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Derek finds the T-888's chip stashed in Cameron's room and confronts her with it. Cameron admits to John that sometimes she lies (even about "important things") when the mission requires it. John decides to hack the chip to see what's on it. He discovers that the T-888 (human name: "Vick Chamberlain") actually appears to have been married. It's an advanced model, explains Cameron. The images also seem to include shots of the T-888 killing his wife, and the Connor Crew set out to find the body.
What they find isn't Mrs. T-888, but a dead lobbyist who opposed a controversial Los Angeles city project, a computerized traffic system with a centralized database, which could be Skynet's future body (with the Turk being its future brain). The system was the pet project of Mrs. T-888. Rather than blow up City Hall (Derek's idea) John wants to plant a virus in the system, so civic officials think the program itself is no good. The program also seems to be the source of some marital discord between Mr. and Mrs. T-888 (she's having trouble finishing the project), but he's got some moves, man.
Meanwhile, Chrome Artie continues his mission to hunt John down, killing school administrators, bullying coaches, and intimidating showering high school boys along the way, and he obtains a list of all the boys who have enrolled in school since the fall and tracks John "Baum" down. Gee, it's almost like it was a bad idea for John to go to high school. Cameron, spotting Chrome Artie first, sends Morris into the office to pose as John. Morris doesn't realize just what danger he's in, although I don't think it's inaccurate to say that even if he did, he wouldn't say no to Cameron. Chrome Artie compares Morris's face to his file images of John, determines there's no match, and moves on. John's upset that Cameron could have been sacrificing Morris, and he also doesn't want Sarah to find out that Chrome Artie got this close.
More images are revealed on Vick's chip: turns out one of Derek's men, Sayles, was following Mrs. T-888, and Vick followed him back to the safehouse, where he killed the resistance fighters. John flies a little too close to the sun hacking Vick's chip, almost reactivating him (and alerting any other Terminators to John's presence). Derek and Sarah's mission to upload the virus to the traffic program fails when the program seems to repel the virus. John's solution: stick Cameron's brain-chip into the traffic system, let her muck it all up. And it works.
Finally, Sarah's come to the conclusion that Derek killed Andy (his silence when she confronts him is confirmation enough). "You lie to me again, I'll kill you," she says. Presumably, that'll be after their meeting tomorrow morning with the guy who bought the Turk. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Chrome Artie, AKA "Agent Kester" seems befuddled by the sparkle globe he's holding (it doesn't match any of the images in his database). Perhaps this will turn out to be the key to defeating him, like the glasses of water in Signs. Or maybe not. I mean, it's a freaking sparkle globe.
Chrome Artie is in some school administrator's office, and when the official comes in, Artie flashes his ID and says he needs a list of all the male Caucasian students who have enrolled in the district. The administrator is unimpressed. "You boys are in here at least twice a month, waving your Patriot Act around," he says. The administrator figures it's drugs, but is that such a big deal? He leans forward: "Look me in the eye and tell me you've never smoked a little marijuana." I suppose the school district is tolerant of drug use, right? Nevertheless, Chrome Artie leans in closely and says he's never smoked a little marijuana. I'm not sure why this mollifies the anti-Patriot Act administrator, but it does, until he asks to see Artie's paperwork. Artie doesn't have it, and the administrator rattles off a rote speech about the district not releasing personal information without proper blah blah. This, unfortunately, gets him his neck snapped -- "thank you for your co-operation," says Artie after the guy is already dead. I'm not sure how the sarcasm jibes with the way the Terminators normally take everything literally. Anyway, Chrome Artie sits down in front of the computer and gets the information he needs anyway, scanning the names (including John Baum's).
Voiceover topic of the episode: masks. We wear them, they wear us, they serve as metaphors for whatever. We have frayed psyches, you and I. And everyone. We are bereft. We trade honesty for companionship, and companionship for a Bobby Orr rookie card.
In the kitchen of the Connor Compound, John works at the table while Cameron stares out into space the way she does. Perhaps she is keeping watch. I don't know. She is wearing a mask. That is not her face. Her face is a gleaming steel skull with glowing red eyes. She trades honesty for a case of WD-40. John yells that the food is done, or at least smells done. He doesn't offer to check it. Sarah's on the phone, calling Mr. Sarkissian about the Turk, and asks him to call her back. Good plan. The man who designed it is dead, and the man who stole it and sold it is dead. I'm sure this Sarkissian guy will get right back to you, Sarah.
