Short version: It was kickass, y’all!

Longer version:

Sarah’s back in an orange jumpsuit and behind bars, apparently thanks to the Fed who worked Savannah’s case last week. John and Cam are holed up in a nearby hotel and he’s wondering if Cam’s shielded nuclear power source is the cause of Sarah’s might-have-it-but-then-again-might-not cancer. The Terminator who tried to nab Savannah last week is plucking bullets out of his skinsuit.

John-Henry is playing D&D with Mr. Murch and totally cheating by rolling D-20’s. That’s not the only odd thing about J-H, whose personality seems a bit altered. Murch thinks that the new wire they plugged into him during a minor repair affected his “soul,” and that any change to his hardware or software changes J-H’s very essence. The Weaver-1000 looks concerned.

Ellison tries to convince Sarah in prison that he didn’t rat her out, but she’s not buying, since he’s lied his god-fearing tongue off on too many other occasions. All the while, John-Henry is watching Sarah in her cell via a tap into the prison’s monitoring system. Ellison also meets with the other agent, who really wants to find John, but Sarah insists her son is dead and Ellison doesn’t disabuse him of this. The other agent mentions that Sarah has asked to talk to a priest.

It turns out the priest she called is Father Bonillo, who witnessed part of Cameron’s freak-out earlier this season. Sarah uses what he saw to convince him to help her get a message to John and Cam.

Ellison isn’t happy to find out that Weaver-1000 and J-H are watching Sarah in jail. Weaver waves off his concerns and says she wants to meet John Connor, in order to thank him for saving Savannah. Yeah, right. Weaver tells Ellison that she knows John’s gal pal Cam is a cyborg, and that she knows Ellison knows, and that he’d better not lie to her ever again. Ellison reluctantly agrees to try and arrange a meeting between Weaver and John.

The other Terminator, meanwhile, is off buying silencers for his guns. That is not A Good Thing.

John is brooding over mom being in jail and possibly having cancer. Then he gets a call from Father Bonillo, whom we see giving the Hispanic girl from Sarah’s old contact’s house a message. Later, she turns up at John and Cam’s hotel room with passports and the message from Sarah: leave this place as soon as it is safe and don’t try to break her out of prison. Really. Has Sarah met John?

Cam peeks out the window and spots Ellison lurking in his car. She hauls him into the hotel room, where he again tries to convince John he had nothing to do with Sarah’s bust. He tries to set up a meeting between Weaver and John, who turns him down. Ellison asks Cam, on behalf of Weaver, “Will you join us?” and Cam immediately tells Ellison not to say another word. Okay, so I guess the speculation that Weaver is the same T-1000 from the Future Sub is confirmed.

The other agent, whose name I never caught so I’ll just call him Agent Other, gives Sarah a song and dance about believing in cyborgs, time travel, Tinkerbell…whatever Sarah’s ever spewed, he’s in. She doesn’t buy it for a minute and continues to insist that John is dead and gone. Agent Other leaves her cell, with a parting shot of info that Danny Dyson, Miles Dyson’s son, has been missing for three months.

The other Terminator (yeah, no name for him, either), comes to Zeira Corp’s garage and confronts the Weaver-1000. He shoots her full of holes, which she immediately heals, much to his chagrin (expressed by cocking his head slightly to the side). Weaver then awesomely executes him by spearing him with one arm and sticking her other arm into a  high voltage box.

Weaver brings his chip to John-Henry, who says that it was programmed to burn up as soon as it hit the air. She asks J-H to retrieve any data possible. Ellison shows up and Weaver is disappointed to hear John turned down her meeting.

Then comes the weirdest, sexiest scene of human-Terminator penetration in the history of ever. No, John and Cam don’t do the Forbidden Dance, but she does strip down to her bare, perfect torso in his bedroom and lie down on his bed. She tells John to get on top of her and hands him a knife, which she directs him to use to cut into her breastplate to check her nuclear power shielding for damage. He reaches into her chest and finds the node, which is cold, indicating all is well. He hovers over her, their faces inches apart and it looks like they are in the middle of extreme naughtiness. John’s looking very turned on by the whole thing and, in a way, so does Cam, and it is all very Strange and Disturbing. Then Cam spoils the mood by saying it’s time for them to go.

Go where? Why, to do the exact opposite of what Sarah ordered and break her out of jail, of course. Father Bonillo is sent ahead to warn Sarah that Cam’s on her way, and sure enough, she pulls the ol’ Terminator standby of breaking Sarah out of whatever hospital/prison she happens to be in at the time. Cam is careful to shoot around the humans, despite the fact that they riddle her with bullets. John-Henry watches it all and decides to help out by disabling all the locks in the prison. Much fleeing ensues.

