We assume that Wyman was the target because the targeting angle Cameron derived from Stark's location behind the wall converged on the presumed location of the dais. And we don't see anyone else on the dais we can identify as being important. And Cameron assumes he's the target because that's what she envisions - or at least she envisions SOMEONE on the dais speaking as being the target.
Here's the logic of the scene, such as it is:
1) Cameron assumes that Stark came back on a New Year's Eve for a reason.
2) The building is going to be opened on New Year's eve in 2010 with the Governor speaking. This Governor is NOT Arnold since he is already identified as the Governor now in 2007.
(So, yes, the writers decided to 'write out" Arnold. It's another joke like the way they call his office all the time to try to get him to make an appearance on the show.)
3) Cameron assumes the Governor is Stark's target since the whole plot appears to be about assassinating someone on a New Year's Eve, and this is the only one she can find that seems to relate.
4) She finds the ballroom, assumes the layout is focused at the far end where it is likely the dais is going to be.
5) She imagines the current Governnor Wyman standing there being shot.
6) She triangulates back to the far wall which would be where the shooter would be. Except THIS makes no sense. Why would she assume Stark would be firing from there? Why not from anywhere in the room? She doesn't know where Stark is UNTIL she decides that the shot must come from the rear of the room. It's backwards! The only way I can see that she knows this is that she REMEMBERS the scene from 2010 somehow, as if she'd seen it before but made no connection to Stark because she didn't know the details about it. But the fact that she has no recollection of anything else about the assassination in 2010 makes no sense either.
The whole scene breaks down at this point.
7) If you accept that she has figured out where the assassin would be, then she reasons that Stark sealed himself in the building until the time to act. The best place to be for this purpose would be behind the far wall. So she breaks open the wall and finds him.
It's a weak scene. It's almost as if the writers spent all their time developing Stark in the 1920's, and then threw in the assassination at the end to explain why any of this was done.
And as everyone has pointed out, there is no explanation as to WHY the assassination is done, and why it is done in this fashion (publicly on New Year's Eve). Hopefully we'll see something more about this at some point. If not, it's a throwaway and not a particularly well done throwaway.
For those still hoping Cameron has some emotions, it's clear to me that Cameron, by giving Eric information about his medical condition that she detected, was trying to insure that he continued to survive so that he could continue to let her in the library. She was perfectly willing to let him be removed by treatment for a while as long as he survived and returned to his job later - hopefully. And that's probably exactly what happened - he left the job for medical treatment, was replaced by someone else, and Cameron proceeded to deal with that someone in exactly the same way she dealt with Eric.
And while Eric wasn't happy about her revealing that his cancer had returned, if she notified him about it in time, she quite possibly saved his life. Which makes him ingrate (understandably, given his normal human reaction to the news and the less than sensitive way it was delivered to him.)
So Cameron was merely being helpful because it might have helped her own agenda of continuing to use the library secretly.
I saw nothing in her behavior which indicated any emotional response. She was quite matter of fact about her and Eric being friends, and that she didn't have any friends. She UNDERSTANDS all that stuff, including about Eric being "a happy person" and the Connors NOT being "happy people". But it strikes no emotional response in her.
All those times where she's staring at Eric while he reacts emotionally is her trying to figure out what it all means in human terms to humans, and how she should react.
She's a machine that's rarely had to deal with the nuances of humans reacting emotionally. In the future, as a Skynet Terminator, she either stimulated negative reactions in humans to get what she wanted, or she ignored them in the process of killing humans. Once reprogrammed by John, she merely had to function efficiently in a military context, where emotional outbursts are discouraged in the interest of military discipline.
Once back in the past, however, she is confronted with suicidal teenage girls, a sexually starved teenage boy, a half-crazed mother, a suspicious uncle, and all sorts of creeps and weirdos like Jody, as well as "normal" people like Eric.
It's not easy being an unemotional Terminator trying to figure out how to deal with humans without killing them.
It's hard for HUMANS to figure that stuff out! ;D
What's more interesting to me is answering the questions of:
1) Why can't she use the library during the day? She can read books fast, but nobody would really notice. And it would be more useful than doing the Connor's laundry! ;D
2) Why does she abandon her "guard dog" post at night to do this? It seems to be that this is another indication that Cameron has her own agenda which takes precedence even over protecting the Connors at all times. I suspect she feels that as long as there is no immediate identified threat of Cromartie or some other Terminator finding the Connors at night that she can afford to "abandon her post" and do something equally important to her.
Or more likely, the writers are simply being inconsistent again because it lets them tell a story.
Zack, would you admit that the writers simply don't care about being totally consistent, if it lets them tell a "cool" story? I mean, that's their primary job, right? Tell a cool story and keep the ratings up and to hell with consistency if it gets in the way?
Vicheron:
You have demonstrated nothing because Cameron has never actually exhibited this behavior before. You have failed to answer my question, when has Cameron ever done something like this before without prompt? She may have had plans for Carter but she didn't go after him until she had to. She may have had plans to go after Cromartie too but she didn't until she had to. Maybe she was planning to destroy Vick too but she didn't until she had to. You're just speculating on what she might have done, while I'm focusing on what she actually did. The fact is that Cameron has never taken the initiative in these situations. Saying that Cameron had all these other plans and designs is like saying the Uncle Bob had always planned to destroy Cyberdyne and kill the T-1000 and it was just fortuitous that things played out the way they did so he didn't have to take the initiative in doing those things.
