An excellent episode with two very well integrated plot arcs. The Connors are robbed and spend the episode searching for their identities. Cromartie gets ever closer to the Connors. While Ellison, he's more and more entangled in the future and the past. (spoilers)

First off, I just have to say that the teaser for "Brothers of Nablus" was on par with the long ago ST:NG blow up the Enterprise episode teaser. With nary a thought of review, I rewound just to watch it again because it was that was mind-boggling.

We continue with our trend of the porous future. Skynet knows who Ellison is and has sent a machine back to become him. Since it seems redundant for that to involve searching for the Connors, I do wonder at his role as the future unfolds. It seems more and more clear that Catherine Weaver's plans may not be the same as Skynet's plans.

While Cromartie continued on his journey to becoming an individual. Consider the sheer contrast between how he interacts with Ellison and how he interacts with Jody and Riley later in the episode. When Ellison asks Cromartie a question, why he saved him, Cromartie actually replies. "Skynet does not believe in you like I do. You will lead me to the Connors." Consider that killing John Connor is Cromartie's reason for existence given to him by his creator, Skynet, and yet he opposes the will of Skynet in order to achieve that purpose. The idea of a machine having faith in anything is somewhat mind boggling. Also Cromartie kills another machine because of that faith. That's a lot of attention on one man, who isn’t about to save the world. Skynet, Weaver, and Cromartie are all interested in Ellison, which leaves the viewer to speculate as to why.

Meanwhile at the Connor residence, they've been robbed of money and IDs, although presumably not the guns in the walls. The blame is placed on Riley, who John gave the security code. There a particular emphasis here in the danger of their identities falling into the wrong hands. It's the first of many moments in the episode that plays on the nature and danger of identity.

Also I'm inclined to wonder if the blame is misplaced. The introduction of Jessie last week puts yet one more agenda in the storyline. Thus far, only Skynet and Future-John have sent characters back. They each have specific and defined agendas. Kill humanity. Save humanity. Jessie is a wild card, who is on one hand intimate with Derek. On the other hand, she's hiding her surveillance of the Connors. Given her dealings with Moishe, I wonder if she set the thieves in that direction in the first place.

Even more troubling is that when Sarah calls Derek, he hides Jessie's presence from the Connors and conversely he hides the presence of the Connors from Jesse. It isn't a good thing to be caught between loyalties. Derek tells Jessie that he needs to return to real life. When she remarks on a quip, he makes the amusing comment that the first thing that people notice about him is that he's "Funny Derek." It's both an amusing line, which inverts what people might actually notice, in this case his palimpsest of scars and tattoos, and again it plays into that concept of how people identify and characterize each other visually.

After all, what sets Cromartie ever closer on the trail of the Connors is a scan of Cameron's picture that was taken at the shelter from "Allison from Palmdale." He recognizes Cameron and visits the shelter. As he questions the woman at the counter and identifies himself as Cameron's uncle, the woman  responds that she is Angelina Jolie. Like Funny Derek, it is humor at the inversion of identity.

However, Jody recognizes the picture. Cromartie again plays at being an uncle, someone connected by blood, but denies her identification of him as a cop, someone representing the law. Oddly, Cromartie actually is related to Cameron after a fashion, a sort of sibling. However Jody tells him about Cameron's brother, John Baum, and with a word, Cromartie has John's other identity.

Ellison, as when the episode opens, gets a knock on the door. He attempts to confirm the identity of the people outside by asking a sports question. Presuming, I suppose, that machines don't follow sports. He doesn't know yet about their Bible reading ways. Ellison is arrested for a murder that his future-doppelganger committed. He is placed in a line up, where he is positively identified. The reason he was picked up was the witness remembered his face from the t.v. report about the FBI deaths. This is identity theft in the most extreme degree. What was stolen from him was not credit cards or his social security serial number, but his face.

In our other plot thread, the Connor's go to Moishe, a diamond fence, and encounter the other thematic plot arc of the episode, and in a way the series. Moishe pontificates on the violation of their home and quotes conflicting religious concepts. He starts with the admonition not to seek vengeance which he balances against the idea of "an eye for an eye" and a reference to the story of the Brothers of Nablus, the episode title.

