This week on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 2.3, “The Mousetrap”, Cromartie built a better mousetrap with real mousetraps. Practically everyone drove out into desert and had an interesting time. Ellison got an interesting offer. John tried to do what real kids do, but got to be a mouse instead. He also learned a valuable lesson about the relative buoyancy of certain things.

We opened with the desert. Charlie and Michelle Dixon having left Los Angeles in the previous episode, but haven’t gotten all that far, which tells me not much time has passed.

They come to a desert, and almost deserted, gas station. Charlie cleans the dust of travel from their car, while exchanging an awkward look with his wife. Charlie goes inside the gas station to get Michelle a soda, a sort of peace offering I suppose. Unfortunately, that's when Cromartie shows up and kidnaps her. I do wonder at the ability of Cromartie to find them, but I suppose he could have just followed them from the previous episode. This may be the first time that they’ve stopped and he’s a patient hunter.

Meanwhile, John sets up free cable in Casey’s room. She flips channels to a scene from a terrible B Movie, with a shot of nicely-buff George Lazlo in loin cloth swinging a sword. A t.v. broadcaster goes on to explain that this movie rested in obscurity before shooting to fame as a result of George Lazlo killed twenty FBI agents. While Casey natters on about the horrible influences of L.A., we see John realize that he’s looking at the face of Cromartie. Well, he’s looking at the face of the man Cromartie killed and whose identity he took. Terminators, they not only kill, but they commit identity theft.

John returns home and finds Cameron standing in the living room watching the floor. She tells him the house is moving. He asks her how this affects the safety of John Connor. She tells him that it doesn't, but that next year they will have to repaint. This is just another sign of the changes that have occurred in Cameron since the explosion. Last season, she would have ignored the irrelevant. Now she stands in contemplation of change and of the random consequences of it.

John goes into the kitchen where Sarah scolds him for stealing cable for Casey. This turns into a brief exchange of mother to teen barbs about growing up. He doesn’t know anything about babies. It seems babies grow up.

Charlie halts the exchange by calling John because he doesn't have Sarah's number. Charlie tells John that he's leaving and that he wants to talk to Sarah. We cut Charlie, who is barely holding it together. John hands the phone to Sarah, who conceals from John the nature of Charlie's call. Charlie begs Sarah to help him. Sarah, still concealing what happened, asks Charlie where he is by telling him not to tell her the conversation is a wonder of double talk. In a way there are almost three threads of conversation. There is the conversation that John hears, teenager that he is, Sarah’s still protecting him. There is the conversation that Charlie and Sarah have. There is the knowledge that Sarah is concealing from all of them.

Sarah prepares to leave. Cameron looks up the chimney at a bird's nest. We hear the infant birds chirping. Sarah orders her not to kill the birds, not now, not ever. I was much taken by the block words on top of the book shelves behind Sarah in this shot. They say, "Enjoy, Relax, Dream." In conjunction with the helpless birds, there’s a surreal quality to reading words for things that won’t happen in this house. This is not a house of dreams, unless they are nightmares. There is no relaxation. Enjoyment tends to come from ignorance of what’s going on. However, there are still birds in the chimney.

She orders Cameron to watch out for John, while he buys new computers, and not to touch the birds. Don’t kill John. Don’t kill the birds. We’ll see if Cameron gets it.

Sarah loads the car with a bag of guns. She updates Derek on what's going on and barely gives him enough time to load up his own guns before they leave. They both know it's a trap. They know it's the wrong thing to do, but they go anyway.

Meanwhile, Michelle finds herself tied to a chair near her cell phone. Her fear is palpable as the reality what Charlie has told her becomes abandoned building clear. While in the next room Cromartie prepares the esoteric of his trap with duct tape. Even Terminators know that duct tape holds the world together.

Michelle struggles her way over to her phone. We have a moment of her reaching and then an image of a finger in a mousetrap, which turns out to be Cromatrie’s. This emphasizes the sense of Michelle's danger. There's a horribleness to her struggle, because viewer knows that the presence of the cell phone is all part of the trap that has already closed around her.

We then shift to John and Cameron wheeling large boxes out to their truck. Cameron loads a large box by herself. John tells her that she needed help, because people are watching. Cameron remembers that she must pretend to be weak, but she keeps loading boxes.

Riley calls John. She's bored at the Promenade. She also almost forgets the code. As a completely superfluous aside, based on events, I'm guessing that she's in Santa Monica, which is mostly interesting to me because it's where they used to film Buffy.

In any case, Riley's looking at magazines. She asks John to join her. He tells her that he’ll be there in fifteen minutes. She responds that the world could end in fifteen minutes. She's bored and in fifteen minutes her teenage world could end. John lives with the end of the world every gain of sand moment. Every day it gets closer.

