Recap: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles S2E9 "Complications"

Ugh, a dream scene.  This show's dream scenes are YAWN.  Sarah and Cameron, wearing pink dresses, are watering cacti growing on Cromartie's Mexican grave.  The cacti grow and encircle John in their prickly arms.  Sarah wakes up in the car as they're driving home from the debacle in Mexico.  She's sick to her stomach and feverish; by the time they get home, she's pretty sick.  She wants to go right back down to thermite Cromartie's chassis but John and Cameron say they'll take care of it.  Cameron seems to have picked up some new cowboy boots on their recent trip south of the border.

Derek gets a call from Jess: come here now and bring a gun.  She's at a warehouse, ranting about having seen "Fisher."  Derek: "Who's Fisher?"  Jess is all, you know, Charles Fisher, sent back from the future and working for the machines, really bad guy?  Inside, she's got some poor guy taped to a chair.  Derek's all, explain this to me again, would you?  Jess insists that this guy is a traitor, working for Skynet.  The guy pleads with Derek, saying his name is Paul Stewart and this is all a mistake.  Derek: "For your sake, brother, I hope you're right."  So then we all know it's Fisher, right?  Jess interrogates Stewart/Fisher but her fuse is very short, so Derek pulls her off him.  He tells her that if this guy is Fisher, then he deserves everything he's going to get - but not before he admits that's who he is.

Sarah has another fever dream that she finds very disturbing and I find boring: a hospital nursery full of baby turtles.  When she wakes up, she's sleep-walked over to a mirror and is pointing a gun at it.  Meanwhile, when John and Cameron dig up Cromartie's grave to melt him down, all they find are his boots - the body is gone.  They immediately assume Ellison took it since he was the only other person who knew about the grave.

Derek brings Stewart/Fisher a cheeseburger as it's now time for good cop/bad cop.  Stewart/Fisher maintains his innocence.  Derek notices a tattoo on the inside of the man's arm: a clock with no hands.  This is a prison tattoo meaning "'til the end of time" and indicates a life sentence.  Stewart/Fisher: "How could I be here if I had a life sentence?"  Um, time travel?  Derek: "That's what we're going to find out."  He emails a photo of Stewart/Fisher's face to Cameron, asking her to check her memory banks.  She doesn't recognize the guy, which makes Derek doubt that it's Fisher.

John and Cameron stake out Ellison's house until he comes home.  Cameron grabs him by the throat and tosses him around the living room for a bit until he chokes out that he didn't take the body.  John believes him  and they leave.  Sarah goes back to Dr. Sherman's office, wanting to talk about her nightmares.  She's resistant and defensive, however, and he tells her he can't help her if she won't open up.  She pouts that she doesn't have anyone to talk to.  Sherman: "Nothing is going to happen in here until you decide to be honest." Sarah leaves.

Jess has kidnapped someone else: Warren from BtVS, a/k/a Charlie Fisher, an engineer at some local technology firm or something.  This kid and Stewart/Fisher have identical birthmarks on their shoulders so, yup, the old guy is Fisher, face-to-face with himself as a kid. Jess beats on old Fisher for a while as young Fisher freaks out.  The kid has no clue as to what's going on.  Jess tells Derek that it's his turn and it's going to stay his turn until Fisher talks.  Derek starts slicing into the younger Fisher who shrieks until his older self comes clean: I'm Charles Fisher from the future.  Derek: "Why are you here? What's your mission?"  Old Fisher: "I'm not here on a mission - this is my reward."  Seems he'd been captured by the machines and this is sort of a vacation for him.  I think he's lying.

The two Fishers talk a bit, the younger one skeptical about Judgment Day and the machines until the older one drops enough private information to convince him.  Outside, Jess is all, this guy was the worst of the worst and he needs to die.  Derek:  "What did he do to you?"  As Jess talks, we see her captured, drugged, starved and tortured by Fisher for months, all so the machines could learn about how humans work.  Derek's all, but how did you get away?  Jess: "You really don't remember any of this, do you?  It wasn't me they captured, Derek - it was you."  And then we see the same events, but with Derek in Jess's place.  Derek has absolutely no recollection of any of this, despite Jess insisting that he was obsessed with getting revenge on Fisher.  Derek goes back in and starts beating on the older Fisher.  Fisher: "So you remember me now?"  Derek: "No, but she does, and that's good enough for me."  Derek pulls his gun, ready to shoot the younger Fisher, but Jess beats him to it and shoots the older one instead.

John and Cameron get home and tell Sarah that Cromartie's body is gone and Ellison doesn't have it.  Sarah apologizes, telling John that Cromartie got to him because of her refusal to kill that last kid in the bowling alley.  She's wracked with guilt.  John: "We're not murderers.  You're not."  They talk about how they have to find Cromartie's body.

Speaking of bodies, Derek and Jess have buried the one they made.  Derek is concerned that the younger Fisher will talk but Jess says they had to let him go as he wasn't yet the monster they just killed.  She asks him again if he really doesn't remember anything about what happened with Fisher and he says no, nothing.  He muses that maybe he came from a future where it didn't happen and she came from the future where it did - maybe the things Derek and the Connors are doing now have changed the future just enough.

Young Fisher goes to his lab and is arrested by the FBI and Homeland Security.  They have records that he was in the lab at an unauthorized time and that he's installed a roving back-door in the mainframe that they've been unable to dismantle.  Fisher protests that it wasn't him, plus he doesn't have access to the mainframe ... and in a flashback we see the older Fisher doing everything the younger is accused of. Not on a mission my ass.  Young Fisher decides to try to explain about being kidnapped but when the FBI check out his story, they find no evidence and lock him up.

Ellison meets with Catherine Weaver and shows her Cromartie's body stuffed into the trunk of his car.  Ellison: "We have to figure out how they work."  Weaver smiles.  Oh, Ellison, you idiot.

Previously on T:TSCC / next time on T:TSCC