She hangs up, and John is yelling at her about food. She heads for the kitchen, where Cameron tells her the food should have been taken out of the oven eighteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds ago. "It's fine," says Sarah, although she seems to think "fine" means "charred black with smoke pouring off it." Maybe Sarah shouldn't be picking recipes out of the Judgment Day cookbook.
Derek strolls into the room and plops down the chip Cameron saved from the T-888, saying he found it in her room. "Why were you in my room?" she asks. Sarah's more interested in the fact that Cameron lied about destroying every last piece of the T-888, and Cameron says the chip contains visual records of the Terminator: where it's been, who it interacted with, etc. Derek bitches that that's the only truly irreplaceable part of the machine, and Cameron kept it. "she's going to tell us it'll help us find the Turk," he snaps, but Cameron says it won't. John wants to know what Derek's getting at. "She can't be trusted. No matter how she acts on the outside, we have no idea what's going on in there," says Derek. "Well, I could say the same about you," says John. You could, but you should probably at least append "no gives back, infinity" to the end of it.
Since he's getting nowhere with John, Derek tries convincing Sarah, pointing out Cameron was the one who told the Connors about the safehouse. "Who else knew about it? Nobody. Where are my men? In the morgue." Cameron says she didn't tell the T-888 about the safehouse. "Prove it," says Derek. John shifts the topic slightly to ask if Cameron's ever hacked one of those chips. "No. But you have," she says.
John and Cameron head to some kind of video game café where some people are playing some Halo-like game (if not actual Halo, I don't know) on giant screens. John asks Cameron how often she lies. When the mission requires it, she says. He asks if she lies to him. Yep. "About important things?" he says. You mean like Yes, I destroyed all of the T-888? Yes, John, about important things. Jesus.
Anyway, some guy comes out with some machinery with dual-core processors and Johnson rods and genectagazoinks and whatever, and John speaks dork right back at him, and apparently this thing is really amazing and will let John create actual human life like in Weird Science, and he takes two, and there is now probably a picture of John on the wall at that café: "Dude is so hardcore he bought two."
John asks Cameron if he's making a mistake with the chip thing: "Do I wanna see what's on it? Tell me now," he says. "I'd rather tell you after," she says, which makes no sense at all unless she knows what's on the chip. If she's trying to imply that she can't tell him if he'll want to see it because she doesn't know what's on it, wouldn't she say, "I can't tell you until after" instead of "I'd rather tell you after"?
Back at the Connor Compound, John's working away on the chip, which is plugged into the guts of the HAL 9000 he just bought. He suggests Cameron make herself useful and make a 7-Eleven run for burritos and chocolate milk: "It'd mean a lot to me." Instead, she plants her arse on a stool and watches him. They talk a little bit about how much power he's giving the chip, because it only needs a little bit to access the visual memory, but if he gives the chip too much power, he risks activating its decision-making capabilities and strategic mission analysis. "We don't want to activate those functions," she says.
So John cranks the juice, enough to see some jumbled images of streets and hallways. "What a mess. How the hell do you keep your brains organized?" he asks. "Not like yours," says Cameron. After a random scary image of a platoon of naked bald men (well, Terminators, presumably, or else the T-888 still had to come to terms with certain aspects of his orientation, I think), we watch a woman writhe in a bed. "Vick, God, you poor thing, you're up again?" she says, imploring this "Vick" fellow to come back to bed: "I can't sleep with you standing there like a statue." As "Vick" turns, we glimpse him the mirror. It's Brett Favre! No, wait -- it's the T-888! There's also a picture of him on the dresser with the woman in the bed.
"Was that thing...married?" says John. "The T-888 is an advanced model infiltrator." Yeah, but I don't think she knows, says John, asking if that's possible. "She would not be the first person to be fooled by a machine," says Cameron. Maybe she meant to say that the T-888 is an advanced model vibrator?
It's later now (as in the day), judging by the lighting. More images from the visual memory: a woman in a room with diagrams and work across every surface, explaining that she's been working a lot lately, and she knows it's hard on Vick to stay at home since his car accident. "I thought we'd made progress. Just talk to me, sweetie. Don't keep it inside, please." Poor woman -- everyone knows male Terminators aren't programmed to talk about their feelings.
