Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles - Episode 6
“Dungeons and Dragons” starts off right where the last episode left us, with John’s uncle, Derrick Reese, in critical condition and Sarah’s ex-fiance, Charley Dixon, coming to save the day. The show splits into two different stories, one of which is Reese’s flashback to… well… the future, and the other is “present day” with Charley, Sarah, John and Cameron coping with the situation.
The present day storyline of Charley reuniting with Sarah and learning the truth about the terminators is easily the most enjoyable thing about this episode. Charley is a very likable character, which is unfortunate, because I don’t think they’re going to make him a regular. His conversation with Cameron after he learns the truth is very weird. He tells her a couple times that she is “scary” and the show tries to back him up by showing Cameron pocket the defunct terminator’s brain chip. This is where our two stories intersect, because we find out that Derrick already knew Cameron, or at least a Terminator of her model. Given the uniqueness of the other terminators in the series, we’ll assume it’s the same machine.
So Derrick’s flashback has a couple cool things going for it, namely that it reminds us of the original terminator movie. They follow cannon very well, by including Kyle with his photo of Sarah, and even used a similar hallway as the rebel base we saw the attack in Terminator the movie. If you’re up to snuff on your trivia, you’ll notice that Kyle’s flashback in the original movie and Derrick’s flashback here overlap with the attack on the rebel base. We see a lot of references here to Terminator reprogramming and specifically, the fact that it doesn’t always stick. Add in some Cameron taking the robot brain stuff for spice, and instantly we no longer trust her. Cameron has said a couple times that the terminators only carry out the mission they were sent for, which is very interesting, because we don’t really know what her mission was. It is presumably to protect John Connor, but I seriously doubt that’s the extent of it.
The pacing of the episode wasn’t done very well. The storyline split between the flashback and present day was completely backwards. At the beginning of the episode, you want to see the present day storyline because of the Charley Dixon drama, but they keep switching to the flashback. By the time the flashback becomes interesting, you’re already too bored with it to care. The flashback brings up a lot of really weird questions (what the hell was the musical torture thing about?), which we may or may not get answers too, and I think they introduced too much at once.
Still enjoyed it, but it pretty much played out exactly as you’d expect and we didn’t see much character growth.
3 stars out of 5