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
it. He tells her just to put it all back, and he reaches for a box of documents himself, and he falls out of his chair. Cameron moves to help him, looking like she's reaching to right an upturned turtle, and he angrily waves her off before climbing back into his himself, and wheeling away.After the break, Cameron finds Eric in another part of the building, putting books away with a long reachy tool. She tries apologizing, but he flatly pretends it's no big deal. She says it is, because she doesn't have any friends. "That I find hard to believe," says Eric, clearly forgetting to add, "Because you're so hot!" When she turns to walk away, he quickly asks if she found anything out. She didn't, as there's no record of him before the fire. Eric suggests she try immigrant records, because maybe he came in through Ellis Island and worked himself up from nothing, which he calls the "single-minded pursuit of a goal" or something else that describes terminators and immigrants in equal measures. Cameron calls that "an effective strategy." "Either that or he robbed banks," jokes Eric. And we flash back to Stark doing just that -- a bandanna wrapped around his face as he mows people down with a Tommy gun. "Can you show me police records?" Cameron asks Eric.
And just like that, she's found a vinyl recording of an interview with a police officer describing the robbery of a La Brea savings and loan with awesome old-timey newspeak like: "Eight citizens were felled and did not live to tell about it." The police officer says the robber was hit by at least thirty bullets and still got away. "You really think he robbed banks?" asks Eric. "It's an effective strategy," says Cameron.
And they've already found more records of Myron Stark buying land just two days after that heist, and here, Cameron's already found a business application for Stark's construction company. And hey, here's a whole talkie newsreel which I don't believe even EXISTED at the time that documents the construction company battle for supremacy between Myron Stark and Rupert Chandler, that details the young upstart Stark taking on Chandler's company, the largest in the county. There's even some trash talking from Chandler's head foreman, Fred Jeffers, who said Chandler will "crush him like a bug." Stark's response? "We'll see," also used by Chrome Artie.
And now here's Eric wheeling in with some more information (Fred Jeffers disappeared in 1925 and was never heard from again) that he must have retrieved from the goddamn Myron Stark Wing, there's so much of it, and he puts it on the table but accidentally knocks Cameron's gun to the floor. He's rather disquieted by the fact that she's toting a gun, and asks her why. "In case I need it," she says. He asks if she's ever fired it. She has. He says he's noticed cuts on her face, and asks if she's in trouble. No. Is she afraid of someone? "'Afraid'? No." Heh. I loved the way she said that. She explains that there are people after her brother, and she protects him. "Who protects you?" asks Eric. "I do," she says. Duh, Eric. She's the one with the Glock. She puts out her hand to take it back, but Eric says he's never fired one before, so she asks if he wants to try, and the next thing you know he's shooting up the Yellow Pages. And I'm rather impressed that he hit the target on his very first try, especially since he doesn't have the use of his legs to brace himself. Cameron digs the slug out of the Yellow Pages and hands it to him, but he can't hold onto it because it's too hot. He's ecstatic; I think a marriage proposal is forthcoming.
Man, nothing makes for a fun party like people sitting around playing video games. Meanwhile, John's sitting there looking all sour, and Riley's good-natured cajoling isn't improving things, and neither is Douchebag Mike's lighter-flicking. That's his thing, apparently. Like that's even a thing. John eventually takes a turn with the controller. "Look at you, Mr. Normal!" chirps Riley, like SHUT UP, RILEY, and John affects a Rain Man head tilt and gets his ass handed to him in some kind of futurist shooter, and it looks like his problem is not so much sucking, but that he's imagining how real this is all going to seem before too long.
When he's finally killed by a loser who celebrates like it's some kind of accomplishment (although to look at this guy, it wouldn't be a stretch to think he'll never accomplish much). John wants to leave, which means Riley's going to go, much to Douchebag Mike's chagrin (because John is a weirdo. In Douchebag Mike's defence, John's ACTING like a weirdo). Then he accuses Riley of stealing his lighter, and keeps grabbing at her arm, and John FINALLY steps in to help after Mike calls her a "screwy bitch" and efficiently takes him down by grabbing him around the face and throwing him to the ground. He then pounds Mike's nose a couple of times, getting it all nice and bloody, before Riley pulls him off and they get the hell out of there. See you at school!
While Eric flips through some old documents, Cameron watches a television news piece from the '80s, featuring a reporter with huge blown-out hair, and a green outfit paired with a massive leopard-print belt. She's interviewing a hiker who found an old-timey car with bones in it, and the personal effects identified the guy as Fred Jeffers, and we drift into a flashback of Stark stopping Jeffers' car on a lonely road. Stark lifts up the front bumper of the old Model T and drags it off the road and, from the sounds of it, tosses it down a hill. And it took sixty years to find it?
Back at Insta-Research Central, Eric's discovered that Jeffers' disappearance was just the latest in a string of tragedies for Chandler, who endured the loss of his son on New Year's Eve, 1920. Flashback to a cop identifying a dead man on the sidewalk as "Rupert Chandler's boy." So Encyclopedia Brown and Sally here have figured out that there must be some sort of connection because Stark was there too.
So John's taken Riley out to some sort of lookout, where she says she thought he was going to kill Mike. John grouchily asks why she called him, and she says she wanted him to come. He says she's got a funny way of showing it. "I'm a teenage girl, John. We do that kind of crap to guys we like," she says, and I hate to have to tell her that admitting you're a psycho does not make being a psycho OK, and no, not all teenage girls pull this kind of shit. Just the kind who wind up with men whose prison records are longer than their resumes. And you know what? She did take the lighter. "I like shiny things," is her reason. That's it: from now on their dates should consist entirely of John shining a laser pointer on the wall for her amusement.
And now we have to suffer some boring chatter about their foster parents, like how Riley's previous couple thought they were awesome because they recycled, and they called her "The Deviant" and she mentions BRUCE HORNSBY of all musicians, and John decides he can be just as boring and talks about how his foster parents used to call him "The Delinquent." Oh, if only they could see you now, John, beating people up at parties. He asks what happened to Riley's real parents. "They died when I was little. In a fire." She asks why John was in a foster home, and John says his mom was in a mental hospital. "Well, that explains things," she says, and she needs the concept of SHUTTING UP explained to her apparently, and it's WAY past time that John kicked her selfish, manipulative ass out. Then John cryptically tells a vague story about Charlie, and how he lost his wife, and Riley is asking him about talking things out, which John says he sometimes wants to do but mostly doesn't, and now they're making out, and for the life of me I can't understand why John is being cryptic about the whole Terminator thing with Riley, who was almost killed by one in Mexico.
Cameron needs to learn a thing or two about personal space, doesn't she? She barges into the men's bathroom with Eric in a stall, to tell him she found Will Chandler's obituary. She says four hundred people came