Episode Report Card Daniel: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times
By Daniel | Season 2 | Episode 11 | Aired on 12.01.2008
to his funeral, so he must have been well-liked. "His father had money. There's a difference," says Eric, who hasn't gotten over his shock at Cameron barging in like that. Cameron thinks Stark killed Chandler, but Eric points out that they don't even know if the two knew each other. Besides, why take out 43 innocent people just to kill Chandler. "It happens," says Cameron. While Eric finished up, Cameron asks him if he ever thinks about death or killing himself. Surprised, Eric asks why she'd ask that. "Because there's something wrong with you," says Cameron. That's enough to make Eric's genitals shrink up and withdraw into his groin, so no more need to urinate! He rolls out of the stall and says he's never for one second thought about suicide, because of what it'd do to his family. And besides, he's clean of cancer; he just needs a scan done every six months.Outside, Eric suggests checking out a documentary on the Roaring '20s, because it features a woman who was at the speakeasy. Cameron will have to go alone, though, because it's on the top floor and there's no wheelchair access. Cameron, who seems to have given up any idea of acting like a normal teenage girl, lifts Eric right out of the wheelchair. "You're strong," says Eric, ready to have Cameron's babies. "I work out," says Cameron.
Up in the film room, she sets him down on a box, and he's in awe of the "silver nitrate" all around him, none of that digital crap they do nowadays. He says the reels are "raw humanity on display" and Cameron's eyes are glazing over like she's being lectured at a party by the guy who smugly tells everyone he doesn't own a television, you know that guy? Just give him a second more to think about how no one on those films will ever get old, and it would be nice to freeze a moment, when you're young and healthy ... my GOD JUST WAKE ME UP WHEN YOU'RE DONE.
So this elegant older woman (think a Jessica Tandy type), smilingly reminisces about going out to gin joints and smoking and drinking, and at least her scandalized grandchildren aren't going to have to hear about Grandma's promiscuity as well, and she talks about the fire, how suddenly there was a man, "Naked as a jaybird" in the middle of the room, and there was this blue light and electricity. Cameron casts a sidelong glance at Eric, who's enthralled. She chalks it up to the liquor talking. "He didn't mean to kill all those people," says Cameron. Eric agrees, already chalking the fire up to an electrical problem. "It's just like in The Wizard of Oz when the house falls on the witch, says Cameron. We revisit the scene from the beginning of the episode, only this time we watch the familiar zapping electricity that accompanies time travel, and the Terminator crouch, and naked Stark grabbing some man fleeing in terror and saying "Give me your clothes."
And we watch him again walking among the dead and the distraught, including the crying woman who I assume is Smokin' and Drinkin' Grandma now, and he looks up.
Cameron strides outside, Eric right behind her, asking where she's going. "I know what he was looking at," she says, looking up at the sky herself. She says he was measuring the stars' radial velocity, distance in parsecs, and Cartesian co-ordinates. Well, why didn't I think of that? Eric asks why. "To pinpoint the date," says Cameron, which Eric seems to disbelieve. We watch Cameron -- and Stark in flashback -- do just that, and in what really can't be a coincidence, do so by picking out three stars in a triangular pattern that would make Sarah's head explode. Eric asks why the date is so important. "It's not. Unless it's the wrong date," she says. Starks' display shows him calculating the date as Dec. 31, 1920. "TEMPORAL ERROR" flashes the screen. A single metallic tear rolls down his cheek. "Myron Stark was in the wrong place at the wrong time," says Cameron. No, right place, wrong time.
Rupert Chandler's eulogy for his dead son? Of course it's there. Does it contain oddly specific information about a particular piece of land to hold a particular building that the architect son planned to design? Sure does. Pico Tower, on the corner of Third and Pico. Rupert said the land will never be sold or developed but will remain a memorial garden forever. Eric says there is a Pico Tower, though, an architectural landmark. "Someone must've built it," says Cameron. Yeah, that is what was probably required for it to exist, Cameron. Fortunately, the explanation is right at hand: tax records that show Chandler's battle with Stark cost him everything, and he had to sell off all his assets. "It's like the family's cursed," says Eric.
Flashback to yet another thrilling scene from the 1920s, this one of Stark accosting Chandler and Jeffers at the movie premiere and offering to buy the land at Third and Pico but getting rebuffed. When are they going to get to the fireworks factory? So who bought the land? Well, you're never going to believe this, but it looks like Stark did, and designed the tower himself. It's about the building, figures Cameron: "Stark accidentally killed the man who was going to build it, so he built it himself." Things seem to be clicking into place for Cameron, not so much for Eric, who discovers that Stark disappeared two weeks before the opening of the building and was never heard from again. Cameron asks if anything important happened in the Pico Tower, on New Year's Eve. "What year?" asks Eric. Any year, says Cameron. Eric can't think of anything, and at any rate, the tower's been closed for retrofitting since the last earthquake. Cameron turns and stomps out of the room. No goodbye for Eric.
Cameron walks in the front entrance of Pico Tower, which is apparently closed but for some reason has a sign on an easel in the lobby that says it's reopening New Year's Eve 2010: "Join us for the ceremony, with a keynote speech by governor Mark Wyman," the sign tells all the people who don't walk past it every day BECAUSE THE BUILDING IS CLOSED.
Cameron walks through the building, eventually coming to a large ballroom with a stage. She stands in the centre of the room, and then looks at the stage. She pictures New Year's Eve 2010, with a grinning governor standing at a lectern on the stage. She turns and walks toward the wall opposite the stage. She looks back at the stage, and her on-screen display overlays a grid and the words "Calculating optimal targeting angle" appear, and then she's picturing the governor being hit by bullets. She turns back to the wall, knocks a couple of times, until she hears a hollow reverberation. She punches through the wall, and standing there in an old-timey gangster's outfit and holding a Tommy gun, is Stark. He jerks back to life as Cameron breaks through, but isn't quick enough to keep her from throwing him through the wall and then unloading most of the ammunition from his Tommy gun into him. He doesn't fight back too well, but I guess it's like when your computer's a little sluggish after being woken up from sleeping. Cameron tosses him into the wall a couple of times for good measure, then kicks aside the grate guarding the empty elevator shaft. She throws him against the wall of the shaft, but he manages to grab a hold of the floor (and her ankle). She grabs a cord and yanks a freaking elevator down on top of Stark. Well, half of him, anyway. The top half struggles to pull itself to safety, so Cameron whips out a knife and gets to work.
Back at the Hall of Records, Eric's pleasantly surprised to see Cameron back, at least until he sees she's scratched up. "I'm fine," she says. "Your brother again?" he asks, and she repeats that she's fine. He's also not so thrilled when she tells him his cancer is back, in the long bone of his left arm, and possibly in his lungs. Eric calls her crazy, and gets angry when she starts clinically explaining what Ewing's sarcoma is. "No wonder you don't have any friends," he says, bitching that you can't just come by whenever you want something, can't carry a gun around and freaking people out, can't just barge in on someone in the bathroom. Well, appar