Ever since Cromartie’s head bounced out of the temporal event and into the future, he’s been an unspoken threat and a menace lurking in the background, a threat that exploded in the first season finale wiping out an FBI SWAT team and tearing holes in the lives of Charlie and Agent Ellison. In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Mousetrap 2x03, Cromartie brings the threat home by creating an elaborate mousetrap to catch John Connor.

Cromartie is Mousetrap’s strong suit, less the conventional T-800 Terminator and something closer to the T-1000, S2E03 Mousetrap demonstrates his ingenious ability to set a trap, operating at an inhuman level that makes him an eerie match for Cameron. Unfortunately his ingeniousness comes at the cost of rendering Sarah and John Connor into idiots playing out an idiot plot.

John Connor has gotten ridiculously whiny lately and Sarah Connor’s actions in this episode are completely out of character. Putting her son at risk twice in order to save Charlie’s wife would be bad enough, but going into a building with a Terminator inside backed by two humans, one of them holding a 9MM pistol is just laughable. Cromartie vandalizing their car instead of blowing them to hell is also a little dubious though justifiable as part of an overly complicated plot.

While Mousetrap is an appropriately dark episode, the heart of the series as of the original Terminator is the humans rather than the machines. And while the second season of Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles is doing a great job with the Terminators, it needs to step up its game when it comes to John and Sarah Connor.