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Double the Summer Glau, double your fun. It was only a matter of time before we saw a robot Cameron and a regular Cameron, right?

In this week’s episode, Cameron (Summer Glau) has flashbacks (to the future) about the woman who inspired her “look,” a young lady named Allison Young. Allison was apparently part of John Connor’s resistance fighter group, and Cameron—an “infiltrator” Terminator—adopts Allison’s hair style and mannerisms in order to get close to John (in the future.) Then she kills her. Remembering these incidents first from Allison’s point of view, Cameron experiences acute amnesia and runs around for the entire episode trying to figure out whether she’s a robot or not. Meanwhile, Kacy (Busy Philipps), the severely pregnant neighbor of the Connors, experiences what seems like an abruption, but luckily is just a false alarm. She and Sarah bond in the hospital and Sarah meets Trevor (Jon Huertas), Kacy’s baby daddy (who is also a cop.) Also, Agent Ellison (Richard T. Jones) decides to leave the FBI and go work for Shirley Manson. (Full recap here.)

It took three weeks, but we’ve finally reached an episode that deserves full marks. Of course I’m biased towards the storylines that focus more on robot history than Connor history, but it’s good to finally have a piece of the Cameron puzzle in place. It makes a lot more sense that Future John Connor would trust a robot who looks like someone he already knew. Whether or not he knows what happened to Allison, and how his friendship with Cameron developed, is for future episodes I suppose.

The introduction of a “single pregnant woman” character as some sort of parallelism to get to know Sarah better is kind of a stretch, but I’ll go with it because it seems to be working well enough. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of single pregnant women in the world. I’m not sure if Sarah giving birth in the Guatemalan jungle is Terminator Canon or not, but it sounds like something she’d do. My question about this and about the Cameron character in general is whether or not it’ll be in continuity once McG’s Terminator: A Hat Full of Terminators Terminating movie is released. So far the show has been really respectful as far as incorporating all three Terminator movies into its writing, but whether or not McG can be trusted with the same remains to be seen.

The one thing that seems a little tiresome at this point is the tendency to introduce partners or love interests that are law enforcement officers of some sort. While Charlie Dixon (Dean Winters) technically isn’t a cop, he’s a paramedic and they get badges, so, CLOSE ENOUGH. Agent Ellison’s ex-wife is also an FBI agent, and now Kacy’s boyfriend is a cop. Can’t someone just be dating an accountant? Surely there are CPAs that wouldn’t mind fighting the future.

I’ve also been baffled by how Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) has a daughter. I’ve been assuming that she’s been around (as a robot) for quite a while, but it only just occurred to me that the T-1001 probably killed the real Weaver and is posing as her to further Skynet. (This would explain the whole “I survived a helicopter crash but my husband didn’t” story that Weaver uses to hook Ellison.) For a second there I thought maybe we’d have some robot baby plotlines, and considering how that’s working out on Battlestar Galactica, I’m kind of relieved that that’s probably not the case.

Overall I’m happy with this episode (despite its lack of BeastWizard,) and I’m still hopeful this show might be heading in the right direction. I just hope Monday Night Football doesn’t kill their ratings so badly that they aren’t renewed for the rest of the season.

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