out that EVERYTHING upsets John, that just caring about people hurts John, and that the only way he will ever overcome that is to be completely alone. Sad but true.
While the Connors deal with their emotional Metal-drama (haha, that’s funny because it’s a play on melodrama), John Henry the cyborg child decides to play a game with another child he finds floating around his building. Catherine Weaver’s daughter (sort of) is looking for a friend, and John Henry is only too willing to be that friend. They start playing Hide and Seek, but when Ellison and Weaver demand to know where the little girl is hiding at, John Henry doesn’t understand that the game could be dangerous and refuses to tell them. Eventually they find the child, and Ellison has to try and teach John Henry an important lesson about the importance of human life and how endangering children is very naughty.
It was nice to see all of the players return in this episode, as they had taken a bit of a back seat to Sarah’s emotional journeying in the last few weeks. But that didn’t necessarily make it as strong an episode as the last few have been. The Connors spent most of the show moping around having arguments with each other over keeping secrets and lying and whether or not the GirlBot should be destroyed. Jessie and Derek talked and made out and did nothing terribly important with their time except not decide to do anything about the GirlBot. Even the GirlBot did nothing much but wander in and out of scenes looking a bit mopey herself. I still don’t miss the time-traveling cyborgs and their constant need to destroy everything EXCEPT John Connor, but all of this moping is getting tiresome.
I was excited at first to see the back-story flashes that Jessie was experiencing, until I realized she and everyone on her submarine were complete idiots. Their captain is so obviously a cyborg that the show practically slaps you in the face with that fact, and yet none of them seemed to notice. These are people that have spent their lives fighting SkyNet and its minions, and yet they can’t recognize a cyborg in their midst? Especially when he talks and reacts in typical robot fashion? Suddenly it is making a lot of sense to me that humans were losing the war for so long. They just aren’t all that bright.
The most intriguing aspect of this episode was the storyline with John Henry and Agent Ellison. After the dangerous game of Hide and Seek was over, Ellison gave the immature A.I. a very stern talking to. And John Henry seemed to understand pretty quickly that what he had done was wrong, because he had endangered a human life and those are sacred. You could actually see something click in John Henry’s head when he realized this, which makes me wonder . . . will he really be a key element in SkyNet and Judgment Day? Or is John Henry just a red herring meant to keep viewers focusing on one thing while the real culprits of Judgment Day are hanging out in the background of the story? Could it be that I’m right and Sarah Connor, or even John Connor, is really the key figures to causing the robot war? Or is it possible (more than possible) that the writers have no idea where they are going with any of this so they are throwing as many possibilities out there as they can think of, so when the end of the series come they can pick whichever one they like best and go with that?
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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.
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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. 
The sub crew did know the captain was a former terminator. They said something about a "wiped triple 8" or something like that. They knew.
Wow, I didn't hear them say that, and it didn't look like they knew to me, because they didn't treat him at all the way you would expect them too. When they showed Derek in previous episodes reacting to "re-programmed" cyborgs, he wasn't comfortable around them at all. Most of the soldiers they've shown interacting with the wiped cyborgs have acted like they were the last things they wanted to be around. And Jessie is totally against the idea of dealing with re-programmed machines (we've all seen how she feels about Cameron.) I can't see her being so okay with a cyborg captain. But I may have just missed them explaining all of that.
You said >>>I was excited at first to see the back-story flashes that Jessie was experiencing, until I realized she and everyone on her submarine were complete idiots. Their captain is so obviously a cyborg that the show practically slaps you in the face with that fact, and yet none of them seemed to notice.<<<
Point of order: everyone *knows* he's a Terminator. John Connor's resistence has been shown frequently using "Tame" killbots in various roles, and no one in the future is surprised by that. "Captain Queeg" (The name is obviously a joke among the humans in the crew) drives the ship to within a few centimeters of Crush Depth. Jessie all but says "He can do this because he's a machine" during that sequence.