The Weaver-1000 watches the break-out with John-Henry. Cam gets Sarah out to John and they drive off. Sarah scolds him and he tells her to ground him. Hee. Cam is not looking too good — one red eye is out — but Sarah takes her to off John-Henry anyway while she and John finally come face-to-face with Weaver.

John tells Sarah that Cameron thinks she’s sick. Sarah doesn’t confirm or deny, and then they are met by Ellison and taken to Weaver. John tells Sarah he loves her and she gets all melty inside. Awwwwww. But, not so melty that she doesn’t lie to Ellison that Cam is waiting out in the car and totally not going down to the basement to take John-Henry apart.

However, when Cam finally confronts J-H, he tells her he knows her and she replies that she knows him. He then asks, “Will you join us?”

The Connors finally meet with the Weaver-1000, who tell John she knows about Skynet and that Cam is in the basement going after J-H as they speak. In the background, we see a small dot that quickly comes close enough to see that it is a Skynet hunter drone. Uh-ohs.  It comes busting right into Weaver’s office and she tells the Connors and Ellison to get down. Then she goes all liquid metal and shields them from the ensuing blast and it is, once again, most awesome.  John, Ellison, and Sarah split while the Weaver-1000 reforms.

More extreme weirdness: Weaver’s pet eel, blown out of its tank, writhes on the floor for a moment…before TURNING INTO LIQUID METAL AND JOINING WITH WEAVER’S LEG. WTF is that about?!?! Why would she have a pet…her? Or part of her?

Weaver leads the Connors and Ellison to the basement to save “her” John, whom she insists is necessary for Sarah’s John to save the world. When they get there, Cam is sitting in J-H’s chair, chipless and thus lifeless. She apparently gave J-H her chip so he could become mobile and escape. Cam left behind a message that repeats on J-H’s screen: I’m sorry, John. Aw, see, she does care, somewhere deep in her electrodes. John spies Andy Goode’s Turk and Sarah accuses Weaver of building Skynet, which she denies, claiming that she’s building the anti-Skynet. And don’t call her a bitch, bitch.

Weaver invites Ellison to join her in retrieving John-Henry from the future. He says hells no, so she tells him to pick Savannah up from gymnastics. Such a good metal mommy. John can’t bear to lose his Terminator sister/BFF/favorite gadget and so joins Weaver in the electric blue bubble of time travel. Sarah bails on accompanying them, telling John instead that she will “stop it.”

Then bam! We’re back to the future. Naked John finds a jacket lying handily nearby, while naked Weaver forms appropriate clothes and…okay, I’ve got to call them out on this.  We’ve already seen that Weaver’s clothes are extensions of her, not separate articles of clothing. We know this because we just saw her close up bullet holes in them, meaning they are a part of her veneer. So why would they disappear during time travel like real articles of clothing? If she made it through, then her “clothes” did, too.

Okay, I’m done picking that nit. On to the mind-bending conclusion. Soldiers with dogs come into the warehouse where Weaver and John appeared. John finds himself alone when they confront him — ‘they’ being some random human and good ol’ Uncle Derek! Now 100% less dead! So cool…that ignominious death last week couldn’t be the last of BAG, I just knew it. However, Uncle Derek doesn’t know who John is…in fact, he’s never heard of any John Connor. Well, of course not — John just launched himself right over Judgement Day, so he’s not leading any Resistance anywhere.

Then, even more mind-blowing, Lucky Spencer…er, sorry, Kyle Reese strides in and stares at the boy who looks so much like him wearing his coat. Then, just to jack it all up to eleven, Kyle’s followed by a smiling Cameron! Who is  totally not Cam, of course, but Allison, the human on whom Cameron is based. We can tell this because she pets the guard dog and he doesn’t flip out, as animals do around Terminators. John boggles his way into the closing credits.

If this is the end of the series, I’m gonna terminate Fox.

RECAP DETAILS AHEAD (don’t read if you haven’t watched it yet) …

Okay, allow me to just get the 800 pound gorilla/elephant in the room out of the way and say, “Holy crap!”  This, of course, was my response to what happened about a quarter of the way through, when, while in the process of trying to rescue young Savannah Weaver from a Terminator disguised as a water delivery man, Derek Connor took a bullet to the forehead and died.  It happened so quickly that I immediately jumped back to watch it again (thank you TiVo!), and sure enough, he hadn’t been shot in the leg — which would have necessitated another obligatory hospital episode — or in the chest — where a prudent bulletproof vest might have saved his life — but right smack in the middle of the forehead.  That was it.  No getting around it.  Derek was dead.

As for why the Connors were trying to save Savannah Weaver from a Terminator, it’s because John found her photo on the PDA of one of the men who came to the lighthouse and killed Charley last week.  Poor John.  Between his real dad, Charley, and now Derek, he’s all out of father figures now.  Anyway, John recognized Savannah from Dr. Sherman’s office, back when he helped the girl tie her shoe in the waiting room, not realizing who she was.  This odd coincidence alone is enough to convince the Connors that they need to find the girl, and when they do, they find the Terminator.

