Plot
Derek finds a pregnant woman in the throes of premature labour. She and her teenaged daughter know Sarah. Flashback to six months earlier when Sarah and Cameron broke into a family's cabin to protect them from a Terminator.
In another flashback or flash-forward, Derek investigates a plague-infested rebel bunker, and meets Jesse for the first time.
Tropes
- Anachronic Order: Three separate time periods, with Derek delivering Anne's baby "now", Sarah defending the Fields family from a Terminator six months previously, and Derek and Jesse on a mission in their past but the chronological future.
- Born in an Elevator: In this case, an abandoned bus.
- Coming-Out Story: Subverted, in a tense yet funny family bickering scene.David: What were you doing?Lauren: Looking at lesbian porn.David: You're gay?Lauren: No!
- Death by Childbirth: Anne. Although she's still alive when the baby is born, she dies soon afterwards due to shock from her gunshot wounds.
- Delivery Guy: Derek ends up delivering Anne's child, although she doesn't survive.
- Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Sydney.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: "Charles Barkley" goes crazy when the Terminator shows up.
- Explosive Breeder: Jesse tells Derek about the rabbit problem in Australia. It's a metaphor.
- Heroic Sacrifice: David walks up to the Terminator in the belief that he's its main target, but it ignores him. (The true target is Anne's unborn child).
- Insistent Terminology: Cybernetic organism instead of robot.
- Ironic Echo: Sarah says "Don't confuse close with happy." Anne repeats this when her husband finds out about her affair with Roger.
- Living MacGuffin: Sydney, who carries a disease immunity trait that will allow the future resistance to develop a treatment for a Skynet bioweapon.
- Lock and Load: In the 'months earlier' part, Sarah proves to the family she wants to protect that she can defend them all effectively by showing them she knows how to use guns despite not having a license.
- Origins Episode: We see Derek's first meeting with Jesse.
- The Plague: Implied to be bio-engineered by the machines.
- Series Continuity Error: The episode has two separate time-frames, one featuring Derek Rees attempting to deliver a wounded pregnant woman's baby in what is implied to be the episode's "present", and the other with Sarah trying to protect the same woman and her family from Terminators during an earlier stage of her pregnancy. The problem is that the woman isn't visibly pregnant at all in the earlier time frame, suggesting that months have passed between the two sets of scenes. However, the events of the entire two seasons of the show don't seem to last that length of time, and a scene in the later episode "Ourselves Alone", involving the question of whether Sarah has a firearms licence, suggests that the entire show up to that point has taken place in a time period of less than thirty days!
- Sound-Only Death: Charles Barkley's barking is cut off by a yelp when it challenges the Terminator.
- Stable Time Loop: Created by saving baby Sydney for her future role.
- Terrifying Rescuer: Sarah first approaches the Fields family by breaking into their house and holding them at gunpoint.
- The Worf Effect: Cameron gets beaten into shutting down and thrown through the window of the cabin as a message.