Then we watch as Vick watches this woman outside, parking her car. And then there's a shot of Vick (we see him reflected in the window of a door) walking up the steps of a house, taking the mail out, and looking at each individual piece of mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Vick Chamberlain, pausing long enough for the Connor Crew to get a good look at the address.
Sarah and Derek saddle up to go check it out, Derek making sure to get in a good dig at how twisted Terminators are. When he goes off to stew in the Jeep and wait for Sarah, John tells his mom that Cameron didn't give up the safehouse. She's not like that other, bad Terminator! he says. "I hope not," says Sarah, and then switches gears completely to brightly tell John to enjoy Pizza Day at school day. "I read the newsletter," she says, when John looks incredulous.
"Isn't Pizza Day tomorrow?" asks Cameron. "Yeah," says John. First my stupid bitch mom wanted to give me up. Now she can't even get Pizza Day right.
At the Chamberlains' house, Sarah observes the mailbox, crammed full, and puts out the wild theory that the woman hasn't been here in a while. "I wonder what she thinks happened to her husband," she says. "Are you kidding? She's dead," says Derek, picking the lock. Derek's always such an optimistic ray of sunshine to have around.
Inside, they look around the house. "You think you'd know?" asks Derek. "I know I'd know," says Sarah. They find some info that Barbara Chamberalain was a Los Angeles city manager. "That's infrastructure. No wonder Skynet's interested," says Derek. Well, it's municipal government! Who wouldn't be interested?
More video footage of Barbara. She looks like she's a very pretty woman but one for whom the lighting and webcam-style camera-work are doing no favours. She's got kind of a fivehead action going on, and looks all washed out and haggard. At least it fits with her demeanour, as she's now sitting in front of a bottle of wine telling Vick that she wants to work on this. The wine? Oh, no...the relationship. This may be hindsight, but my advice is to stick with the wine. "I'm quitting my job. I'm coming home," she says. After a brief flash of Barbara being chased -- it's dark out, and a hand reaches out to her -- we go back to drinkin' Barbara, and hear the disembodied voice of Vick saying, "I don't think that's a good idea, babe," and he pours her more wine.
Damn -- is John actually watching this stuff at school? In the public courtyard? Not that anyone around him is paying him any mind -- Morris is showing Cameron a scar he received a secret Björk show. "I consider it my first tattoo," he says. Cameron looks completely at a loss for words, and finally says, "That's tight." John spots Sherry sitting at a nearby table, and ditches Morris and Cameron (and who can blame him, really) to go hit on her, by way of suggesting they use study hall to study for the chemistry test. She thinks that's a great idea. Not so great, though, is when John talks about how they were "Midwest neighbours" because he's from Lawrence, and he heard she's from Wichita. "Who told you I'm from Wichita?" she says, wigging out slightly. John says he doesn't remember, and Sherry says whoever said it was wrong. John's all, "All right! Jeez!" and she calms down and says she'll see him in study hall tomorrow.
We're in some school gym shower room, filled with boys soaping themselves up, and yet unlikely to burst out Motown classics in four-part harmonies, like they always seemed to on The White Shadow. And here comes Agent Kester. He flashes his ID to the coach, who for some reason is just standing by the boys showering, holding a clipboard. "I need to speak to Eric Carlson," says Chrome Artie. Just got out of gym class; give him five minutes, says the coach. Chrome Artie ignores this and heads down the row of showering boys, calling Eric's name at each of the stalls in turn, until he gets to Eric. "What seems to be the problem, officer?" says a spooked Eric, looking like he's about to pull a Vito Spatafore Jr. in the shower. Chrome Artie compares Eric's face to John's. No match.
"Are you for real, buddy?" yells the coach at Chrome Artie, threatening to get him fired for his little peep show. Well, Chrome Artie wasn't the one standing there the whole time with a clipboard, coach. Chrome Artie just tosses the coach against the wall and calmly walks out. "Coach!" hilariously screams Eric.
Sarah strolls into the bathroom and says she's only understood about a third of the files they grabbed from the Chamberlains' place. Derek just looks at her and continues to brush his teeth, and she points out he's been brushing his teeth for twenty minutes. Well, dental hygiene is good, Sarah. "With my toothbrush," she says. Oh. Oh, well, that's just nasty. He spits, and hands her the toothbrush, which she promptly deposits in the garbage. "I got you your own," she says, grabbing it from a shelf above the toilet, "and now it's mine." In which case, she didn't have to throw out the other toothbrush, then, right?
