This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, there was ballerina on contortionist Terminator action, Derek ran into a friend, and practically everyone got therapy. Not that it helped. (spoilers)

I generally don't comment on the quality of the writing or acting on Sarah Connor, because I leave every episode amazed at the thematic coherency of the series and the intense hum of the acting. I want to sound neither like a hiss and scratch broken record or someone's too perfect iTune set on permanent loop. However, this week's episode was simply amazing.

Following "Goodbye to All That" where we were reminded that Derek was once a child, in "The Tower is Tall, but the Fall is Short" we are reminded that all the adult characters were once children. With the benefit of future perspective, we see current children, both John and the Turk, as the reflections of the wounded adults that they will one day become. The title itself is evocative and reminds me of the Tower card in the tarot. In some decks, the Tower card shows a a tower struck by lightening and two figures fall from the tower. It's symbolic of sudden uncomfortable changes, revelation, disillusion, disruption and realization. 

In the return of the S1 style voice over, which I always loved, we are told that Sarah Connor was once a child and her father fought in a war. This sets the theme of the episode. Her father had his "Goodbye to all that" and was forever after one of the walking wounded. She never expected to become her father. Yet there they are, breaking into the office of a psychiatrist, Boyd Sherman, trying to discover why his name was on the written on the wall by the future resistance fighter.

The discussion in the car later illustrates the fragmented dualistic nature of the episode. Sarah, John, and Cameron talk about how they do not know if the writing on the wall means that Dr. Sherman is friend or foe. Cameron, ever literal, tells John that Dr. Sherman is not their friend. However, as John tries to define whatever word covers someone who is the opposite of foe, the only word Cameron can provide is friend. Throughout the episode, characters talk about each other in this manner. In a later scene, Derek describes John's difficulties as a result of being neither child nor adult, neither soldier nor civilian. There is a tension between the implied transitions from blank slate child to a broken slate adult, but we are given no third options. A page is either blank or it is written upon, and no amount of erasing can regain the unwritten potential of the page.

The awkward family scene in the car transitions to an awkward scene with Catherine Weaver. She is doing some sort of corporate/lifestyle photo shoot where she is, of course, perfect at moving at the photographer's instructions. However, she cannot smile with genuine emotion. For a T1001 infiltrator, she's curiously bad at long term emotion. She doesn't have the instruction set. Savannah plays at building something nearby. Savannah not only refuses to join in the photo shoot, she wets herself at almost being forced to go near her "new" mommy. This both shows the audience the weight of her fear, and is the first of many points in the story where blood, grease, water, urine are referenced in connection to people under emotional pressure.

Catherine's assistant says that old saw about not being able to kill your kids, which leaves Catherine humorously nonplused, and suggests that Catherine take Savannah to a miracle worker that she knows. It's an interesting moment, because I was left to wonder why Catherine doesn't kill Savannah, who is small, fragile, and untrusting. From the perspective of the future is Savannah friend or foe?

The episode strongly parallel's the Skynet family with the Connors. What I find interesting is that the family made up of one human, Savannah, and two machines, goes to Dr. Sherman for help. Catherine wants Savannah to be fixed. Possibly, like the other child that she's growing in the basement with a room of scientists, she wants to understand her.

While the Connors, made up of two humans and one machine, and minus one uncle, go to see Dr. Sherman to determine if he's friend or foe. What they find is someone who is very observant, although he doesn't understand all the clues that he is given. How can he? He can't understand Sarah's mistrust of psychiatrists. He doesn’t know that her last encounter involved a mental institution. Cameron as suffering Asperger’s is much more likely than Cameron is a machine learning what it is to exist. While, John's issues are a whole new level of compression.

We see this as Derek returns home from a six hour “run” and there’s a gunshot from John’s room. He claims to have misfired while cleaning it. There’s a burn mark from the metal on this face. There's an interesting symbolism in John's "accidental" gunshot. A gunshot is a sudden and violent release of compressed energy that flings-fires something, a bullet, forward. John struggles throughout the episode for a way for relief from the pressure of his life.

