This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, they played two plot churning episodes in one night and called it a two hour finale. There were revelations, explosions, and a certain amount of this viewer going "Dude!" during the commercials. Yes, dear reader, I'm one of those people who says dude like way too much.

Anyway, since they're really two episodes, I'll be reviewing them separately.

In Vick’s Chip, we begin with Cromartie examining a snow globe. He shook a city in his hand, but did not know what it is. This moment can be read as pure comedy. The relentless killing machine confused by a knick knack, but as he shook snow from a non-nuclear winter, I did wonder at it. John was not hiding in it. There was no purpose to examine the globe except for curiosities sake.

Then curiosity was put aside, as a School District Administrator came in. Cromartie was all business asking for a list of Caucasian males registering in the district since the Fall of 2007. That request also made me wonder. Since there's no reason to think that John and Sarah are in Los Angeles at all. Perhaps he saw something in Charley's demeanor when he questioned him. Perhaps Cromartie was planning on going out in concentric circles through every school district in Los Angeles. It would be a daunting task, if Terminators could be daunted.

In a different age, the administrator wouldn’t be so used to feds coming in and waving the Patriot Act at him. In “Gnothi Seauton”, Sarah learned about 9-11. Here, Cromartie learned about one of the results of that event. I wonder if like the snow globe, it had any meaning for him, or it was so much glitter.

When he lacked sufficient paperwork, Cromartie killed the administrator against a posted that proclaimed, "Teach the people," and ever polite, he thanked the corpse for his cooperation.

One full murder into our episode, Sarah began the opening monologue. She told the watchers of her chronicles that we all wear masks to spare our loved ones the truths about ourselves. Given that last week, John learned that his mother does not walk on water, it was an interesting statement.

While she was busy monloguing (and calling the latest possessor of the Turk on the phone Andy Goode sold her), their dinner burned. On a scale of fiddling while Rome burned, a burning roast was trivial. However, there was something hilarious about John doing his homework and calling for his mother, Cameron staring out the window, while no one took the roast out of the oven.

Mom and roast do seem to be the realms of the domestic, but Sarah is not really a domestic character. That is an ill fitting mask.

All their masks fit ill. Derek emerged from his own mission. The previous week, he saw a machine dance for no reason. This week he searched for Connor worthy proofs not to trust her. He placed that dead 888's chip on an empty plate like a meal. Vick cannot be dead as long as the chip remained. Cameron told them that it contained valuable information and yet had Derek not found it, it may very well have stayed in her room.

The burnt roast and the chip sat on the counter, while the little dysfunctional family argued about what to do about little metal-sis. Every eye and gesture meant to convince Sarah. She's the mother and she's the one who decided.

In the end, it would seem they must trust themselves.

Cameron told John that she'd never hacked an 888 chip, but that he had. Past tense, he had hacked a chip. This story is in the past, this was the first 888 chip John hacked. Perhaps, the point of the chip isn't the information that they get, but the experience that John gained. He's had his apprenticeship in weapons and tactics, now he is in the journeyman years of hacking Terminators and hiding in the unburned world.

We move to the image of teenagers, children, as they played video games. Guns blazing, they fired on great machines. John and Cameron ventured into the land of the blaster in search of systems sophisticated enough to take on an 888. They found Korean techy, tech processors used in Star Command. While I realize that Star Command, the video game, has little to do with Buzz Lightyear, that was who I thought of in that moment, a toy who thought that he was real. I also thought of Andy Goode, who built the Turk out of daisy chained game systems. In this world, it is not war machines that ask, “Do you want to want to play a game of Thermo-Nuclear war?" In this world, the game systems become war machines.

However, that was just background noise. The important thing was that Cameron told John that she lies to him when the mission requires it. She could have lied and said she doesn't. Instead she outright tells him that she wears a mask. She was honest in her dishonesty. In the face of not knowing, John must decide for himself who he can trust.

