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With the help of Miles Dyson's widow, Sarah tracks down a former Cyberdyne intern whose photograph appears in surveillance photos taken by the resistance fighters they found dead last episode. Sarah figures they were a "Skynet hunting party," so she tracks down the intern herself, and he's now a dorky cell phone salesman with a hobby that involves building a chess-playing computer that may or may not be on the cusp of artificial intelligence. She charms her way into a couple of dates and then torches his house. Which beats the time he went on Blind Date and a little pop-up graphic implied he was impotent, but still.
Meanwhile, Cameron and John begin classes, with John warning Cameron not to be a freak. This proves to be more than she can handle; she tells another girl that yes, that dress does make you look fat, and then makes friends with another girl who goes and throws herself off the roof of the school a couple hours later. It probably wasn't Cameron's fault, but she stops John from intervening. Sarah thinks that was the right decision, but John wants to know why they're bothering to save humanity from the robots if this is the way they're going to act.
Special agent Ellison is following the Connor Crew through the murders of Enrique and the resistance fighters, as we build the "weird evidence makes authority figure wonder if maybe Sarah isn't crazy" storyline.
And Chrome Artie tracks down a scientist and gives him some crazy skin-growing formula that he hadn't been able to get just right. It's a literal blood bath for Artie, who emerges a lot fleshier and creepier than his robot version. Science guy, do you need those eyes? Because I think I'm just going to help myself. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
A classroom full of scientists -- the sweater-vests and pipes letting us know these are old-timey scientists -- write incomprehensible formulae on a blackboard and discuss science-y things as Sarah voiceovers that she became obsessed with scientists while she was in the mental hospital. Specifically nuclear scientists, the ones who invented The Bomb. "Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Fermi, Teller. Pioneers, geniuses, all." Suddenly, Sarah's in the midst of the scientists, with her gun out and ready to kill these beautiful minds. She wants to know why these "fathers of our destruction" couldn't stop what they were doing, and if she had the chance, would she have stopped them? None of the scientists is paying any attention to her, and she shoots several times, killing them all. But they just get up again, and encircle her. And then they aren't scientists at all, but a ring of fleshless Terminators. She fires her gun again, but it has no effect. And then all the Terminators simultaneously raise their weapons, and shoot, which is when Sarah wakes up. She's on her bed, surrounded by documents and photographs.
John walks in with a cup of coffee for her, and he says, "You look like hell," which is not true now, and has not been true thus far in the series. She explains that there are newspaper clippings, surveillance photos, bank records, and pamphlets from every high-tech company in the state. "I even think I saw the deeds to city hall in there." She says the resistance guys weren't sent back to be a support group: "They're a Skynet hunting party." She can't make heads or tails of all the info, but there's one document that seems like a good place to start: a Cyberdyne employee list. "She's not going to be happy to see you," says John. "She never is," says Sarah wryly. He asks if she wants him to come along, and she says he's got his own job to do, a big one. At that moment, Cameron walks past in the hall, wearing nothing but bra and panties. Sarah takes a moment to reflect on the gratuitous cheesecake. Really, they're lucky she had any clothes on.
In the kitchen, Cameron, now fully clothed, is robotically putting on makeup, and John jokes that she's getting pretty good at it, but since it's not brain surgery, it'd be odd if an advanced cybernetic intelligence couldn't do handle a stick of eyeliner. Cameron replies that brain surgery would require a much sharper stick of eyeliner. John rolls his eyes.
Sarah walks in and notes that it's "much better" when Cameron wears clothes, which is a matter of opinion, and then starts going over the big job that Cameron's got to do, unfolding a diagram on a piece of paper: "Okay, six ways in, six ways out. The front opens to the street here. Security's minimal. Two armed guards in the morning, four in the afternoon. And if anything goes wrong, there's a parking lot here." Planning a raid on some computer research lab? Nope. Just going to high school. John says he can handle it, and kisses his mother goodbye. "We can handle it," says Cameron, which is a relief to Sarah. "Don't you kiss me," she warns Cameron, who heads out the door. "Or anyone else," calls Sarah. Aw, the first day of school. That brings back memories; heading to school with my futuristic cyborg killing-machine bodyguard.