While having both John and the Weavers at the Dr. Sherman's office at the same time made for some nice nail-biting excitement, it also served to play with the parallels with the families. Savannah is Skynet's sister. She has a sibling that she doesn't know about. Her mother is not her mother. John's not-sister waits outside listening to his not-secrets.

Catherine's reaction to Savannah’s earlier untied shoe lace was to tie it. John's reaction is to teach Savannah a silly mnemonic that shows her how to tie her own shoe. A mnemonic, that like the one for jammed guns in the previous episode, he probably learned from his mother.

Dr. Sherman asks Catherine a question that ties into the theme of the episode, what is her most vivid memory from childhood. Unlike Skynet/Turk, Catherine had no childhood and she has nothing to offer.
When John gets his session, he has rather more vivid memories, but just as limited range that he can express them in. He is a soldier, not a veteran. With the cold precision of either-or language, he identifies his father as not-a-veteran because Kyle didn't make it out of his war. John examines the exits when he enters the office. This is both what he was taught to do, and ties into his longing for escape. Dr. Sherman's question about John's role in his family is interesting, because John is not being pressured to become his father. That would be easy. His father died and now Cameron reads pamphlets on preventing suicide. Instead John is alive to remember the fight with Sarkasian when his world shifted into a new season.

Meanwhile, we learn what Derek does with his time. He runs and he sits in a sunshine park. He has a usual food, but the illusion of normal breaks when he sees someone he knows. He gives chase and given later revelations, I wonder how often Jessie, his old lover, runs there. It seems that John isn't the only one who wants an escape. Jessie tells Derek that she escaped into the past and describes how John has metal all around them now. She shows him a burn from when one those machines "flipped" and took out an entire bunker. Given John as teacher of mnemonics, I wonder what he's trying to teach that metal. He seems to do very little without a purpose.

Catherine continues to work on both her children. She watches a video of the couple that she killed and hears the real Catherine talk about her most vivid childhood memory. Her father was a butcher and she loved to draw on the large blank sheets of paper. The dead-Catherine loved the smell of grease pencil. Generally, when I think of the word grease, I think of machines with grease being required to keep the gears spinning. Savannah watches the video and sees her father touching his pregnant wife, her mother, and correctly interprets this as a hug. Given the circumstanced, Catherine's rather hesitant touch on Savannah’s shoulder is creepy in the extreme. While down in the basement, like some sort of mad relative, the Turk flashes through images that appear to have no meaning.

As Catherine attempts contact through touch, Sarah contacts a punching bag with her fists. What follows is an interesting discussion where John clearly wants to be able to talk to someone, but cannot talk with his mother. While Sarah is focused on the mission and that odd idea that within a time travel show, they cannot know when whatever threat that attacks the good doctor will arrive. My guess will be they'll all happen this season. The original writing on the wall had a relatively rapid resolution too. 

As in this case, where a Terminator arrives inside a bus and rapidly defines her intent by killing the sleeping driver and in a subsequent scene killing Dr. Sherman's receptionist. However, what’s curious about this is that she is working to replace the current receptionist. If she wanted to kill Dr. Sherman, all she would have to do would be to go kill him. Replacing the receptionist implies that she has a surveillance type of purpose.

Derek arrives home, saying nothing of his own future visitor. He finds Sarah at her punching bag, punchless. He tells her a story, as these things always seem to be, about a "friend", who "fought and fought and fought for his life, and then he just couldn't anymore." So he went outside to take a leak and tried to shoot himself in the head. In a system under pressure sort of way, this makes me think of all these individuals that we're seeing who are being placed in enormous pressure cooker situations. Eventually something longs for release. Derek repeats his belief that John saw Sarah kill Sarkasian, and Sarah flash to that Samson and Delilah battle.

Ellison's plot arc in this episode seems more to about placement than arc. Catherine sends him on the hunt, but only brings him so far into her confidence.  Where last week, he was introduced to the child, who Catherine admits to, this week, he is denied access down the elevator to where Catherine's other child plays. Even as I type that, it's interesting to consider that Catherine is creating her own parent. However, her agenda is ambiguous. She doesn't seek out Dr. Sherman with future knowledge. Yet, both a Terminator and a resistance fighter came back with knowledge of Dr. Sherman’s importance. I’m left to wonder not only why she didn’t know who he was, but what her plans actually are.

