Summer Glau

While this week’s Sarah Connor got poor ratings, “Allison from Palmdale” was itself an incredible episode that dug into concepts about identity, truth, and the stories we tell. We got a double dose of Summer Glau, which is always good. John got to be competent and Sarah got to show her softer side. Meanwhile, Ellison made some career choices, but sadly he no longer enjoys Sudoku. (Spoilers)

We begin with what appears to be the future. A fearful girl runs through a dusty labyrinth of tunnels, while being chased. She runs outside to a destroyed landscape before being captured. We see that frightened girl has Cameron’s face. This is significant because it’s the first of many feints within the episode. We, the viewers, see something, and assume that it has a specific meaning.

We shift to Cameron riding with John in the product placement car, which I hope helps offset the cost of the show enough to keep it on the air.

John sends Cameron shopping for food while he goes for machine supplies. There’s a lovely irony in this. Cameron cannot eat. John is not a cousin to anything at radio world.

In the store, we see Cameron’s computer view as she passes clerks scanning food. She appears to particularly click with the clerk scanning bar codes and I’m inclined to think this is where the glitch worms it’s way in. To a long time viewer of the movies and series, a bar code stands for a survivor of the camps. For Cameron, bar codes signify the other. Machines are not bar coded on their skin. In a store, a bar code signifies a product. It is one symbol that has many meanings.

Cameron picks up a shiny red apple, but she does not eat it. Terminators don’t gain a knowledge of good and evil from fruit. It was so shiny, I almost wondered if the fruit was wax, which would have been a nice extra layer if the fruit was not fruit, but an object that signified fruit by its shape, but conveyed none of the flavor of the thing.

She sees herself in the reflection of a silver balloon. A memory of that girl screaming flashes into her mind.

Now, before I go any further, I’d like to point out that all the memories we see in this episode are not from the point of view of the girl running, but of someone watching her. Also, that Cameron’s essential programming is as an infiltrator. Cromartie didn’t just get a new face when he lost the old one. He took George Lazlo’s. That’s what infiltrators do. They take on a human’s identity. I suppose until there are no more humans to become.

In any case, Cameron is overwhelmed by this memory, and there’s a low level shot of her pushing her wobbly wheeled cart through the store before she runs into a display of watermelons and comes to a halt. Thus does an out of wack machine run into the symbol of summer fruit.

A cop shines a light into her eyes. Eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul, but Cameron has none. He sees nothing with his light.

He asks the zoned out Cameron if she’s been drinking or taking drugs. What’s wrong is far worse, but he does not know it. He is worker from his own frame of reference, which cannot give him the truth of what is happening.

He asks for a ID, something that defines who she is. She holds up a wad of cash, which is as much a signifier as anything. After all, her only ID would tell him that she is Cameron Baum, which isn’t who she is at all.

We switch to the future girl in an interrogation room with a light shining directly into her face. Instead of a human questioning a machine, here a machine questions a human.

She is asked by a mechanical voice what is her name, her definition in her world. At first she refuses, but then a Terminator comes around the light and tattoos her arm, she says that her name is Allison Young. The machines give her one ID, the tattoo, the humans another, her name. Both identifiers are externally applied and each are valid depending on your point of view.

We switch to Cameron standing in holding. Another girl asks her what she’s in for. Cameron says that she can’t remember anything. Cameron has lost hold of her own identity in some sort of blue screen of death.

The girl seems to think Cameron’s having a substance abuse blackout. Cameron doesn’t help with that impression by being fairly out of it. Cameron holds out her arm and asks if tattoos can disappear. She clearly thinks that the bar code, like the bar codes she saw at the store earlier, and which may have triggered some of today’s current crisis, was tattooed on her arm.She thinks that she is the frightened girl that she is remembering.

The girl replied that she had two tattoos lazered off. Those tattoos were markers, stories, of past loves, which she has had removed. Her skin now tells a different story. In the future, she quips that she plans to mark relationships with the impermanent mark of henna, which fades like memory itself.

The girl introduces herself as Jody. This is the name we’ll know her by. However, names can be changed and identity is fluid as we’ll see over the episode. Cameron introduces herself as Allison, which is not her name. Then again, Allison is as much her name as Cameron. If Derek were in the episode, he might make a pointed remark about naming a machine.