John calls Sarah into his bedroom, where he's discovered that the memories in the Terminator chip are stored according to category, "like mission, or location, or whatever." He says the same symbol keeps popping up on screen whenever Barbara's there. "You should look at this," he says. It's more video of a woman (we never see her face) being chased at night, then dragged by the hair, and then tossed down a forested path, coming to rest abruptly against a log. And doesn't move. "He gained her trust. Made her think he was human. And killed her," she says, looking over at Cameron. "That's what they do," says Derek, and he too looks at Cameron. John doesn't even have a line, but he does look at Cameron too. Sarah tells John to get the flashlights because they're going to go look for her. "Finding Barbara's body should not be a mission priority," says Cameron. Sarah agrees: "But we're going to anyway," says Sarah. Derek gives Cameron a little extra stink-eye on his way out.
Outside, in the woods, Cameron checks the view of Los Angeles against a printout from the T-888 chip. Like it wouldn't have taken them one hell of a long time to find the right location. Derek and John partner up and Cameron and Sarah do likewise, and start searching. Cameron scans the area all fancy, and comes up empty. "I don't understand your need to find her," she says. "That's because you don't value human life," says Sarah. Cameron points out, rather logically, that Barbara's body is not alive: "Just bones and meat." Sarah stops short and stares at her. "Was that bad to say?" asks Cameron.
Nearby, John asks Derek if they do a lot of sneaking around in the future. Sure do, says Derek. We don't get to hear any more misty watercolour memories of the future because they stumble on the body. Derek whistles for the other two -- totally necessary, since Cameron and Sarah appear to be at least FIFTEEN FEET away.
They roll the body over. It's not Barbara, not that I could tell. Derek pulls her wallet and checks the ID. "Who the hell's Jessica Peck?"
More video, of an angry Barbara on the phone, bitching about someone meeting with city council without them knowing: "I can't be everywhere at once. I just can't." She adds that she's working from home because she has family stuff to work out. She notices Vick watching her and hangs up. "Jessica Peck's trying to shut down my program again," she complains, and stomps off.
Back at the Connor Compound, John has apparently done some research: Jessica Peck was a lobbyist paid to oppose Artie. Not Chrome Artie, but ARTIE: Automated Real-time Traffic Information Exchange, Barbara Chamberlain's pet project. "I think it's one of Skynet's pet projects," corrects Sarah. "So this is about traffic lights," says Derek. John explains that it's a fiber-optic network connecting every city intersection to a central databank in city hall. It's a pilot project right now, but it could go statewide. Sarah still seems unsure, but Cameron said it's about having eyes and ears on every intersection. "If the Turk is destined to be Skynet's brain, this could be its nervous system." Hopefully the metaphor stops before we figure out what Skynet's wang will turn out to be.
John wryly jokes about not being able to fight city hall, and Derek says, "Whoever said that didn't have as much plastic explosive as we do." "We can't blow up city hall!" says Sarah, and Derek is all, "Sounds like a wager to me!" Sarah's problem is not so much that she's less of a psychopath than Derek as it is a problem of practicality: she figures if they blow up the program, it'll just get rebuilt. Whereas if John plants a virus in the program, maybe administration will think the program's no good. Wise move: because lord knows governments are loath to throw money at bad ideas. So it's up to Sarah to get the virus inside city hall.
Derek and Sarah sit in an outdoor café directly across the street from city hall. Armed guards are frisking people entering the building. Is this how it is as a matter of course in big cities or are we supposed to assume something recently happened? After the waitress takes their drink orders, Sarah starts reminiscing about her time as a waitress (Derek has a hard time picturing it), and tells some story about a regular customer, a stage mother who used to criticize her two beautiful children constantly. "I swear sometimes I understand why they drop bombs on us," she says. Careful, there, Chomsky. There are many reasons why they drop bombs on us, but pushy stage mothers aren't one of them, and certainly not one that would deserve understanding if it were. Sarah goes back to watching Lockdown Day at City Hall, looking discouraged at all the security. Derek tells her not to worry about it, since they're not going in the front door. Derek's more about the rear entry, I guess. Actually, he's all about the network of underground tunnels underneath city hall. He did a school report on them in the ninth grade (his last year of school). Sarah asks how he knows they're still functional, and Derek says he lived there with Kyle. "After they dropped the bombs on us."