As for why the Terminator was trying kill Savannah, that’s less clear.  But my assumption is that he was a foot soldier of the Cyberdyne faction, which as we learned last week has its own A.I., and may stand in direct opposition to the ZeiraCorp faction.  Which has me wondering more than ever if maybe Weaver-1000 isn’t as bad as we’ve assumed she is all season.  Further feeding into this are conversations that John Henry has with Ellison about whether he is the Cain or Abel in his relationship with his A.I. “brother”, and conversations between Weaver and Ellison about how John Henry will save them all.  It certainly seems uncharacteristic that either a cyborg or a potentially malevolent A.I. should care to such an inordinate extent about the life a young human girl.

Derek’s death aside, Team Connor does manage to incapacitate the Terminator and rescue Savannah.  Ellison watches the security tapes with John Henry, recognizes the Connors, and convinces JH to lie to Weaver about the tapes.  Ellison meets with Sarah, who convinces her to hand over Savannah in exchange for a meeting with Weaver, who also grudgingly agrees to the same deal.  Meanwhile, John bonds with Savannah, and as they talk, he learns not only about John Henry, but also about the fact that JH has Cromartie’s face/body.  (Hey, John Henry Cromartie = J.H.C. = Jesus H. Christ?)

Despite the fact that this latter bit of intel means Ellison is either lying to and/or withholding from them in a major way, the Connors move ahead with the exchange of Savannah, which goes down at a movie theater.  The Connors enter, put Savannah in a seat by herself, Ellison enters, talks to Sarah, she tells him where Savannah is, and as Sarah leaves the building, she is pounced on by a SWAT team.  John immediately accuses Ellison of betraying them, but he denies it, and I tend to believe him.  More likely, the FBI detective who’s had his eye on Ellison all episode is to blame.  Sarah puts up an admirable fight with the cops, but is ultimately taken down, while John and Cameron duck out the back door.

In the closing, creepy scene, we see/hear John Henry and Savannah singing an old Scottish folk song, “Donald, Where’s Your Trousers,” and listen to it as we watch a box containing Derek’s ashes get lowered into a hole, in the same green, hilly graveyard that his brother Kyle is buried in.  R.I.P. B.A.G.!

Next week … the season and/or possibly series finale.  Because I haven’t heard any word yet about whether or not the series will be renewed for another one.

Sarah and John, Cam and Derek, finish packing up Casa de Connor while Sarah reminisces about her time raising young John in the jungles of South America.  In the present day, she is snide with Derek and it becomes pretty dang clear that John told her everything about Jessie and Riley. So now Sarah doesn’t trust either Derek or Cameron. In fact, she drives off with John, ostensibly to a desert safe house (wouldn’t you think she’d want to avoid deserts?) and leaves my new favorite odd couple, Cam and Derek, to finish packing the munitions and rendezvous with them later.

John Henry is making a Lego castle and setting up an elaborate game with treasure and figurines. Aw, he’s just a big toddler. Savannah comes to join him and offers up her rubber duckies. J-H is humorously confused by how to incorporate happy duckies into his live action D&D game, but decides that they can change the rules so the duckies can be happy. Savannah is very pleased…until J-H’s computer hookup suddenly powers down, then uploads a weird, rapid run of code that causes him to malfunction. He grabs Savannah’s hand, hurting her, and won’t — can’t — let go. He asks, “What is this all about?” then seemingly answers himself, “I understand what this is about.” He releases a screaming Savannah and Murch runs in just as J-H starts to do something to his own equipment. Weaver-1000 and Ellison come in, holding Savannah, and watch as J-H falls lifeless to the floor.

Cut to John and Sarah road-tripping in the car. John is annoyed by some sort of interference with the car radio — that’ll be significant later — and then Sarah bops him on the shoulder, initiating a game of “bug slug.” I always called it “punch buggy,” but to each their own.

Murch meanwhile discovers that everything seems to be running fine in John Henry, however, something from the outside has infiltrated his programming, which is A Bad Thing. The Weaver-1000 is not pleased.

Odd couples Cam and Derek finish packing up plastique and the like. He takes Jessie’s jacket, which makes Cam comment that she knows he loved her, since he fathered her child and all. She utters her robotic, “I’m sorry for your loss” just like she did when telling Jessie about her miscarriage in the future. Derek reacts well, by sticking a gun under Cam’s chin and demanding an explanation. She tells him about the miscarriage aboard the Jimmy Carter and he is devastated. When he asks her why she’s dropping that bombshell now, Cam says now that he knows he lost a child, he’ll be more sensitive to Sarah’s fear of losing hers and won’t make any more dumbass  mistakes where John is concerned. Cam’s all about the tough love, yo.