Meanwhile, as Sarah is leaving the house, their pregnant neighbor, Casey, is having weird pains and bleeding. Sarah takes her to the hospital. A doctor examines Casey and sees no problems, but she wants to do tests. Casey tells Sarah she can leave, but that’s not what Casey means. Sarah understand the subtext and stays. As this episode emphasizes, she’s been in Casey’s position. She was even younger than Casey when it happened. It is significant that practically every time Casey talks about her unborn child, Sarah’s musical queue plays in the background.

At the store, John learns that Cameron lost her memory and that she was taken away by the cops. Given that it was his decision to keep Cameron around; this knowledge must fill him with a special horror. Every action that Cameron makes, good or bad or it’s all relative, flows out of that choice.

Cameron and Jody are released. The cop tells Jody this is her last get out jail free. As she says later, she’s burned her bridges. However, on seeing Cameron’s wad of cash, Jody latches onto Cameron.

John arrives at the station, too late. He uneasily passed by cops, and he asks about his sister, who is not his sister, Cameron. He’s told that she was released. He asks where she is because his mom is going to kill him, and then more truthfully that his mother will probably kill Cameron. this is a statement that has one meaning for the cop and another for the viewer. How you take the statement depends on how much you know.

Casey tells Sarah that her child is a boy. She wonders if she cannot protect her child while he’s still inside her body, how can she protect him in the world? She asks Sarah what her pregnancy with John was like. Sarah responds that she was in Central America hiking when her water broke, but she lies and says that John’s father was there with her and that she remembers that he held her hand tight.

There’s an interesting theme throughout the episode of characters shaping the truth of a memory or a story based on what they would like to be true. Practically every character does it in some way or another. In some cases the viewer knows the truth of the situation, that Kyle Reese was not there, in others the truth is slowly revealed. While in others, the truth turns out to be subjective.

In any case, Trevor, the baby’s father, shows up. Sarah gets up to go, but Casey clearly doesn’t want her to leave.

It is fortunate that she’s busy, because John is clearly having no love trying to find Cameron. He’s asking every other person in LA if they know Jody, who is a intermediary in his search for Cameron. He doesn’t know where Cameron is, so he must look for the next best signifier, Jody.

Sarah stops in front of an infant ward, and full of nostalgia for something that never happened to her. John really was born in Central America. He never rested in a clean crib with a card with his name on it for all the Terminators to see. She calls John. They’ve dropped the codes, which would define who is real and who is not. She merely greets him with a “Hey.” She tells him that she’s at the hospital with Casey, but he doesn’t’ tell her about Cameron. After all, his mother will kill her if she knows.

We return to the Ellison plot arc as he meets with Catherine Weaver again. He’s concerned that the last time he hunted one of these things that twenty people died and he doesn’t want that to happen again. He tells her that these "things" are evil.

Catherine, the machine, warns him not to anthropomorphize a machine. She goes on to tell him about how her "husband" died. What’s curious throughout this entire story is that he was not her husband. She is not Catherine Weaver, who was a real person once, but now is liquid metal.

She tells Ellison that her husband was flying them to "Barstow," which is a few hours outside of L.A. in the desert, in a helicopter. She tells Ellison that flying was his passion. She pauses and Ellison infers that this is difficult for her. She doesn’t change expression either way. She just goes on to tell him that a Kalashnikov is a beautiful flying machine, like the most perfect bird. Its only flaw is that it needs a human to fly it. Ellison asks her if she thinks machines make better decisions than humans. She responds that in certain specific extreme conditions, that even the most calm man panics. I’ll note that she doesn’t say that he crashed the helicopter, merely that he panicked, which if perhaps the dashboard morphed into his wife, he may well have done. Here Catherine is relating the concept of passion with panic.

Catherine asks Ellison again to find this machine, which she will take apart. She doesn’t know what they’ll find, but she doubts its evil. He’s not convinced.

Of course, he’s human. The thing that is killing your species may certainly come off as evil. But Terminators didn’t eat the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their knowledge is of 0 and 1. They define people by barcodes on skin that identifies who you are. Allison had a name, but that’s not what her barcode read. It would have been a number.

In the future, Allison sits in her cell. Something shoves a plate of food to her. She throws it against the wall. She rejects sustenance from machines.

In the present, Jody puts a tray of food in front of Cameron. Cameron wonders at the amount of food and doesn’t eat.

Cameron tells Jody that she likes her necklace. Jody responds that she got it at an awesome thrift store in "Echo" park, the name of which seems fairly significant given what happens later.

