Strange Things Happen at the One-Two Point…
That’s an episode title, and it’s a Go proverb. No, really. The game of “Go” has proverbs, and that’s one of them. If you’re interested, you can find a couple of really good, in-depth descriptions of what this actually means with respect to playing Go. But the important thing for us (and the episode) is its meaning in a larger sense: in certain situations, the rules of battle change. The pace of battle gets faster, more intense. Everything can become life-and-death (which, as it turns out, is another term that comes from Go).
Why this obsession with an old strategy game from China played with white and black stones? Well, when a writer goes in search of a metaphor… just as when Sarah Connor goes in search of three dots… sometimes, we land on a thing we’re so sure is right that it becomes everything. In this case, Go and its proverbs. At the risk of getting meta, Go became the tale and the tale became Go. Starts simple, gets complicated. Nothing is what it seems until you get to end-game and suddenly realize “of course”. It was always this way. It was always going to end this way. It had to end this way.
There’s a great Go proverb that didn’t make it into the episode but applies nicely: “learn the nuclear tesuji”. That’s a fancy way of saying sometimes the only way to prevent a loss is to get ticked off, destroy the board and beat your enemy senseless. It’s meant in jest, but it’s strangely effective. At the very least, it might make you feel better.
Just ask Sarah Connor. And Skynet…
Again, this is why THIS IS THE BEST SHOW ON TV!
Two more hours to go…!
ahh this episode was the best. “Hello Mr. Ellison Im John Henry” Will Live Forever In My Book As one of the greatest quotes of all time.
OMG, this episode nearly killed me. I love this show. I suspected the stuff with Riley, but it still blew me away. And Derek — keep your mouth shut! I have no idea who I’m supposed to be rooting for, I just feel sorry for John and Sarah.
This was a great episode! A bunch of awwsome twists. You writers walk a higher path. I bow to you.
Awesome episode!
TSCC is now pretty much the only reason I use my tv
I KNEW I hated Riley for a reason!
Can’t say enough about tonights Ep. Man it was good.
*SPOILERS*
Riley, a resistance fighter sent back for the purpose of giving John a human companion so Cameron doesn’t get to close to him which apparently she will err does. Who’d a thunk that? Not to mention my new Nemesis is Jessie. I don’t like her because she’s shady and plans on potentially offing Cameron. In any case I somehow doubt that will happen and suspect Derek is in for some heartache down the road. Who knows maybe its John who prevents Jessie from achieving her plans? Finally mans up and makes a choice. That’d be the second time he’d save Cameron. Hmmm? Finally Cromarties back as John Henry, Priceless! There’s another twist for the old brain pan to ponder. The Terminator sent back to kill John Conner fails and is reborn as the childlike beginnings of Skynet. You could say Weaver is its mom and Cromartie is the dad… Creepy.
In any case great show, great episode, great cast, great performances. Keep up the good work!!! Oh and I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of the 3 dots yet.
P.S
As a bonus to a great Ep Summer and Lena looked stunning and lovely. Thats two classy actress’s right there. A couple of keepers for sure.
@ John
Yeah I still don’t Like Riley I just didn’t see that coming. At first I was like Jessies going to use Riley to get at Cameron, but then I was like holy crap Riley’s a resistnace fighter from the future!!! Head exploded.
Okay, I’ll have to rewatch the episode, but I do not recall it being said that Riley is from the future. For a strange thing at the one-two point what if Jesse worked with Fiscer(sp? torture guy) to capture and torture Riley. Fiscer did the torture than Jesse came in and saved her, got her devoted to her and had her get close to John. Why? To find out who John’s father is. Skynet has never known. The only ones to ever know were Sarah and John. Charley found out and so did Derek. Derek just gave Skynet what it had been looking for. Or not.
once again, AWESOME EPISODE!!
and nice to have “Cromartie” back!!
Great work guys!!
Thank you very much and hoping for MORE SEASONS!!!
Riley’s a resistnace fighter was not said in the show and maybe she only knows of judgment day becuse Jessie told her.she seemed mental tonight too maybe she just some wack job and jessie is getting to do her dirty work for her.she a mole to get info not to keep him from cameron and i dont think jessie has time for a long con like that she here to get her mission done kill cameron and save her people from the future .i feel bad for john she is his frist girlfriend and she is a fake he going have no trust for any woman when he finds out that.
“The wait is long, but the payoff is huge.”
Riley, you crazy girl. At first, I thought you were a ditsy valley girl, hitting on the mysterious loner. Now, I know your secret agenda, and I’ll never be the same. You sneaky ninja!
