TV REVIEW: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep" (Season 2, Episode 16)

Welcome to the the Fox Friday Night Death Slot where they dump all their soon-to-be-cancelled shows. Tonights feature: Terminator 2.5 (Cuz, y'see, it takes place in between the 2nd and 3rd movies, on an awkward tangent timeline)

There's two plots running paralel on the show tonight. In one, Sarah is in a sleep research clinic because she hasn't slept since she whacked that security guard dude like two weeks earlier, and she's getting increasingly jittery, paranoid, and clumsy. Let's face it - you don't want a woman as heavily beweaponed as Mz. Connor getting clumsy. People die when that happens.

In the sleep clinic, Sarah is monitored and drugged and assigned an annoying, overweight english roomate. She begins to suspect all is not as it appears when the place seems increasingly dictatorial and creepy, and then her roomie dies in exactly the manner she dreams about. There's midnight skulkings about which unconver a secret room where mysterious shenanegins go on. John doesn't believe any of this, and thinks his mom is merely psychotic from sleep deprivation. Ultimately, however, he grudgingly helps her check it out.

In the other plot, Sarah is captured by the security guard she whacked. He was very clearly dead before - apparently. I never saw that episode - so his return has to be a dream, right? He captures her, traps her in a van, and questions her in a creepy but non-invasive manner more like an old-fashined LSD Psychological Session than a real badass, and pumps her full of drugs to get answers. We see the scene play over and over again. At one point, he seems to let her go, but he's just screwing with her, and he admits to killing a hell of a lot of people for his bosses, who ran the factory. They're European!

We cut back and forth between these paralell tracks more or less at random until a Terminator nurse gets the gun away from Sarah in the sleep research center and shoots John dead on the spot. Then Sarah wakes up in the van, and manages to work out her escape (Unbelievably gory!), and subdues her captor, the previously-dead-now-not-so-much security goon.

"You're real" She asks/declares.

He allows as how he is.

She kills him dead on the spot, and then goes home.

The End.

OBSERVATIONS

The big hook/fakeout in this episode is that the van sequences are real, while the more-real-seeming hostpital sequences are fakes. Yawn. Very Freshman English Writing For Science Fiction Media 101. Seriously. That's an old, old, saw. I, myself, had called it before the first commercial break, though I'm sharper in the old-school cliches and counter-cliches than most. But seriously - did that surprise anyone? Twists are supposed to be the thing you don't expect. Therefore it's the opposite of what the episode is telegraphing. If the episode *Seems* to be saying the hospital is real, and the nightmare is a dream, then nooooooooooooooo the hospital will be revealed in the final act to be the dream and the nightmare is real. It's hard to overlook a cliche as hoary as that, nor one that's been the subject of so many twilight zone episodes, at least one TNG episode (Riker is either Riker, or else he's an alien from a race composed entirely of eye-bags who thinks he's Riker), a couple Voyage to the