"Sarah Connor" 1.09: A great ad hoc finale
"Sarah Connor" 1.09: A great ad hoc finale
S1 comes to an amazing, if unorthodox end, in "What He Beheld."
Season 1 - Episode 9: “What He Beheld”Original Airdate: March 3, 2008
Written By: Ian B. Goldberg
Directed by: Mike Rohl
Plot Summary: The Connors’ search for The Turk leads them to an explosive confrontation with the mysterious criminal known only as Sarkissian. Meanwhile, Ellison’s investigation culminates with him coming face to face with Agent Robert Kester, aka Cromartie.
Review
As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Except, you rarely have any control over how and when they come to an end. Maybe you’re nonchalantly playing baseball with your older brother, only to realize that the Apocalypse has started. Maybe you’re preparing to celebrate your birthday with your family, only for your sister to get blown up with a car bomb. Or, perhaps the show you’re a big fan of gets cancelled or shortened due to unforeseen external events.
In an ironic meta-textual twist of fate, TSCC’s first season had to deal with the 2007 WGA writer’s strike, which cut its episode order down to just 9 episodes and made “What He Beheld,” a story about how life has a tendency to throw you unexpected curveballs that disrupt the best laid plans, into the defacto season finale.*
*Though the series would return for an expanded S2, the intended final act of that arc was jettisoned for a whole variety of reasons, sending the show into a different direction.
On some level, you can tell that it was not intended to be the end. It doesn’t really bring any S1 plotline to a definitive resolution, nor does it fulfill the promise of weaving together the disparate threads of the Connors, Ellison, and Cromartie. And yet, despite this, it still works remarkably well, both in and of itself and as a part of the larger narrative and thematic whole of TSCC’s first season. So, if the show had to end prematurely, it was probably for the best that it did so here.
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One thing to immediately appreciate about this episode is how it continues the structural experimentation of TSCC S1. There are roughly three parallel story threads playing out in “What He Beheld,” though their relative levels of importance are constantly renegotiated. The ostensible “A” story appears to be a self-contained mission that finds the Connors running afoul of the mysterious criminal named Sarkissian, who decides to blackmail them instead of simply selling them The Turk.
Now, the expected procedural route is that the Sarkissian threat is introduced in the beginning, escalates in the middle and is over and done with by the end. And the episode does start off in that direction, introducing the Internet café as a potentially important location at the outset and cluing us in to the idea this is where the episode will reach its climax. But as the case has been for much of this debut season, things don’t proceed as expected.
First, Cameron makes short work of Sarkissian’s henchman offscreen and then the mysterious Chola shows up to guide the Connors to Sarkissian’s hideout in retaliation to him killing Carlos’ crew (though the show notably leaves the fate of Carlos himself in question). The raid on the Café, which makes for an exciting set piece, goes surprisingly well, despite John having a close brush with death: Sarkissian is dead and the Connors have his hard drive with 15 minutes of running time left to spare. And what is great is that this doesn’t at all feel rushed, because the show once again narrows the story down to its core beats, while skipping all the busywork that usually takes place in the middle of a traditional network episode.
The final third of “What He Beheld” then moves on to the other two big threads. First, it deals with a stealthily constructed John/Derek plot, making it clear in hindsight why we saw that opening flashback and the seemingly throwaway scene of Derek and John talking in the car. Derek’s “birthday present” for John is the opportunity to see his father Kyle as a young boy, which also leads to his confession that he had figured out that John is his nephew. Later, when John returns to work on the hard drive, he basically lies by omission to Sarah, keeping the fact that Derek knows to himself.
It’s a great payoff to the slowly but surely growing relationship between the two of them and what I love is how it feels like an unexpected yet completely organic progression from the show’s previous episodes, which established that John is more trusting of Derek than either Cameron or even Sarah. Now, Derek knows and John knows that Derek knows, while Sarah doesn’t know Derek knows, nor that John knows that Derek knows.
And then, the episode brings to a head the Ellison/Cromartie story, which, though relatively brief, may be the most interesting and thematically significant one. The scene, where Ellison speaks with Charley for the first time in 8 years, illustrates just how much the character — and arguably, the writers’ conception of him — changed since the Pilot. Instead of the righteous skeptic and an antagonist to the Connors, the Ellison of the present is far more zen-like and a believer in Sarah’s cause.
His speech isn’t enough to convince Charley to divulge Sarah’s location, but it is enough to make him realize that Ellison now wants to protect her. The very way that he attempts to appeal to Charley by citing a passage from the book of Revelation reaffirms the series’ commitment to the idea that some sort of higher power exists in the universe of TSCC and that the events of Judgment Day are foretold in the Christian bible. Ellison never really explains why he cites this passage, but one can infer that he now believes that the prophesied Apocalypse is coming and that the Terminators pursuing Sarah are its heralds.
It is not clear, whether the series wants the audience to consider Terminators as literal stand-ins for the four horsemen, but the rest of Ellison’s subplot serves to indicate that at least one of the Terminators we’ve already met may very well be the personification of death. I am, of course, talking about Cromartie. After discovering that “George Lazlo” is masquerading as FBI agent Robert Kester — and incorrectly deducing that he is the lone suspect responsible for all the mysterious deaths he’s investigated this season — Ellison asks Simpson: “What is he?”
Now it is obvious that Cromartie is a Terminator, an inhuman killing machine, and this is something that Ellison by this point has come to realize himself. But, in context with everything else we’ve seen on the series thus far, the scene also suggests that Cromartie may be something more, something unknowable, perhaps supernatural, if only in a symbolic sense, an idea corroborated by the final shootout that sees Ellison’s FBI strike force utterly decimated.
Set to the tunes of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around,” which reiterates the biblical passage Ellison cited earlier, it is easily one of the most memorable and aesthetically pleasing action sequences that the series ever put together. After the first agent is shot back and falls into a swimming pool, the camera lingers there as we see more and more bodies accumulate in the pool in slow motion, the image overlaid with sounds of shots firing and radio exchanges letting us know that the FBI is losing.
This ballsy choice of staging never actually lets us see the action that takes place, effectively robbing us of the excitement offered by traditional action coverage. By the time the song is over, and we cut back to the surface, the message conveyed by this combination of sound and image is clear. How exactly Cromartie manages to shoot and kill all those armed men is not the point. The point is that they never really stood a chance, for Cromartie is far beyond that of mere mortals.
He is the fourth horseman, death incarnate, the man who comes around and takes names. And he is also the one who judges you and decides your fate. We see the latter quite literally when Ellison chooses to embrace death and shuts his eyes in anticipa-tion, only for the Terminator to instead walk away nonchalantly and toss his handgun.
Now, one can easily come up with a plot-related explanation for why Cromartie doesn’t kill Ellison. Cromartie only in this episode discovered that Ellison was the lead investigator on the Sarah Connor case, so we can assume that he weighed the pros and cons of killing Ellison and chose to spare him due to the possibility that he may very well lead him to his true targets.
But the series depicts this moment as miraculous and surreal — we have this interesting pause, almost as if Cromartie wants to kill Ellison, but something else is holding him back from doing so. Given everything else we’ve seen on the show so far, it would not be unfair to assume that whatever higher power exists in this world, whether it be God or Skynet, has other plans for Ellison, and so stays Cromartie’s hand. In other words, Ellison doesn’t die, because it is not his time yet.
And then, the episode in its final scene bring us back to the Connors, reiterating the idea that nothing good really lasts. Their victory over Sarkissian and John’s happiness at getting a moment of brief normalcy amidst all the chaos literally go up in flames, when the real Sarkissian (James Urbaniak) — the cashier of the café and the father of the little girl Derek took hostage previously — shows up looking for payback.
It’s an amazing reveal, in part because it both feels inevitable and surprising. (Faux) Sarkissian’s defeat seemed a wee bit too easy, yet there was no in-story reason to suspect that plotline wasn’t finished.* Moreover, we realize that Sarkissian is not a one-and-done villain at all, but somebody meant to play a bigger role in the macro-arc of S1. And so, we end on a moment of uncertainty, with a final shot of Sarah ready for action and Cameron seemingly taken out by a car bomb.
*It helps also that James Urbaniak isn’t such a big actor that you immediately know there is a twist coming with his character.
Speaking of Cameron, if there’s any major character that feels somewhat shortchanged by this episode, I’d say it’s her. While she plays a key role in the plot — and gets a particularly badass moment to bust a wall during the attack on Sarkissian’s hideout — she has relatively few moments of character development, the most notable being her discussion of birthdays with John at the Museum.* Nonetheless, what we do get with Cameron is pretty good. Her early scenes again demonstrate how much more interesting the high-school scenes can be once they directly intersect with the Connors’ other lives. And though it’s difficult to believe that Cameron wouldn’t survive that car bomb, it doesn’t lessen the impact of the finale’s cliffhanger ending.
*One gets the impression that Cameron genuinely wants to experience a birthday or “built-day,” whichever applies to her, another idea alongside her going on a prom date that I am sad will have never received a follow-up.
Overall, “What He Beheld” is a great, if unorthodox season finale to what has been one of the most unorthodox network genre series to come out right before the era of peak TV. Though season 2, unfortunately, would suffer from a greater degree of network interference, it is great that this episode will not ultimately have been the last we would see of the Connors.
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Notes and Annotations:
A whole lot of ideas and setups for future episodes introduced in “What He Beheld” would, unfortunately, not carry over to S2. Thus, it’s time to speculate as to what the lost third act of S1 would’ve been.
Before the car explosion, John found and printed out a photo of a potential buyer of The Turk, but the Connors never follow up on this lead. The guy who had purchased the Turk looks like a Terminator and the original plans for S1 state that there was a network of Terminators working in LA. Based on this, it seems the final four episodes would’ve revealed that the Turk has been acquired by this Terminator network, rather than Zeiracorp.
The larger role clearly intended for Sarkissian would also be dropped, and no mention would ever be made again of his daughter. It is debatable just how big the role would’ve been, but I doubt it’s coincidental that the faux Sarkissian establishes that he had access to Sarah’s FBI files or that he threatened to out her if she did not comply with his demands. I believe the ultimate consequence of the Connors messing with him would be that his “people” would inform Ellison of where Sarah is. Luckily, as Ellison had come around by that point, he would not arrest her but instead join forces to stop Cromartie.
I suggest reading a 2021 interview with James Urbaniak conducted by Will Harris of
, where the actor discusses the role of Sarkissian and his disappointment at dying in the opening sequence of Season 2:One very obvious bit of setup was the “prom,” which Cameron was set to attend with Morris (Luis Chavez). I suspect that prom night would’ve taken place in the season finale, as this would provide a perfect opportunity for Cromartie to attack John, as well as bring the events of the season full circle. S1, after all, began with Cromartie attacking John at school, so it would make sense for it to end with him attacking him at school again.
The only episode that we have some real details for is the original planned tenth episode of S1,“The Crawl,” which would’ve focused on Cameron as she crawled back to the Connors’ house after sustaining heavy damage and losing her legs as a result of the explosion. Based on this, we can infer that Cameron would have to get her legs back for future stories, likely using the bar(s) of Coltan she got back in “Heavy Metal.” This may explain why Cameron is a sidelined somewhat in the finale, for the following episode would’ve been a Cameron-centric hour.
One of the final three episodes of the season would’ve definitely had to bring the School Graffiti mystery to a conclusion. Josh Friedman mentioned in an interview that various students at the school were being targeted by a blackmailer and John would’ve run afoul of him. By this, I assume he would’ve blackmailed John by threatening to reveal his true identity. It is likely that this incident would’ve also brought John closer to Cherri Westin, who was being blackmailed in regard to an unexplained incident in Wichita.
I do wonder if that business card Cromartie gave Charley, which he then relayed to Sarah, would’ve come back into play somehow. It seems unlikely, as Cromartie has been outed by the end of this episode. Indeed, I’m kinda disappointed that he never got to do all that much with his new suit before Ellison uncovered his new identity.
I love how the series again suggests some strange and inexplicable relationship between Cameron and Chola. I believe the implication is that Chola wanted to die after getting revenge on Sarkissian, which is why Cameron asks her if she’s supposed to kill her.
On the “Producer’s Blog” entry for “Dungeons and Dragons” Josh Friedman noted that the original plan was to do four episodes set in the post-apocalyptic future in a 22-episode season. This then got shortened to just two future war eps. due to the 13-episode greenlight and the just one due to the Strike cutting the order down to nine episodes. This means that one of the three final episodes of the season would’ve featured Future War flashbacks. Until recently, I believed this would be a sequel to “Dungeons,” but I now think that we would’ve gotten an episode where the Connors repair Cameron and this would be interspersed with flashbacks to the Future War from her perspective.
Some quotes about the episode from Josh Friedman, dated 03/03/2008 :“If you’re reading this I’m going to bet you already know tonight’s the two hour season finale of TSCC. In case you don’t know, well, you do now. These two episodes were never supposed to be the end of our season, but there was this little thing called the writers’ strike, and there you go. As it happens, if we were going to end somewhere, these two episodes aren’t a bad place to do it. Dumb luck, really. But I’d rather be lucky than good any day. (And I am.)
“Ian Goldberg, another one of our staff writers, penned “What He Beheld…” This is probably one of the only seasons in television history where the last two episodes of the season were written by staff writers (the most inexperienced writers on a show). Then again, I’d never written an episode of television before this year so what’s it matter? Both of them were under intense pressure to write quickly and I can’t praise them enough.”
“As of this writing it’s unknown whether we’re coming back for Season 2. I’m very proud of Season 1 and I know I speak for John and James when I say how much I appreciate everybody’s intense interest in our show. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to come back and do it again.”
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