Great job Ashley, Josh and Crew. Nice Plot twist. It had to be this way. Although, I’m still uncertain if Riley’s from the present and Jesse recruited/blackmailed her, or if she and Jesse came back together from the future. Cameron had no files on Riley. So, if Riley is from the future, she must be from the same alternite time line that Jesse and Charles Fischer are from. Right? If so, that explains why Cameron had no memories of Riley, or Charles Fischer.
Please tell me there’s a podcast for this episode.
I didn’t know where else to say this, so I hope this gets to the right people.
I purchased a season pass on iTunes to season two, and the latest episode just began downloading. Unfortunately, it has the title “Self Made Man” instead of the correct “Strange Things Happen at the One-Two Point” title.
The content is fine. It is merely mislabeled.
Why is it, with over 6 billion people on the planet, and God knows how many machines, they all seem to converge upon Los Angeles - and bump into one another none stop! Does any ELSE know that LA is 50% Latino? Wouldn’t Skynet have roots in Silicon Valley, which is 600 miles NORTH of LA? Wouldn’t Skynet target replacing Bill Gates with a killer robot to run his empire - or has that happened already? Or, would it be better to take over the Mac world and produce better TV commercials than the PC? Or shouldn’t Skynet focus on putting nanobots to take over our bodies by drinking Starbucks coffee or Coca Cola soft drinks? Or wouldn’t they try to deaden our bodies with massive Prosac prescriptions, or mesmerize us with mundane reality TV shows? The truth IS out there…
Yes, somebody should call Agent Mulder - as soon as he gets out of sex addict rehab!
Well i did not see this coming at all. Never even thought of seeing Riley as anything more other than John’s Girlfriend. Well done to the writers.
The things i cant wait to find out is
1) What is Cameron’s Real mission in all this. I dont think it is just to protect John Connor. As we have seen in flashbacks, she killed the real cameron to get to john connor in the future. As much as i dont want to have her become the baddie. It could happen.
2) What is going on with John in the future? Seems to me like he is putting to much faith in Metal for some weird reason. From what we have heard from Jessie
3) No her (Jessie), what is she up to. Never trusted her in the first place.
Cant wait to see more episodes
LOL @ Chris! Hee! It’s already happening, man. There’s Prozac in the water. We *are* mesmerized by mundane reality TV shows. I’ve given up Starbucks and Coke - too much nanobot aftertaste! And PCs will always have better commercials than Mac, because Skynet is behind the PC! [cue terminator music].
Why everything happens in LA is beyond me - must be the worm hole’s terminus.
@ Chris
Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you!
Wow good episode
I may just be too paraniod or just a fan of the show but a few things stuck out for me.
Jesse is out for no good and I think she is a skynet plant and worked with ficher. She killed old ficher before derek killed young so that the timeline could be maintained. She also is Riley’s handler the speech about “the feelings for John Conner and don’t let that get in the way of the mission” seems omnis.
Riley did prove she was from the future when she freaked out at her foster mom and told about judgement day. Her Indentifing with the fish caught in the bears mouth makes me think she was caught and “given” a choice work for skynet or die.
I’d been getting the little hints that Riley might be from the future. She didn’t seem to fit well into the story otherwise. I loved the reveal.
Here’s what confuses me:
If only 5 people knew where Cromartie was buried, the Connor clan + one outsider, then how come no one is no one is surveilling Ellison? If they simply followed the guy for one day he would lead them to Zeiracorp. It’s so simple, it seems like it would be the second thing to do (after beating the crap out of him).
Okay, I’m going to try to answer my own question (sarcastically):
1) Sarah’s nutty pursuit of the 3 dots - everyone’s on board with that
2) The Connors still believe Ellison works for the FBI (and it pays well enough for Ellison to afford a high-end mercedes)
3) John can’t be wrong (after all, he’s the future leader of mankind)
Digging up Ellison’s backyard at night is not the same as following him around for just a couple of days. The backyard is a one-time thing.
It’s a big deal that Cromartie is missing. If it wasn’t Ellison, then someone is following the Connors and knows their every move. Unlikely, because that person would be associated with SkyNet, and if SkyNet knew where the Connor’s were, they would kill them.
This is a simple case where Occam’s razor applies: the most straightforward explanation is the best.
@ logan
The Connors did’nt know Ellison was looking for them and up till that point he really wasn’t anymore so they would have no reason to be interested in him anymore.
As for not following him and discovering the whole kit n kabootle. That would make for a very short season if they did that for starters, and sometime for sake of making a show the obvious solution is the worst idea.
