Plot
Charley patches Derek up, then Sarah explains some things to him (how she's alive, the machine war, endoskeletons, etc.). They talk further and make amends with each other. Charley saves Derek again when his lungs hemorrhage but says he needs a large transfusion of AB- blood - John matches this rare blood type and gives a transfusion.Cameron removes Vick the Terminator's skin and burns the skeleton to ashes in thermite but secretly keeps the computer chip from its head. Cameron confirms to Sarah that the hand is still missing.
The episode is interspersed with Derek Reese's time in the future - Derek and his team are captured while on patrol and taken to an abandoned hall. The team members are barcoded, chained up and taken in turn to a room in the cellar where music is playing (where they are presumably tortured) by a T600.
One of his men, Billy Wisher, confesses to him that "this is all [his] fault"; his real name is Andy Goode and he was part of a group who created Skynet.
The team wake up one day to find that the T600 is gone and they have been left tools to escape. Unfortunately, their bunker was found and wiped out. Resistance soldiers find the team and take them to John Connor, who completed a top-secret operation nearby a couple of days ago. Derek meets the reprogrammed Cameron at this base, who takes down a Terminator which reverted its brainwashing and starting killing personnel.
John Connor explains (off-screen) to Derek that Kyle was sent back in time on a mission and the team accept a mission to be sent back in time as well.
During the ending monologue, it is shown that Derek Reese, despite telling Sarah otherwise, did kill Andy Goode.
Tropes
- AB Negative: Reese's blood type is rare. Luckily, being related, John can help him, with a healthy dose of Artistic License. Sarah is a universal donator, and somehow a different blood type to her son, but Derek's condition means he needs the exact match.
- Aborted Arc:
- The episode includes heavy innuendo that something sinister with long-term implications might have been done to Derek while he was a prisoner of Skynet. This is never actually followed up on.
- It is implied that Derek's returning to the past changed his future but the questioning still happens, just in a different way than he remembers. In the Season 2 episode "Complications," Derek has no recollection of being tortured by The Grays.
- Arc Words: In this case, the franchise-wide concept of "There is no fate but what we make."
- Back from the Dead: Sarah, to Charley. He saw the explosion on the news eight years ago and thought she was dead.
- Continuity Nod:
- Sarah's description of Kyle is very close to the way Reese described John to her in the first film. Derek's flashback takes place shortly after Kyle was sent back in time.
- The underground base has a mural of a lion chewing on the head of a Terminator and the caption "Hang in there, baby", explaining why the resistance fighter safehouse in 2007 had a cutesy poster of a cat saying the same thing.
- Death Glare: Charley calling Cameron a "very scary robot" seems to crack that hyper-alloy combat chassis shell of hers and she responds with this, intimidating him as she incinerates the bad Terminator.
- Flash Back: And, technically, a Flash Forward into the future war with the machines.
- Graying Morality: Derek Reese, who's one of the good guys, yet shoots Andy Goode for inventing The Turk.
- Insistent Terminology: Hyper-alloy combat chassis.Charley Dixon: Is that a complicated way of saying robot?
Cameron: Cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
Charley: Okay, scary robot. Yet here you are, carving this guy into chum.Cameron: He's not a guy. He's a scary robot.
Charley: He's a scary robot. You, you're a very scary robot. - Kill It with Fire: Cameron burns the T-888's exoskeleton with thermite.Cameron: Every component must be destroyed beyond repair or recovery. Even a single unaccounted for piece of the exoskeleton can alter the course of technological evolution and hasten the arrival of Judgment Day.
- Mythology Gag: At the end of the episode, when Charley nods toward the sky and tells Sarah a "storm's coming." This is a Call-Back to the ending of the first film.
- Robotic Reveal: Inverted. While Charley Dixon has been made aware of the existence of Terminators, and that Cameron is one, he still finds it hard to believe until Cameron begins incinerating the T-888's exoskeleton with thermite. The bright light generated is so intense that Charley can see Cameron's metal skull and blue eyes through her skin.