Some quirky kid with a pink phone message slip stuck to his chest makes his way down the hallway at Degrassi Junior High until he finds Cameron. "Happy Pizza Day!" he says. Cameron says she had two slices, and then asks him if she looks fat. "Uh, still good," he says. Hee! He explains that he recently had an incident involving a "banned substance" in the school parking lot. "As a condition of my rehabilitation, I have to hand these out to people," he says, peeling off the phone message and handing it to Cameron. There's a cop in the principal's office, he giggles, and he wants to talk to your brother. I suppose it would be silly of me to ask why he didn't deliver the message to John, but if I were a high school boy I'm relatively certain I'd prefer to use Cameron as an intermediary. Buddy stops laughing when he sees Cameron doesn't think it's quite so hilarious that there's a cop in the principal's office who wants to talk to John. "Wait, he's not a narc, is he?" Cameron glares at him, then says she'll make sure John gets the message.
Instead, she makes her way to the principal's office herself, and scans Agent Kester, identifying him as Chrome Artie (coming awfully close to being spotted herself, if you ask me).
What to do? Seek out Morris and say, "I need you." That's all Morris needs to hear, and Cameron grabs him by the shirt and drags him down the hall.
Cameron peeks through the window in a classroom door into the office as Morris approaches Agent Kester and holds up the phone message slip. "You wanted to see me," he says. "John Baum?" asks Chrome Artie. "Yes sir," says Morris, nervously. Chrome Artie scans him; no match. "Thank you for your time," says Chrome Artie, and walks out. Cameron starts to follow him, but when John calls her name, she quickly abandons Chrome Artie and pulls John aside. "What are you doing?" he says. She makes sure Chrome Artie has gone, and says, "Never mind," and walks away.
Morris, however, is more than happy to spill the beans, since he's got "nerves of steel" and Cameron's a genius for getting the cop off his back. "What cop?" says John. Morris looks around the hallway, but the cop isn't there, and Morris is puzzled like the cop's disappearance is a real mystery, like when you buy a monkey's paw from an eccentric shopkeeper who then vanishes. John goes running off down the hall after Cameron.
John's watching more video of Barbara Chamberlain whining about this project that she can't finish, and she feels like it's become a monster between her and Vick. "Finish it," says Vick. And he strokes her neck. She leans back on the bed, and he strokes her cheek and her lips. Yeah, it always turns my wife on when I robotically order her to finish some work project of hers that's causing us grief. I can see how Barbara was totally fooled by the T-888. The screen goes fuzzy again. John sighs. Just when it looks like we were getting to some good stuff. He turns and is startled to see Cameron sitting there watching. She notes that the T-888 is one smooth operator, when he touched her lips. "I could see that she liked it." What are you doing, asks an exasperated John. Cameron holds her hand out -- she's putting on nail polish. John didn't see the Terminator enter his room, nor smell the nail polish she was applying. RIP, Future John. But that's not what he's talking about -- when she says things like that, what is she doing? Besides making John feel all funny? Cameron says she's just making conversation, which just seems like something she should do.
But John's pissed about Cameron using Morris as a decoy. "Was that something you just thought you should do, no matter what happened to him?" he asks. "Yes," says Cameron. John snorts. Dude, you're already upset because she lies to you. It's not fair to get mad when she's being honest. Cameron breaks the news that that wasn't just a cop -- it was Chrome Artie. This surprises him. This surprises him. How many Terminators have to pose as law enforcement before John starts to detect a pattern? Cameron explains Chrome Artie's going school to school looking for John. "He's moved on, though. He won't go back there. I wouldn't." Greeeeaat, says John. "The only way I'm reassured by that is if I remember that in the core of your chip, you're just like him," he says.
John is more concerned that Sarah might move them than that Chrome Artie is tracking him down, and he wants Cameron to promise she won't tell Mom (because Cameron's so trustworthy these days). Before Cameron can make him agree to cover her chores for the couple of weeks, in walks Sarah. She asks if she smells nail polish, and Cameron waggles her fingers. Sarah asks what they're talking about. Cameron and John exchange NOT AT ALL SUSPICIOUS glances. "Just making conversation," says Cameron, getting up to leave. She winks at John on her way out. If John doesn't want his mom to suspect something's up, he should probably try not to look like he's got severe diarrhea.
More video: Derek and Sarah watch as we see Vick watch Sayles, who appears to be tailing Barbara, outside their home, on the street. And it's Vick who trails Sayles to the safe house, where he shoots all the resistance fighters. Interestingly, from the T-888's perspective, the murder looks very much like a first-person shooter video game -- like the ones on the screen at the video game café where John was earlier.
