As the season draws to a close, I can’t but think that if Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn’t make it to season three I can sleep easy knowing I did everything I could to save it. I wrote about, watched it, posted on forums about, wrote more about it, signed an online petition to keep it going, pleaded with friends to watch, and wrote some more about it. I move on knowing we saw a show that had just begun to “get it.” If nothing else, these last five episodes have proved that Terminator:SCC deserves another season. Unabashed praise? Sure. Deserved? Most definitely.
Having recently been arrested Sarah is in jail. She is classically tight-lipped about John’s whereabouts and asks only to speak with the priest we met earlier in the season. Through this priest she gets a message to John that he is not to try and break her out and gives him explicit instructions to get far away.
John Henry and Catherine Weaver are monitoring Sarah’s incarceration and this is the first look we get at two robots (that aren’t Cameron) that don’t seem to have malicious intent towards the Connors. Weird feeling. She lets Ellison know that meeting John Connor is of the utmost importance to her. I have suspected for awhile that Catherine Weaver’s goals align with those of the Connors. She just never seemed intent enough on killing John.
Even giving explicit orders, John still wants to break his mother out of jail and begins questioning Cameron’s makeup. This leads to a strange scene where Cameron insists John check her for any flaws. This comes off as an erotic encounter between the two. One could read this scene in one of two ways. The first would be that it is an obvious allusion to the two making love. The second though symbolizes the aloneness John feels in the world forcing him to connect with the only thing that makes sense to him. He and Cameron are connected for good or bad.
Cameron breaks Sarah out of jail without knowing John Henry and Catherine Weaver played a major role. They arrange a meet. John and Sarah will meet with Weaver while Cameron disables John Henry. While in Weaver’s office the group sees a flying object coming towards the window. It is the machine hijacked from an earlier episode, sent on a kamikaze mission towards the office. Catherine saves the day by transforming herself into a T-1000 angel, of sorts.
Finally we learn of Weaver’s allegiance. She had offered an olive branch earlier in the episode by asking Cameron and John through an Ellison proxy, “Will you join us?” An allusion to future John’s attempt to side with a rogue sect of robots. Weaver is part of this faction to stop Skynet. I knew I always liked her!
When they reach the basement of Zerocorp John Henry is missing as is Cameron’s chip. And here is where it really gets interesting. Weaver knows that John Henry has time traveled away and she has the technology to follow him. John wants to go after Cameron’s chip. As the time machine is powering up Sarah and Ellison step away. That leaves John to make the decision to travel with Weaver alone to the future. He is basically choosing Cameron or his mother. He chooses Cameron.
The time machine works. Weaver and John are in the future. Here he meets Derek (he’s back!) and Kyle Reese: John’s father. We also see a very un-robotic Cameron.
This leads me to believe that this signals John’s role in the beginning of the resistance. Terminator 3 aside, we never knew how exactly John Connor came to lead the resistance. This scenario aligns perfectly and makes sense in more ways than one.
If ever a show needed to come back it was this one. The writers have corrected all of the questions I had in the early season of how to continue a show that seemed to have such an obvious outcome. This season ending cliffhanger has so many implications I can’t even begin to formulate them all now. Let’s wait on the network decision and hope. The future depends on it.