He tells her to stay where she is. He asks Cameron to drop him off. He angrily tells her that he could do whatever he wants, which is whatever people like him do. She reminds him that there are no other people like him. She gets in the car and he runs off. There's a moment of pursuit, but he escapes protection.

This segues into Ellison watching that same horrible movie with George Lazlo. In the movie, Lazlo says a cheesy line about how the trees here bear beautiful fruit. A typical B-movie blond cowers in wispy clothes in the tree. A stock footage tiger approaches. The first thing that occurred to me upon seeing this, beyond wanting to make fondue from the cheese, was of the story "The Lady or the Tiger". In the story, a princess must give her lover a clue which of two doors to pick. Behind one is a beautiful Lady, who he will marry. Behind the other is a Tiger, who will eat him. She guides him to one door, but the reader doesn't know which door she guides him to.

As Ellison watches this metaphorically useful drek, he gets a phone call from Catherine Wheeler, who wants to talk to him about a job opportunity at lunch. He at first rejects her, but she offers to talk about who or what killed his colleagues. I don’t know if this makes Catherine the princess from the story, but she’ll certainly be leading him to more tigers.

We shift to Michelle struggling to reach her cell phone. Then as the ominous Terminating music plays, we shift from the bait to the baited. Charlie questions Sarah about how they will find Michelle. She tells him she doesn't know. Derek strikes at the jugular of the conversation. He tells Charlie that his wife is dead and that it's all a trap.

Right on cue the phone rings. Derek tells Charlie to make sure that it's really her, and it becomes clear why Michelle is still alive. She can't be proper bait if she's dead. She needs to make her phone call telling Charlie where she is. Rightly distrusting, Sarah and Derek insist on Charlie questioning Michelle, but Cromartie's playing a cleverer game than that. Charlie haltingly asks his personal questions. Standing in the desert, he asks her where they first made love, a beach. They began in one liminal space, the area between land and sea, and they fled into the desert, the emptiness beyond El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, the town of the Queen of the Angels. At dinner that once-upon-a-time night, a Magician took her watch, magic stole time. Now all the time that she has left is being taken from her. This show is all about time and how we use it.

Charlie tells her that they are coming. She hangs up the phone and pretends to Cromartie that she hasn't made her call. She doesn’t realize that if she could hear him, he could certainly hear her.

Cromartie lays mousetraps on the floor, while Michelle begs Cromartie for understanding. He tapes her mouth shut. Cromartie, efficient killing machine that he is, explains the history of the fastest killing machine, the mousetrap. He tells her that its springs shut in a thirty-eight thousandth of a second. Death is fast and time is fleeting. As he lifts her chair onto the set traps, he tells her that it's a record that's never been broken. Then the traps snap. He tells her that it is hard to build a better one.

From the trap to the one to be caught, John and Riley look at magazines on the shady promenade. Riley teen-pontificates that magazines just want to convert you to their cult, People and OK. Then they riff on which magazine they each are, which easily identifiable label defines them. I flashed back to Cameron's statement that there are no people like John. He is neither a number nor a magazine title.

Riley asks John if he's going back to school, but with a line they drop the high school plot arc altogether. He's to be home schooled. John asks Riley if she'll miss him, and she calls him Cat Fancy, just as she spots Cameron watching them.

John hustles them away. Cameron follows. In the adult version of the child's play that John is engaged in, Sarah drives up to the building Michelle described. Sarah gives Charlie a gun and they all head inside the abandoned building.

They find Michelle in her chair. Sarah gives Michelle back her voice by removing the tape from her mouth, but she tells her not to move. She’s sitting on a bomb.

Derek goes to look for Cromartie.

This leaves the not-love triangle alone. Michele, the wife, tied to a chair and on fire with fight or flight adrenaline urging her to move. Instinct says flee, but logic says that if she does, they’ll all die. The lady could bring on the tiger. Charlie tells Michelle that it will be okay, but Michelle responds that it'll never be okay. She’s right and they both know it. They are not at a Paradise beach. They are in an abandoned building in the middle of a nothing space, with death lurking, and it is just the beginning.

Sarah sends Charlie for a bag in the truck. Now there are two. Michelle tells Sarah that she didn't have to come.

Sarah couldn't be who she was if she had not come. However, she had expected that Michelle would already be dead. That would have been easier, because there would have been no one to save except Charlie. Instead Cromartie has led them into a complicated mess.

Charlie returns and tells Sarah that that the car was killed by Cromartie. Sarah wonders why Cromartie bothered with the car rather than the vulnerable humans. She rips off the bomb from the chair and it's just molding clay, but that's not the trap.

The trap is that instinct drives Sarah to call John to warn him. Cromartie, with his nearby cell reception, listens to the call, gets John's cell number and learns their code.