Sarah and Cameron arrive at the school, with John entreating her to blend in. Let's presume he taught her some hip phrases like "no problemo" and "hasta la vista" on the way over. Basically, he wants her to not be a "freak" and asks if she knows what he means. Sarah rattles off a list of synonyms for freak, and says, "I've been reading the dictionary. I don't sleep." Some advanced cybernetic intelligence! She can't even tell the difference between a dictionary and a thesaurus! John tells her that talking like that is being a freak. Oh, and she shouldn't act like she's his bodyguard; she's supposed to be his sister. "You won't fool anyone," he says. "I fooled you," she points out. He's got no comeback for that.
Nearby, a crowd has gathered around what seems to be a painting of a door on the school wall. There's no clue what it means other than for a letter A on the window of the "door." "What's that all about?" asks John. "Appears to be a re-imagining of a trompe l'oeil fresco," says Cameron, who's destined to ace art history (if not French). A blond girl seems oddly distressed by the painting. My theory is that the Road Runner painted it so he could escape from Wile E. Coyote.
The actual door to the school is going to be a bit of a problem for Cameron, since the students are filing through metal detectors while the security guard calls out, "Cellphones, hats, rings, and bling," as they make their way in. John gets through no problem, but Cameron's going to be a little tougher. Not so much of a problem, though, that John doesn't exchange glances with a blonde girl (not the same one upset by the trompe l'oeil), before stepping in when Cameron trips the alarm. He tells the security guard that Cameron has a metal plate in her head, a big one. The guard waves his metal-detecting wand over Cameron's head, and sure enough, it chirps and whirrs, and he lets her through, so Cameron doesn't have to kill him. This time.
Sarah shows up at Miles Dyson's grave, where Tarissa is laying a bouquet of flowers. "I thought you were dead," says Tarissa, without much surprise at the fact that Sarah is very much alive. "I'd explain it to you, but I can't," says Sarah, as if Tarissa, considering everything she's been through, couldn't handle it. Sarah lays a yellow rose on Miles' grave. Tarissa asks what Sarah wants: "You never die, and you always want something." Sarah hands over the photographs for Tarissa to thumb through to see if she recognizes anyone. Tarissa looks through them, shakes her head. Sarah suggests one of them might be involved with Skynet now and not even know it. Tarissa looks at her blankly, so Sarah apologizes and starts to leave, whereupon Tarissa says the fourth picture, the young one, was an intern at Cyberdyne one summer. Miles liked him. "Is he going to die too? Is that what happens now? He dies?" Sarah says, "I don't know. I hope not." Tarissa says if he does, Sarah needs to make sure it's not in vain. "No one dies in vain," says Sarah, before walking away. Tarissa cocks her head, because I think she might take issue with that.
At the resistance safe house, Agent Ellison strolls in among the crime scene guys and gets his chops busted by the field agent already there, who says "Hoover was cross-dressing at Quantico" the last time Ellison set foot on a crime scene. Ellison ignores this and tells her the same gun that killed the people here killed one of his informants: Enrique Salceda (since Cameron killed Enrique, I guess the explanation is Cameron used a gun she found at the safe house. I'd check, but what used to be a recording of the second episode is now a recording of Game 2 of the 1988 Smythe Division final between the Oilers and the Flames. Ellison thinks there might be a connection, because Enrique made fake paper, and these guys had fake paper. Agent Brassy says this wasn't any kind of terrorist sleeper cell or anything, because the prints didn't match up in any database. Because sleeper cells are generally made up of criminals wanted by major international law-enforcement agencies, right? Agent Brassy says these guys were small-time drug dealers. Ellison looks at the wired safe and sarcastically says you see this all the time. "Why was the safe wired directly into the power?" he says. "Why is the sky blue, Ellison? Don't overthink it," shrugs Agent Brassy. Uh, Agent Brassy? There is a reason the sky is blue. "Somebody came back here for whatever was in that safe. They're out there, and I'm going to find them," says Ellison.
