- Sarah turns to Dr. Sherman when she begins having nightmares, Jesse tries to convince Derek that she has captured an important figure from the future, and John and Cameron discover that Cromartie's body is missing.
- With Cromartie buried in Mexico, the group return to Los Angeles. Sarah is not well and is hallucinating as well as walking in her sleep. She returns to Dr. Boyd Sherman to seek help. When John and Cameron return to Mexico to destroy what is left of Cromartie they find he is missing. Meanwhile, Derek learns that Jesse has kidnapped a man she is convinced they knew in the future. Derek doesn't recognize him, and Jesse sets out to prove he is the man who taught the Cyborgs how to question humans. Elsewhere, Ellison delivers the inactive body of the Cromartie Terminator to Catherine Weaver to ask for help in knowing how to control it.—garykmcd
- The show opens with a dream sequence: Sarah and Cameron are at Cromartie's burial site in Mexico. Sarah watches herself and Cameron as Cameron waters a trio of cactii in the form of a tiangle. Suddenly, the cactii sprout up from the ground. John appears in front of them as they turn a metallic silver and grab him.
Sarah awakens in the back of the truck on the way home from Mexico and has John pull over so she can vomit. Cameron wonders if she might be pregnant, but Sarah says its probably stomach flu. Before getting up to get back into the truck, Sarah spots a small tortoise upside-down under the truck. She picks it up, then sets it down on its feet a safe distance away. Back at home, John and Cameron tend to a very ill Sarah. The consensus is that someone must return to Mexico and burn Cromartie's body.
Meanwhile, Derek is running errands when he gets a call from Jesse; it's urgent. They meet at a warehouse filled with storage containers, where Jesse tells him she saw whom she claims to be Charles Fischer (Richard Schiff), most notorious of the "grays" (a human traitor who worked for Skynet), at a shopping mall. So she followed him to his car, hit him over the head with a brick, and now has him tied up in one of the containers. But Derek doesn't recognize the name or the man, which surprises Jesse. She tells Derek he works for the machines "and he's gonna die."
John and Cameron travel back to Mexico to finish their business with Cromartie. On the way there, John asks her why she has a foot hanging out the window. She says that she's trying to feel what it's like to "get away from it all." John dismisses her statement, saying she doesn't know how to feel. She says she does experience sensation and she is capable of feeling, otherwise she would not be of much value.
At the warehouse, Jesse strips the tape off the prisoner's mouth. He says he's Paul Stewart, a watch repairman from Pasadena, and that he has no clue what's going on. Jesse continues to rough the man up, but his story doesn't change. Derek holds back Jesse and assumes the role of "good cop", just to see if Stewart's story changes. Outside the container Jesse insists Fischer was the most important of the "grays", and that the machines kept him hidden and free from prosecution. Derek refuses to kill the man until he admits to being Fischer and why he's here. Jesse leaves, telling Derek she will return with proof of his identity.
Sarah has another dream. This time, she enters a maternity ward. Each of the maternity cribs has three tortoises, again arranged in triangles, except one, which is empty. in the far corner of the room, Sarah sees Cameron in a rocking chair, apparently nursing (!). Looking again, Sarah watches herself and Cameron, as Cameron gets up from the chair with a tortoise in her hand. Sarah thinks Cameron will give it to her, but Cameron grins and hands it to Cromartie, who has apparently appeared out of nowhere. Then, Sarah wakes up, pointing a gun at her reflection in a window. Realizing she's been sleepwalking, and thinking there's a significance to these triangles, she draws three dots on a notepad and attempts to ponder them.
At the burial site, Cameron and John attempt to dig up Cromartie's body, only to find one of his boots. John immediately assumes that Ellison made off with the body, because he was the only other person who knew about it. They immediately high-tail back to L.A.
With Jesse gone, Derek continues the "good cop" routine with Stewart by bringing him a cheeseburger. He cuts the tape binding Stewart's hand so he can eat, and they talk for a few minutes. Stewart says he was once an engineer, but it got boring, so he went to Bern, Switzerland, to learn how to fix watches. Though still skeptical, Derek has been able to keep an open mind, until he spots a tattoo on Stewart's arm. He immediately recognizes it as "prison ink": a clock without hands, which symbolizes a lifetime sentence. Stewart says it's just a simple tattoo related to his work, but Derek isn't buying it; he binds Stewart's hand back to the chair and then calls Cameron. Derek asks if she can identify him; even with a messaged photo, she does not. John, who is with her in the truck, is surprised that Derek would call her (given their history), but she assures him that "Everything is okay. Don't worry about it." She even gives what is supposed to be a reassuring grin, but it comes across as slightly creepy.
Sarah arrives at the office of Dr. Sherman, the psychiatrist from several episodes earlier. After he tried to tell her to make an appointment, she manages to talk her way into his office by telling him about her dreams.