(BTW, I'm pretty sure that manuver wouldn't work)
It was a really good episode, though. I'd really like to see more of the future in this thing, and the "Goodbye, Bird, there was a 51% chance I wouldn't kill you" had me rolling on the floor.
I guess I'm going to have to go back and watch again to try and catch these references to them knowing the captain is a machine, because I missed several of them apparently. And I know that John has been using tame robots for things, but that didn't mean everyone was comfortable with them. When you see the soldier go to pick up John's super secret box, he doesn't look comfortable or happy at all. Even though he is dealing with machines that aren't making any move to kill him, he doesn't look like he wants to be in that situation. I couldn't tell if those were tame robots, or maybe cyborgs from the other side (doing who knows what), but still. I can't see a whole submarine of human soldiers who have been fighting cyborgs for most of their lives being so okay with one in charge of their ship. Why would he even be in charge? Wouldn't he be just another of the crew, and a human would be captain? That doesn't make sense.
You said >>>When they showed Derek in previous episodes reacting to "re-programmed" cyborgs, he wasn't comfortable around them at all. Most of the soldiers they've shown interacting with the wiped cyborgs have acted like they were the last things they wanted to be around. And Jessie is totally against the idea of dealing with re-programmed machines (we've all seen how she feels about Cameron.) I can't see her being so okay with a cyborg captain.<<< I suspect the point of the flashback story is to explain why everyone is so uncomfortable with it now, or at least why Jessie doesn't trust them. Clearly she did up to that time.
The scene where Riley's foster father and John were on the phone with Cameron-pretending-to-be-Riley was just heartbreaking. As was John sneaking into the morgue to say goodbye. As much as I disliked the character of Riley at first, I really felt bad for her toward the end. She never had a choice in the course of her life, and that's tragic. I suppose in that way, she and John had more in common than either of them realized.
Yeah it was! And kind of weird, too, on a whole bunch of different levels.
Hi Melissa…..This is from the official FOX show recap "Inside the sub's control room, we meet Queeg, the reprogrammed Terminator driving the boat."
So now that some of the things in the episode have turned out to be different than you thought they were, does that change your opinion of it any?
I think it actually lowers my opinion. It doesn't make any sense to me for Jessie and her crew aboard the submarine to be okay with not only a re-programmed terminator onboard, but serving as captain. These aren't people who have just started dealing with cyborgs. They've spent most of their lives fighting them. They aren't going to trust them that much, no matter what John Connor says to them. And if they are serving with a wiped machine because they are being forced to by John Connor, I don't think they would be acting so comfortable around it. They would be suspicious and distrusting, just as Derek was when he first met Cameron in Connor's bunker last season. I don't think it would take something extra to make Jessie and the other humans distrust re-programmed machines. They would already distrust them. They would expect them to turn around and go evil again at any moment. And they would be right. Cameron took a severe knock to the circuits when she was blown up in the season finale last year, and it reset her programming to kill John Connor again. Apparently all it would take in any of the cyborgs is a big enough jolt to make them evil again, which means they aren't really "wiped," they are just going on programming put in over the top of their intial programming. I want to believe that the characters in this show could be real people, and so I need them to be written to act in ways that seem real and make sense. This whole business aboard the submarine seems contrived to me, and does not make sense. So an episode that I originally thought was quite a bit better than most of the season has been, has now been downgraded in my opinion.
In an earlier episode in the season, ("Alpine Fields" I think?) during a flashback when we see Derek and Jesse first meet, Derek is at first quite envious to hear that the Australians have an honest-to-dog nuclear submarine, until Jesse tells him they have a wiped Triple-8 driving the thing. When he expresses shocked disbelief that they would let one of those things drive them around the depths of the ocean in, essentially, a tin can, Jesse replies, "Well, show me a sub captain that survived J-Day." I think it's pretty clear in this episode that Jesse's acceptance of Queeg was uneasy to begin with, and after the events that transpired with the package, the trauma pushed her over to full on metal-hate.