John and Sarah don’t go to the desert after all. Instead, she drives him to a lighthouse that turns out to be occupied by ex-fiance/widower/Connor whipping boy Charlie and his Labrador Retriever.  John’s thrilled to see his almost-stepfather and vice-versa. Charlie is a lot less thrilled to see Sarah again. For some reason, Sarah needs them to spend the night with Charlie, without informing either Derek or Cameron, before going to the safehouse.

Charlie and John commiserate over dead girlfriends/wives while fixing up Charlie’s boat. Charlie explains that Sarah set him up in the lighthouse — no, not for naughty business, but as his own safehouse, so no Terminators will track him down as a loose end to be tied up. He even has the beach wired with explosives should they show up and a nifty escape plan involving his boat. Yes, that’s going to be significant later, too.

Sarah again reminisces about jungle life, and when she left John alone in for the night while she hid up in a tree serving as lookout. Charlie returns from shopping and he and Sarah manage to have a cordial conversation that takes a dark turn when she takes his hand and puts it on her breast. No, again, not in a naughty way, but to feel the lump she found there a few days ago. She fears that the cancer over which she leapfrogged through time has finally caught up to her, and she is obviously setting things up for Charlie, the only other person she now trusts, to take care of John after she’s gone. Hugging ensues.

Weaver-1000 demands Murch bring J-H back online, without access to other systems, so he can tell them what happened to him. The first words that come up on up on J-H’s screen upon reboot is, “My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?” Oooo, Creepy with a Capital C.

The following morning, Sarah makes pancakes — poorly, apparently — and she, Charlie, John, and the dog all sit down to a nice family breakfast. It’s just so, so sad…this was the family that should have been and never can be.

Murch explains that the act of turning off J-H was equivalent to killing him, very slowly. Weaver-1000 tells him to fix it and get him fully back online right away. After J-H is replugged in, he tells Ellison that he knows what it feels like to die and then come back. Just call him Jesus Henry. He also tells them that there is another one like him out there. Cue ominous music.

Sarah tells John that she no longer trusts Derek. John tries to argue that his relationship with Jessie was a human mistake, but she ain’t having it. Sarah tells John that they’re with Charlie because of him, because people are all that matter, and don’t forget it.

Back in the jungle, Sarah wakes and looks for her pre-teen son in his campsite, but he’s gone. She panics and searches the area, calling for him, until he sneaks up behind her and says that he won, that was the game, right, for him to hide so she couldn’t find him? She plays along and tells him he did win and hugs him with relief.

Sarah is at the doctor’s office getting an ultrasound, which gives her a big surprise. The lump is not cancer after all — it is cystic tissue that has built up around some small piece of metal. Sarah flashes back to her kidnapping by Evil Dead Ed and she realizes that he implanted her with a transmitter. In the boob. Yikes!

We then see uniformed men making their way through the doctor’s office, in a van behind Cam and Derek’s car, and toward the lighthouse.

Sarah charges the resuscitation paddles in the doctor’s office and zaps herself in the chest to disable the transmitter. Ow. The uniform heading to her examination room pauses as his tracking device winks out.

The guys in the van shoot out a rear tire on Derek’s car. He goes to investigate while Cam changes the tire and gets zapped with a Taser for his efforts. The van uniformed baddies throw him inside. They drive at Cam, but she shoots one of them dead, so the surviving driver decides it’s time to go. Cam gives chase just long enough to spot a parking sticker she can track.

Back at the lighthouse, John and Charlie hear the alarms go off around the perimeter.

At the same time, the uniformed baddie at the doctor’s office bursts into Sarah’s room, whereupon she kicks him to the ground, zaps his head with the paddles, and dashes off.

John and Charlie shoot at their own uniformed baddies from the dock. John hops on the boat while Charlie covers him and Charlie hits a switch, presumably the one to detonate those bombs in the sand.

J-H tells Weaver-1000 that he has a worm that uploaded itself and is highly sophisticated, beyond any human being’s ability to create. Another intelligence is using the worm to infiltrate major systems all over the world and take control, in an effort to track J-H down. He says that the intelligence is his “brother” and shows them a screen capture of an image from the code. It shows Cyberdyne (!) and that its creator was Miles Dyson (!!) in 1997. Ellison lies that he’s never found Dyson’s presumed assassin, Sarah Connor. Weaver wants to know what J-H’s brother wants. “What we all want. To survive.” Gulp.

Cameron tracks the van to a warehouse at the port of Los Angeles. She marches in and is doused with water, then electrocuted. One of the uniformed baddies tries to get to her chip while she’s down, but she reboots and kills him extremely dead, then releases a bound Derek. He looks shocked to see her and she tells him he’s welcome. Hee. Who says Terminators don’t have funny bones? She tells him she came after him because he knows the address of the safe house and might have talked under torture.