Outside Ellison's house, Cameron asks John about the tortoise and why Sarah helped it. John explains that most people will try to help those who need it. Then Cameron rightly observes that not all people are like that. When they see Ellison pull into his driveway, they move in. Ellison enters his home, only to get thrown around by Cameron. John asks about the whereabouts of Cromartie's body. Ellison insists he doesn't know where it is; John believes him and tells Cameron to let him go. As she does, she rolls him onto his stomach, as if he was a tortoise. Before he leaves, John spots the Polaroid of his mother (NOTE: Continuity link to the first movie!), taken when she was pregnant with him; he takes it with him.
Back in the compartment, Jesse arrives with another, younger man. Jesse pulls back their collars to reveal that they have identical birthmarks on their left shoulders. The younger man says his name is "Charlie Fischer," a service technician for a company that does seismic retrofitting. Stewart sticks to his story, even so far as to say this must be an elaborate trick to get him to confess he's this infamous Charles Fischer. But when Derek starts pulling out the fingernails of Charlie Fischer, Stewart confesses he's really Charles Fischer. The elder Fischer goes on to say the trip to the past was not a mission, but a reward. He had been in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay on Judgment Day, at which time the machines forcibly recruited him to help teach them "what makes people tick" (a bad time for a clock pun, as Jesse reacted by shoving him to the floor). While all this is going on, young Charlie Fischer is completely flabbergasted by what he's become a part of.
In Dr. Sherman's office, Sarah tries to continue her discussion with him about her dreams, but the good doctor is very perceptive. He knows Sarah is less than forthcoming about her family life. She says she has no one else to talk to, but the session quickly breaks down; Sherman states that, without the truth, he can't help her. With that, Sarah quickly and quietly leaves.
In the container, the elder Fischer asks his younger counterpart what is the toughest decision he ever made. Charles goes on to say to Charlie that he has no clue what kind of person he really is. Charlie wonders why his future self won't give them what they want:
CHARLIE: You're here. You're safe. CHARLES: Are you?
Outside, Jesse doesn't buy that Fischer isn't on a mission. When Derek asks why, she tells him that Fischer helped explain to the machines how to get information out of humans by using humans as guinea pigs. Over a period of weeks, or even months, he taught Skynet how to use torture, drugs, starvation, and even constant exposure to someone's presence to get what they want. She described the whole thing as some kind of "perverse theatre". Then, Jesse drops the bombshell: Derek was among the tortured prisoners! But Derek still cannot remember Fischer or the torture sessions. They go back inside to finish the job.
Derek tells the elder Fischer his name and unit, and starts beating him. Fischer acts pleasantly surprised to see Derek remembers. Derek says he doesn't, but that Jesse does, and that's good enough for him. When Charles asks Derek if he's going to kill him, Derek turns his gun on the younger Fischer. A shot is fired; the elder Fischer slumps in his chair, killed by Jesse's gun. The younger Fischer is relieved to be alive.
At the house, John quietly enters, trying not to disturb Sarah. She assures him she wasn't sleeping, and she shows him the paper with the three dots, asking him what it means to him. He simply says it's just exhaustion from being sick and chasing killer robots. Then he tells her Cromartie's body is missing, and that he's sure Ellison doesn't know where it is. She then tells John it was her fault that Cromartie found him. She tells him about the boy she had spared at the bowling alley, and that Cromartie must have used him to find John.
After burying Charles Fischer, Derek wonders if Charlie Fischer will talk. Jesse says they had to release him because he is not the monster that Charles was. Jesse then asks if Derek remembers any of the torture; he says he doesn't. She believes his memory has been traumatically repressed; he suggests that perhaps the reason he has no memory of the torture is that his actions in the past have altered the future, and that they are now from two slightly different futures.
When young Fischer next arrives at work, he is detained by the FBI and Homeland Security. The agents tell him that a couple of nights earlier, he entered his work area without authorization. He protests his innocence, but the security logs confirm Fischer did indeed enter the facility, and with retinal and thumbprint scan. The agent goes on to say that Fischer accessed the Military Industrial Complex network and uploaded a "roving backdoor" program that cannot be stopped. Fischer claims he has no clue how to do this, but the evidence is overwhelming (We learn during this that it was the elder Fischer who did this, which means he was indeed on a mission -- he went back into time to upload the program, which we can assume will help in the creation of Skynet). When the agents try to get an alibi from Charlie, all Charlie can do is to lead them to the now-empty (and clean) storage container. In the end, Charlie is locked away in solitary confinement for espionage (a lifetime sentence), where he will remain until Judgment Day.
At an undisclosed location, Weaver and Ellison meet. Ellison opens the trunk of his car to reveal Cromartie's body. "We need to learn how they work," he tells her, "How to fight them. We can't allow history to repeat itself, not when we have the power to stop it. It's up to us, now. The two of us." Weaver is pleased with Ellison's find.
Sarah has another dream. This time, she descends a ladder into Cromartie's grave, and then into Dr. Sherman's office. He barely acknowledges her presence with a terse exchange about lies, wasting time, and having things to do. Following the dream, Sarah returns to the bloody-name wall, where she spots three dots in a triangular pattern, next to Greenway's (the late nuclear plant official) name, and above Sherman's name.
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