Dekker—who in real life is prone to giggling and is way friendlier than his dour onscreen character—reveals, among other things, that his not-everything-she-seems girlfriend Riley (Leven Rambin) may not have killed herself, as it appeared in the last episode of last year.

"She did not die from slitting her wrists," Dekker said, confirming what co-star Garret Dillahunt had leaked earlier. "I will say that much. But I can't say what happens—Garret's a trickster, so I wouldn't believe much that he said."

But she may not be the last character to take the big dirt nap as the season winds up, Dekker added. "They said at Comic-Con that one of the major characters would die this season, and I think everyone thought it was Garret's character [killer cyborg Cromartie] ... His character did die, but then ... he's back [as a new cyborg, so] maybe he's not the one who dies. I can't really say who. It's so cryptic. Somebody still has to die. ... Yes, there's still a major death. I think."

John will encounter his real father, the ill-fated Kyle Reese, played by Jonathan Jackson, at some point.

Interesting. Are we going to see a lot more cyborgs coming back or a lot more people? It seems like there's a revolving door on the time machine.

Dekker: I think that the writers are tired of that. I think that initially, when we started the second season, kind of one of the requests of sort of the powers that be was that we did more singular episodes, less serialized. ... That's why they invented the wall with all the names on it, so that we would be able to do a mission an episode. But that involved a lot of Terminators coming back, and to me that's always irritated our writers. And now they have permission to be more serialized again, and more science fiction, so that's happening less. Because that started to bug me. I was like, "Yeah, this time machine's busier than freaking JFK airport." ...

Yeah, I think it does, it definitely, I don't think in the back nine we find anybody coming back. There's just a lot, it really gets interesting with John Henry [Dillahunt] and, uh, my father.