Sarah goes to the lighthouse and find the poor Lab dead on the floor. She runs to the beach and finds the burnt remains of uniformed baddies, then heads for the dock. She sees the boat is gone and is relieved…until she looks in the water and spies Charlie’s body floating there, riddled with bullets. Aw, geeze. That’s just not nice, Show. We end with a close up on Sarah’s sad, sad face.

So, I think what we’re seeing here is warring futures, the one in which Cyberdyne develops Skynet and another in which Colibra creates it. And they’re fighting one another for existence. Just a theory — what are your thoughts?

Anyway, onto the second part of the episode that kicked off last week:

Riley’s still dead. That’s the good news. The better is that John did indeed deduce from the defensive wounds on Riley’s body that there’s no way in Hades Cameron did it – if she wants you dead, you’re dead, and no time for a slappy fight first. He talks to Uncle Derek in the car about Derek’s future and, while we don’t hear the rest of that conversation, it becomes pretty dern clear later in the eppie what it was about.

A very-fit Jessie is at the pool reminiscing about her time in the sub with the Trip-8 Queeg and her ever-nervous crew.  Crewman Deets incites them to doubt Queeg and the entire mission, because why won’t he just say what’s in the box? Jessie remains loyal to her captain and the mission, but her own doubts continue to grow as Queeg refuses to confide in her, either.

John and Sarah have a heart-to-heart about Riley and there’s a great little moment when he says, “I’m sorry I doubted you,” that Sarah thinks is directed to her, but just as she’s feeling all maternally melty, he says, “Not you,” and stares directly at Cameron, who is standing quietly behind her. Psyche, mom!

Jessie’s crew, led by Deets, decides to pop the lid off the box and that works out great when it turns out there’s a puddle of T-1000 inside. It forms, stabs one of the female crew through the chest, and gives the rest of them the patented “don’t do it” finger waggle we first saw in Terminator 2.  Then it melts down and shoots away into the vents. Awe. Some. This is apparently the first time humans have seen a liquid metal Terminator and they are justifiably freaked. When Queeg won’t allow them to search for the thing, their suspicions go through the sub roof, including Jessie’s.

In the present, Sarah tries to have another comforting heart-to-heart with John, but he’s not having it. Meanwhile, John Henry is painting D&D  miniatures with Ellison and learning about souls. J-H asks Ellison if they’re friends and Ellison looks perturbed.

Back in the YMCA Pool of Memory, we flashback to Deets becoming suspicious of his crewmates and whether they are what they appear to be, or if they’re stealth “metal.” Deets starts a mutiny in the mess hall that leads to the crew beating the crap out of Jessie…until Queeg comes in and lobs Deets into the nearest bulkhead, killing the crap out of him. Despite the fact that Queeg probably saved her life, his killing a human in front of her is the moment that pushes Jessie over the edge into Don’t-Trust-The-Metalville.

John goes off somewhere and Cam is about to follow when Sarah stops her. Sarah wants to know why Cameron is really there with them and insinuates that Future John sent her away from him for a reason other than just protecting his past self. Mee-ooow, Sarah.

John Henry is still up painting when the Weaver-1000 comes down to visit. Ellison apparently trusts him enough now to leave him operational without human supervision. Weaver is pleased with this, until J-H tells her he’s been playing around in the company files. He’s found documentation on employees that left showing they’ve moved, gotten other jobs, etc., except that they then vanish without any further outside record. Ellison and Murch also have complete files on leaving the company and going to new jobs, which J-H finds a wee bit suspicious, especially since there’s no dates on them. He point-blank asks Weaver if she’s going to kill his friend and she tells him that they’re merely prepared in case he disappoints them, as humans are wont to do. Again, I still can’t figure out why she wants J-H taught that human life is sacred and souls are good and the Ten Commandments if her plan is to launch the rise of the machines.

In the past, Jessie confronts Queeg in the wheelroom. He notes that she looks ill repeatedly, and that turns out to be a significant point later. In the short term, Queeg clearly hasn’t had an Ellison in his life, as he is unmoved by Jessie’s pleas that killing humans is bad, m’kay? She tells him he’s relieved of command and that she, as ranking human, is taking control. At first, he seems to comply, but then he tells the Chief to escort Jessie to her rack, saying his classified mission protocol overrides all other considerations.

Her final pleas fall on deaf ears, so she pulls out an energy rifle and blows a hole through Queeg’s head, chip and all. She then sets the sub to self-destruct and evacuates the crew. Her intention is for the liquid metal to sink to the depths, but it has other ideas. It stops her on the way out and tells her to tell John Connor that the answer is no, whatever that means. Then it squirms out of the sub and swims away.

