This was both the most riveting and in a small way one of the most boring episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Luckily the former far outshone the latter.

We got ourselves an origin story last night, the origins of a cyborg, and it was a tragedy. Through the mind’s eye of a short-circuiting Cameron we learned of Allison Young, a teenager born before Judgement Day but most of whose life was defined by it. A fighter for the human resistance, she was captured by the machines and interrogated.

For a while there, you almost thought she and Cameron were one and the same. Not quite.

Meanwhile, Busy Phillips’ character—who has made so little impression on me I’d have to look up her name and don’t feel like it—is having pregnancy problems. Sarah, ever the good Samaritan, takes her to the hospital and spends the next day with her there.

While John Connor searches for Cameron, Sarah offers maternal bedside manner to Phillips’s mother-to-be. I get it: Sarah laments that she can never protect her son the way she feels compelled to. It’s a struggle no mother should face, but all those babies on the maternity ward are counting on her. Yada yada.

I was tempted to fast forward through every hospital scene (because DVR is how I roll), but I didn’t.

The producers of the show have made it clear Cameron is only a machine and will never be more than that. That doesn’t keep me from rooting for her to be more, against all logic. And it isn’t like the show doesn’t lead me and like-minded viewers on. Her desperate appeal to John in the pilot not to kill her comes to mind. And tonight’s flashbacks to a more emotional, defiant and courageous figure who looks just like her spurred me to root harder.

But in the end, logic prevailed like a soulless machine squeezing the life out of its heroic likeness.

Cameron was, as we knew all along, created to kill John Connor. But first she killed the girl he loved. And somewhere along the line, in a narrative we haven’t seen yet, she failed to kill him, was deactivated and reprogrammed by him. That still didn’t keep me from mourning Allison Young’s death and the tragic life, in which that next birthday never arrived.

And just how sad was it when Cameron, in her delusion, called Claire Young, who was only then pregnant and unaware of her daughter or the unwitting impostor on the phone?

Summer Glau is a fantastic actress, one of the best on this show for sure. Her portrayal of Cameron as she drifts from robotic consciousness to the frightened flashbacks of a young girl in a nightmare world was amazing. Throw in her portrayal of future Allison, a prisoner in a fright show of a prison where people are caged alongside maneaters.

As Allison, Cameron seemed to really befriend Jodie, the conniving runaway who nearly suffered the same fate as Allison amid Cameron’s flashbacks. Even as whiplash quick as she returned to her “normal” state, Cameron betrayed a hint of hanging onto this new awareness she’d discovered, telling John she’d gotten her necklace at some thrift store just like Jodie had lied to her.

He can never trust her. Not only could she turn on him at any moment, she isn’t quite right already.

Allison’s back story is intriguing: the daughter of an architect and a music teacher from Palmdale. I suppose eventually we’ll learn how she survived, fell in with the resistance and met John. More important, we’ll learn how John somehow replaced her with Cameron. It does already explain why he sent her back from the future.

How cool was it for Cameron to be questioned by the social worker even as she flashed back to interrogating Allison, matching question for question and answer nearly for answer?

I got a little annoyed at the Battlestar Galactica parallels that seemed to be getting established, that there will be good terminators who want peace. But it quickly seemed clear that was merely a ruse to get close to the resistance.

The C story had to do with Agent Ellison’s developing alliance with the erstwhile Catherine Weaver. Weaver’s husband died in a aviation crash, the cause of which is apparently in doubt. We know Weaver is really the T-1001, and she’s a baddie. Ellison doesn’t know that. But he’s going to hunt terminators for her, huh? That’s not going to end well.

That storyline is unfolding way too slowly, wasting two incredibly interesting characters.

A couple of random observations:

Those tattoos that the terminators put on captured humans don’t go on easy, huh? Yech.

Ellison has an ex-wife who knows him so well she can tell he isn’t wearing a cross. And she’s also an agent. Convenient.

I thought for sure Jodie was going to lift Cameron’s wad of cash.

How surprising was it for Cameron to give it to the guy who cold-cocked Jodie? I was sure Cameron was going to knock him out.

Apparently, Jodie is a frustrated fashion designer. Why put that sketch out there and then drop it?

No Riley tonight. Or Cromartie. Whatevs.

Ah well, not a perfect episode, but quite awesome for what it gave us information-wise. I just wish they’d get away from the wishy-washy Sarah because those chronicles aren’t very interesting.