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
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Cameron takes a starring role in an episode that features very little Sarah, no Derek at all and John relegated to the B-plot (which, um, climaxes in a heavy make out session). So let's dispense with John and Riley right away. Riley? You're a psycho. And admitting that you're purposely trying to push John's buttons by flirting with another mom-hating douchebag doesn't make it OK. It makes you more of a psycho because you're doing it intentionally, and now John has to get into a fight because you think it's OK to steal someone's lighter.
So anyway, you know how Cameron likes to do super-fun crazy stuff like read the dictionary? Apparently she's read all the books at the Connor Compound, because she sneaks out at night to a library, where she befriends a guy who works the night shift, and she reads up on esoteric things.
A photo from a tragic New Year's party in 1920 catches her eye, and she recognizes one of the bystanders as a Terminator. She digs deeper, and we get to see a Terminator-with-a-Tommy-gun story that she manages to put together from records that are almost 90 years old. This terminator, Stark, somehow got sent to the wrong time; instead of going to 2010 to assassinate the governor of California ["Ha! Very clever." - Angel], he wound up in 1920. And here's how committed he is to seeing the mission through. When the owner of the building where he's to carry out his mission in 2010 refuses to sell back in the 1920s, Stark starts up his own construction company that eventually takes over the building (after some shady stuff like murder of the magnate's right-hand man), and Stark walls himself up to wait for the 21st century. Cameron gets to him first, and destroys him.
Which is great, because while she was out gallivanting around, Skynet got to the Connor Compound and killed everyone without Cameron there to guard them. Well, they didn't. But they could.
Want more? The full recap starts right below! Well, looks like it's the 1920s, because everyone's dressed all flapper-style and listening to big band music. Really, did everyone dress like that then? Eighty years from now, if a show is set in the late nineties, is everyone going to be dressed in khaki and black and listening to the Squirrel Nut Zippers just because some people did? The happy carousing is cut short by this raging bonfire that has everyone screaming and running for the exits.And they still look happier than John does, as we fade into the present day, with John farting around on a laptop in the dining room. He says he's dumped about fifty thousand websites, and there are hundreds of companies with three dots for a logo, including companies that make baby wipes and ice cream. "Nothing screams Skynet like baby wipes and ice cream," he says. Any new parent can change a diaper and figure that if such a sweet little bundle of joy can produce such a giant disgusting mess, then the end times can't be far off. John reminds her that she saw the three dots in a dream. Yeah, and also IN BLOOD ON A WALL, she points out, and tells him to keep looking. He says he will tomorrow, as he's beat. So Sarah passes off the laundry basket to Cameron and tells her to make herself useful, since she never sleeps. John isn't so tired that he can't hang around to sarcastically point out that Cameron is the most sophisticated killing machine ever invented, and she's got it doing laundry. Sarah's got the cure for that sassmouth: she takes the laundry basket and gives it John, who, once his mom is gone, sheepishly hands it back to Cameron, whose look clearly says, I may just be a terminator, but I know when I'm getting hosed. John walks out and turns the light out, so now she's got to turn on her nightvision just to fold the freakin' laundry.
And now Cameron's at the employee entrance of some university/library-looking building, and ringing the doorbell. The door's opened by a guy in a wheelchair who answers so quickly he kind of had to have already been there. Cameron holds up a bag: "One glazed, one rainbow sprinkle, one cinnamon twist." You never forget, do you, marvels the guy. I mean, it's THREE donuts. Does she need a mnemonic device?
So she's clearly been doing this a while; they sit in the library and work. Buddy asks her about her trip to Mexico, wondering if she met up with her friend. We flashback to Cameron and John digging up Chrome Artie but finding only a boot. "He was gone when we got there," says Cameron, and then agrees with Eric that it was "a bummer." Eric asks if her brother is still dating that crazy girl, and Cameron says yes, telling him about getting robbed because Riley snuck out the window. Eric asks if they got who did it, and Cameron flashes back to blowing away the perps in the bowling alley. "Everything worked out fine," she says.
Suddenly she asks if there are any books about California field artillery, as she's interested in muzzle-loading rifles used during the Murdoch Indian War. Eric seems surprised by the request, but tells her it would be in the California room.