Elsewhere, Chrome Artie, still in his Homeless Snake Eyes getup, helps himself to some Type O plasma at what I'm presuming is a blood bank, stuffing it in the handy dandy coolers. Neither the intern nor the security guard has much luck stopping him. On the other hand, they're still alive, so maybe luck was with them after all.
Sarah struts around a cell phone store, rocking the leather look until she draws Andy Goode into her orbit. He asks if he can help her. She says she's just looking, and he says, "You kept looking over like you needed something." She lets that hang in the air, and I'm half-surprised Andy hasn't gone all Squeaky-Voiced Teen by this point, like I would have. He says the phone she's looking at is his desert-island phone. He outlines all the non-telephone features the phone has (camera, music, texting, voice modulator, breath spray, etc.). "What happens if I press these numbers here?" she says, confusing him. "If I press seven of them, will someone talk to me through the ear part up here?" He says yeah, looking unsure if she's yanking his chain (which she clearly is) or if she's like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and all our modern ways and shiny technology confuse and frighten her.
She takes three phones and sashays out to the car. As she gets in her Jeep, one of her new phones rings. It's Andy, pretending to be calling to make sure everything's okay with the phones. He's also walking outside to stick his head through the passenger window of the Jeep to ask her if she wants to have dinner with him. She says no, and he says that she answered too quickly, and asks her to hear him out. She says yes, and he starts babbling on about how silly it would be to have a cell phone on a desert island. "This is you selling yourself?" says Sarah, who really should have just put a bullet in his forehead by this point for harassment of his female customers and possible future creation of Skynet. Sarah eventually puts us all out of our misery and agrees to have dinner with him.
Elsewhere, John (as Mr. Baum) is strolling into a science class, and sits to the same blond girl he noticed earlier. Behind them is the girl who was upset by the "trompe le monde" or whatever. This is going to be kind of like Bayside High in that all the characters are in all the same classes together, right? I say "almost," because Cameron doesn't appear to be -- oh, wait, here she is, knocking on the door and telling the teacher she's "transferring in." This, to John, is "acting like a freak" and he berates her as she sits down to him. Hey, I bet Cameron at least can find a damn pencil in her damn backpack when the teacher announces a pop quiz.
Agent Ellison strolls up to Carlos' house. Cameron's friend the Silent Chiquita is on the porch, throwing looks of indifference in all directions as Ellison walks in to talk to Carlos.
"Your sweet Uncle Enrique lived a colourful life. One we have not yet painted in full," says Ellison, who should think about getting to the point sometime soon. "Every day is a new adventure. Who can keep up?" shrugs Carlos. They tacitly acknowledge Enrique's rat status, and then Ellison says Enrique called Carlos three times the day he was murdered. "What'd you chat about?" The Lakers, says Carlos, who then says Kobe is "the bomb" which is the first time I've heard anyone call anything "the bomb" in like 10 years. Ellison calls Kobe a "ball hog" and we transition into Kobe-as-metaphor territory with Carlos saying Kobe's "all alone" who's "got no one else who can shoot." and Ellison asking if Carlos is like Kobe, all alone, and Carlos indicates the thugs around him and says, "All these boys can shoot," and Ellison chuckles all not-intimidated. "I didn't kill my uncle," says Carlos. Ellison stands up and says, "No. And you're too smart to know nothing about who did." And no, he wasn't speaking sarcastically and using a double negative incorrectly. He gives Carlos a card and says he'll be in touch.