Jody goes on to tell Cameron about how she came to LA two years ago from Michigan for a design internship from which she was wrongly fired and which led to a sketchy life on the street. She draws a picture of Cameron in a funky outfit, and tells her she’d be pretty in it. Cameron smiles, which shows just how much she has absorbed the Allison persona. By drawing a picture of Cameron, Jody in her way is defining her. By telling a story about her journey to LA, Jody is defining herself with all the little details that make up a life. Her story is as true as Cameron’s smile, but we’re not there yet.

A man shows up and demands money from Jody. He hits Jody and demands to know if Cameron is a thief too. Cameron seems afraid and gives him her roll of money. I do wish he’d hit her, given that might have hurt him, but he doesn’t and Cameron still doesn’t know who or what she is. She does not know herself. She has defined herself as Allison and all the memories we have of Allison is of fear.

Jody and Cameron go to a shelter. Jody tells Cameron that you have to take the punch to keep the cash. They fill out forms for the shelter. Cameron doesn’t know what to fill out on the form. Jody tells her to lie. I’m not sure that Cameron understand how to tell a story about herself at this point. From what we’ve seen, Terminator’s borrow their stories. Cameron fills in Allison’s information. It’s the only identity that she has at the moment.

In their room, and somewhat improbably from the top bunk given what Cameron must weigh, Cameron applied makeup to Jody’s face to hide the injury. This is another way of defining oneself or rather concealing the truth of the situation. Like the costumed picture that Jody drew of Cameron, it’s another way of defining oneself.

Jody asks Cameron how she knows how to do that so well and infers that "Allison" was getting beaten up. Cameron doesn’t answer. She neither agrees, nor disagrees. Jody fills in her own idea of what Allison’s life must be. Creates her own story for who she imagines Allison is.

Jody feels bad about making the statement about the punch earlier and gives Cameron her necklace telling her that from now on Jody has her back. At this point in the story, the necklace signifies found friendship. It is an object purchased in Echo park. That is not it’s truth, but at this point in the narrative, it is what the viewer knows to be true based on what we’ve been told.

Ellison stands in an office looking at a picture of running Zebras. A woman, Lilah, comes in and it becomes clear that she is his ex-wife, and still has his last name, but she’s just returned from a trip with another man.

It’s interesting that they’re playing here with all the different ways a person takes a new name and a new identity.

Ellison asks her to run a check on Catherine Weaver, to infer her truth, and tells Lilah that Catherine offered him a job. Lilah, is concerned about him. She can tell he’s not wearing his cross, which to my mind is a fairly major revelation about the Ellison’s state of mind. In this time of trouble, he has put aside an important symbol of his faith. He stands differently and I wonder what his rudder is now.

In the future, Allison is questioned where she’s from. Allison says she doesn’t remember. We cut to Cameron in a Counselor’s office saying she doesn’t remember. The entire scene interleaves Allison’s interrogation by a Terminator and Cameron’s session with a Counselor. The Counselor tells her that sometimes people forget because they need to. Allison tells the Terminator that everything is gone, that she lives in a tunnel and eats garbage, while Cameron stares out the window. Allison needed to forget and Cameron forgets for her. The Counselor tells Cameron that everything is confidential unless she’s planning on harming anyone, in which case she’d have to report her. Cameron responds that she’d never hurt anyone. Allison wears a bracelet from her sister. At this point in the story, that bracelet symbolizes a lost world where sisters gave gifts and there was love.

Allison says her father was an architect. Cameron finishes the statement by saying that he taught her how to draw. She describes her birthday and Cameron cries because she didn’t have a birthday the next year because everyone was dead. Allison cries and Cameron cries. They are as one in this moment, separated by years and the viewer is left to wonder if they are one individual.

Cameron sees a statue of a Balinese tiger, which the counselor tells her was hunted into extinction. Cameron asks her if she thinks that could happen to "us" to humans. The counselor asks her is that’s what she worries about. The Terminator asks where is home and Cameron says she’s from Palmdale. The word Palmdale evokes that most Californian of images, a suburban dale/street lined with palm trees. In the future, that world is gone like the Balinese tiger.

Allison sees a slightly open door, which must be a test of what Allison will do.

John finally tracks down a place where Jody hangs out. He has finally been able to tie the name that he has with a place.

Casey tells Sarah that Trevor is the baby-daddy and that he freaked when she got pregnant. That they’ve been on and off, but she wants life to be perfect for her child. As Sarah’s theme song plays, Casey talks about her feelings for her child, whose life is as yet unwritten and unmarred. That as he grows inside her, no one has yet hurt him or shown him how hard life can be.

