"The Good Wound," the 14th, season two episode of "The Sarah Connor Chronicles," manages to remind its title character of her priorities while at the same time telling an incidental love story before Valentine's Day.
Lena Headey's Sarah Connor exemplifies the tremendous extent of her sacrifice to keep her son alive until Judgement Day when the Kyle Reese hallucination (Jonathan Jackson) says to her, "I die for John Connor." She responds, "I die for my son."
Contrasting how Kyle dies for a man who stands for a cause with how Sarah suffers for someone she loves, the latter implies that she has given up her own identity for this one sole mission. Protecting John is all that defines Sarah, and the Kyle hallucination's photo is a reminder of when she discarded her old identity.
Kyle's hallucination continuously stifles her soldier's instinct to hide her identity and trust no one, reminding her in a way that it is her mission to survive. Fighting the war against Skynet is not necessarily her responsibility, after all.
Here "The Good Wound" introduces a few difficult questions to answer, which are whether Sarah as a soldier is being too hard on John, if she is trying too hard out of a mother's instinct to fight a war that fate dictates belongs to him, or both.
All are likely relevant to ponder about because of how Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green) openly questions why John, his future commanding officer, unnecessarily exposes himself to the authorities in choosing to look after a hospitalized Riley.
Either John is too emotionally erratic, understands something about human compassion that the battle-hardened Derek does not, or both.
A comment made by Summer Glau's Cameron that the future John would have more important things to worry about than the health of one person drives this point home.
Very apropos to introduce this complexity in the development of characters who are less important in the future than John, it implies that he must as a leader learn to think about the bigger picture when it comes to caring for the people in his life, even if that means making sacrifices. Sarah might yet allow her son to learn this lesson through experience.
Two different approaches for the ethical development of the infant-like John Henry by James Ellison (Richard T. Jones) and Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) are meant to represent a parallel to the parental roles Sarah and Derek play in John Connor's life.
Slightly confusing about the episode is the scene between Sarah and the Kyle hallucination near the scorched apple tree.
A good guess is that the apple Weaver eats earlier represents the machines destroying the paradise God gave the human race and how the survivors make do with what little they have left. The burned apple tree Kyle and Derek use as a meeting place where they keep their prized possessions indicates that love, Sarah's photo, is buried underneath the collateral damage of the war against the SkyNet.
At least it is reassuring to know that the series' writers are taking a few creative risks.
"The Good Wound" is a complex examination of its title character that might not necessarily make sense to casual viewers looking for a few explosive Terminator moments. While there is a literal explosion in the episode, the story alone provides very combustible plot devices with which to keep "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" burning this season.
Popcorn rating:(4 out of 5 pieces)
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