In the present, Jessie returns home to her apartment to find John waiting for her in her apartment with a gun. Ruh-roh, Scooby. Then John gives her a rundown on how he figured out who she is and how he found her — guess that’s what he had the chat about with Derek in the car. John monologues that he grew suspicious enough of Riley’s myriad slips of the tongue and odd behavior to start following her and that he figured out that she was from the future awhile ago. Which kind of casts his conversations with her  in a new light and makes me happy that John wasn’t being a complete dumb kopf. Jessie plays counselor long enough to tell John that he didn’t help Riley or admit he knew what she was up to because he wanted Riley to know who he really was and to love him anyway. John implies that the only reason he’s not blowing Jessie’s head clean off her shoulders is that Derek loves her and she and John are the only people he has in the world.  Aw.

Before Jessie leaves, she asks John if her plan would have worked — if Cam had killed Riley (or been framed), would he have turned on her. John says no and I’m not sure if he’s being honest or just doesn’t want to give Jessie the satisfaction of thinking that her plan ever had a snowball’s chance of success. Jessie says it’s all a damned waste then, and leaves.

Back to the future for the last flash, we see Jessie talking to Future Cameron at Serrano Point and getting dressed down for losing the submarine. Cam wants the answer the T-1000 gave her and Jessie resists, saying the message was for John Connor. Cameron insists that telling her is the same as telling John and Jessie realizes that Deets was right about Connor’s machine love. She tells her the answer and Cam looks disturbed. Jessie demands to know the question and Cameron actually tells her — it was, “Will you join us?”

We now have a clue as to the future politics going on; there does seem to be a rift between the liquid metal and the hard metal Terminators, perhaps because of Connor’s forced chip alliances. Cam then drops the final torpedo on Jessie, telling her that Jessie lost her baby with which she was pregnant and apparently didn’t know. Obviously, Derek’s baby. The last remnant of Jessie’s soul is crushed into oblivion.

Jessie heads out after her present-day confrontation with John and walks into Derek, who is waiting outside. He tells her that he killed Billy Wisher, his best bud, in his past/our present because it turned out he was Andy Goode and created the program that later became Skynet. Implying that, hey, if I killed the guy I thought of as a brother because it was for the best, you don’t have a chance of walking out of here. Jessie pleads with him that he doesn’t understand how much the machines took from them (the baby) but he doesn’t let her go on. He reminds her that they don’t really know each other, as they are from different futures and she’s not “his” Jessie. He tells her than John Connor said to let her go…but he ain’t John. He goes for his gun and she runs. We see him track her, start to squeeze the trigger…but we never find out if he followed through on eliminating this threat to John or not. He later implies not, but we’ll have to wait until she either pops up again or floats to the surface of a river.

Derek goes up to Jessie’s apartment and finds John there, fiddling with the pocketwatch trigger. John wants to know what the future resistance fighters think of him and Derek tells him they don’t all agree with everything he does or love him, but that he’s their leader and they all know they need him. All humanity rises or falls on his shoulders. No pressure there, eh, Johnny?

We get quick flashes of what everyone else is up to: Sarah is melting down more Terminator leavings, Cam is up on a roof carefully holding a pigeon in both hands and not killing it, and a maid tidies up Jessie’s now-empty apartment, even straightening the lamp we saw Jessie fiddle with last week.

Finally, back at the Connor Compound, John, Sarah, and Cameron are sitting together on the sofa and I like to think they’re kicking back to watch some Celebrity Apprentice. John suddenly leans back and starts to cry. He glances at an impassive Cameron, but it’s Mamma Sarah’s lap in which he lies to weep. She holds him and he snuggles her and it’s adorable and very sad. Cameron just sits silently next to them and it goes to show, when things get really harry, a boy needs his mommy more than his hot metal sister/girlfriend.

The opening to this episode was great – just Jessie sitting alone (or so it seems) in her apartment, looking beat up after her brawl with Dead Riley. She sits and stares at nothing, only interrupting her reverie long enough to make a tiny adjustment to her crooked table lamp.

Then we see Riley’s still on the floor of the otherwise scrubbed apartment, tucked into a dress bag and awaiting disposal.

We get a lot of flash-futures in this one, mostly of Jessie and her submariner friends, who spent a lot of time in a big tin can with a “Trip-8″ that Derek warns her should never be fully trusted, scrubbed or not. Such is our theme, folks — can a Terminator, even one that’s been reprogrammed, ever be trusted? Even if she’s a cutie-patootie like Cameron? That’s the question that plagues Sarah and John, especially after Riley is found a-floating in the river with a bullet in her chest.