Derek, understandably, has found the whole thing tough to watch. "Sayles was always...I loved the guy, but he was an idiot sometimes. He was careless." Sarah's all, uh, you were following Barbara Chamberlain? "I wasn't. I didn't know he was," says Derek, adding that there were a lot of leads, and they spent a lot of time on their own. He gets up and leaves. "I didn't know," he says, walking right by Cameron. Hey, I think you owe her an apology, Derek.
Sarah gets up to leave too, and stomps off into her bedroom, John trailing her. She pulls out the information they nabbed from the safe house, saying Barbara Chamberlain's name is on a list in there somewhere. "Why do we always have to find out about these people when it's too late, when they're dead? Do all these people have to die so we can win?" I gotta be honest with you, Sarah -- I kinda thought that was the point of those lists. John's sussed out that she's not really so upset about Barbara but about Andy Goode. She ignores this, and asks if the virus is ready. It is. "City hall's closed. We leave in half an hour."
Flashlights in hand, Derek and Sarah make their way through the underground tunnels that apparently looked a lot nicer before the human resistance started living there and messing them all up with their guns and garbage. Derek says again he didn't know Sayles was trailing Barbara: "You gotta believe me," he says. "I don't have to believe anything. In fact, I don't," is Sarah's response. So no trust falls at a weekend retreat for you any time soon, I guess.
Sarah asks if Derek's sure he knows where he's going. Well, I should, says Derek, pointing out a spot which is where he says he lost Kyle to the machines when they were kids.
And yet...they immediately come upon a wall that Derek says shouldn't be there, because in the future it's not. So the answer is to blow it up -- which they do. Behind the wall is an elevator shaft. "That's going to draw attention," says Sarah. Way to voice your concerns after the explosion, Sarah. Derek figures since they're on a fault line, it'll just be assumed that was a tremor. "Hey, Bob, did you hear that explosion? Should we check it out?" "Don't worry about it, Gord. We're on a fault line."
Derek and Sarah rappel down to B4, where the data centre is. Inside, they stroll freely about an expensive array of computers and machinery, none of which is locked up or monitored by cameras or anything. Sarah sticks in the USB device with the virus, and sectors on the city map start flashing red. "It's working," says Sarah, figuring that "red" equals "bad." Soon, though, the affected areas are clear again. That's...not so good. "Something's wrong. The system's blocking the virus," says Sarah. This doesn't bother Derek so much, because hey! They can still blow the place!
Well, now that an alarm's going off, they might not get the chance. A couple of security guards show up to waddle after Derek and Sarah, who go back the way they came, taking a ladder back up the elevator shaft. The guards aren't really doing anything but yelling "stop!" half-heartedly, but Derek and Sarah can't seem to flee at a pace faster than "trot." Maybe this "chase" was supposed to have been sped up in post-production. Making their way through the tunnels again, Sarah ducks out to the side while Derek continues to lead the guards through the maze of tunnels, cornering him in a dead end. They order him onto the ground and are about to handcuff him, when Sarah comes in from behind, and disarms and knocks out first one guard, and then the other (the second having naturally stood there and watched while his partner got his ass kicked). Derek grabs a guard's gun and is about to shoot them before Sarah intervenes. Derek is all wild-eyed and panting. Dude needs to get back in shape.
More brief images from the chip of Barbara working on his project, with Vick rubbing her neck. Then it fuzzes out again. Frustrated, John says he gets to a certain point and then the machine kicks him out. "It's like a part of Vick's memory just turns off. I've even cranked up the juice" -- he does so again, and things shut down -- "and there goes the power supply."
Suddenly, his phone starts ringing with the sound of an old-school dial-up modem. "That's weird. My phone is dialing for an internet connection." Suddenly, his screen blinks on with the red Terminator POV: John himself, sitting there staring at the computer. TARGET ACQUIRED -- JOHN CONNOR, blinks the monitor. Is that supposed to happen? "Vick's reactivating," says Cameron, and she and John go to town pulling out the chip, yanking out wires. On screen, it looks like the chip's trying to get online. "Did it happen? Did he get out? Did he call someone or something?" "No," says Cameron. Well, we all know we can trust Cameron. "We should be very careful with Vick's chip," says Cameron, who, since she was supposed to destroy the thing in the first place, probably should keep quiet.
