Friday, July 22, 2011

Recap: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - S1E7 "Vick's Chip"

Cromartie, as Agent Kester, is searching all the L.A. schools for John.  When a school administrator wants to see a court order, Cromartie just snaps the guy's neck and scrolls through the computer screens himself.  [Note: "Cromartie" and "Kester" are the correct names/spellings as per this episode.  I'm not going back and correcting prior recaps.  Sorry.]

At dinner, Derek brings out the computer chip Cameron took from the Terminator she disabled and burned.  John and Sarah are shocked that she would hide something like that from them.  Derek smugly reminds them that machines can't be trusted.  John and Cameron hack the chip to access the video data to see what the Terminator was up to before he killed Derek's fellow freedom fighters.  It turns out that this machine's name was "Vick Chamberlain" and he was married to the L.A. city planner.  They get his address off a video memory of his mail. Sarah and Derek break into Vick's house.  No one has been there for a while and Derek assumes that the wife, Barbara, is dead.

Cromartie walks into a high school gym locker room and checks out all the showering boys.  He's looking for an "Eric Carlson" but when he finds him, the facial scan doesn't match the one he has for John.  When the gym coach complains, Cromartie tosses him into a row of lockers.

One of Vick's video memories is of him killing a woman.  It never shows her face so the gang heads out to try to find out if the Terminator killed his own wife.  When they find the body, it isn't Barbara but a lobbyist who had been working against one of Barbara's pet projects: a traffic system run by artificial intelligence using video cameras at all the traffic lights/intersections/etc.  Cameron points out that this would be of great interest to Skynet what with all the surveillance everywhere.  Derek thinks they should just blow up City Hall and be done with it but John says they should drop a virus into the program instead so Skynet thinks the program is flawed and abandons it.

The next day Cromartie arrives at John's school, this time looking for a "John Baum."  Cameron sees him first and sends one of John's friends to say that he is John Baum.  Cromartie scan him, determines he's not the kid he's looking for, and leaves.  Later, Cameron tells John what she did and he's (1) furious that she'd put one of his friends in such danger and (2) worried that Sarah will make them move again if she knows how close Cromartie got to him.  He makes Cameron promise not to tell Sarah what happened.

From Vick's chip they learn that Derek's freedom fighters were killed because one of them was tailing Barbara - and being careless about it.  Derek says he didn't know anything about it.  Sarah is skeptical.  She and Derek head into the tunnels under City Hall (Derek knows them fairly well because he and Kyle lived down there in the future).  They get into the data center and begin to upload John's virus, but the system sounds an alarm and they have to run for it.  "We can still blow the place," Derek says hopefully.  Sarah drags him out of there before he tries it.

Meanwhile, John and Cameron are poking around in Vick's chip some more when they inadvertently give it too much electricity and it starts to re-activate. Panicked, they pull everything apart.  Sarah and Derek return with news of their failed mission but John has the brainstorm of using Cameron's chip to upload the virus into the system right through a traffic light.  Derek thinks she can't be trusted not to escape into the system and possibly become the thing that becomes Skynet but John trusts her.  He cuts into her head, with her telling him how to do it, and removes her chip.

Derek takes John to a traffic light and he hacks in, dumping Cameron's consciousness (?) into the system to deliver the virus.  The city's traffic system freaks out and Derek and John grab the chip and bolt.

That evening, Sarah corners Derek while he's showering (!!) and tells him that she knows he killed the defenseless Andy Goode.  (How does she know this?)  "Lie to me again and I'll kill you," she promises.  On the plus side, she finally got a call back from the guy who bought the Turk from Victor.  But that's the next episode!

Previously on T:TSCC / next time on T:TSCC

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