After Riley-disposal, Jessie drops by a bar and deliberately starts a fight with a Navy officer and his buddies. I thought at first it was just because she was feeling guilty and self-destructive, but no, it’s actually a pretty clever way to cover why she’s all bruised and cut when she sees Derek again.

Jessie plays dumb when Derek says that John’s girlfriend is dead, telling him that it isn’t up to Derek to get rid of Cam – John has to come to that conclusion himself. Why? I dunno. But he does.

We learn in the flash-futures that Jessie trusted her T-800 sub skipper so much, that she let him lower their vessel to near-crush depth to avoid a “kraken” (not the one from Pirates of the Carribean, I’m guessing). It turns out that his ploy worked, but at the same time, she discovered he’d steered them hundreds of miles off-course on a secret mission. He only tells her they are following an order from John Connor to pick up a package and deliver it to Serrano Point, but he won’t tell her what is in the package.

They wind up on an old oil rig platform for the pickup. She sends her people in and they find themselves face-to-face with two bare-metal Terminators and one…I want to call him a skin-job, even though I know that isn’t this show, but that’s what he is, so I’m calling him that. Skin Job picks up the large, sealed container single-handedly and the poor submarine officer handling the pickup wets himself.

Jessie later  tells Derek that maybe some good can come from Riley’s death, which Derek slams, because a kid is dead at the hands of a “metal bitch,” and how can that ever be good? Jessie looks all quivery-lipped guilty when he leaves.

Cameron, meanwhile, tells John flat out that she didn’t kill Riley, but also agrees that she lies to him from time to time, which doesn’t exactly satisfy Our Hero. However, he doesn’t blow her head off with the handy-dandy bomb detonator she gave him last week, so he obviously really wants to trust her.

We get to visit with the Weaver-1000 and her adorable not-daughter, Savannah. I have to say, as a Terminator, she’s an awfully patient mother, calmly explaining s to the little girl that she’s working and can’t play hide-and-seek right now. Savannah finds another playmate for her game: John Henry, who guides her to his basement home with a musical elevator and blinking hallway lights.

The Weaver-1000 realizes her not-daughter is missing and alerts Agent Ellison, who hops to and joins her in the basement to question John Henry as to Savannah’s location. J-H insists on playing hide-and-seek variation #362, making Weaver and Ellison answer a series of questions in order to get clues as to where Savannah is hiding. Ellison doesn’t want to waste time, but Weaver is intrigued, and agrees to play the game.

They eventually find Savannah in a helicopter on the roof, safe and sound, after which Ellison has a Very Special Moment with J-H, explaining the ethical problem of playing games with wee girls’ lives. I really do not get why the Weaver-1000 wants to make sure her “son” gets lessons in ethics and morals. I assume we’ll get some sort of insight into her motivation down the road.

Sarah is totally convinced she has a Bad Robot in Cameron, but John feels he knows Cam enough to know that she’s being honest about not killing Riley. Sarah shares a bit of info I don’t think we knew before; apparently, Cam goes out at night and comes back covered in cuts and bruises. Is she getting into bar fights with naval officers, too? Or up to something much more sinister?  Sarah hits a nerve when she reminds John that Cameron babbled that she loved him last time her chip malfunctioned and John has a teenage boy hissy fit that his mother doesn’t know anything and storms off. Oh, yeah, he’s totally feeling the robo-love.

John drops by Riley’s foster parents place and has Cam call using Riley’s voice. She gives him a song-and-dance about having run off to Riverside so he won’t try to track her down. Then, in a really weird and creepy turn, Cam talks to JOHN in Riley’s voice, freaking him way the frak out in the process, especially when she tells him tht she loves him. Ooooo, shivers! John is Most Displeased, but Cam shrugs it off, saying she just wanted to make sure his reactions on the phone were believable. John storms off, leaving Cam behind.

Sarah burns Cameron’s stockpile of endo-metal and tells Cam that she was planning to just blow Cameron away with Derek’s assault rifle. In a darkly humorous exchange, Sarah asks Cam how bad that would have made Sarah feel and Cam replies, kind of hopefully, “Very bad?” Nope, sorry, sister. But Sarah knows John would be more sullen than usual over that, so she doesn’t and she won’t. Cameron tells her that John’s biggest weakness is that he is human and cares, and that as a result they are all a threat to him. Cam says his only hope is to be utterly alone — and someday, he will be. This makes Sarah sad.

John somehow gets into the morgue and pulls out Riley’s body from its Jane Doe slot in the wall. He sees that she fought, as her hands are still bloody and her nails ripped up, and he tells her he’s sorry. I don’t know if that made him more or less suspicious of Cam, since Cam didn’t have any visible injuries recently. He files Riley back in her slot and that’s the end of that subplot, for now.

We close as we opened – with Jessie in her chair in her apartment, staring silently, just reaching over to adjust her table lamp yet again. Guilt induced OCD, much?