It’s a perfect moment to cut Cameron to calling Allison’s mother in Palmdale, but the woman says that she has the wrong number. The woman walks forward and we see that she’s pregnant. She doesn’t have a daughter, not yet. The Allison who will live in tunnels and eat garbage has not yet been born. She grows inside her mother who will not be able to protect her. Life will be very hard indeed.

Cameron cries at being rejected. Jody tells her that parents suck, particularly mothers. There’s a load of anger there. There is an untold story waiting to unfold.

Trevor returns to the hospital with some food. He wants to throw a barbeque with all of them there. It’s very domestic of him. He offers to take John to the range to shoot with him and we learn that he’s an LA PD detective.

The doctor comes in and tells Casey that the child is fine. Meanwhile Sarah stares at Trevor in a very, it’s not good that you’re a cop, sort of way.

Lilah tells Ellison that Catherine has a clean record. But she cautions him about making such a drastic change in his life, in his identity. He sees that the record shows that the helicopter crash was due to mechanical failure, which isn’t the story that Catherine tole him. Lilah tells Ellison that she’s never seen him this hurt before. He responds that they both know that’s not true. Here the truth of emotion is subjective. It depends on the story either of them tells about their lives.

John finds Cameron at the shelter playing fooze ball. He approaches her, but she doesn’t know him. He tells her that they need to go home. She insists that she’s Allison and they succeed in freaking each other out. He tells her that she’s a machine from the future and that her chip is messed up. We flash to Allison running through corridors. She finds a room where humans are kept in cages. They scream for her help. She runs by them, with their arms reaching, but she doesn’t pause to help them. She runs out the other door. She sees monkeys and the tiger in cages like the humans. She climbs up a ladder outside. She runs, but comes to the edge. She’s on a large ship. She jumps into the water. She’s definitely human because she swims long enough for a rope net to rise up and capture her again.

In the present, Jody shows up and tells John that he needs to leave. Cameron throws him back. She’s clearly remembering herself more now that she’s been reminded of her past-future. Security shows up and makes him leave.

In the future, Allison is returned to the interrogation room, where she is confronted by Cameron, whose voice changes from that of the unseen interrogator into Allison’s voice.

Cameron tells Allison that she’s just made things worse for herself. Cameron tells that Allison that her hair is very pretty and that the machines worked very hard on imitating it. Cameron claims not to be Allison’s enemy. She goes on to say that she can see why John Connor chose Allison. That she admires John Connor and that she’d like to meet him.

Allison responds that he wouldn’t want to meet Cameron. Cameron tells Allison that the humans will all be hunted down. Cameron claims that not all machines want that, that some of them want peace. But then Terminators will say whatever it takes to try to get through to their target. With a room full of humans in cages and Cameron leaching details of Allison’s identity, I don’t believe her. Cameron tells Allison that she was chosen both by John but by the machines. That I do believe. Although, given the way time travel works, it’s hard to say why and for what John choose Allison. It’s possible he sent her on that unnamed mission because she would be captured and Cameron would then come to be.

Cameron tells the Counselor that she’s a machine from the future, an Infiltrator into the human resistance. She has shifted from identifying with tiger to identifying with that which hunts it down. She was programmed to find John Connor, because he saves mankind from extinction. When she finds John Connor she’s going to kill him and hang his head on a pike for all to see. She says it in such a wonderfully calm and unemotional way. She’s differentiated herself from Allison completely now. She is the interogator, the hunter, not the victim.

That’s when the Counselor caps her pen on this discussion and gets the police.

Meanwhile, Cameron tells Jody that her hair is pretty and wants to know about her, mimicking her earlier words to Allison. It’s not a good thing for Cameron to get to know you better.

Jody doesn’t want to talk about her past. She came to LA to start over, and she has, but she’s claims to have burned bridges. She wants to go someplace more authentic, like Portland. Something that is authentic is something that is considered real or true. However, as we’ve seen thus far, authentic is hard to get at.

Cameron wants to go with her. They could reinvent themselves in this mythic authentic place to the North. It is the opposite, in its way, of Sarah’s long ago Central American journey where she sought to lose herself from mechanical pursuit and create an identity for John Connor, who saves mankind.

Trevor asks Sarah about herself. She tells him that she’s just a neighbor. He tells her that his job stresses Casey, and that she’s afraid that his job will follow him home. Clearly throughout the scene Sarah is thinking about how his job could follow him home into her life, not just Casey’s. He tells her that you do what it takes to protect your family. Again with families, but Sarah doesn’t need to be told.