A man with a British accent, wearing a white shirt and tie, enters his home, talking on his cell phone about a guy who's "eighteen months ahead of the Germans" which I guess could mean this guy is already way into 2009, and complains about grant money not going to The Cutting Edge or maybe just "the cutting edge" and at any rate he stops when he realizes the Homeless Snake Eyes is standing in his living room. Chrome Artie picks him up by the throat and holds him there for several seconds, which sounds bad, but this is how people greet each other in 2029.
John and Cameron come home from school, and Cameron announces "I have a metal plate in my head" before going upstairs to doodle on her Note Tote. John's synopsis is that he didn't get killed and Cameron didn't kill anybody, so it was a pretty good day. Geez, can we talk about the fucking low academic expectations of the Connor family? Sarah says Tarissa Dyson wasn't so much "surprised" to see Sarah alive as she was "disappointed." Cameron comes back with guns that need cleaning, which is what I guess I can look forward to when my daughter is high school age, and Sarah just hands her a cloth.
Anyway, Sarah reports that Tarissa IDed a former intern at Cyberdyne, and John figures the guy is now building "rocket guidance systems" and is surprised that the guy is just a cell phone salesman, which is kind of like being surprised that a guy who interned at a movie theatre didn't end up becoming Martin Scorsese.
Anyway, Sarah's having dinner with him. "Like a date?" says John. No, not a date, says Sarah. "Are you going to kill him?" asks Cameron. Hee! Although, it must be said that at this point Cameron's closer to correct than John is. Sarah's quite indignant at Cameron's suggestion, since she doesn't even know the guy, and Cameron has her whatever face on (it's hard to tell, because it looks like all her other faces) and goes back to cleaning her Uzi. "No one dies until I say so," says Sarah, telling John to tell Cameron, who replies, "People die all the time. They won't wait for her." John makes a face like, "It's like the robot from Small Wonder grew up and is all hot but still takes everything literally" until Cameron says, "I fooled you again." Everyone has a good laugh. But seriously, Sarah, take your gun.
At the scientist's house, Chrome Artie has finished saying hello, and the recovering scientist asks him things like, "Who are you? How did you find me?" Interestingly, he also asks, "Are you a veteran? Is that what this is about?" When asked if he speaks, the Endoskeleton of Christmas Future silently points at the wall, which is covered by an insanely complicated formula. The scientist stands up, and his fear seems to be overtaken by fascination. "That's just not possible. That's an epidermal growth rate that's just not sustainable." He says a couple other science-y things before repeating, "It's not possible." "Possible," croaks out Chrome Artie. Silk Tie the Science Guy has another look, and sees something else, I suppose. "Woo was wrong," he says, and rattles off some other names, colleagues or rivals, I suppose, all of whom were wrong, although some were closer than others. "I wasn't even close," he says. "Can you do it?" says Artie. There's a slight electronic tone to his voice. Silk Tie the Science Guy stammers out that he'd have to go his lab, for equipment, and, they'll also need at least twenty units of blood. "I brought my own," says Artie, indicating the cooler. BYOB, dude. Let's do this thing. "Yes I can," says Silk Tie.
How nice for John that his mom likes to get ready for a date by having a bath with the bathroom door wide open as she shaves her legs. Her voiceover tells us the endlessly fascinating story of Moe Berg, the professional baseball player/spy who attended a lecture in 1943 by German physicist Werner Heisenberg to try to determine if the Germans were close to building the Bomb, and if so, to shoot Heisenberg in the head. Bonus Canadian trivia! Moe Berg is also the lead singer of the late, great Canadian band The Pursuit of Happiness, whose albums are criminally hard to find these days. If anyone has a copy of The Downward Road, email me. I want it. I will pay you.
