Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - "Self Made Man"

Enjoyable enough episode. Kind of felt like a side-story, but I guess it resolved the subplot of the three dots. (Of course I thought they did that in the previous episode too, so who knows.)

I liked the concept of a Terminator that arrived in the wrong time, although I think I kept expecting it to become something bigger than it was. Maybe I'm a bit slow, but every time I thought "What about this plot point?" I then realized "Hmm, I guess this answers it." I think I'm a victim of expecting this to be something that's laying ground work for later episodes, but it really isn't, it all wraps itself up quite nicely. Let me make sure I understand how this was supposed to go:

The T-888 was sent back in time not to kill John Connor, but to kill the mayor in 2010. But he arrived in 1920, accidentally killing the guy who was going to build the tower where his assignment was to take place. So he builds the tower himself, then hides in it to wait for 2010 to come around. Then in 2008, Cameron figures it all out and shuts him down. Did I get it right?

Now, it could be argued that there were other, easier ways to fulfill his mission (Kill the mayor's parents? Wait until the mayor was born and kill him then?) but maybe he wasn't that adaptable.

I also rather liked seeing Cameron's attempts at making a friend. While it seems that she's really only trying to adapt her program to know how to improve her "human interaction skills" so she can get what she wants, I'm definitely left with the feeling that there's something more going on in there at the same time. If she was completely indifferent to the dude in the library then she could have not told him about his cancer returning at all, because it was irrelevant to her needs. I think she really did learn to make friends with him... she just had no idea how to be a friend.

But the worst part of the episode was that I kept looking at those donuts thinking "If you don't eat them soon, they're going to go stale, man. What a waste of perfectly delicious looking donuts. Geez, give me those donuts if you're not gonna eat them!"

At any rate, this was an enjoyable done-in-one episode.