TV Recap- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Today Is The Day (Part 1)

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a cruel mistress. She tempts you and taunts you. She makes you want to watch but also frustrates the hell out of you. She gets close to answering the questions you have but then walks away just before you get all the information.

It’s moving day at the Connor house. This is probably coming a bit too late but the family knows they need a change of scenery. Too many things have been going wrong and when that happens, they can only assume that Skynet is closing in. While packing, and talking to a neighbor, Sarah finds out that Riley is dead. We know that Jessie, Riley’s handler and Derek’s boyfriend, killed Riley last week. The Connors don’t know that so the suspicion falls on Cameron. It makes sense to assume that Cameron iced Riley for getting too close to John. John though doesn’t believe this is the case. He believes Cameron when she tells him she had nothing to do with the murder.

Jessie is struggling with Riley’s death/ murder in her own way: acting out aggressively. She gets into a bar brawl with Navy pilots and Derek needs to bail her out. This leads to a flash forward into the future. She is a sub commander leading a mission to Australia. The sub is driven by a terminator. We don’t know what goes wrong yet but it stands to reason that the machine driving the sub is a big reason Jessie can’t stand machines. This could be the reason she is leading the faction of people dead set on turning John away from his reliance on “metal.”

Catherine Weaver is back to her creepy self. Her daughter Savanna wants to play hide and seek but robot mommies don’t play games. Savannah is forced to find other sources of entertainment. John Henry, the programmed robot, leads Savannah to his lair in the basement and plays hide and seek with her. Only he won’t tell Weaver or Ellison where she is hiding. He’s a wily little reverse engineered, artificially intelligent robot. Through some solid C+ detective work Ellison is able to find Savannah. Ellison questions John Henry’s motives for playing the game. John Henry doesn’t understand what he did wrong. Robots, as we have seen, never do.

The metal on Jessie’s future sub has led them off course. On instructions from John Connor they are led to an oil rig where the crew is supposed to pick up a package. Waiting are some terminators and one of them looks exactly like the Navy pilot Jessie punched out in the bar. I don’t know if this is significant but it was at least interesting. In the present, it is obvious Jessie that while Riley’s death is hard, her mission remains to get John away from his dependence on Cameron.

John is working towards trusting Cameron but she keeps making it harder and harder. She doesn’t always tell the truth or follow the script and that is a point of contention for John. He decides he needs to be alone and goes and visits Riley’s body in the morgue. Meanwhile, Cameron and Sarah have a little heart -to-mainframe. Sarah is looking out for John but Cameron tells her that they (the family and Cameron) are all threats to John’s safety. She says, “The only way for John to be safe is for him to be alone." A big theme of the Terminator franchise is the roguish mentality of John Connor and this seems to be the onset of that thinking.

In all, this episode does a good job of beginning to lay the groundwork for why exactly Jessie is working so hard against John and Cameron’s relationship. John is becoming more and more the detached person he will need to be in order to lead the fight against the machine. I will end this recap just like the episode. To be continued... (Don’t you hate that?)