- Cromartie uses Charley and Michelle in a plot to lure Sarah into the desert and leave John alone and vulnerable in the city. Meanwhile, Catherine Weaver has a job proposal for Agent Ellison.
- Having left town out of fear for their safety, Charley Dixon's wife is kidnapped by Cromartie when they stop for gas. He contacts Sarah and she and Derek set off to help him. Her kidnapping has a very specific purpose however. On a leave of absence, Agent Ellison receives a call from Catherine Weaver who has a job offer for him at ZieraCorp. Elsewhere, John wants to spend some time alone with Riley and gives Cameron the slip when they are out shopping. But Cromartie is soon onto him however.—garykmcd
- We open with Charley and Michelle getting gas along a dusty road which looks to be just west of the middle of nowhere. Charley leaves the car to pay and get a soda just as another car pull up. We see a hand reach under the dash of the new car and yank out some wires (it's Cromartie). An unseen man (it's Cromartie) gets into the driver's seat next to Michelle (it's Cromartie) and she begins asking him a question before looking up (oh, it's definitely Cromartie). Lo and behold it turns out to be Cromartie, who peels out with both Michelle and the gas nozzle, leaving Charley there to run after them and yell.
John steals cable for the extra preggo neighbor, and he sees a newscast detailing the success of a movie starring the actor (Laslow) whose identity Cromartie used for his killing spree.
Back at home, John gets a call from a distraught Charley. Charley lies to John, saying simply he is on his way out of town and needs to say goodbye to Sarah. Speaking in front of John, Sarah tells Charley he shouldn't have called and it's "better for you if I can't find you." But wait, it's code! Without letting John know she's doing it, Sarah gets Charley's whereabouts. Sarah chastises John for giving Charley his number and tells Cameron not to let John out of her sight as she walks out the front door. Though he thinks it's a bad idea, Derek ends up going leaving with Sarah to help Charley.
We cut to Michelle in captivity. In an adjacent room Cromartie is surrounded by electronic equipment and appears to be putting together some sort of device involving mousetraps.
John and Cameron are loading computers onto a pickup truck when he gets call from Riley who wants to see him right away. Cameron argues when John asks to be dropped off where Riley is, then he takes off on foot when she gets behind the wheel. (Terminators always fall for that one...).
Ellison is at home watching Laslow's movie when he gets a call from Weaver. She tells him of an "opportunity" and talks him into a lunch meeting.
We go back to Michelle, who has managed to free her cell phone despite her hands being tied behind her back. Cut to Sarah, Charley and Derek who are discussing how to handle the situation. At this point Michelle calls, and gives her location just before Cromartie returns to the room. He looks down and sees the partially hidden phone as we go to commercial.
We go back to Cromartie and Michelle. Michelle pleads with her captor as he tapes her mouth and sets her chair on top of the mousetraps while giving us the history of the mousetrap. (Terminators apparently come with Wikipedia...). As the camera pans up from the floor we see what looks like an explosive device underneath the chair, connected with wires to the mousetraps on the floor.
Meanwhile, John and Riley are out browsing through magazines. John tells her he's not coming back to school just as she spots Cameron staring at them Terminatorishly from a nearby café.
Sarah, Charley and Derek arrive at where Michelle is being held and enter the building with guns drawn. They reach Michelle and Sarah immediately inspects her chair/mousetrap set-up. Sarah warns the two men not to touch her. As we head to commercial Derek says ominously: "They never let you have a good day, do they?"
Sarah takes the tape off Michelle's face and tells her that she's sitting on a bomb. Sarah sends Charley to the truck for a bag. While he's gone Sarah coldly tells Michelle she only came up because she didn't think Michelle would be alive when she arrived. Charley comes back to the room holding wires and tells them Cromartie has sabotaged their truck. This turns on a light bulb for Sarah, who immediately reaches down and rips off the C4-looking substance from under Michelle's seat, confidently proclaiming it to be "molding clay." Apparently this was a trick so Cromartie would have a free(er) shot at John.
Sarah calls John, who by now has given Cameron the slip and is shopping for dresses with Riley. (Does he want to die?!) As she is warning him to stay with Cameron and stay at home, we see Cromartie listening to the conversation from an undisclosed location. Searching the house, Derek comes across the equipment Cromartie is using to monitor the phone conversation from a nearby car. As Derek continues to inspect Cromartie's set-up, he notices a cell phone and a wire connected to a cellular tower next to the building. Just then we see Cromartie dial a number and the phone next to Derek begins to ring. Derek frantically runs towards the others and tells them to move as an explosion severs the cell tower and sends the top half on top of the building.
Back from commercial we see that everybody has survived the fallen cell tower. Derek and Sarah realize that Cromartie has heard her last call to John and now knows the secret code - beginning each conversation with the date. As Charley helps Michelle out of the room we see a circle of blood on her lower back.
We cut to Cromartie, who calls John using Sarah's voice and the code. He tells John to meet him at the pier and to turn off his cell phone. Several desert miles from the road, the foursome in the building decides they are going to have to start moving on foot in order to get to John. Despite her injury, Michelle says she'll walk with them.
At the lunch meeting, Weaver shows Ellison pictures of a plane crash where Terminator parts were found in the wreckage. She says she and her late husband have spent $20 million trying to reverse engineer the technology but have yet to be successful. She next tells him the story of witnesses in New Mexico eight years ago reporting a man with a robot leg trying to kill John Connor. It was Ellison's case, Weaver says, and she thinks he knows what really killed those agents. Weaver says she wants answers and wants Ellison to help her find another Terminator.
Sarah van-jacks some random guy, giving the foursome wheels. As they begin to drive, Michelle appears to take a turn for the worse. Charley says she's "bleeding out" and has Sarah stop the van.
John and Cromartie have a good old fashioned pier chase, with both ending up in the water. Terminators apparently can't swim, and John is able to escape as Cromartie sinks like a stone to the bottom. Cameron arrives at the scene and the two jump in Sarah's van in a nearby alley.
We cut to a bench outside an emergency room, where a sobbing Charley is consoled by John. Immediately after that is (apparently) Michelle's funeral, where we see Charley dropping a bible onto the casket almost in disgust. Ellison is there and we also see Cromartie a few feet away, monitoring the situation. The episode ends with Sarah, John, Derek and Cameron lowering their heads at a dinner table.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content