The way I explain it is John was convinced Ellison did not dig up Cromartie. We know he was wrong and I’m pretty sure Cameron knows he was wrong. In my mind thats why Cameron went to Ellisons house and was looking in his back yard. I don’t think she was sent to do that and instead think she did it on her own. Hench the perplexed look on everyones faces when she walked into the kitchen with the rebar. If John is convinced and Cameron is now convinced then they have no reason to persue Ellison further.
hail the the writers
great job !
jessie is dark, derek is soo blind for her
finally we have something good from riley
i want to see cameron killing them
@ Josh
Yes, the Connors do know that Ellison is still looking for them. He was on their trail at Dr. Silberman’s when Sarah saved him from the fire. He had Vick’s hand with him, which means he linked Derek Reese and Andy Goode’s murder to Sarah Connor and the machines. To the best of Sarah’s knowledge, he was still looking for them.
Following him makes more sense than digging up his backyard. He had to have a reason for digging up Cromartie, and digging him up simply to bury him in the backyard seems far-fetched.
I agree that Cameron suspects Ellison, despite John’s opinion, but I don’t think that Cameron has really followed through enough. Cameron should be tailing this guy, not digging up his backyard.
Incidentally, the quickest way to lose an audience is to ignore the obvious, b/c that undermines the characters, and the insults the intelligence of the audience.
I love this show. I am worried about Fox moving it to Friday nights- that is normally the death of a show…
The choice of Go was a breakthrough from season 1’s Queen’s Gambit. Due to its complexity and capture strategies it is the chess of a battle fought across time. Its Eastern origin seems more vital in an age when computer chip development is as likely to come from Japan or South Korea. Keep this metaphor-advance it-the threshold of AI is master the almost infinite Go. After all, Bobby Fischer is as dead as Dr. Sherman.
Really great episode… fantastic job of you… I need to rewatch it to get everything clear (can it really be so ? do we want it to be totally clear ? No, we don’t ;))
Nevertheless, I had hoped to see more Cameron-John interaction (I’m not even sure they spoke to each other in this episode).
Even if we don’t know yet the truth about Riley, I definitely don’t like her. I wish so much that John could forget her and spend time with Cameron, who is definitely worth it…
Josh and Logan:
It is certain we can write off the oversight(s) by all of the major characters on the “good” side, who are clearly pre-occupied AND distracted:
Sarah is a complete introvert whack-job passifist (she keeps letting people/things go that can only come back to place them later terrorist, barely holding it together trying to “protect” her son while destoying Skynet all the while knowing of her pending death by cancer;
John, scared out of his mind and trying to grow into a role he neither wants or feels he deserves - all the while felling it is his mother who is the (overbearing) savior, and being buffeted about by his own (unknown, but identifiable) actions in the future (not to mention Skynet and the Terminators they send back;
Derek, once just a victim of Post Traumaic Stress Syndrome - now just mainly chasing tail, and not yet fully revealing his REAL mission either;
Cameron, who has suffered major head trama - making her as flawed as the rest of the shock troop troup (who obviously also has a yet to be revealed mission motive);
They all don’t TELL anyone about what is REALLY going on, and people make BAD decisions because of it. Would it have been so bad to tell the ex-FBI agent about stuff he already KNEW about after reading Sarah’s files?
Why couldn’t he have “come clean” about his encounter with Cromartie? Why’d he have to go to Big Business with his fight - and why didn’t/doesn’t he reveal his knowledge of Cameron, Sarah and John because of this knowledge? Surely, they must be a catalyst in the matter - and they have a live WORKING Terminator cyborg to study and analyze!
Yeah, it would have been easy to tail him and find his connect - and lead them right to the heart of the snake pit with a mean ol’ T-whatever advance hell bitch butt kicker mogul to deal with! (Maybe this is coming…)
However, I would like to see that the writers - even though they had to go with a tired plot convention (”let’s split up,” running from an assailant and not being able to get up in time all the while crying about it) of oversight by the Conner Clan to believe the ONLY other person with access to the T should NOT be further investigated. I think he’d have talked about everything he knew by the time Cameron broke a few fingers or pushed in an eyeball (hey, he still had another, and I’ve heard of humans doing far worse to one another!).
It would be a go thing if the writers had the characters verbally acknowledge that they got sloppy under stress (or trying to hold on to high moral ideas “we are not killers) during a WAR!) and need to tighten their game up.
I’d like to see a trend where they are on REALLY high alert and the T’s sent back still manage to wreak havoc in spite of their best efforts to stop them - not that they toil in shadows and silence and still make mistakes. It is OUR lives they hold with their actions; or do they not really consider that our lives - whom they consider will be lost enmasse - aren’t worth much by analysis? If so, why do they keep letting people live that are going to die anyway?