Sarah's having dinner Andy's house, and prying into his past, saying she can't believe he majored in "cell phone sales" in college. She kind of pulls it off, given that she's a 33-year-old waitress. I think a better question is how this guy affords this place. He talks about he and his roommates hacking Zelda III so the princess would speak funny lines ripped from reruns. I suppose when you talk about your geek roommates hacking video games to make your pixel girlfriend speak lines you want, you're either going to avoid wasting time on second dates, or you're going to know right away if you've found your soul mate. "What's that language you speak, boy?" smirks Sarah. He calls it "computer science, Caltech, advanced dork." Only he never earned his degree, because his father died in senior year, and he dropped out to help his mom, who kind of went "off the rails." Sarah says she's sorry, and he thanks her but points out it was a long time ago, and now his mom is married to the security guard at her bank. So she's got that going for her, which is nice. He asks if she has family, and she says, "Distant," and I think if Sarah wants this relationship to go anywhere, she might as well own up to having a kid right now, and she gets up to stroll around his pleasingly tidy home. He asks (invoking privilege as a cell phone salesman) if she ever wanted to be anything other than a waitress. She says yes, but she can't remember what. Way to work on your cover story, Connor.
She's seen something that's caught her eye, though: a poster with a human hand playing chess against a robot hand. The poster's titled "Kramnik vs. Deep Fritz". Andy says, "Most people cite the '97 Kasparov/Deep Blue as the watershed man vs. machine match" -- yep, that's what most people do, all right -- "but Fritz would have wiped the floor with Deep Blue." Sarah looks unnerved by the robot arm on the poster. "What is it you do, Andy." He looks at her, and, given that she hasn't already left the place after he regales her with tales of social-misfit college years and man-vs.-machine chess matches, decides to go for it. He takes a key from the string around his neck -- my god, he wears a key on a string around his neck -- and opens up his closet.
The inside is crammed with computer equipment whirring away. "Meet the Turk," he says. He says the original Turk was an automaton unveiled in 1770; it was a chess-playing robot. A crucial piece of information he neglects to add: it was a hoax. Sarah, who should try harder to look like she's not about to throw up, asks if that's what Andy's Turk does: play chess. Andy brags that his Turk plays chess at a level that could beat any human that has lived or ever will live. Well, that sounds like fun. This information does not, surprisingly, prompt Sarah to rip Andy's clothes off. Even if she had been about to, she spots someone lurking outside Andy's window and forgets all about Turk. She goes to the door to look, and doesn't see anyone. We, however, get a glimpse of a bar-code-tattooed arm. Same person from last episode? She goes back inside, where Andy's already calling the police, either because he's a big wuss or because there's been a rash of break-ins in the area. Either way, Sarah's already out the door.
Back at the Connor compound, Sarah gets frustrated as John asks her technical questions about the Turk that she can't answer, like about horsepower, network access. "It plays chess," says Sarah. Well, you're the one freaked out by it, Sarah. "So did Einstein," says John, like that's some kind of argument-winning coup de grace. "Have you ever heard of the singularity?" asks John. He says it's the point in time when machines get so smart that they can make smarter versions of themselves without human help. Yeah, I'm pretty sure your mom's familiar with that concept, John. "That's pretty much the time we can kiss our asses goodbye. Unless we stop it." Language! That's your mother. "Like you said you would," he reminds her. Moooooom! You promised to change the future so humanity doesn't get wiped oooooouuuuut! You promised!
Ellison is scowling at some work at his desk when Agent Brassy strolls in with some new info, and she wanted to see his face when she gave it to him. After trying everywhere else, she says she ran the prints through "Kid Prints" which is kind of scary to think that the child-identification thing your parents did (which was already kind of scary, like, "Oh, this is so Mom and Dad can identify my CORPSE") means that the FBI has a file on you. Anyway, one set of fingerprints match those of a four-year-old boy living in Canton, Ohio. Ellison looks perplexed. "And that's the look I wanted to see," she says, taking the file back, and if someone could explain just WHAT THE HELL HER PROBLEM IS I'd appreciate it. Ellison follows her out into the hall to ask if the crime scene guys found any "peculiar blood," because at the Salceda murder scene, there was blood found that was almost human, except it had no red blood cells. "I want to see the blood evidence from your guys," he says. She says she'll get back to him. Then he asks if she's going to double-check the fingerprints. She hands him the file. "Have a party," she says, like excuuuuse Agent Ellison for actually wanting to SOLVE crimes instead of being a pain in the ass.