Cameron's odd mercy in "Allison from Palmdale" in not killing Jody has led to Cromartie getting closer on their trail. While conversely in that episode her murder of Allison, the first person whose identity she once stole, short circuits her memories. Cameron is the same as the Terminator who attempted to kill Ellison. In one case, Cameron has replaced and subsumed Allison. In the other case, Ellison was spared by the faith of someone stage left. Someone who also stolen the face and identity of a person, Lazlo.

Moishe tells the Connors to go after a man named Walter. He tells them that he’s providing this information because of Jessie. When Sarah asks about Jessie, Derek lies to her and says that "Jesse" was a fellow resistance fighter, who was killed last season. Jessie's name is ambiguous enough that it can be a man or a woman's name, depending on the addition of an "i", which can be seen, but not heard. His/her identity is a matter of perception and how much truth is revealed.

This is further emphasized in the subsequent scene where Cromartie and Jody, odd couple that they are, discuss who Cromartie is. Jody runs through the options of not uncle, not cop, which leaves "some guy." Like Ellison at the beginning of the episode, she asks the "why" for his motivations. The difference is Jody doesn't wait for a response. She fills it in herself that he's out for revenge. His reply, which is some form of the truth, doesn’t get at the full answer.

Plot lines converge as Cromartie, Jody, John, and Riley all end up at the supermarket where Cameron had her melt down. It's a wonderfully tense scene with un-knowing characters gliding down well stocked aisles and never see each other. The truth of the matter can be blocked by flimsy towers of food.

While the action end of the team discover that Moishe has led them off track. He lied to them about the identity of the thieves and has sent them to frighten someone who owes him money. Sarah and Derek argue over why they have been led off track. Derek's angry concern that John is becoming more "John Baum" and less "John Connor" is fascinating in context with thinking about identity and becoming an adult. John is becoming the person that he will be. John Baum is the normal kid, who makes mistakes with girls. John Connor will save humanity. In a way, he’s both. So much story telling has been built up around “John Connor” that no person could ever live up to being him. Superman must be Clark Kent and bumble with the rest of us.

Sarah and Derek then argue about the others ability to comprehend the experience of another. Here Sarah is a mother-lion concerned about John following his killing of Sarkasian. While Derek is that war scarred soldier, who has seen the world die.

The second confrontation with Moishe goes somewhat better and leads Sarah and Cameron off to search for the thieves trail. While Derek goes off to confront Jessie about Moishe. He finds her soaking in the sun by a pool. These war hardened people are surrounded by laughing sunlit innocence and Jessie reasserts her desire to experience every moment of this innocent time. This only served to further remind me of Jessie's ulterior motives, because Derek's charms aside, if avoiding the apocalypse were her objective, she'd have gone back far enough not to care.

Cromartie begins a door to door search in a one mile radius out from the market, because an employee recognized the Connors as repeat customers. Again pictures rather than names identify. Jody continues to criticize Cromartie's mechanical search technique and in one of the odder moments of the episode, demands to be let out of the car. Cromartie actually slows down and shoves her out. That is to say, he doesn't snap her neck. It bears repeating, he even slows down. Given that I doubt he has "faith" in her, in a way it’s an even odder action that saving Ellison.

Cromartie makes it as far as still-very pregnant Kacy's house. He identifies Cameron as his niece. Kacy, like the witness who recognized Ellison earlier, recognizes Cromartie's face. Unlike the witness, she doesn't remember where she remembers him.

At the compound, Riley pretends to live in the house, while John grabs a gun in a game of avoid the wandering Terminator. There's a sort of parallelism in Riley and Cromartie’s claims. Cromartie's not an uncle. She doesn't live there. Also, in an episode where Cromartie has been holding up various pictures as a way of identifying people and Ellison was identified in a line up, Cromartie looks at the photo's on the refrigerator and recognizes that Riley is not in them. She rather cleverly responds that it is because she's the one taking them. In a way, she is defining herself as the one who defines others, not as the identified. This makes sense because while John may not realize it, up until this point in the plot she represents his desire to be John Baum.