Instead with no future information, Catherine invites Dr. Sherman to view the pictures that the Turk displays. He laughs because the Turk is telling a visual joke, "Why are math books so sad? Because they have so many problems." He finds it interesting because while it's normal for a child to start asking questions at age 3 or 4, humor is more complex. What I find interesting is that the Turk either came up with that joke on its own or it was left in its programming somewhere by Andy Goode, the good dead father. It's one thing to hear a joke, find it to be funny and repeat it. There's a whole additional level of complexity involved in creating humor.

While Catherine seeks therapy for the child-father. Sarah listens to her savior-son talk to his therapist. The expression on her face as she listens to him, accurately, describe her as wanting him to be afraid in so he’ll stay alive was beautifully painful.

Derek returns to his past-future connection and asks Jesse if she remembers when they met, the day he tried to kill himself. Then they do the opposite and fall on each other seeking the little-death. As they strip, we see the myriad of scars and tattoos that mark their bodies. The wounds they've been given and the markings they've given themselves. Afterwards, Jesse asks if there is word for that they have just done, but in a lovely turn of phrase, she doesn't want any of the old words. She wants a new fresh word for the new-still innocent world that they are now living in. She has returned to the place of her nostalgia and she wants a word representing that. She errands Derek to get her a drink, while she hides photos of Derek and John under the bed. Whether she is a betrayer or another guardian remains to be seen.

John still looking for non-fatal release, returns to see Dr. Sherman and removes the listening device, a move which interestingly may have saved his life. As he tells Dr. Sherman a version of the story of Sarkasian's attack on their house, Cameron arrives in the building at the same time as the other Terminator. Something in their movement gives them away to each other and they go into a rather beautiful elevator to fight. They are briefly and very humorously interrupted by a family with their child. The innocent child notices the womens' disarray, but their parents are too caught up in not looking at strangers to notice. The fight resumes resulting in Cameron folding the other Terminator into a pretzel. ASd she cat-like presents the twisted thing to the others, they look at the chip, which self destructed to prevent the machine from being reprogrammed, to prevent John from reprogramming. Skynet wants its soldiers to belong only to Skynet.

Catherine asks Dr. Sherman to join the team of scientists working with the Turk and in a move to answer his earlier question, she tells him the story that human-Catherine told in that video. Except when he asks what the butcher paper smelled like, she doesn't talk about grease pencils. She tells him that it smelled like cow’s blood. Catherine the techy luddite loved the smell of grease. Catherine the liquid machine posits a love for the smell of a dead living thing.

As we shift into the end of the episode, Sarah voice over a series of shots. She tells us that in 1678, doctors diagnosed soldiers with nostalgia, homesickness, a longing for an innocence they could no longer have. However, once something has been wounded, leaked grease or blood, even if the injury heals over, the scar remains. The butcher paper no longer smells like paper, it smells like the thing that it has been wrapped around. We see Savannah climb into the lap of her parent's killer. Sarah considers the way in which the wounds of war have bled her dry, as Derek sits on his bench and looks at the innocent world he has returned to. Jessie looks at the metal burn from a war she left behind. However, no matter how beautiful this nostalgia world, she is a product of a war. Sarah has leaked out and gotten no new drink. She has "No words of comfort. No words of forgiveness" while her children, both real and not, consider their wounds. Cameron reads a suicide prevention brochure while the holding the suicided Terminators chip. John looks at the bullet hole in his mirror, in the reflection of himself and gets, “No words at all,” from his mother.

We close on Sarah going to see Dr. Sherman. He's surprised see her there and she flashbacks to the fight with Sarkasian. We see that John killed Sarkasian and it's understandable why Sarah has no words at all. After all the years of pushing/programming John to be a certain someone, now that he's becoming him, she doesn't know what to do.

In an episode with so many walking war wounded, I think Dr. Sherman may have his work cut out for him. We’ll have to see if his role is to teach the Turk not to fight in the war room or we end up with Judgment Day after all.