Sarah Connor Chronicles: Season finale recap

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Two hours of some of the most enjoyable television I’ve seen this fall season.

True, nothing much comes close to Lost this year, but after a slow start, The Sarah Connor Chronicles really took off and the season finale was explosive and moving. It really grew into the show I was hoping for from the start and other than Journeyman and the afore mentioned Lost, there really hasn’t been anything as fun to watch for me.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles season finale was actually broken down into two episodes, so you got two different stories here. Unlike the usual recaps I do for this show, I’m not going to do a serious play-by-play, but delve somewhat into what happened and what it means.

Episode 1×08: Vick’s Chip

We find out why Cameron kept the chip off the Vick terminator that was trying to kill Derek Reese. The chip is like the brain of a terminator, containing memories and higher brain functions. In fact, if you give it too much power, it can make things happen around it.

Derek finds the chip and outs Cameron, casting doubt on her trustworthiness. But she convinces everyone that it has a ton of information on it that is worthwhile. We don’t know what she was going to do with it, but she doesn’t try to get it back.

So John hacks it. And I really love how they are growing John’s character. We know what a great leader he will eventually become, and I like that the guy just has a knack for figuring things out and hacking computers. It’s going to come in handy.

The chip contains video memories of Vick’s mission, which was to protect a woman who worked for city hall. She developed a program to basically control all traffic lights and video cameras in the entire city.

You give that thing a little intelligence, and suddenly it can see and monitor everything happening, follow you around and know exactly where everyone is. Yikes. It obviously was important to Skynet because they send a terminator to protect it.

That was a sweet twist. All we’ve known so far, in T2 and now this series, is terminators being sent back to protect Sarah and John Connor. Now we see one being used for the reverse motive by the robots themselves.

Nice.

The program is active and our heroes figure that causing a virus to bring it down will cast major doubts on its reliability, perhaps halting the entire project.

Seeing what Vick’s chip did when it got too much power (it started watching John and trying to use his cell phone to dial out), they decide to use Cameron’s own chip to infect the program.

I don’t know why, but there was something touching in the way John carefully removed the chip from her head. He has a fondness for her, that is clear, but in what capacity, we don’t know yet.

He plugs her into the network and causes the virus to bring the system down, creating a gridlock across the city. Mission accomplished.

But the Turk is still out there. Oh and also, Sarah figures out that Derek killed Andy Goode.

Episode 1×09: What He Beheld

This finale episode was so great. I don’t even know where to begin.

The title could refer to a multitude of things. You have what Derek Reese beheld when the nukes went off and he had to save his brother. You have John beholding his father as a 5-year old child.

Maybe it refers to James Ellison finally seeing with his own eyes what is at stake.

I’ll give a brief recap of what happened here, because I want to really get into the parts that mattered.

The episode focused mainly on finding the Turk and they get led on a chase to get it by some Irish gangster who says he’s Sarkissian, has the computer and wants $500,000. Later he kills the fake ID bunch from the first few episodes and uses information from them to find the Connor’s house. The guy puts a watcher on John and Cameron, and threatens to kill John if he doesn’t get $2 million for the Turk in 24 hours.

There is also some mysterious guy watching the house as well, but we don’t find out until the end who it is.

They eventually kill the Irish guy and take his hard drive which leads them to discover that the dead isn’t who they were really after. Sarkissian is actually someone else and he was the guy watching them all.

He puts a car bomb in their jeep and unfortunately for him, Cameron was the one to use it first as she went to get a cake for John’s birthday. Boom. Hope she’s alright, but come on…she’s a terminator!

A sweet ending to be sure, but there was a lot of great stuff in this episode.

The first is just a tiny thing. There was a little girl who witnessed the execution of the fake Sarkissian, and the brief moment of care on Sarah’s face as she told her to find her daddy was great. I think the big thing in this show lately is the heart it has and the love for humanity Sarah tries to hang on to.

It could be easy to just kill everyone to get the job done, but she struggles to do it without so many people dying.

There were two poignant moments in What He Beheld. The first was between John and Derek, and the second was James Ellison.

You know, it was around the time of Derek’s arrival that the show found its legs. Who would have thought Brian Austin Green could bring an added layer that the show needed? Obviously it was more of his backstory of being Kyle’s brother, but it was still something that gave the series new legs.

Derek remembers it’s John’s birthday and takes him to the park to just get away from the computer hacking sessions. They buy ice cream and watch two young kids play baseball. Derek recounts what it was like to see the world now compared to the future devastation.

The two kids playing baseball looked a lot like the first two we saw at the beginning, which showed Derek and Kyle at the moments the nukes launched in 2011.

At first you think it’s just one of those cheesy scenes where the writers throw in some kids to remind Derek of what it was like before. But I kept saying…”no, that’s them…that has to be them…”

And it was. They were seeing Kyle and Derek as kids. And then the big reveal…Derek knows Kyle is his father, because every time he looks at John, he sees his brother.

That was a moving scene I thought, something the show is getting better at. The longer we watch, the more we care for these characters. Realizing how powerful it was for John to finally see his father, albeit 5 years old, was just touching.

The second moment was what James Ellison beheld.

Earlier in the episode he goes to see Charley Dixson, and tries to get him to confide in him about Sarah. He says he’s starting to realize that there is something going on out there, that Sarah is alive, that he’s seen the evidence of robots, etc.

While he’s there, he picks up on the name that Charley gives him for an FBI agent that visited him earlier: Kester. James finds him in the FBI database, realize he’s a fraud and they decide to go get him.

He’s worried though…he wonders “what” Kester is…

At the same time, James probably just missed being killed, as Kester/Cromartie was looking for the Sarah Connor file that Ellison had.

Before they hit him, Charley hears the alert while in his ambulance and heads to the scene, having recognized the name Kester.

The beauty of the scene in which Ellison and his SWAT team surround Cromartie’s apartment, is the song playing in the background. It’s called “When The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash and is one of the last songs he ever wrote.

It has many references to the Bible and the Book of Revelations particularly. I didn’t connect them right away, but earlier when James was at Charley’s, he quoted him a verse from Revelations about the end of the world.

As the first of the SWAT team enter the room, the lyrics in the background:

“Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom…”

The first man gets thrown out the door and you see him falling into the swimming pool below in slow motion, as blood spreads into the water. Then you hear gunfire all over as more and more men land in the water. Then you hear Ellison yelling “Fall back now!”

We see Cromartie walking around the pool as he turns and aims his gun at Ellison, the only man left. Sirens in the background.

For some reason, he doesn’t kill him. It could be the fact that he no longer posed a threat and killing him wasn’t part of his mission. Or possibly it meant something else.

Charley drives up and sees the aftermath, with Ellison standing there, over his partner’s dead body…

This scene with Ellison was brutally moving. In that moment, he beheld the reality of the world. The reality of the danger the human race was facing.

In Conclusion

All in all, the first season, or nine episodes, of The Sarah Connor Chronicles was pretty awesome. Like I said, it started a bit slow for me, the mythology was sort of uninteresting until they introduced Derek Reese and the whole backstory of him, Kyle and John from the future.

At the end, I actually find myself caring for all of them. The scene with Ellison especially had me nervous for him, not wanting to see him killed. He’s not used as much as the others, but that character is very important and one of my favorites.

Next year we’ll find out how damaged Cameron is, we’ll continue the chase for The Turk and find out just how Ellison’s future will relate to the Connors’. And also, just who the heck is this Sarkissian guy?

This recap has rambled on for quite awhile, and I’m more interested in what you guys thought. Did you love it as much as I did? Was the season awesome?