In come Derek and Sarah, whose operation went equally shitty. Derek AGAIN proposes blowing shit up. Sarah asks if he's going to take an axe to every traffic light in town. "No. We only need to take down one," says a very pensive John.
After the commercial break, Cameron lies down on a bed, with John carefully laying her head on a pillow. Then he whips out a huge utility knife and looks like he's going to dissect her head. Cameron guides him where to cut, and tells him to cut a semicircle with a diameter of twelve centimetres. Somewhat nervous, he asks if it's okay if he's off a little, and she says it is, but he should cut a bigger circle to compensate.
Sarah wants to know how this is going to work, which you'd think would be a discussion they had before he actually starts cutting, but what do I know? John explains that Cameron's neural network is the most sophisticated learning computer on earth. "If we can get her chip into the ARTIE system, it can take over the whole thing, just like Vick did with my laptop." Not that he or Cameron is actually sure this'll work.
As John steels himself to cut into her scalp (would it not have made more practical sense -- if not aesthetic sense -- to shave a patch of hair above the chip), Derek quietly asks Sarah who's to say Cameron will even come back out of the ARTIE network once she's in. "Maybe it's not the Turk that creates Skynet. Maybe it's her. Maybe this was her plan all along." John has had just about enough of the Cameron bashing for one episode and snaps that Cameron's a machine who doesn't have a soul and never will: "You don't have to trust her; you can just trust me."
Back to work. John peels a big gross bloody flap of hairy scalp back, and Cameron directs him doing it. He looks like he's going to chunder the entire time. "It's okay, John," says Cameron gently. "It's not the first time you've done this." Wouldn't Cameron understand that, actually, it is the first time he's done this? John pulls out the chip, and watch from Cameron's POV as her display winks out. She lies there, mannequin-like, (not the living mannequin in Mannequin, which I haven't seen, shut up). John and Derek head to find a traffic light, while Sarah stays behind with Cameron, and doesn't even ask them to stop at the In N' Out Burger on the way back.
You'd think Derek and John would have found a traffic light on a less busy street. I mean, it's not a freeway or anything, but since they're sitting there with a laptop plugged into the control box, you'd think they'd want as few people as possible noticing this. Fancy schmancy computer screens go flashing by on the laptop screen. That means she's in, according to John. He makes small talk with Derek, saying he believes Derek didn't know Sayles was following Barbara. "Thanks," says Derek. Oh, more flashy computer graphics. "She's done," says John. What? That's it? What a gyp! No Cameron wandering around some Matrix-y computer world? We don't get to see that at all? This is bullshit. She didn't even get to ride any light cycles like in Tron!
Derek reaches down and yanks out Cameron's chip. Dude! It fucks up my iPod when I don't eject it properly -- Cameron's a Terminator! Derek stares at the chip, then says to John, "I want you to hear this in no uncertain terms. Someday, one of these things is gonna kill you." John takes the chip back. "It's not gonna be this one," he says. And that's when traffic goes completely haywire. Instant chaos! It appears the virus's effect causes stock photography of traffic jams to appear on television screens.
Back at the Connor Compound, John replaces the chip in Cameron's head. He folds the flap of skin back over the head wound, and presses down really hard, which I guess ought to be enough to heal the cuts. After a moment or two (with John stroking her head), Cameron stirs. John asks her what it was like. "I saw everything," says Cameron, looking slightly awed.
Speaking of seeing everything, a pissed-looking Sarah bursts into the bathroom and pulls aside the shower curtain, surprising a very naked showering Derek. Sarah says Sarkissian returned her call, and will meet about the Turk. Derek, remarkably composed in such an indelicate situation, asks when the meeting will be. Tomorrow morning, says Sarah. "Meaning this news could have waited?" he says. Sarah stares at him a moment. "You killed Andy Goode," she says. Derek doesn't react. "There was no one there to protect him, and you killed him," she says. Derek continues to stare at her, possibly wondering if she expected him to wait until Andy was protected before he tried to kill him. "You lie to me again, I'll kill you," says Sarah. She should threaten to kill Derek every episode.
Cut to another shower scene, this one of Barbara, smiling as Vick slides open the shower door. She's all smiles, and burbling about their upcoming trip to Tahiti. Hey, why don't they make Tahiti Treat anymore? I loved that when I was a kid! I --- oh, sorry, Vick's strangling Barbara. Understandably, she looks upset about this turn of events.