At least Jesse let loose with the real stress of the situation…how would YOU deal with having the weight of dead world on your shoulders. Makes you consider what goes on in the minds of any soldier - espacially those stationed in urban environments (probably the reason the U.S. Army is opposed to operating on native soil - soldiers are professional killers: what they DO is tear stuff up!). I wonder about ninjas, kamakazis, and terrorists with bombs strapped to their bodies…do they give a hoot?
It be refreshing to see something that we haven’t seen in a long while in movies: acknowldege the obvious, so we can move on and really become invested in the story. This happened in the movie “Batman,” when early on a thug pulled out a pistol and shot him several times, he got up wearing Kevlar, and ripped them a new one - very pissed off! It hurt him, but he perservered, which is what we want to see in our heroes.
T:SCC is becoming very good with providing twists (although that can be overdone ala “Heroes”); I’d like to put my 2 cents in for making sure we stay grounded in the obvious - and not have our “cold war” combatants get so into espionage that they miss basic, good, solid police work. –Shouldn’t they know a lot about doing police work? The rest of the world does, just by WATCHING so much TV!
Great episode.
Just one thing that bothers me: How did Cromartie’s head/skin get fixed?
I realise it would have been too expensive to use CGI to show his damaged head while talking, but couldn’t he at least had half his face covered by plastic or something similar?
For anyone who is interested in learning more about the game (Seeing as the reference brought me to the show, I think its only fair to let the show do some of the reverse),
check out http://www.playgo.to
That should give you the basics. I like the analogy here as well, especially since go is the last perfect information game in which humans reign supreme, largely owing to our ability to mix intuition with calculation. (We do not have the power to calculate the entire board, but thanks to training our intuition, we don’t need to)
Totally random please writers don’t hurt John Connor. In my opinion one of the greatest fictional characters ever written. Ramblings of an obsessed fan. Reading to many what ifs on the interweb lol.
What did the “old” Fisher do to Babylon AI? Did his download (using his young self’s prints and eye scan) get AI to become John Henry? Wasnt that his real mission? Did Jessie make up the Derek torture incident to justify killing him? Makes me think Jessie is a “gray”, working with Skynet, and using Riley for some advanatge over John - teaching him not to trust human women, and direct/convince him that Cameron is the only “woman/human” to be trusted?
Writers - Awesome show. I’ve never followed any TV show like this - gone to the web, made blog comments, watched episodes 2-4 times on my laptop, etc. Keep the surprises and storyline coming…WOW.
About the the game “Go”: it should be very interesting to see Cameron performance on it becouse unlike chess (or any of these games) it’s says that it is a very human game.
One of the first Go programs is one named “Handtalk” (from early 80′ I think), and is not just because they like that name, it is because 2 HUMANS can get to know each other very well only by playing a game. I can explain:
In the course of the game you are in a lot of different situations, pressure, under attack, attacking, relax… you have to take all kind of choices and probably one important: you have to negotiate with your opponent all the time.
When you play against the best computers Go today it is very clear they are a stupid machine, they have no style and are not coherent. Go is far to be solved in AI. Of course that have been progress, but it was very little.
The best actual Go program is not much better than that old Handtalk.
So, what can Cameron do on it…. I think is interesting. Don’t you think?
PD: it’s said that the technology that can play Go will give a LOT of tools for many many other AI problems.
Having watched the whole season (admittedly, I watch it on line because my wife grabs the remote to a competing half hour television show) I can honestly say this in my point of view, this is one of the best episodes of one of the best shows out there.
With so much new material and the pressure of time moving on few of us revisit old sites even when we had questions of a non-rhetorical nature. Chris asked, probably in a rhetorical fashion why the X-Files coincidences of materializing Terminators fell in the realm of plausibility. A concept called Basin of Attraction goes further to suggest in a manner reminiscent of relativity and the effects of gravitational fields that objects which had traveled through time would be drawn to each other unless a temporal glitch intervened as in Self-Made Man. The physics of Time Travel is an offshoot of Chaos Theory with its strange attractors.
I find the Riley character annoying more than intriguing and wonder if anyone who survived Judgment Day and the machine holocaust wouldn’t resemble Derek’s callous view of the “sanctity” of life and the grudging admission of the advantages of being “metal”. Although she’s complicated, she’s definitely a threat but no substitute for Cameron except in the most primal fashion.
WHYD YOU KILL DEREK! HE WAS THE BEST CHARACTAR IN THE SHOW! BIG MISTAKE! he totatly would have heard the footsteps and thought ” it might be metal i should find cover” but nooooooooo. Now that he and charlie are dead you guys better not kill ellison. you should make them alter the future in a way where future john dosent send derek back till after that incident. by the way nie job putting sarah in jail thatll be interesting