I always like to watch the "Previously on" montage that opens each new T:SCC episode. Not for the plot-refresher, although that can come in handy; it's more that the montage gives you a sense of what to expect from the rest of the ep. If we get a lot of clips of Jesse and Derek, we know they'll be doing some damage in the upcoming forty-three minutes; if we see Sarah freaking, we know there's gonna be some more of that in our future; and if we see John and Riley making googly eyes, we know that this would be a good time to play some FreeCell while the TV runs in the background.
"Self-Made Man"'s refresher gave us some quick references to Cameron's chip damage; which is good news, since that means we get another largely Cam-dominated story, with a background assist from John and His Girl Manic. "Man" lacks the emotional weight and uncertainty of "Allison From Palmdale," but it's a solid, un-insulting entry, riding on enough clever ideas to make its lack of big moments significantly less important.
In general, I'm not a huge fan of T:SCC's structural tendency towards multi-storied episodes; for the series where it works (as it did on The Wire—and yes, I've now managed to mention The Wire in all four blogs I write for the TV Club, which fulfills my contractual obligations for this year), it can create a rich, thriving world, a sense of perpetuated existence that continues even beyond the moments we spend with each character. At worst, well, anybody remember the second season of Heroes? Or, honestly, the first? The more plots you try and cover in a single chunk, the easier it is to short change one and over spend another, killing the flow and giving audiences the perpetual sense of moving far too quickly over nothing much at all.
But even at its clunkiest, plot-density provides the writers with a lot of empty spaces. In "Man," we learn that Cameron's been moonlighting over at a college library with a wheelchair bound student named Eric; apart from what it tells us about Cam and her increasingly flexible mission priorities, the info fits in just fine with everything else that's been going on this season. As both Sarah and John point out, Cam never sleeps. Given her growing interest in basically everything, her copious amounts of free time, and the fact that outside sarcasm and the occasional command, there's not much in the way of conversation at the Connor household, it seems inevitable that she'd start up some extra-curricular activities.
These activities comprise the bulk of the episode, as we see Cameron doing her level best to "make friends," a task aided by her physical attractiveness but defeated by her inability to read social cues. In between semi-flirting, she investigates a photograph of a 1920 speakeasy fire after she recognizes a man in the photograph as a T-888 model who she and Eric later identify as Myron Stark. One of the ep's niftiest conceits has Cam and Eric tracking Myron through a variety of media: filmstrip, microfiche, radio news, and a documentary with footage of one of the survivors of the speakeasy fire. Like a lot of things on T:SCC, it's more of an admirable idea than anything with lasting resonance, but it was still fun to watch the mystery unravel.
There is one sub-story going on during all this–John and Riley, together again. It's a bunch of standard teenage angst stuff; Riley gets John out to a party by pretending she wants a ride home, but when he gets there, she convinces him to stick around. (At first I thought we were just seeing one of Riley's lately revealed mood shifts, but while there's some room for argument, the fact that we don't see her getting all depressed again seems to indicate the whole thing was a con.) And wouldn't you know it, John runs afoul of the party host; first he gets tormented because he's a loner, then he has to defend Riley's honor when the host accuses her of stealing his lighter. (Unsurprisingly, Riley actually did swipe the damn thing.) It's a scenario that's been played out in teen soap opera countless times, and it ends about as you'd expect, with John and Riley parked on a hilltop, making out.