Silk Tie is working in his lab, making notes to himself on a handheld tape recorder. He says the one thing no one thought of is using a "synthetic oxygen carrier" and I should probably warn everybody right now that I am not going to have any idea whether any of the science jargon is only semi-bullshit or total bullshit. So I'm not going to be able to say, "Nice try, but current synthetic oxygen carrier technology could never provide the requisite oxidization for a project of this scope" or whatever, because I don't even know what that is. If an upcoming episode's plot hinges around the lead singers of various current and defunct Canadian bands, I'm your guy, but I'll be letting you down on the science aspects. "The real-world applications are mind-blowing," he tells Chrome Artie, who just looks at him through the ski goggles. Silk Tie looks momentarily unnerved. He ain't seen nothing yet.
Silk Tie dumps a vat of grenadine into a bathtub -- oh, that's blood. Lovely. "It's ready," he says. He asks Artie if he can videotape what's about to happen, which sounds kind of forward to me, and Artie shakes his head and pushes past him and starts undressing. Cut to Silk Tie's slack-jawed reaction. Cut back to Artie, standing there in all his metallic altogether. "Who are you? What are you?" says Silk Tie. Artie holds out his hand, motioning to the door. Silk Tie closes the bathroom door, the two of them inside.
Sarah's back at the doctor's office, who wonders why she's come to see him, since he called her about the test results, which were negative. "You're healthy as a horse. A healthy horse!" She says she wants to know if there's anything she can do for cancer prevention. He says that whatever she's doing seems to be working, which seems fallacious to me, but he tells her not to smoke, to get exercise, and to eat leafy greens. Also, "don't snort asbestos." He says she's got no risk factors, no genetic factors to indicate she's a candidate. "Is there anything else about your history I should know?" Sarah's face is all, "No, nothing about my history." You've got children, right? asks the doctor. Sarah nods, and the doctor chalks it up to her worrying about being strong and healthy for them. "Don't drive yourself crazy chasing the future. We can't predict. We can only try and prevent," he says, and I really really hope tertiary characters aren't constantly making surfacely-inocuous-but-actually-apropos comments about the future.
Back at the Connor compound, Sarah calls Andy. Don't give it up on the second date, Sarah!
Over at Terminator High, John notices the blond girl (the mysterious one, not the freaked-out one) coming down the hall. As nonchalantly as he can, he asks if she's going to chem, and she says she is and they silently shuffle down the hallway together. They come upon another trompe l'oeil, inside this time, with a little more detail. This time, the letters on the door seem to read DAN, and there's a painted bra hanging from the handle. Standing there, clutching her books to her chest and fighting back tears, is the freaked-out blond girl from before. She pushes her way through the crowd, all straight long bangs and quivering lip, away from the painting, and there is muffled Marie Antoinette-esque (as in "comprehensible only with subtitles on") whispering. "She is such a skanky whore" is said, with the captions revealing it's "...skanky, slutty whore." That's much worse! "I can't ever talk to her ever again" is apparently also said, but I couldn't make it out. Oh, and there's "whore" again.