At the shelter, the cops arrive for Cameron, but she’s not there. The room is not an empty signifier.

Ellison meets with Catherine. Her "daughter" Savannah, a quiet little redheaded girl, sits on a nearby couch doing Sudoku. Ellison sits next to Savannah, and tells her that he used to love Sudoku, which would mean he’s lost faith with numbers too.

Catherine asks him if he has children, he says no. He wanted children once, but in a trailed off comment about his ex-wife, it wasn’t meant to be.

This is an interesting statement in an episode so full of mothers and parents. Jody’s are unseen, but her existence is later marked by their empty-nest home. Casey is bound to a bed. Trevor wants to grill. Sarah can’t protect John searching for Cameron. Allison’s mother doesn’t even know her child yet. Allison’s architect father taught her to draw, but is absent. Then there’s that most surprising of mother’s, Catherine Wheeler. I can’t even begin to guess whether Savannah was the real Catherine’s child or a machine. Her quiet play with numbers doesn’t tell me much.

Catherine brings Ellison into another of those glass lined rooms. He tells her he read the report on the helicopter crash. She repeats the word, "Mechanical failure" and agrees. He asks her which is the truth between what she told him before and what she told him now. She asks tells him to tell her.

However, she never said that her husband crashed the helicopter, merely that it’s a perfect machine and people can panic. Here she doesn’t come up with a theory. She allows Ellison to tell her what he believes to be true, that reports aren’t always true. He paints a picture of a mother concerned about her daughter and blaming a human error on a machine. This is the story Ellison tells, not Catherine. She merely let’s him tell it

Then he asks when he can start.

Jody and Cameron arrive at an empty house. Jody claims that she used to babysit for the family five years ago. Cameron questions this as Jody said earlier that she arrived in LA two years ago. Cameron breaks open the door. Cameron wants to check for cash and jewelry, but Jody goes directly to a safe to which she knows the combination. Inside are earrings that are the same as necklace Jody gave Cameron.

Jody claims to have stolen the necklace when she worked there. Cameron questions this, because Jody said she bought it. She wants to know about the necklace, repeating the question. She wants to know what it signifies. She want’s to know it’s story.

Jody admits that the necklace is hers and this is her house. Here she transforms her identity. She isn’t a migrant to the dream of LA. This is her home. This is the empty shell that she left behind when she burned her bridges.

In the future, Cameron tells Allison that she lied to her. Allison told her where the camp was and that her sister gave her a bracelet. Humans tell stories. However, the machines found similar bracelets on her friends.

Allison denies the bracelet has anything to do with the Connor camp. Cameron figures out that the bracelet, like a barcode, is a signifier. It doesn’t stand for affection. It’s a pass, which if she didn’t have it, would have revealed her as what she was, an infiltrating machine. She chokes Allison and says, “You lied to me.” Allison tells her that she’ll never help Cameron get to John Connor. Cameron breaks her neck, takes the bracelet and says that she already has.

In the present, Cameron repeats the phrase, "You lied to me" to Jody. She wants to know who Jody is. Jody dropped out of college and has been cut off by her parents. She tells her they need to go, because there’s a silent alarm that they tripped when they came in. Machines follow programming and tell their own sorts of stories.

Cameron confronts her saying that Jody was planning on leaving without her and abandoning her to the police. Cameron is creating her own interpreted story here, which isn’t something we’ve seen machines do. We cut back to the memory of Cameron killing Allison. Then Cameron chokes Jody. We hear again the crack noise of Allison’s neck breaking. John comes in and sees Jody on the floor. He wants to know what Cameron did. He wants to know the story of what has occured.

Jody is still alive. They leave her in her own empty home.

At the hospital, Sarah and Casey talk. Casey admits that she was the one who freaked out, not Trevor, because of the cop thing. She doesn’t want to breast feed her child next to the paraphernalia of a cop.

Casey tells Sarah, in a sort of half hearted sort of way, that Trevor’s a good man. Sarah admits that John’s father wasn’t with her when John was born. It’s just what she wishes were true. Again we touch on the stories people tell. She tells Casey that she got through it and so can Casey. She’s says that she’ll be there too, which is all well, but she can’t really. Sarah brings with her far more violence than any off duty cop ever could.

In the car, Cameron says that was her last get out of jail free. John notices her necklace and she tells him the story, the lie, which Jody earlier told her. They drive down the road.

This was a fascinating episode with a lot of meat to it. I hope the ratings improve, and wonderful episodes like this spread the word, and we get to see where they drive to next.