None of that makes any sense. I never said that Cameron "had plans" to do anything about Carter, Cromartie or anyone else. What I said was that she reacted to the situations as she did. YOU were the one who suggested that she DELIBERATELY did NOTHING in regards to these situations except protect John and in fact actively RESISTED doing anything about these situations. And I demonstrated that she did nothing of the kind. She reacted appropriately in each situation.
To be clear: one of Cameron's goals is to assist the Connors in stopping Skynet. It's not a primary directive for HER to do the stopping on her own. Her primary goal is to survive and that requires a surviving John Connor. In order for Connor to survive (and thus indirectly herself), Skynet has to be stopped. Therefore she protects John and whenever an opportunity arises to either protect John OR stop Skynet, she will move to do so in coordination with the Connors - or, in this specific case, on her own.
A clear example is the case of Cromartie showing up at the school. John was around but not in immediate danger because Cromartie hadn't found him yet. She became aware of Cromartie's presence and deflected him from finding John and diverting him from the school entirely. THEN she proceeded to march right after him with the clear intention of attacking him when the opportunity presented itself. It was only John re-inserting himself in the situation unexpectedly which derailed her from that course. And she even did not immediately tell John that Cromartie was even there! She only admitted it later in the bedroom scene.
So here is a clear case of her taking the initiative to attack another Terminator who was a threat to them. And that even though most of the time merely evading Cromartie was sufficient.
Whereas in the cases of the Terminators who were NOT direct threats to John initially (Carter, for example), she resisted allowing John to place himself in danger but said nothing about whether she agreed with Sarah and John about following up on the threat in another way. Once John was placed in danger by his own actions, she moved with Sarah to remove the threat to John. Once again, she was acting in coordination with the Connors and had no need to "make plans" of her own in this regard.
The only difference between the Stark case and all other cases is that she took the initiative in dealing with the situation because the Connors were not around. She could have taken the Stark information back to the Connors and coordinated with them in dealing with the situation. But that would not have made the episode "Cameron-centric", which was the whole point of the episode.
But there's nothing inconsistent in her behavior so far with regards to what she will do if presented with a Skynet threat which is independent of an immediate threat to John.
Again, while protecting John is her primary goal (because she needs him to protect HER), the most obvious way of doing this AND achieving her primary goal of personal survival, is to stop Skynet from ever existing. Cameron will always act to stop Skynet when the opportunity presents itself. However, she may NOT act to stop an irrelevant Skynet side plot whose only effect is to change the war in the future (such as protecting some future Resistance fighter in the future in the present like Bedell). In those situations, the lead will be taken by the Connors and she will go along as long as it poses no immediate threat to John.
In the Bedell case, she didn't care a whit about either little Marty OR the other Bedell.. She merely went along with the Connors concern. On her own, she probably would have done nothing about it because the plot was no direct threat either to John or her, nor would it have had any impact on whether Skynet came into existence. She doesn't care about the future war - if it happens, she's already lost her goals (and so has John). She also didn't like it when John went off with Derek to deal with the situation alone without her. That stare she gave John before he left made that clear. And she wasn't happy she arrived late to the fight, which is how I interpret her look in the forest at the end. But if she was the only one who knew about the first Martin Bedell assassination in the paper, she probably would have ignored it, reasoning that it had nothing to do with stopping Skynet from existing, was no threat to John, and if he knew about it, it might put him at risk.
Cameron is cooperative with the Connors, but it's clear she keeps her own counsel on what they do and whether it makes any sense to her. How she interprets threats is clearly her own decision, as the gunning down of the three burglars showed. If she's not told otherwise by the Connors in advance, she will make her own determination of what is a threat and what isn't. If told by the Connors not to do something (or to do something), she will (usually) comply - unless it conflicts with her determination to protect John. But she's not going to go out of her way to deal with basically irrelevant matters.
She might well have ignored Terminator Carter as well, because he was there merely to safeguard the coltan needed to built Terminators. She probably really didn't care about that because it had nothing to do with stopping Skynet from existing. But she never actually said anything about that one way or the other.
But if you told her about "The Turk" or Weaver having it, she would move on her own to resolve that situation if she couldn't enlist the Connors help for some reason. But she wouldn't put John at risk in doing so if she could avoid it (which she probably couldn't since Sarah takes the lead where the Connors are involved.)
The problem with the Stark case is that she didn't KNOW what the plot was until she found Stark and saw the sign in the lobby of the building. She had to find out what the plot was because it could have been about either threatening John or enabling Skynet to exist. An unknown Terminator wandering around is a threat if you don't know why he's around. And even in the case of assassinating Wyman, since we have no information as to WHY that plot existed, presumably she didn't either. Therefore once she found out about the plot, she had to continue to deal with it by getting rid of Stark.
All of which is only explainable if you assume that her primary goals are to protect John (to enable him to protect her), and to protect John by preventing Skynet from existing. Both goals are tightly intertwined when combined with the fact that she's usually working directly with the Connors rather than on her own initiative.
I'd actually like to see her using MORE initiative. I'd like to see her start wondering where Derek is all the time these days, follow him around and find Jesse, then follow her around (especially if she knows from the future that Jesse is part of the Resistance faction that doesn't like reprogrammed Terminators) and find Riley. That would be more proactive than just complaining to John about Riley, In fact, she should start following Riley around and make sure she's not a threat to John - which would lead her to Jesse.
Right now, she's assuming Riley is an "ordinary girl" and is not an immediate threat to John - just a threat to Cameron's own purpose with John. If she doesn't get more suspicious, she's going to get blindsided by Jesse.
I'd like to see Sarah start wondering about Derek, too - but she's too obsessed with her "three dots" nonsense.
