What a mind scrabble! If you’ve not seen it, then please do not read this now, watch the show! It’s bloody brilliant. Right, forget almost all of that, because in the 43 minutes that Born To Run takes almost all of that and anything else you concluded about this show gets entirely turns on its head. The story starts normally enough, with Sarah in jail while John and Cameron debate the next course of action. Catherine Weaver really wants to meet Sarah Connor, and John Henry really likes playing D&D. Sarah asks for a priest, and Father Armando Bonilla reappears, brought back from the start of the season where she took refuge in his church. She sends a message to John that they should leave, which is communicated to him by Chola (Sabrina Perez), who you might recall was the girl who Cameron emulated when standing outside Enrique Salceda’s den in season one. She brings false identities for them, which is still the family business it appears. The Terminator who killed Derek has a nice scene where he goes into a gun shop, which is a nod to those in the first two films. He asks for silencers for his pistols, and the shop owner directs him elsewhere. As he leaves the shop keeper comments that the nicest thing about his weaponry is the sound they make, and the Terminator replies, “No, it’s not”. Great. Cripes! My mind began to spin at this point, as the implications of this one statement pervaded my understanding of this series. My assumptions that Weaver was a bad Terminator, sent to make sure Skynet was created, flew entirely out of the window, where I’ve left it circling menacingly for a later scene. The Derek-killing Terminator turns up at the Zera building, and shoots one of the guards with his nice new silenced weapons. Catherine Weaver appears and comments that he broke the gates, and she really liked those gates! She stabs one blade through his power source and the other through the electrical substation behind her. He was somewhat overmatched here, I suspect. After some more strange Ellison, Weaver and John Henry conversations comes possibly the creepiest scene in the show so far, where John tries to assess if Cameron is leaking radiation, which may be making Sarah ill. Cameron strips to the waist, and gets John to pin her down, while slitting part of her torso open and reaching up inside her skeleton. It was very creepy and sexy at the same time, not sure how best to explain it further. She seems ok, but very shortly after this scene she’s certainly not 100%. We are given a classic Terminator sequence where a determined Cameron enters the jail where Sarah is to release her, taking massive amounts of weapons fire as she does. The makeup of her face in this sequence is awesome, better than all the films so far. She also chooses not to kill the guards who confront her, by either making them run or disabling them. From here John and Sarah head to see Weaver, and they instruct the now badly damaged Cameron to deal with John Henry. Except they don’t realise what the message meant, and Cameron does. They enter Weaver’s office where she and Ellison are waiting. At this point none of the humans know she’s a Terminator, and they also don’t know that she’s actually on their side! But that all gets revealed just as the prototype hunter killer appears outside the window and crashes into the office in an attempt to kill everyone. There is an amazing extra bit to this incident which took my breath away. Weaver tells them to run and the room explodes. The flying debris takes out the fish tank where Weaver keeps her pet eel. The creature propels itself across the floor, becomes liquid metal and then merges with Weaver! Wow. The eel form was the same shape that the liquid Terminator took when escaping the sub in that story, so this might actually be the same Terminator. A counter is running. Stupidly, I assumed that John Henry had set the building to explode, but it’s actually something much more interesting than that. Before the next crucial event I should also mention that they find the ‘Turk’ computer system, which has the three dots on it that preoccupied Sarah so much earlier in the season. Ahhhhhh….my brain exploded…and dribbled out of my nose in a very unsightly manner. It wasn’t part of the show, but I thought you ought to know. Weaver and John materialise in a dark post-judgement day world, where they are soon located by freedom fighters. Weaver hides and John is left to prove he is a human. The electrical spark of another time bubble indicated another traveller is coming. We hear Sarah say, “I love you too,” and then the credits ran. I shouted ‘NOoooooo……’ in that really childish Yu-Gi-Oh fashion at the TV. And then… the person next to me on the sofa became unemotional. I sensed a red glow from their eyes and they asked, “Will you join us?” Ok, so I made that last bit up because I didn’t want the story to end. If this show doesn’t come back next season, I’ll make it my personal mission in the future to send killer robots back in time to get the TV network people who cancelled it. TV doesn’t actually get much better than this, in my less than humble opinion, and everyone involved with the show should be congratulated. If there is one word for this show and the creative talents behind itn then that would be ‘awesome’. Read a review of the episode 21 here.
