Okay, currently watching it for the third time, on Hulu. Some further thoughts...
1.) First time I saw this, it looked to me like the resistance fighter moved while in the time bubble and got brushed with the spherical time-displacement field, and that's what injured him. Now I see the bullet. Not only is it a bit silly that yes, the bullet seems to go back in time with the resistance fighter, but anyone notice that he seems to go through the time bubble and emerge in the present at night...but when he runs out of the alley with the coat he grabbed from the homeless guy, it's suddenly daylight?
2.) How dumb is it for Sarah and Derek to talk about how much they don't trust Cameron, how she's a guard dog they can't trust, in the same room with her, when she's got robot super-hearing?
3.) John, what happened to "playing hooky gets you on the radar"?
4.) That Riley is not only hungry all the time, notice that the first thing she looks for in the Connors' new fridge is pickles. Then she gets ecstatic upon finding ice cream. Pickles and Ice Cream, eh? Are the writers trying to say she's pregnant?
5.) Okay, I can sort of buy the idea that a family spending a year working in Tokyo would rent out their old place. But leaving all their furniture and toys and such behind? Not just leaving it behind, but letting whoever they rent the house out to use said personal possessions? I could buy having it stored somewhere, but letting strangers use your stuff? Even if "As soon as I figure out what to do with all this stuff" meant that they wanted Busy Phillips to sell it, are they really gonna buy everything new when they get back from Tokyo? They should have gone with the previous occupants being dead or somesuch.
6.) Busy Phillips was amusing as the landlady. And Cameron's hand on her tummy was cute and creepy at the same time. But, I agree with several posters above, I want some explanation for how the Connors are paying for all this. Credit Card fraud? Identity theft? Black Market Diamonds?
7.) So...is this guy from the same future as Derek (and assumedly, Cameron)? Or a new alternate future created by the killing of Andy Goode? We can assume he was sent back by John, since he found them so fast he must have had their address. We can also probably assume from the fact that he was apparently shot while transiting that he wasn't sent back by a Resistance-controlled time machine, but apparently snuck into a Skynet-held one and sent himself back. How excrementally stupid is it to send someone who knows the Connors' address on a specific date in the past into the heart of Skynet's time-machine infrastructure? If he'd been captured and tortured for that info, Skynet could have sent a whole platoon of Terminators to take them out!
8.) I'm amused by Sarah telling Derek, "I send you and the landmine to do this, someone ends up dead". "The Landmine" is a great nickname for Cameron at this point.
9.) So the resistance takes the plant on December 8, 2026. Battle of something-or-other beach. So this plant is on a beach, eh? Nuclear reactors on coastlines don't have those parabolic cooling towers, they use the body of water as a heat sink for waste heat. Those iconic cooling towers are only used for inland plants. Actually, that looks more like either a coal-fired plant, or a generic chemical plant or oil refinery with CGI'd-in cooling towers so the idiot viewers will know it's supposed to be a nuclear plant. Doesn't look much like a real nuclear plant inside, either.
10.) Okay, I can buy them using Cameron to cheat and get a perfect score on the application exam. But do they really mean to imply that they beat up a pair of janitors to create vacancies they could fill on the staff?
11.) Something struck me as odd about Michelle Dixon's reaction to the news. Can't quite put my finger on it.
12.) Anyone else notice a parallel between Riley trying to cozy up to John in this ep, and John trying to cozy up to Cheri last season? Bringing up your prior schools without prompting, that sort of thing?
13.) Yeah, getting increasingly convinced Riley's parents have something to do with the Resistance. The odd slang, appropriate for future-war world....having an arm tattoo...her saying "parents are freaks"...her zeroing in on John Connor...asking if he thinks about the future a lot...calling a toy robot a "big scary man"...I can almost imagine a resistance fighter who gets sent back in time far enough before J-Day might decide to live a life in the past rather than, or perhaps after, completing their mission. What DO you do after your mission is done if you can't go into Terminator sleep mode?
14.) Naval Station Ingleside is home to a squadron of mine countermeasures ships, not nuclear subs. Given that nuclear subs are capable of minelaying, it's not ENTIRELY ridiculous that someone who also worked on subs would be assigned there, but a reactor engineer? There are no nuclear-powered minesweepers.
15.) I wonder where they got that Nuclear Power Plant orientation video cartoon with the insane Mr. DNA-like Squirrel. Was that a pre-existing cartoon, or was it commissioned special?
16.) That bit in the bar with "I'll have what he's having" reminded me strongly of a scene in the Andromeda episode "Last Call at the Broken Hammer", where "what he's having" turned out to be Fermented Mare's Milk. Our own TheTurk worked on that ep as a consultant producer. Recycling jokes, Zack?
17.) I also wonder if that bit with Sarah calling Greenway's ex-wife a bitch was a shout-out to the great fanvid of TSCC to a certain Meredith Brooks song:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq7YLF7PfY.
18.) "Now what you're gonna do is bend over the table here...and provide copious fanservice..." At least they didn't yield to the temptation to include a reverse-angle shot of her denim miniskirt-clad rear end perkily poking up as she bends over the pool table.
19.) So was that Gordon Freeman smashing Greenway's windshield with the crowbar?
20.) So....Riley spent the night sleeping in John's bedroom? O-kayyyy....
21.) No the geiger counter with a mind of its own wasn't the machines going after Sarah Connor. Just the slimy pervert of a boss finding an excuse to simultaneously punish Sarah for associating with Greenway, and have an excuse to strip her naked and get her roughly hosed down and scrubbed with stiff brushes. But yes, the use of the name "Karen" and the hose-down scene are definitely homages to the movie "Silkwood".
22.) Apparently Toyota didn't pay enough product-placement money. They blacked out a couple of the letters on the grill of Charley's truck. Or is this because their cross-promotion deal with Dodge Ram Pickups won't let them show any other trucks in the same ep?
23.) Lymph nodes are in the body side of the armpit, not the bicep. That scar's in the wrong place.
24.) So...how smegging stupid is it to design your power plant so you have to go through the radioactive waste storage chamber to get from anywhere to anywhere?
25.) If it's still November of 2007, I guess we were wrong when we thought that the last few eps of first season were set in Spring 2008.
26.) There's another angle of John's statement that he doesn't have to prove himself to anyone, including Cameron. At least he's including Cameron in "anyone". Treating her as just another member of the team, in other words.
27.) So...is Auto-Mite Systems the same company Catherine Weaver runs, or another company entirely?
28.) That morphing effect of the Auto-Mite Systems guy turning into a liquid metal terminator and then into Catherine Weaver didn't look very good. But I guess I can buy her becoming a larger guy if the liquid metal has some voids in the middle to let it get bigger.
29.) Yep, Orion Pictures released the original Terminator movie. Here's their opening logo:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfa9rc3IX-4And here's a screencap of the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of John's new bedroom:
They even rotated the camera slightly so it looked like the stars were slowly spinning, just like the Orion Pictures fanfare opening.
Whew. That's a lot of bullet points.