on Cameron’s behavior:
i like it. we now know what a bored terminator does when it no longer has to follow its prime directive.
the undercurrent between her and Riley continues the thread started when she was pinned down by the truck.
on John’s reaction:
nobody likes a whiny teenager but, can you really blame him? you grow up being told that you will be this great leader and savior of the world that you never asked for. your birthday is spent exactly how the rest of your life is probably going to be spent. and you have an odd relationship with your terminator that squicks you so that you jump on the first flesh and blood girl who showed you any interest.
yeah the show has huge plotholes and lazy writing.
Cromartie pulling the wire off his car, ostensibly to show us that Charlie won’t be able to chase him, but how did Charlie know that without even checking? the elaborate mousetrap which contrasted with its sloppy finish. a crowded area bordered with terrain you cannot cross?
Correct. He’s the same Terminator from then, but now with a new face, so they’ve just kept calling him that to distinguish him from the inevitable onslaught of other Terminators that will come through.
Cromartie’s a T-888 model using an all new skin he made himself (Arnie was a T-800 model using the T-101 skin). Cameron’s model number has not yet been specified.
Well, there’s a difference between writing that isn’t tight, and writing that makes supposedly intelligent people excruciatingly stupid for the convenience of the lazy script.
When Sarah called John, she said something like (I don’t remember exactly), “Stay where you are and don’t ask me any questions.”
Why on Earth wouldn’t she say, “Cromartie is after you. Stay with Cameron and get undercover.”
Yes, she did. She called John once and Cromartie’s plan was to monitor it to listen for secret codes or clues to John’s whereabouts and whatnot. Then he blew the tower.
I suppose one could argue that if Sarah had started to give John useful advice, he’d’ve blown the tower right away.
But let’s face it, if the characters behaved logically, there’d be no show.
Yeah, what Bryan said. After Sarah discovered that the explosives were fake, she realized that the whole thing was a trick by Cromartie to get her and the uncle away from John. That’s actually something I give the writers credit for. At first, I was thinking it was incredibly stupid; why would Cromartie kidnap the paramedic guy’s wife (sorry, I’m bad with names)? It made no sense. But then it did make sense: Cromartie was actually being portrayed as smart enough to know that kidnapping the wife would make Sarah and the uncle run off to rescue her and leave John behind.
But then, as I said, the writers fell back into their convenience hole; Sarah called John (after realizing it was a trick), but didn’t tell him anything useful. I mean, I know they’re trying to play up the aspect of her being the mom and still trying to protect John, even though he’s supposed to be the world savior, and in same cases where she acts stupid I can forgive it from the standpoint of her being mom trying to protect him. But this was a case where her lack of being forthcoming put John in more danger, and there is no way to rationalize that away. She was incredibly dumb, for no other reason than lazy writing.
As an example of how, with just a bit more thought, the writers could have achieved basically the same thing without needing the characters to be stupid: How about if part of Cromartie’s electronic bag of tricks included some sort of magic “cut over” switch? In other words, Sarah calls John. Cromartie is listening. As soon as Sarah gives the code, and Cromartie knows that John knows it’s her (John says something like, “Mom, what’s going on?”), Cromartie throws his magic switch, Sarah is now cutoff and Cromartie’s phone is instantly connected to John instead. Now, Cromartie imitates Sarah and tells John to meet him at the pier. No stupidity on Sarah’s part, and more smarts and techno-savvy on Cromartie’s. The rest of the story plays out the same.
I love this show. So very much. It plays with the Terminator mythos in ways I always hoped the movies would do but was afraid they would screw up. But so far the show has really hooked me.
So was future Cameron telling the truth? Or does her “Kill John” program make that a big old lie?
I hope “Cameron has a software glitch” doesn’t become this show’s equivalent to a holodeck malfunction. Are John and Sarah still going to let Cameron go on after she assaulted that girl?
I don’t think it’s quite as dumb as you think it is. Sarah at that point realized that she had been lured away to leave John exposed, but she didn’t realize what was going on with the cell phone tapping. So she thought that John should be perfectly safe as long as neither she nor Cromartie knew where he was. So she told him to keep away from home, and she assumed Cameron was with him (or did she outright ask?).
That would have been a perfectly reasonable thing for her to have done, and should have kept him perfectly safe, EXCEPT that Cromartie was not only a step ahead of her, but was TWO Steps ahead of her.
The first time I saw Jodie I could have sworn they were digitally sticking in a younger Linda Hamilton. Anyone else thing our girl looked insanely like a 16 year-old Linda?
Well, we’ve had two instances of “kill John” evidence so far (the HUD/chip damage programing, and the head-pike statement), vs. future Cameron saying that some wanted peace.
On the other hand, maybe future Cameron was telling the truth…a future Cameron. We don’t know how many there are, or how much memory sharing goes on. It’s possible that the original Cameron was found out and reprogrammed, or simply replaced, by a loyalist Cameron, who then killed Allison.
(Or the one who killed Allison was still, at that point, one who wanted peace with mankind in general, but just had anger control and trust issues. And possibly a thing for apples.)
It’s not a big deal, but once I realized the convenience of Sarah Connor just happening to be away from the house for a whole night the same night that John has to track down the disfunctional terminator just kinda bugged.
They’ve already stated in previous episodes that Cameron was captured trying to infiltrate the base and reprogrammed by John. Remember, she was one of the terminators who was torturing/interrogating Derek and the Turk builder.
Interrogator-Alison-Cameron was lying to the real Alison. “We want peace” was exactly the same as “John, I love you, I don’t want to end!” from an earlier episode. Terminators will say anything to achieve their objectives.