So that's where they go, with Eric rambling on about the assignments he's got due this week. Cameron's barely listening as she surveys the old framed photographs on a table. She picks one up, of a chaotic scene with firefighters and screaming people. Eric rolls over to have a look. Cameron points out the guy in the centre of the photograph, as her on-screen display identifies the guy as a T-888. "I know him," she says, but Eric points out she'd have to be about 110 years old, as that photo was taken on New Year's Eve, 1920, at the scene of a speakeasy fire that killed forty-three people. It was rumoured that the party was started by a Molotov cocktail thrown by another speakeasy club.
We fade back into the aftermath in 1920, which looks like the season premiere of Law & Order: The Roaring Twenties, dead people laid out on the street, people crying. The T-888 makes his way through the wailing and the death and looks up at the sky, which is when the picture was taken. "I need to know what happened to him," says Cameron.
After the opening credits/commercial break, John's awoken by his cellphone ringing. He checks the number, sighs, and picks up. It's Riley, who's been indoctrinated into using their foolproof beep-boop phone code (which John doesn't do back, I'd like to point out). Sounding distraught, she asks him to come get her. Sounding put out, she gives him an address in Van Nuys, and pleads with him again to come get her. John hangs up without even saying anything, so I guess silence is implied acceptance.
Back at the library, Eric is explaining that most periodicals from the fifties haven't been transferred into digital format yet, so this could take a while, which is going to turn out to be ridiculously not true, but he's optimistic because with a fire that big there are bound to be survivor stories, and then he talks about the last living survivor of the Titanic, but he doesn't have any point except to mention his own bone cancer, which he says is like being the Titanic and the iceberg. If he's looking for sympathy from Cameron, he's getting nowhere. She's busy looking at a piece of microfiche, but she does notice Eric pulling his sweater on, claiming that it's cold. "It's seventy-six degrees," she says. She asks him to bring up image D6 on the reader: it's a picture of Myron Stark (he's the T-888) shaking hands with Rudolf Valentino at the premiere of Valentino's The Sheik. Cameron's never heard of Valentino. "Oh, you kids, with your rock and roll music and obsession with medieval siege weapons!" clucks Eric.
Anyhoo, Cameron wonders what Stark is doing there, and we flash back to a more sepia-toned age, with Stark enthusiastically shaking Valentino's hand and saying he enjoyed the movie very much, except for the fact that he disagreed with Valentino's giving Lady Diana a gun to defend herself from the caravan of thieves, given that she was "a security risk." Valentino seems a little freaked out by Stark's intensity, but Stark turns his gaze on someone else, which Cameron notices in the picture: Stark's actually looking at someone else in the picture, some top-hatted guy named Rupert Chandler. Cameron wants to search the city and county records, and Eric says that's in Vital Statistics, which is in the basement, which is locked, and he doesn't have a key, so she'll have to come back in the morning and talk to Barry. Cameron pays him no mind, and just walks away. "Excuse me, hey, where are you going?" Eric says, and starts rolling after her.
So John shows up at this party where no one says hi to him, except for the mom of the slicked-up tanktop-wearing utter douchebag Mike, who gets chewed out by her son for BUYING THE WRONG BEER, and then he basically tells her to get out of her own kitchen because it's kind of hard to relax with her hanging around, only judging by the way he's flicking bottlecaps around and playing with his Zippo, he seems plenty relaxed. Mike's mom asks why he never introduced her to his friend John, and Mike says it's because John's not his friend but some "weirdo loser who dropped out of school," and I can't imagine in a million years talking to my mom like that, and obviously neither can John, who eventually says he's looking for Riley, who coincidentally shows up and happily takes a beer and makes like it was no big deal that she called John all upset. She wants to hang out, and he snaps, "I only came to get you!" and she sulks and he gives in and apologizes to HER, and says they can stay awhile.
Cameron has helped herself to some records in the basement when Eric rolls in. Like nothing's happened, she tells him that she doesn't think Myron Stark is who everyone thought he was, but Eric's too pissed off that he lets her in after hours whenever she wants, and then she does exactly what he told her not to. "I need the information," she says, simply. "I need this job! You broke the lock!" he yells, and she says she'll fix