Dungeons & Dragons

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 Episode 6 - Plot: As Charley and Sarah fight to save Derek Reese's life, Derek recalls the events that led to him travelling to the past.

The Present

Sarah fills Charley in on the details of Judgement Day, Skynet and the machines. He accepts the story fairly well, but is rather freaked out by Cameron, especially as she works to destroy the exoskeleton of the machine that tried to kill them in the last episode.

Derek's condition is grave, as his lungs begin to fill with fluid. John is able to help by donating some of his blood. Derek has a rare blood type and the fact that John is a match allows Charley to fill in the blanks that the pair are related. He's not John's father as he originally suspected, but his uncle. Knowledge of the fact that Kyle Reese is John's father is a very closely guarded secret, Sarah won't even let Derek know. This is understandable as it puts Kyle at risk in the future. If Kyle is killed before he's sent back to protect Sarah then John is never born.


The Future

It's important to note that this is actually Derek's past. Derek, Kyle and a group of other freedom fighters are holed up in a bunker in a ruined city. Intelligence reports reveal that the machines have a secret weapon, this transpires to be the device that can send people through time. While on an offensive, Derek is captured and held in captivity with other freedom fighters and Andy Goode. Andy confides in Derek that he helped to create Skynet.

Derek and the other captives are inexplicably let go after being tortured. They return to the bunker where news of the capture of the secret weapon is passed around alongside news of the missing Kyle Reese. He had been sent back to the past, but Derek doesn't learn this until he himself is briefed on the device by John Connor.

The Past

Derek Reese and three others arrive in the past to work to stop Skynet from being created. In an effort towards this, we see Derek killing Andy Goode after the chess tournament.

Sometimes they go bad

In the present, Cameron discusses the fact that captured and converted machines have their memories scrambled. She says this is to help prevent them from turning bad.

In the future we see Cameron and Derek meet. Derek assumes she's bad, but is informed that she's been converted to join the freedom fighters. Later on, she helps to stop another convert that has gone bad. It seems that the process of converting the machines to fight for the humans was not and may still not be perfect.

It's assumed that Cameron's memory was removed after she met Derek Reese, so she does not believe she has met him by the time he turns up in the present.


The review

So it's all a little complicated, but works really well once all the bits fall in to place. Not much really happens in the scenes set in the present, but they do help to make the future scenes more intriguing.

We never actually see Derek being tortured, but his demeanour after being taken down to a mysterious basement room suggests that it wasn't a pleasant time. Honestly, I couldn't guess what actually happened and there was a lot about the machines that was 'odd'. For starters, the one that watches over the captives doesn't appear to be particularly advanced. His skin job isn't perfect, nor is his mobility and dexterity. On top of that, a flying machine regularly blasts a high intensity light in to the room in which they are being held captive. At a guess, I'd say that it was to check up on them, but then what were the other machines doing in the make shift prison?

What's more curious is that the machines just let them go. It could've been a ruse gone bad, but I sense that the machines aren't the cohesive force that we might've expected.

Finally, we never actually see John in the future. This may just be because Thomas Dekker isn't old enough to really play that part. Or, it may be because something is yet to happen to John in the series that will effect the way he appears, or the way we perceive him in the future.

The scenes set in the present didn't really contribute much to the episode and were mercifully short. This allowed a tantalising glimpse of the future to play out in intricate detail. It all fit together perfectly in the end, helping to make this one of the better episodes so far.

8 out of 10