TV Verdict

“Two Sarah Connors were murdered before they found me.”

Now the Terminators from tomorrow are looking up Martin Bedells. One’s dead, and there are two others in the phone book. If the right Martin Bedell gets killed, John will lose an important Resistance ally in the future. In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 2, Episode 5, “Goodbye to All That,” John goes to a military prep school to keep an eye out for Terminators, and the school hires Reese. Meanwhile, Sarah and Cameron arrive just in time to save a boy from the cyborgs.

And then this happened, and that happened, and something else happened …

Often, in series television, there’s a plot and then there’s what the story is really about. You might think of Sarah Connor as big on action and very straightforward, but tonight’s episode had a couple of extra layers.

The main thing the story is really about is Reese’s memories, both of the future Martin Bedell and of war in general. Asked by a green but gung-ho cadet if he has any “kills,” teacher Reese tells of a comrade who ended up holding his own intestines in after being wounded. “The game is played with your buddy’s life … The game is played by you, on behalf of the whole damn human race,” he says. Brian Austin Green gets to show a few cracks, just small ones, in his toughness–just enough to show how his character got that way.

The other real subject of the story is predestination. The Martin Bedell that Reese knew is a West Point grad, but the one they’re actually dealing with wants to drop out. Reese wants to make sure Bedell goes to West Point, but John isn’t so sure that destiny needs to be served.

The big action scene has some interesting cutting between John and Reese fighting a Terminator at the military school and Sarah reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with a frightened boy.