Processors in hand, they sit in John's room, his computer blazing. I like the idea that Cameron has some understanding of how much power her mind needs, but she cannot answer John's questions about the meanings of Terminator symbols or directly explain how machine memory is organized. I don't know how my memory is organized either.

Then again, that could be a lie. Perhaps, this moment, Cameron sitting off to one side of John, is all part of training John. The knowledge will be all the more his because he gained it himself.

That 888's first memory is an infinite image of himself. This was perhaps an assembly line of Vicks. However, given the use of mirrors in "Vick's" memories, I do wonder if he wasn't looking at an infinite mirror of himself, as he put his mask in place.

This glowing image of mechanized birth was juxtaposed with that of a terrified woman running in the dark woods. The memory that connects the two was of a wife, calling her husband to the sleep he cannot have. She could not know who she was married to. Clearly she was once married to a man who had a terminal accident. Yet, the names on the mail remained the same, Mr. and Mrs. Vick Chamberlain. A chamberlain is literally an official who manages the living space of the ruler. He's the mom who makes sure the roast does not burn. Here, the machine lived in the home and encouraged his wife to husband her work.

However, Sarah's not a Chamberlain. For all she read the school newsletter, her wish of happy Pizza day was a day off.

She believed that she'd know if she loved a masking machine, because in the end, she doesn't trust anyone.

We cut to John and Cameron at their not pizza day. Morris showed them a scar he got at a concert and considered it a tattoo. Morris hasn't seen Derek.

Alas, poor Sherry, John talked to her about being near neighbors: Wichita to Lawrence. She forcefully said she wasn't from Wichita. John isn't from Lawrence. His last name is not Baum. He has no relation to Kansas. Unfortunately, Sherry's plot line will be cut short this year, and that's the last we'll see of her this season.

Then we have our first shower scene of the episode, boys in their locker room, scouring the sweat of PE. They faced the wall and pretended they were a million miles from anyone else. However, in that moment of naked vulnerability, a Terminator came in. I'm guessing they'd have preferred Cameron, but they got Cromartie. At least none of them died.

Last week, Derek reveled in grass. Here, he stood in the bathroom space, and brushed his teeth for twenty minutes. In the future, he strained his water through a cloth, because clean water was a thing of the past. In the past, he stood and cleaned his teeth with something that was probably hard to come by in the future. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, he's lost those little niceties of not using someone else’s toothbrush. Like staring at someone in the communal showers, it's just something you don't do.

Then John called out, "Mom." This time it wasn't about a burning dinner, but the storage of memory. However it is that humans store our memories, these machines do it by category. The running woman was in Barbara’s file. So, they assumed she was Barbara.

Sarah insisted that they go find the body. It was an illogical choice. As Cameron said, "It's not a mission priority." Her body was now just meat and bone. Barbara was no longer alive. Vick, the 888 now named, like Cameron with her name, did what they do. Gained Barbara's trust and then killed her.

However, because they do the illogical, they discover the truth of the memory. Watching Vick's memories, all they knew was the impression they conveyed. But like the brief flashes where Vick would walk past a mirror, and for a moment we'd see him, it's only a flash of perception. The truth of that running woman was that she was someone else entirely. If they hadn't done the random illogical thing, they never would have found the next clue. The dead woman, meat and bone, but still named Jessica Peck, wanted to shut Barbara’s project down. She was building a traffic system, ARTE (Automated Real Time Traffic Exchange – how engineers love their acronyms), that could/would form Skynet's nervous system, if Skynet had a head.

Without Jessica, Vick's memories were random images in a file. He killed people. That’s what Terminators do, but that's not what he was there for. He didn't come to past to fight resistance fighters or kill random women. His mission was to create a part of Skynet. Create a system of information that could track you wherever you go and know the truth of your actions.

Derek thought they should just blow up City Hall, which was very tactical of him. John and Sarah knew the way to destroy the system was from the inside.

So Derek and Sarah go on a little scouting date. They sat across from City Hall and chatted. She ordered iced tea, all business. He got a beer, a day in the sun with a pretty woman on surveillance.