RECAP DETAILS AHEAD (don’t read if you haven’t watched it yet) …

Cameron ’s having some hand trouble, which manifests itself when she tries to release a pigeon that had been nesting in the fireplace and crushes it to death instead. This leads to a wonderfully weird sequence paralleling Riley’s (unfortunately) unsuccessful suicide-by-slit-wrists, in which Cam slices her arm apart and begins tinkering with her malfunctioning metal. Riley spies her in action and soils herself, then goes running to her mother/girlfriend/I’m-not-sure-what’s-up-between-them figure, Jessie, to try and get out of her deal to turn John away from Cameron.

John helps Cam rejigger her arm, even though we (and he) damned well know she’s designed to self-repair, so why involve him? Anyway, he goes along with what is apparently the cyborg version of flirting and Cam reveals the stash of “endos” that she was supposed to have burned all along, but which she’s been stockpiling instead. He scolds her for this, but she says that Future John told her to save some of the parts, apparently for just such a rainy day. He goes with that.

Meanwhile, Jessie doesn’t let Riley off the hook, instead promising to protect her from Cam and anyone else who threatens her. Right, and I’ve got a nice bridge for you in Manhattan if you keep on cooperating, Riley.

Sarah, who gets a more relaxing week than she’s had for awhile, talks to Riley’s foster dad and confirms that the bruise on her face from where Jessie smacked her wasn’t inflicted by him. He also drops the bombshell that Riley ranted about “bleached skulls, dogs and cats living in sin…the end of the world!” Sarah gulps and heads off to meet with Riley’s guidance counselor – who turns out to be a scheming Jessie. Not!Counselor Jessie plants the idea in Sarah’s head that John’s been confiding sooper sekrit  things to Riley and that she, in turn, has been blabbing to guidance counselors, foster parents, and the like.

Derek is off trying to track down someone connected to Coliba and the various Factories of Fortitude we’ve visited in the past couple of weeks. And…that’s about all he’s up to this episode.

Sarah talks to John about Riley’s loose lips and he worries what will happen if Cam perceives this as a threat. He also worries about Cam’s sudden interest in making him sandwiches and her thinly-veiled hints that Future John and Cameron are thisclose. Someone from the Department of Family Services shows up at the Connor household to discuss Riley and it appears that Riley called them in, too. Which she didn’t. Another part of Jessie’s overall setup, which, Riley correctly deduces, is to turn John against Cameron by goading Cam into killing Riley. That’s cold, Jessie. The audience appreciates it, but still…cold.

Cam scares the jeebus out of Riley, saying almost exactly the same things she said to the poor, unfortunate pigeon at the beginning of the episode, but Riley’s ass is narrowly saved by John showing up to prevent any premature termination. While John and Sarah debate how to “handle” the Riley problem, she hightails it out of there and goes to confront Jessie, who is supposed to meet up with Derek to help him hijack the Coliba contact. But Jessie winds up a little busy, because Riley tries to kill her at her apartment. What ensues is a battle of the beyotches which is pretty awesome, during which Jessie tries to explain that she only wanted to give Riley a glorious Klingon death saving the future, instead of rotting away unknown and unmourned in the terminator-ridden world from whence she came. Riley makes a good go of it, beating the crap out of Jessie with a chair leg, until Jessie snags a hidden gun and shoots Riley very, ingloriously dead. And…so much for that plan. The question is, what will Jessie come up with next?

Back home, Cameron makes a watch in which to hide her true self should she need to impersonate a human…er, sorry, wrong show. She makes a time bomb and sticks it next to her chip, then gives the trigger, disguised as a watch fob, to John as a failsafe, because, as we know, she can’t self-terminate. Cam’s worries that his various repairs don’t seem to be doing the job, as she keeps accidentally killing birdies and making sandwiches and otherwise behaving like a Cylon instead of a Terminator. John reluctantly accepts her “gift” and still manages to look totally smitten by her. That can’t end well.

In fact, the episode ends on a creepy note, as he finds another dead bird lying outside the house. Ruh-roh, Shaggy!

My guess is this is a bit of damage control on Friedman’s part, considering the flak the series has received this season for being Cameron-light and somewhat aimless.

And I have to say … for me, it worked!

Michael Ausiello has posted the trailer over on EW.com, and I warn you all, it’s spoilery.  So use your own judgment.  But for me, it wasn’t in the bad way.  It’s all just scattered moments here and there, with no context.  I can’t imagine Friedman would have shown it if it gave away TOO much.  But there’s lots of Cameron, lots of action, lots of creepiness, and it really did a lot to energize me for the rest of the season.

Here’s a screen cap to whet your appetite …

Feel free to discuss the contents of the trailer below.  But please don’t introduce any new spoiler information that you might have received outside of this.