The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive: John and Cameron are hiding out in a motel while trying to decide what to do about Jailbird Sarah. John's other concern is that maybe leaking radiation from Cameron's nuclear power source is what's caused Sarah's theoretical cancer.
Meanwhile, Weaver's desperate for a meeting with John Connor, ostensibly to thank him for saving Savannah. Ellison manages to track him down and request this. John's all, "Not without my mother." But Ellison's other assignment is to pass on this message from Weaver to Cameron: “Will you join us?” He's expecting that Cameron will know what it means. She says she doesn't but she's clearly agitated.
So despite Sarah getting a message out to John to stay the hell away, he goes after her. Of course he does. Because what's a Terminator incarnation without an assault on a police station? This one's more T2 than original recipe, with Cameron firing her shotgun in creative non-fatal-yet-still-incapacitating ways. Weaver and John Henry look on with interest.
And Sarah and John go to Zeira Corp to meet with Weaver, while a badly damaged Cameron makes her way through the building's basement in search of John Henry. Things start to heat up very quickly when Zeira Corp is attacked by hunter-killer that flies straight into Weaver's office. She protects the group by turning herself into the Chrysler logo, and then the gang heads for the basement, and it's finally revealed that Weaver's not building Skynet, but building something to fight Skynet. So Sarah better hope Cameron hasn't destroyed John Henry, Weaver says, because John can't save the world without him.
When they get there, Cameron's disabled, her chip gone. John Henry's vanished into time, and Weaver wants to get back to the future too. John's in, for Cameron's sake (dude, she's a CYBORG. A hot cyborg, yes, but still a cyborg), but at the last moment, Sarah steps out of the Electric Blue Time-Teleportin' Globe.
When Weaver and John arrive in the future, they're immediately intercepted by a resistance team led by Unky Derek. John's thrilled to see him, and he introduces himself. But neither Derek, nor any of the other resistance fighters, have heard of John Connor. But that jacket John pulled on after he showed up in the future naked? That belongs to Derek's brother. Sure enough, there's Kyle Reese. And with him is Cameron. Or, more likely, Alison from Palmdale, given the fact the dog she has isn't losing its shit. So: is this how John Connor started with the resistance? Do they not know who he was because he skipped over J-Day and joined the fight later? Or is this how it always happened? Since there's no word yet on a third season, we might not ever know. But what a way to go. Baby, this show rips the endoskeleton from your back.
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Sarah's sitting in her orange jumpsuit in an interview room when in walks Joshua Malina, star of Sports Night, the very first show I recapped for this website, not long after television was invented, and he looks pretty much exactly the same. Maybe a little older. Much like Jeremy did, this guy, Agent Aldridge, talks a lot, too, very eloquently, sophisticated sentence structure. Calling himself a "measure twice, cut once" kind of carpenter, he wants to make sure Sarah's aware of her rights, including the right to a lawyer. Sarah continues to exercise her right to glower at people.
So he moves on and tells her that ten years ago she murdered Miles Dyson. "Long time gone, but the man's still dead, so we've got that." Eight years ago, she and her son and a high-school friend blew up a bank and died in an explosion. "Now of course, you're still alive, which is inconvenient for many, but the bank's still blown, so we've got that." And more recently, as in Monday, she participated in a firefight, leaving five dead and kidnapping Savannah Weaver, daughter of Catherine Weaver and citizen of Scotland, so this time Sarah's gone international! He tells her that two of the dead were off-duty police officers, which usually earns someone the needle.
Sarah tells Agent Aldridge that he's a funny boy: "I never liked funny boys." "I doubt they like you either, Ms. Connor," he says. Laughing time is over! He says there are two ways they can bring her son into custody: with her help, or dead. Sarah says her son is dead, but Aldridge isn't buying it. He tells her to think about it, and walks out. Sarah looks up at the security camera, red eye blinking.
Meanwhile, John is angrily watching the news, by which I mean he is visibly seething as he watches news footage of his mom's arrest, and they show a picture of the three of them, with the announcer saying the other suspects (i.e. John and Cameron) would now be in their mid-twenties.
John wants to move to a new hideout, but Cameron says it's a bad idea to do that within twenty-four hours of an "incident," and this room provides excellent sight lines down the highway. "This is not an 'incident.' This is my mother," John snaps at her. Cameron looks at him. He says he needs a computer so he can do some research, and she thinks he wants blueprints for L.A. county jail so he can bust out his mom. She says she won't let him do that, and he should know that by now. He says he does, and she asks him what he needs to research, then. "Power sources. Shielded nuclear power sources," he says, staring straight at her. "Like mine," she says. Bingo, he says. "I want to know if being around them all the time can give you cancer."
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