She told him a little truth of herself that she used to be that waitress. He smiled in that moment, sitting in the sunny afternoon with a beer on the way. But that wasn't the truth she was trying to tell him. She told him about a mother, who took her children away from safety and normality to make them over into Hollywood stars. But that wasn't that mother's sin. Her sin was she lied to her children every day and called them ugly. From back in the days when Sarah was a waitress, that was the thing she remembered and understood as a flaw/reason for the machines would want to drop bombs on humanity.

Derek then told Sarah they would get into City Hall through Cold War (not hot war) tunnels that he researched in his last year of school, 9th grade. Tunnels he knew existed because he and Kyle hid there as children from the bombs that Skynet dropped.

It's an interesting conversation, because it really placed both characters in their roles. Sarah is a mother who has, for excellent reasons, taken her son from normal life and placed the expectations of future on him.

Her experience of this war has largely been as part of temporal Cold War. Sarah spent over a decade in the war torn gutters of the world. She put her son and herself into war zones. From the perspective of the coming apocalypse, must have made every human conflict seem to be some un-civil civil war with humanity spending itself on itself. Then to go from that to the asylum, where she spent three years infinitely coiling in to preserve not just what she knew, but her inviolate internal self. A self so worn away that she signed away her son in the morning and tried to regain him in the afternoon. With all those memories, the one she remembered as an example of human darkness was the mother who lied to her children.

Derek was a teenager, a child pushed too early into adult responsibilities when the bombs fell. He spent his years losing the world, his little brother in the dark, fighting the Hot War with machines that never stopped. They never slept and they did something to him in the dark. Whenever something seemed safe, it could be a machine out to kill you.

Then again, nowhere was safe. Cromartie had finally found the right school, but Carmon intercepted the message for John and sent in Morris in trade. Cromartie accepted the identity and face he was shown. If John Baum was the boy in front of him, and his pattern recognition software said that the boy was not John, then John Baum was not John Connor. It's very logical, if incorrect.

We return once more to Vick's memories of Barbara and his effective use of touch to ease the emotional distance that Barbara sensed, but didn't understand. Well, the first thought when your husband becomes a little distant isn't that he's been replaced by a cyborg from the future there to ensure your traffic light program is completed. Those are really only the sort of thoughts you get at 3 a.m. after playing too much Civilization or watching too many episodes of Connections.

However, again, the memory wasn't the important part of the scene. What was important was that Cameron painted her nails and made inappropriate conversation. What was important was that Cromartie's pass through their school became a secret John and Cameron held together on the wink of an eye. Something they hid together from Sarah and Derek.

What was important was the flash they see of careless Sales of the future following Barbara, and leading Vick to the safe house, that wasn't safe. While Derek was tracking down Andy Goode, his friends died.

Sarah went back to the papers from the un-safe house. Like Vick's memories, they weren't indexed in a way she could understand. All she knew was that every name they find, it was always too late. Again, there was something in the idea that Sarah may dream of the apocalypse, but her every experience of this war has been of individuals killed: Her roommate who died back when Sarah was a waitress, her mother, the friendly cops in that "I'll be back" station, her lover. She didn't know Barbara, didn't really know Andy, but she knows their names. The abstract three billion that Skynet will kill with bombs hasn't happened yet.

However, sorrow had to wait. The virus was ready.

Derek and Sarah descended into the dark tunnels of Cold War. As he walked through the last remnant of Kyle's childhood, Derek wanted her to believe he didn't know about Barbara. However, Sarah's experiences are all in personal betrayal. She doesn't have to believe anything. Instead she was left with the memory of the spot where Derek lost/will loose Kyle to the machines.

