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100% more Garret Dillahunt, 100% more fun!

This week, Garret Dillahunt returns as Cromartie, and they even give him a couple of lines. He also plays George Lazlo portraying the “Beastwizard” in some background video. It’s fairly awesome. Charlie Dixon (Dean Winters) and his wife run in to Cromartie and are part of an elaborate plot to strand Sarah Connor out in the desert so Cromartie can kill John in Santa Monica. I guess walking around Los Angeles asking “have you seen this boy?” is not going to work when the news is saying you killed two dozen FBI agents and are the star of a direct-to-dvd Beastmaster ripoff. John escapes, and we learn that Terminators can’t swim. Also: Charlie’s wife Michelle eventually dies, because she wasn’t really needed except as a plot device. (Full recap here.)

I enjoyed this episode a lot more than last week’s, and I’m gonna go ahead and say it was because there was 100% more Garret Dillahunt. This week we even get Garret in a Beastmaster ripoff movie, which better be on the DVD box set, or I’m gonna be annoyed. I’m not saying this entirely excuses the hacky writing from last week—I still expect those problems to be addressed or I’m going to be disappointed with the show—but I realized I spent less time this week obsessing on how terrible Lena Headey’s hair looks, and more time enjoying the show. Since the only thing different was more Garret, I’m going to guess that’s what I’m basing my rating on this week.

As per usual, there wasn’t a lot here to move the plot forward. About the only new thing we get (other than the death of Charlie’s wife) is that Shirley Manson’s character is trying to hire Agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones) away from the FBI. We don’t really see whether he takes the job or not, but I’m guessing if he rejects the offer, his days are numbered. It’s bad enough having the Beastwizard robot know where you live, I don’t think he can survive with Liquid Red hunting him down, too. At any rate, Shirley has this story about how “her husband” and she are trying to “reverse engineer” the Terminators. Even if Ellison knew she was a robot, this would still sound like a terrible idea. I don’t know why she’d think telling him that would get him interested in her job offer. I also wonder whether or not Shirley cares about John Connor, because it would seem she’s more interested in strengthening Skynet (maybe even speeding up the timetable on Terminator technology) that she is finding out where John is and killing him.

Since there wasn’t much else going on in this episode, I think I’ll make some notes here. Despite Lena Headey and Summer Glau being rail thin, I enjoy that most of the supporting characters (particularly the women) on this show don’t look like your typical television actors. Despite whatever failings SCC might have in the continuity department, there appears to be an effort to hire actresses with actual curves. Unfortunately this episode we killed one of them off, but it still reflects an effort to blend reality with science fiction. This show has its moments, but on the whole it really is sort of mediocre. There’s room for improvement, but I have hope that we can get an interesting robot show out of it.

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