Meanwhile Sarah and Cameron question the parents of their thief. Pictures of him line the mantelpiece and his life's ambition is to make films. It's a contrast to both the lack of photos of Riley on the refrigerator and the lack of pictures of the Connors. Their only "family" pictures are the photos that Cromartie uses to track and kill them. For the Connor's even their secret identities are a liability.

Later in the car with John, Riley jokes that her middle name is Lucky and then messes up and calls herself Lucky Riley Dawson. Her primary characteristic here, unlike funny Derek, is luck. She has no idea how lucky she has been.

In a parallel car scene, Cameron tells Sarah the story of the Brothers of Nablus from the Bible. It bears considering that the story Cameron tells is the story of bloody revenge. An individual is injured and the entire town is smited. Sarah characterizes the story as Cameron's kind of story, which she accepts. Stories can also be used to identify people. Future-John is entirely defined by the story of his life. 

In yet another form of identification, the thieves use one of the stolen credit cards in a bowling alley. Here identity is attached to a number, which, being tied to a network, allows both Sarah and Cameron, and Cromartie right to them.
It’s questionable that they are lucky that Sarah and Cameron gets there first. As Sarah goes to find one of the thieves, Cameron shoots the other three in an extremely prejudicial manner. This isn't swift vengeance. It's protection. While Sarah, as the New Testament character, spares the life of the baby faced fourth thief.

On the Ellison front, Catherine first visits Ellison in prison. What's interesting here is that he hasn't told her about his encounter with Cromartie. He first makes his freedom a requirement before he'll tell her anything. He's ultimately sprung because the testimony of the witness isn't credible. The "detective" pulls out a full description of what the witness saw, naked Ellison, time travel bubble and all. Since the truth is “clearly” crazy, Ellison is free to go. It comes as no surprise to see the detective become Catherine. This implies that somewhere there's a dead detective.

It was a surprise that even out of prison, Ellison doesn't tell Catherine everything of what happened at the episodes beginning. He visits his ex-wife to once again gaze on the familiar of his home, but that home is gone. He goes to Catherine and tells her that he saw his doppelganger and that he doesn't know where he is, which implies that there's another Ellison wandering around. Instead of telling her that Cromartie actively saved him, he tells her that he thinks he's being tested. Terminators, ever Old Testament, Catherine compares Ellison to Job, who was tested by God by having everything taken from him and spared because he had faith. The difficulty here is which machines have faith in Ellison and which won’t.

While it seems that Derek and Jessie are equally Old Testament. They both arrive at Moishe’s. Jessie got there first and has killed him, perhaps to prevent him from telling what he knows. She asks Derek what he was planning on doing there, and once again we get the line "Funny Derek” before they clean out Moishe’s diamonds. Based on their actions, the line blurs between resistance fighters and common thieves.

After all the threads come to their end, Sarah dictums that John cannot bring anyone to their safe/unsafe house again, which serves as yet one more step in the attempt to hermeticism John's life. It's doomed to fail. Something that John takes Sarah to task on. She tells him that she'll keep him safe, but she cannot. She couldn't keep him from having to kill Sarkasian. She's not going to be able to protect him from having to be John Connor. The scene layers on yet more secrets, because John does not tell either Cameron or Sarah that Cromartie was there. As with last season, where they didn't tell Sarah that Cromartie visited his school, John is struggling to hold on to being John Baum.

The story closes with Cromartie questioning the baby faced thief. Sarah may have cause to regret sparing the boy as Cromartie works to pry what he knows about the Connors out of him.

This begs the question within the series which philosophy will win out. Cameron’s caution where she killed three of the thieves is paralleled with the smiting of Nablus. At the same time, it can be paralleled with Skynet’s pre-emptive smiting of the world because it was afraid. Ellison may eventually have cause to regret Cromartie's mercy. Just as Sarah may have cause to regret her mercy to the youngest thief. It is equally possible she may continue to regard it as an essential component of her humanity. Hopefully, as the year plays out we'll get to see what identities everyone grows into.