Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Queen's Gambit

Hey there, everybody. I'll be your new Terminator: The Sarah Connor (and Moody Son and Ex-Ballerina Foxbot) Chronicles host here at the T. V. Club. I wish I could tell you that Keith Phipps has handed this over because his TV died, or Skynet took over his DirecTV satellite, or any other slick reason. But I think he just gave it to me because he's thinks I'm obsessed with killer robots.
Yes, I watch Battlestar Galactica. I loved A.I.. And that book Love and Sex With Robots by David Levy is on my nightstand – 'cause, um, we're reading it in my book club. Still, one of the things I'm liking about this show is that nobody's trying to have sex with Cameron the Terminatrix. And while she's still paralyzed by culture clash and puzzled by the crazy, irrational things the humans around her are doing, we're starting to see glimmers of emotion – like when she kills a T-888-model Terminator and later, shows grief over it.
Like Cameron, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is starting to show signs of humanity. Everyone who had faith that this was more than just writer's strike airtime filler and a jobs program for bodybuilders with facial nerve damage, should've found a lot to dig this week. Tonight's the episode when they really hit their stride and started to act like they know what they're doing.
The metaphor for the week is chess. We learn that when John Connor was training in the wilds of Central America, the most important thing he learned was how to play that game: "[it] taught him everything he needed to know about war." This is also a good metaphor for the show: it clearly aspires to be chess, whereas the Terminator movies were more like a game of checkers where the pieces kept blowing skyhigh. This week, some of the many plot threads start to converge, the Terminator mythos gets richer (big applause to Brian Austin Green as John Connor's uncle, Derek Reece), the big chase and fight at the end worked great – and even the jokes aren't so grating. (John: "I call shotgun!" Cameron: "I call 9 mm!")
The story this week comes in two parts. First, Andy, the cell phone salesman/closet A.I. researcher that Sarah's been watching has come up with a new computer that can play chess, and the military's interested – or at least, they were interested, until it lost in a game against a computer from Japan. This takes Andy off the Connors' hitlist – except that he winds up dead anyway, with his chess-playing computer stolen and a mysterious drifter as the most likely suspect.