Back in December, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles left off with a decent couple of cliffhangers. We’d just found out that Riley, John’s relentlessly chipper gal pal, was actually working with Derek’s girl Jesse to break John away from Cameron; we’d also seen Riley slowly coming undone from the combined pressures of her responsibilities and her experiences in the post-Judgment Day future. Her mental problems had finally driven her to attempt suicide in the Connors' bathroom, slit wrists bleeding out on the tile till John and Cameron came across her unconscious form.
Plus, there were Sarah’s seemingly endless adventures with the three dots. Her searches had led her to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, and after a brief firefight with a guard inside, she’d pulled herself back outside just in time to get a glimpse of a drone flying overhead. Trapped in enemy territory with a gunshot wound and no back-up, things looked bad; given the title of the show, odds are she wasn’t going to actually die, but there was at least some question as to how she could escape.
“The Good Wound” starts with Sarah waking up in a hospital. There’s never any real explanation given as to how she got there—I doubt anybody who worked at that warehouse would want to get her to safety, and seeing as how she was already passing out from blood loss when the credits ran last episode, I’m not sure how she managed to regain consciousness long enough to find an ambulance. Maybe this will become relevant down the road, but I doubt it. TTSCC generally does a decent job with individual scenes; even when they aren’t all that engaging, we at least know why we’re watching them. The problem lately has been connecting the episodes together. It’s like every week, we’re getting a show from a slightly different parallel dimension; the cast and plot remains largely the same, but threads are dropped without a backward glance, and new things are introduced only to wander off as soon as threaten to cohere into anything relevant. “Wound” didn’t frustrate me like some other shows I’ve watched recently, but it’s like an hour’s worth of movie trailers—there’s a lot of foreshadowing, everyone looks serious all the time, and occasionally, somebody gets shot.
But hey, Riley’s okay. Huzzah, right? John brings her to the hospital which, despite Derek’s lecturing, seems like the right call; maybe hanging around waiting to see if she makes it through okay was a bad choice, but seeing as how the Connors aren’t aware of any immediate threats, I think John made the right call. Soon enough, Derek checks out to go see what Sarah’s up to, which leaves John to get in one brief talk with Riley before Jesse comes and spirits her away. There’s the usual tension between John and Cameron, and Jesse is as brusque as always; I’m really wondering when her plan to get John away from Cam is going to kick in, because right now, nothing’s happening.
John Henry has toys! The robots are easily the best part of the series, and while we didn’t get much time with Cameron, we at least got to see Henry debating the merits of the ball-and-socket joint, and expanding his knowledge base on the World Wide Web. During one of his information hunts, he finds something on Sarah’s recent warehouse break-in; when he tells Weaver what he heard, she basically tells him he shouldn’t have stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. Then she goes and murders everybody at the warehouse before destroying the building. Why? Not sure; I suspect it has something to do with John being able to find the place while running a search for coltan, the primary metal used in Terminator construction. Whatever the reason, watching her cut a swath through the screaming employees is one of the few exciting moments in “Wound.”