We're in the girls' bathroom. Cameron's in there, amusingly, I suppose to touch up her makeup. She stands behind a couple of girls to speak approvingly of things that are "tight," in this instance, the particular shade of makeup one of the girls is wearing. Also "tight," I guess, but in a different way, is the dress she's wearing, because she calls herself a pig and says she looks pregnant. Instead of asking her friend, she for some reason turns around and asks complete stranger Cameron, "Does this make me look fat?" We unfortunately do not get a Cameron point-of-view overlay in which she runs down the possible responses (and hopefully, "fuck you, asshole" was an option) before choosing "yes." Now the angry girl would like to know what Cameron's problem is. "You asked," points out Cameron. The pregnant pig appeals to her friend, who says, "Bitch whore much?" Unsurprisingly, as this does not in any way resemble an English-language sentence, Cameron says she doesn't understand. "I said, 'bitch...whore...much?'" Cameron doesn't respond, so the girl snaps, "What are you looking at?" "I'm looking at you," says Cameron, her flat affect and stare going a long way to seeming like a threat. The school bell rings, and the girls clear out, except for Cameron, who picks up the forgotten "tight" makeup on the counter. And when the hubbub has died down, Cameron can hear someone sobbing in a stall. She goes to investigate, and it's the sobbing blond girl -- let's call her She Bangs -- who really hates trompe l'oeils. "You saw it, right? It's so...freakin' big, and right out there!" she says. "It's freaking big," repeats Cameron, and this is taken as sisterly solidarity, I suppose. "Whoever's doing this is such a jackass," says She Bangs. "I mean, who would do this? And how would they even know? My parents...they're going to kill me! Kill me!" Cameron cocks her head, possibly wondering about trading techniques with She Bangs' parents. She Bangs breaks down sobbing. "You're upset," says Cameron, because this is one impressively analytical Terminator we have here. "No kidding I'm upset! My life is freaking over!" Cameron offers her a present, the discarded makeup. "It's tight," she says, emotionlessly. Hey, remember two episodes ago in the pilot when Cameron knew how to smile? She Bangs shakes her head and stomps out of the bathroom.
Sarah and Andy stroll through a heavily wooded park, which will be a convenient place for Sarah to dump the body. He says he figured he wasn't going to hear from her. "Miracles happen every day," she jokes. He says the police recommend he get a security system and maybe even "armed patrol" but he can't afford it. "You think someone wants the Turk?" she asks. He points out that it's eight years of his life, in which he not only designed the software but customized the hardware as well. They sit down on a bench to chat. "One month I worked on a motherboard so hard I lost my sight for three days. Those circuits are so small." He pulled a lot of the gears from gaming systems, which is what the military does. Yeah, I'm sure the military heads on over to Circuit City to buy the XBoxes and PlayStations to cannibalize, like this guy did. Oh, and the "seriously modded-out code" came to him in a dream. "All this to beat another computer at chess?" says Sarah. "None of this to beat another computer at chess," he says. Then what, Sarah wants to know. "Would you believe it if I told you Turk has moods?" says Andy. Sarah's look clearly means, Well, that's it. Now I have to kill you.
Andy says they're not moods in the sense that people understand moods, but sometimes he'll give Turk a chess problem, and Turk'll solve it one way, and the day, he'll solve it a different way, and sometimes he won't even solve it at all. "Do you know why it does that?" he asks Sarah. Sarah has no idea. I have a theory: that the chess-playing computer made from three XBoxes and four PlayStations all daisy-chained is still less dorky than Andy. "Someday Turk'll tell me," says Andy. "You talk about it like it's human," says Sarah. "Well, you never know," he says, then, seeing her grimace, says, "What? Too far?" She says it's nothing, and they get up to keep walking, Sarah fingering the gun she's got tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
Cameron's admiring her tight makeup in the hallway when John comes out of a classroom. Cameron closes her eyes so John can admire her handiwork. "Do you like this colour on me?" she says. John's all, what? "I'm a bitch whore," says Cameron. John's all, WHAT? "I have a new friend," says Cameron. John wryly asks if Cameron's new friend told her she was a bitch whore. "No. She cried," says Cameron. Understandably, none of this makes any sense to John, but then he notices yet another painting, this one with the door slightly ajar, and featuring a silhouette of a couple kissing. Through the crack of the open "door," we can see the girl has blond hair. "Jumper! Outside the gym!" yells the hall crier, so everyone rushes outside.