She tells John to stay away from home and stay with Cameron. He brushes off her warnings with Riley. He's already not at home. He’s at a Promenade and Riley's trying on costumes. His life must seem pretty good at that moment.

Meanwhile, Derek spots a some techy-tech-tech that clearly equals explosive device wired to the nearby cell tower. Cromartie sends a signal and a phone rings. Derek tells them all to run as the real bomb goes off and the cell tower goes down.

In the resulting carnage, Michelle has been injured. It is at least five miles across the desert. Charlie, ever the emotional caregiver, doesn’t know what to do. He doesn't know what's wrong with Michelle. He only knows that she’s bleeding. They argue over moving her, but Michelle, woman of grit, stands up and says that she can walk.

However, it is too late. Cromatrie, mimicking Sarah's voice, calls John and tells him to go to the pier. Then Cromatrie starts to drive from the desert to the ocean. Clearly, codes can be broken. Only shared experience can tell you who someone is, but that’s a little hard to pull off for every phone call.

John tells Riley that he has to go. She tells him that she's not afraid of Sarah, which just goes to show that she doesn't know her. As he leaves, Riley rather angrily tells him not to forget the secret code. However, the code of dates has already been broken by the future.

Ellison meets with Catherine in her glass tower. She drinks water. Ellison repeats his party line about Lazlo. Catherine tells him about a plane crash five years ago and that her "brother" was on the team that investigated the accident. Ellison shifts through photos of mecha as she tells that she and her late husband spent millions on trying to reverse engineer this technology, but have been un-successful.

There's a surreal quality to the entire scene, since the viewer knows that Catherine knows exactly how to engineer Terminators. She is a Terminator. She is as liquid as the water she drinks and the ocean under the pier. Her brother is the broken machine in the picture. She is technology. As Sarah is the mother of John, I’m left to wonder if Catherine isn’t to be the mother of Skynet. Her objective certainly doesn’t seem to be to track down John Connor.

Catherine relates the events of the pilot episode where a man with a robot leg attacked John. She tells Ellison that Sarah believed her son was hunted by robots. Catherine tells him that they both know who killed his fellow agents. He didn't after all even pretend to ask what the mecha in the photos was.

He asks the main question, what does she want from him. She spins a line that she wants answers and then gets to what she wants. She wants him to find another Terminator, which makes me wonder what specific Terminator she's looking for. Is she looking for a specific Terminator?

Meanwhile John reaches the pier, a place of land fun over the ocean.

Cameron confronts Riley and asks her where John is.

Sarah holds up a van driving across the desert. At least she leaves the driver with a bottle of water. Sarah drives as fast as she can, but Michelle is bleeding out as the van rattles down the road. Charlie begs her to stop. Furious racing mother that she is, Sarah still stops. Like the decision to go into the desert in the first place, she couldn’t do anything else. This is as it should be. To often in fiction when a secondary character faces death/dies, her death is generally about how it creates angst for her partner. Michelle is not treated here as a woman in a refrigerator. While her life is only significant to Cromartie as a device to capture, we are shown Michelle's grit and fear throughout the episode. Michelle is a human.

Cromatrie scans the pier looking for his prey. John spots him first, recognizing the actor from the movie at the beginning of the episode. He puts on glasses and a hat to try to hide, but that doesn't work with machines. Cromatrie chases him across the pier, while Cameron searches for John. She comes across a man in silver makeup pretending to be a machine for tourists. She makes her own, somewhat affronted, mechanical motion, and returns to her search.

As we returned to John, I must admit that I did keep yelling at the screen for John to jump in the water, what with Terminators being mostly metal, but like every character I've ever given advice too, he didn't listen to me at first. But finally after a good deal of running and hiding, Cromatrie almost killing the wrong person, John finally jumps in the water. Cromartie jumps after him. Cromartie grabs his coat and almost drags him down, before sinking red eyed into the not-very deep. Deep enough, he sinks to the bottom while John swims to the top. Beyond physics, there's an obvious metaphor here for death and life.

Clearly hours later, Sarah picks up the dry John and Cameron. John finds blood in the back of the van and realizes that once again his survival has come at a cost.

Back on the beach, Cromartie walks ashore.

At a hospital, Charlie sits outside the Emergency area and cries. John comforts him as best he can, but as the camera focuses for a moment on Charlie's watch, clearly time ran out for Michelle.

We are reminded of this by segueing to Michelle's funeral where the minister talks about the difference between finite life on earth and the eternal life that follows. The scene shifts back and forth between the funeral and John, Sarah, Cameron, Derek at their table. The minister’s words flow over both scenes. However, at the funeral Cromartie watches and waits.

Charlie throws the Bible from Ellison into Michelle's grave as the coffin is lowered.

Back at the table, there is nothing but silence. Death has left an empty space in dialog. There are no better words to end on than John Donne,

"No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee."