Exclamation points! I love the fact that this trailer doesn’t start with Ryan Kwanten‘s character being normal and doing whatever his character does before diving into the fantasy. This trailer is all second act and context clues. In Knights of Badassdom, Kwanten plays a young man who needs an escape, so his friends (Peter Dinklage and Steve Zahn) kidnap him, strap some fake armor to his chest, and bring him to a LARPing (Live-Action Role Playing (let’s all pretend you needed that cleared up)) battle. It sounds like a lot of harmless fun. Until they summon a real demon who proceeds to rip out throats with her teeth.

Joss Whedon certainly does like working with familiar faces. In fact, he likes it so much that he has made room for one of his favorites in his latest offering.

The reviews for Terminator Salvation are mixed. Not exactly what the studio would hope for with a summer tentpole. Does that mean they should stop the franchise? The usual idiots verbally spar it out for this week’s Shouting Match.

Sarah is in jail, facing FBI prosecution. John and Cameron are holed up in a seedy motel, waiting for things to blow over.

John discovers that Savannah Weaver is a target of a Terminator. John Henry detects the threat and tries to lead Savannah to safety. When the Garbage Terminator learns her daughter has been kidnapped, she enlists the help of both John Henry and Agent Ellison to track her down.

In order to keep John safe, Sarah calls on an old friend – former boyfriend Charley Dixon – to keep him in a safe house. Meanwhile, John Henry finds himself in peril when an unknown entity sends a message through the security measures and possibly trips his original programming.

Jessie is still having trouble dealing with the aftermath of killing Riley. She’s weighted down with guilt as we flash back to her time on the S.S. Jimmy Carter with a story that explains why she doesn’t trust the machines.

Now that Riley is finally dead, the Connors are all playing right into the hands of the BSG Sexpot, thinking that it was Cameron who killed her. Meanwhile, the BSG Sexpot flashes back (or rather flashes forward to the future) about a critical submarine missions with special orders from John Connor.

Riley comes back to seek help from John and his family, but she finds that Cameron is increasingly suspicious of her motives. And that suspicion is well founded, considering that the BSG Sexpot is manipulating things behind the scenes.

Sarah is having trouble sleeping after killing the man at the warehouse. She checks into a sleep clinic to help her cope, but soon she fears that she is the center of an experiment by Skynet to map her brain.

Sarah and Company attend funeral services for the families who had loved ones that died in the mysterious warehouse explosion. John follows the lead of a father who has disappeared after the explosion while Sarah befriends the widow of the man she killed.

Sarah finds herself in the hospital with a gunshot wound from her shoot-out at the Skynet warehouse. She escapes the hospital and kidnaps a doctor to help take the bullet out, all the time hallucinating a visit with Kyle Reese. The retrofitted Terminator John Henry is learning about himself and the operation while the Garbage Terminator takes matters into her own hands… literally.

Sarah is continuing her research on the three dot symbol that has been haunting her visions. This leads her to a UFO convention and a conspiracy theorist in hiding who might have a connection to the manufacturing of the Machines.

Sarah and Cameron head out to the woods to save a family that has been targeted by the machines for termination, and the easy part of the rescue is convincing them that there are cyborgs from the future trying to kill them.

On a generally slow night in the Connor family, Cameron (Summer Glau) heads off to the library to conduct some after-hours research. There, she discovers a picture from the 1920s that has a Terminator in it.

Sarah and Cameron are hot on the track of the people they believe have The Turk. Meanwhile, John is still pining over Riley, who receives a visitor that explains some secrets. And Agent Ellison works with the Garbage Terminator to interview a growing artificial intelligence.

It’s no surprise to anyone reading this that I have been awfully critical of this show in season two. However, once we got past the nightmare elements, this episode shaped up rather nicely.

In the grand style of Vantage Point, The Sarah Connor Chronicles tells this episode’s story from multiple points of view. John (Thomas Dekker) runs off for the weekend with Riley (Leven Rambin) and ends up in a Mexican jail.

Sarah and company come home to find their house has been robbed. And John whines a lot.

This episode kinda makes me wish that Michael Biehn hadn’t made the jump to the past in 1984, fathering what might be the biggest panty-waste in future resistance history.