A crowd has gathered outside, around a girl standing atop the gymnasium, with one particular douchebag yelling, "Jump! Jump!" He only stops after John gives him a serious, "Dude! Come on!" "That's my new friend," says Cameron. "The crying one from the bathroom." John stares at her. "When?" he asks. "Two hours, three minutes ago. Four minutes ago," says Cameron, adding that she's upset because her parents are going to kill her. "Did you do anything to her?" asks John. Cameron thinks about it. "I tried to give her a tight present," she says. John runs for the stairs, and Cameron follows him, grabbing him and holding him fast. "We gotta help her, now!" Cameron won't let him go, even after he orders her to. "Don't be a freak," she says.
At any rate, John never would have made it, because She Bangs swan dives right off the building, landing with a sickening thud as the students scatter. John stares at her in horror, blood already pooling around her body. "We have to go. Now," says Cameron, and half drags John away as people start to gather around her body. Looks like she just missed hitting a couple of cars in the parking lot. So, silver lining, right?
"I could have done something. I was right there," says John, back at the Connor Compound. Sarah tries to tell him that people who want to take their lives, if they're serious about it, will find a way. "You didn't see her. If you had seen her, you wouldn't be talking like this," says John, whatever that's supposed to mean. Sarah moves from the futility of trying to stop her to the consequences had he stopped her. "And what were you going to do, be a hero? Get your name in the papers? Your face?" John asks if that isn't exactly what he's supposed to be: a hero. Well, yes, but of a ragtag bunch of post-apocalyptic human resistance army, you idiot. "If it's just going to sit inside me, sit in my gut, then what's the point? What are we doing? Why not just give it to them if we're going to act like them?" he yells, and stomps off.
"I don't know how to help him," says Sarah to Cameron. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any girls discarded any tight cold cream in the bathroom, because Cameron's face is still stuck on whore. "Andy Goode must be killed," she says. Her non-sequiturishness seems to be growing at an alarming rate.
Agent Ellison visits another crime scene, this one at Silk Tie's house. There's an overturned biohazard cooler, and all kinds of lab equipment. There are also bloody smears obscuring a complicated chemical formula written on one wall. What could it all mean, Agent Ellison? And why isn't Agent Brassy here to break your balls about whatever? I miss her already. Oh, here she is, in the bathroom, which looks like the back room at a butcher shop. And not just any butcher shop, but, like, Satriale's. Blood everywhere. Silk Tie, lying on the floor. "Took his eyes, James," says Agent Brassy. "They took his freakin' eyes." When Agent Brassy is too disturbed to crack wise, you know things are gruesome.
Sarah watches from the bushes as Andy Goode parks and gets out of his car. She voiceovers that on July 16, 1945, in the mountains outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the world's first atomic bomb exploded. The red glow on his face manages to alert Andy to something that somehow he missed as he was pulling up: that his house is a raging inferno. Sarah's voiceover continues, explaining that Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Or, as his colleague Ken Bainbridge put it, "Now we are all sons of bitches." Sarah walks away as Andy sinks to his knees on his front lawn, watching his chess-playing computer go up in smoke. You, uh, didn't program it to feel pain or anything, did you, Andy?
Flashback now to a simpler time, when Silk Tie still had his eyes, and was still alive. He watches in amazement as some fleshy, bloody humanoid emerges from the bloodbath in his bathroom. Its eyes are closed. There's even a misshapen nose. Flesh Artie swivels his head towards Silk Tie, who produces an X-Acto knife to get slits in the sealed eyelids. The eyes open, Flesh Artie's red sensors bore through Silk Tie. "Now we are all sons of bitches," repeats Sarah's voiceover. That's where the episode ends, so we never get to hear Chrome Artie say, "Your eyes. Give them to me."