Then it was action and blowing up a wall, which while generically symbolic to mistake earthquakes for bombs, it's time to move along. ARTE was already too sophisticated for a simple virus and the guards too prevalent. They ran. They split up. Sarah took them down and there they stood in the dark. Derek was ready to shoot the cops, because he was a survivor of a life of an endless war. He was a solider too young in those tunnels. It was all very Total War, Clausewitzian "Blood is the price of victory", and blow up City Hall of him. Sarah was more strategic. I realize that she stopped Derek because she values human life. She sometimes understands why they dropped the bombs, but didn't let Derek kill. Like her impulse to look for Barbara, her instincts kept their break in just a break in. Killing the guards would have resulted in a whole other level of problems.

Terminators smash through hails of bullets. Blood (other people's) is the price of their victory. Even after death, Vick's chip woke up and took over John's computer.

Humans are more fragile than machines. We are made of meat and bones. We needs must be more indirect in our strategy. The answer isn't to blow things up, or destroy every traffic light, or attack the strongest point. It seems obvious, but for some reason it always needs to be relearned. Attacking an enemy’s strongest point is not the best strategy, or even good tactics. The best strategy is to attack the weak point with your strong one.

The weak point here was a traffic light on a street corner, undefended and unprotected. Their strong axe was Cameron's chip, which could take over ARTE from the inside. In some strange Sleeping Beauty scene, they cut open her head and pulled out the chip core of her. As John cut, Cameron comforted him that he has done this before to her. Presumably that was when he reprogrammed her and wiped her memory.

As he cut, Derek once more argued that Cameron couldn't be trusted. We come to the crux of the matter. John told Derek that the relevant thing wasn't Cameron. Whether or not she has a soul was immaterial. Derek didn't have to trust "her", he had to trust John.

Over the course of this episode, the characters went through three transitional/liminal spaces. They all went to the woods at the edge of civilization and came to understand the nature of Vick's mission. Sarah and Derek went down into the tunnels beneath civilization, which is when Sarah realized a truth about Derek. Derek and John went to an intersection, a cross roads, in the middle of civilization. Logically, they should have gone to a quiet road. However, symbolically, it was perfect that they were on a busy street in the midst of the city fiddling with the lights that signal the world's stop and go. Well, John, Derek, and Cameron. They plugged her in, wondered if she would become Skynet. In twenty seconds, the world came to a stop.

Given that I've seen Terminator 3, and Derek hasn't, I do wonder about the warning that Derek gives John. This series is set between T2 T3, and that future will never happen now.

Their conversation reminded me discussions about the word assume. There's the whole never assume because "then you make an ass out of you and me." However, we all assume things everyday based off our experience. When I role out of bed and put my foot out, I assume the floor exists. John took on faith, on his experience, that the Terminator that will kill him will not be this one. For now, he was correct.

Then we were back to Sleeping Beauty. John put her chip back in. He held the side of her face similar to Vick's memory of holding Barbara's face. However, here meat and bone touched the face of metal. They had been watching Vick's memories. The memories of an individual. When Cameron was one with the city, she saw everything.

Then we have our second shower scene. Sarah walked double time brisk and pulled back the shower curtain on Derek with her it could have waited news. She was not there to tell him about Sarkasian. She was there in this naked and vulnerable moment to tell him that she knows that he killed Andy Goode. There was no one there to stop him. S

he also knows what Derek doesn't. If the death of Miles Dyson, that previous Skynet Father, didn't save the world, killing Andy Goode won't have either. There with their masks off, she threatened to kill Derek if he lied to her again.

We fade from that shower scene to the third and final one. Vick didn't threaten, he bought tickets to Tahiti. While Sarah's closing monologue told us that evil doesn't give you time to be afraid, we watch the memory of Vick strangling Barbara. It certainly seemed to me that she had plenty of time to be afraid. As Sarah told us that most people don't bother to look behind the mask and resign themselves to unexpected fates, Sarah sat and watched the flickering images of Barbara dying. Sarah's focus has been to continually look beneath the mask. Where she assumes/trusts, it's because she'll need the floor to be beneath her when she walks. We’ll see if anyone gets to that floor with C4.

Next up, the meeting with Sarkasian and other assorted revelations.

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz

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