Last week’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a tough act to follow, so I wasn’t surprised to find last night’s installment, “The Demon Hand”, uneven at times.
When it was weak, like when Sarah was serving up pancakes Marian Cunningham-style, it was tough to watch. And I couldn’t sustain any kind of attention span when Derek and John were having their heart-to-heart over the weapons cache in Sarah’s bedroom.
But there were a few tense, mind-blowing and even funny moments where the show clicked on all cylinders. Cameron’s cozying up to her ballet instructor Maria only to abandon her and her brother Dmitri to a hail of bullets was devastating. Dr. Silverman’s manic turn on Ellison was equally so. (And didn’t that doc play almost the same role in one of the “X-Men” movies?)
But maybe it was Silverman’s protracted shout-out to “T2: Judgment Day” that hooked me the most. He’s sitting on that couch, telling a tied-up Ellison about when Schwarzenegger’s good terminator, Cameron’s forebear, broke into the mental hospital with John Connor to break Sarah out. His reference to the mercury-faced T-1000 brought me back to when I saw “T2” in the theater.
But the first such reference came in the opening moments, when Cameron pulled up on a police motorcycle, looking very much like the T-1000 that hunted the Connors in the first movie sequel.
She punched out the power grid so she could steal police evidence while Sarah’s narration waxed melodramatic about the soul living. Snooze. Returning home, Cameron draws a great one-liner from Sarah about how somewhere a naked cop lies bleeding in an alley.
The episodes’ premise, as the name implies, is that Sarah is searching for the hand of the last terminator they destroyed so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands and become SkyNet. Ellison has it, but when Sarah impersonates an LAPD evidence clerk, he lies about it. The camera zooms into show him with a box of evidence on her, though.
At home he’s watches mental hospital surveillance video of her wrecking her rubber room. Her flip-out in an interview with one of her docs was some of Lena Headey’s best acting so far. That’s no knock on her. I just often feel like she’s being misused in this show. Anyway, Ellison keeps that evil claw in his icebox. I wouldn’t want to be his dinner guest.
So he visits the hospital where Sarah spent three years only to find that all the old staff has left. Even Dr. Silverman has moved into a cabin in the mountains (no doubt awaiting the apocalypse, I thought at the time).
While Ellison is there, Sarah is breaking into his place and she spots her open files and a ton of VHS tapes. DVDs would have have been more realistic but less visual. Besides, being from 1999, would she have recognized them?
Cut to the Glaubot in ballet class. I wasn’t sure why at first. Summer Glau is a trained ballet dancer and it showed. I laughed when her instructor called her upper body movement “mechanical” after she showed off her moves. “Dance is the hidden language of the soul,” the instructor says, recalling Sarah’s narration and underscoring what I expect might be a conflict for Cameron who his realizing she has no soul. Subtle.
I remembered at this point that Derek told Sarah to send Cameron after Dmitri, the Russian who partnered with the late Andy Goode. He must have The Turk, the supercomputer Goode built that possibly leads to Skynet. Dmitri just happens to be the instructor’s brother.
Meanwhile, John is finding that Derek is a tough guy to get along with. Derek doesn’t trust Cameron, and after seeing her pocket that terminator’s brain chip we know he might be right.
Sarah brought home one of Ellison’s videos, which John finds and pops in the VCR. (Why does he own a VCR in 2008?) He’s a sensitive kid, and cries immediately.
I liked how Derek was skeptical that Ellison is the only FBI agent after them. It is a stretch. After John storms out without his Aunt Jemimas, Derek tells Cameron, “You might have fooled them but not me. I know you.” I couldn’t tell if she was mimicking him or not when she said, “I know you too.” She does, after all.
Ellison, meanwhile, has tracked Silverman to his cabin, and they have a nice chat over tea before Ellison realizes Silverman has drugged him.
Silverman’s a believer, as Ellison finds out. When he stabbed Ellison in the leg, I thought, this is what this franchise is about. It’s not a fun romp about a mother and son and some bad guys. It’s about Judgment Day. It should be grim and unsettling. I couldn’t tell for sure right away if Silverman was crazy or actually convinced.
“That’s why I came to you, for your cooperation, to show you that Sarah wasn’t crazy,” Ellison tells him. “Nobody is crazy.”
The hand theme comes back as Silverman recalls Ah-nuld telling Sarah “Come with me if you want to live” and reaching out his hand to her. By the end, Sarah will be reaching out to Ellison in a similar way.
I’ve been saying for a while now that I thought Ellison would come around by the end of the season to knowing Sarah’s not a mad woman and that there’s more to the story he’s been chasing all these years. What he’ll do with that realization I don’t know, but I like him a lot.
Are you one of those people who has been killing this show’s creators over the fact that Cameron was able to portray a regular high school kid in the first episode before reverting into a socially inept robot soon thereafter? It hasn’t bugged me much, but Michael Ausiello won’t stop talking about it on the TVGuide.com podcast. Anyway, she was acting decidedly human in her ballet studio when talked to her instructor about Dmitri and she exuded empathy when she talked about her own brother playing chess.
And when she kicked that thug in the chest it was like she came to Maria’s rescue, even if it was only to earn her trust. So they meets with Dmitri, who reveals that he purposely threw the chess match and he tells Cameron where to find The Turk. He thinks she’s going to protect him, but she just walks out cold as ice as the gunmen run past her.
That was brutal, but it’s was such a great and true scene. I’ll take that over Sarah flipping flapjacks every single time.
Back in the mountains, Sarah shows up at the last second and saves Ellison from a fiery death. And she pops her old doc for good measure. The next we see, the doc’s lying in the rain, and Ellison doesn’t remember a thing. But the hand is gone. So Ellison has Silverman committed, in Sarah’s old hospital room I think, and it looks like he’s got some decisions to make.
John, meanwhile, is still sulking. This show will never last if they don’t stop making this kid do the mopey pretty boy thing. This isn’t an emo video.
Sarah tells him the date on the video, June 8, 1997, was the date she broke out. He was coming for her just as she was coming for him. She couldn’t live with giving him up. They torch the claw together while her narration rambles on about what makes us human. Too bad Cameron’s still got that chip.
The closing scene shows Derek watching Cameron masterfully practice her ballet.
I have a hard time separating this show from Battlestar Galactica sometimes. Just as the Cylons are evolving to become more human, I feel like that’s the path this show is taking us on. Cameron is programmed to learn and adapt, and combined with her artificial intelligence I think she’ll eventually become alive, kind of like the Cylon Sharon.
I know I harped on some negative points here, but I really liked this episode and I’m really pumped up for next week’s hour-long finale, which starts an hour early at 8 p.m.
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