Still, though – haven’t they showed that a terminator can at least be temporarily disabled by a simple high voltage jolt? Then why don’t they just invest some of their weapons budget in a couple of simple tasers?
Because 50,000V (taser) isn’t going to kill someone but 120VAC (your house) will?
-Joe
The taser idea isn’t a terribly bad one, but you’re getting into the difference between amperage and voltage.
You can apparently knock a Terminator into reboot mode with 120 volts AC and 5 amps, which is what you can get from a wall circuit in my house.
A taser is closer to (going from memory here) 100,000 volts AC and 2.1 miliamps.
You could probably engineer a projectile weapon that could administer 1-5 amps to a subject, but I’m kind of fuzzy as to how hard it would be to get 100,000 volts from a man-portable projectile.
I’m also unsure as to whether or not 120 volts would be effective in taser applications, as part of the point of high voltage is that it’ll bridge larger physical gaps than low voltage.
Whoops!
Actually, I just realized none of us has any clue whether or not you’d need a half mili-amp or 5 amps.
So, can’t discredit the taser idea, but since that would be an incredible terminator nerfing, I can’t imagine the writers would go for that.
Holy shit!
Weaver put her AI into Cromartie! I wonder if Ellison is going to have second thoughts about digging him up?
Sarah was so sure she was back on the trail of the Turk, but ended up getting scammed for the sake of the tech guy’s son. But at least she got the truth out of him.
What’s Riley’s connection with Jessie? Did she come from the future, too? Which would fit right in with living with a foster family. Is she on Jessie’s mission? Which is apparently to get John separated from Cameron.
I liked Sarah’s cover name, by the way. Gale. John certainly loves the Wizard of Oz. Hope it doesn’t end up biting them in the ass one of these days.
I think I must’ve missed something in this episode – why did they give the three-dot people the money for the chip in the first place? To see whether their AI would or could evolve into SkyNet? But without the money/the chip/a server farm, they wouldn’t have been a thread anyway, right?
They were going to steal the chip and destroy it - if it did indeed turn out to be the Turk. Sarah was led to believe it was because of the Japanese/chess game connection. They probably would have taken their money back also- which they did, anyway. But the main thing is to get the Turk. They don’t want to take chances with it. What if Weaver gains hold of it and becomes aware of its potential, for example? And there’s always that possibility. Weaver’s company is connected to the Connors through Ellison. She obtained Cromartie and put him to her uses. If someone like her gets ahold of the Turk, it increases the danger to humanity a thousand-fold.
Anybody remember how much juice John had to put through the chip to wake it up back in season 1?
My theory on Riley is that she’s a Terminator, an even more advanced model than Cameron.
I thought the chip just supplied the processing power, the ghost was in the design by the tech kid?
My DVR decided not to record this - can some one write (or point me to) a summary?
Thanks!
Their tech explanations and analogies were confusing and nonsensical. I don’t think they had a clear idea of what they were trying to portray.
I think the kid’s software design was supposed to be the dangerous/revolutionary AI but required a huge amount of processing power. The chip was just advanced enough that it could run the software.
They didn’t really need it - kill the kid, and destroy his work - problem solved. No need to test it, or involve an outside party.
They apparently aren’t learning their lessons about being merciful towards people. The reality is that their mission is more important than any person, or even any million persons. They should unflinchingly kill anyone who even has the slightest hint of being able to be the creator of skynet, or anyone who could ruin their mission. There’s no time to waffle over the morality of individual murders - they have before them the most important task that anyone has ever faced - the entire future of humanity itself.
Woo Hoo! Cromartie’s back! Oh wait… end of humanity and all that… I take it back.
It was cool to really see the “teetering-on-the-edge-of-sanity” side of Sarah as she was beating up that guy.
Cameron “plumbing” Ellison’s yard for Cromartie’s body was great–“Go back to sleep!”
This continues to be one of my favorite shows on the air right now. The pacing is really good–I hope they can keep it up.
As was pointed out in the show, Sarah’s reasoning has been a little sketchy lately.
The extent of her ability to resolve situations amounts to throwing either money or bullets at her problems. If those don’t work, she runs. Remember, she told the guy that ten years ago, she just would have blown the building up.
So, in this case, her plan of action was:
(a) Find out what’s really behind the three-dot clue (it’s a company that’s doing research into AI).
(b) See if they’ve got anything (potentially workable software, which they stole, and set the company back a boatload).
(c) Find out what kind of CPU it would take to run the software and convince people to … umm… not make them? Huh. Lucky thing there isn’t any actual chip like that, yet.
Oh, and Derek? Is an ass. “See these three dots on this belt? Think that’s a conspiracy?”
John’s thought bubble: Gee, I dunno, Derek. Do you suppose that belt manufacturer is researching ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
Whenever I watch this show I always think about the scene from Austin Powers, where Seth Green asks his father, Dr. Evil, why he doesn’t just go back in time and kill Austin powers while he’s sitting on the crapper.
Well, I’m back—been working my flesh creature hide off, recently. Finally got a chance to see yesterday and last week’s episodes in the wee hours this morning.
•So…I think Fox Mulder, so far, has a better track record of figuring out who’s pulling his chain or not at this point than everyone in this series.
•I can’t help but wondering if young Fischer, after hearing about what happened in the future, but still getting locked up (was he in prison, or just in a nut house?) is going to start the time loop over again…or actually change his life decisions in regards to Skynet, and cause another change in the timeline.
Eh, I’m still just hoping for a sweeps week episode where they end up with three different versions of the same person all showing up, from completely different timelines, and all trying to kill each other. (But heck, I’m still waiting for Michael Biehn to make a cameo as Kyle and Derek’s father, Dwayne Reese. 
)
•Well, a bit of research on the Terminator wiki seems to somewhat debunk the idea, but I was almost sure after this episode that Riley was basically a reboot of the “Cheri Westin” character from season 1. (Well, maybe I’m not that far off—time will tell, I guess.)
•Say…isn’t there a line in an old folk song about John Henry that mentions them “bury[ing] him in the sand”? 
•And is Cromhenrk actually in the patched up body, or do they just have the body running off of a network cable jammed in the back of his skull, or something? (Maybe he’s got an Airport card)
Also…I’m increasingly wondering if the real point of the series isn’t going to be so much stopping Skynet from ever being built, but a temporal AI Race over what becomes Skynet.
…Or maybe it’ll just be a message of “us humans is better’an those mean ol’ godless machines,” and end with Sarah busting up every post-industrial piece of tech she can find as she submits to the Unbending Will of Fate as the nukes fall. Oh, well.
OK, let’s say they stop Skynet, then Summer Glau never gets sent back, right?
I missed crazy Sarah Connor.
Why is John Connor such a D-bag? He whines as a teenager. The T-800 practically has to beat some backbone into him in T3. Even in the trailers for the new film he’s whining about the war against the machines. “Boo hoo…this isn’t the war mom warned me about.” Oh, so sorry dumbass. Because it’s supposed to be so easy to defeat a super smart AI and it’s army of robotic killing machines. How does he eventually defeat Skynet? They meet face to interface and he totally blows Skynet’s AI mind by how much of a pussy he is. BUT HOW COULD SUCH A DOUCHE DEFEAT ME…ERROR>>> DOES NOT COMPUTE!! (explodes…horray humans)
For once I want to see a prophetic hero who kicks ass from birth. Not some mama’s boy who has to “grow into the role”. Here’s John Connor. As a child, he used to tear apart old cars with his bare hands for practice. If it wasn’t for Judgement Day, he probably would have been Batman.
More importantly, she never gets created. No Skynet = no Terminators.
Eh, there’s really nothing that says time travel works that way in the show’s universe; so far, they’ve been smart enough to show rather than to tell, which is usually where it all goes down the crapper. So, she could well come from the future, then help altering the future, without any paradoxes – she’s from the other future, after all. Same goes for ‘why doesn’t skynet just off John/Sarah/Sarah’s parents at some convenient point/establish its dominion in the middle ages’’ – we just don’t know that that’s possible with the show’s version of time travel; it might be that there are fixed points in time that cannot be changed, it might all be a complex interwoven construct, there might be points you cannot jump to, anything basically. So lets just hope that they keep their mouths shut about the mechanics of time travel, and there’s always hope for at least a consistent fanwank.
I’m liking this idea… it makes it sound kind of like The Lathe of Heaven: once they realize they’re defining the future, they can steer the way they want to (turning Fischer into a nicer guy rather than just killing him).