The Sarah Connor Chronicles
I happened to be in the states on Monday night to catch the first episode of the new series of Sarah Connor Chronicles. I usually have a problem with TV shows and movies that glorify violence, especially guns and was a bit uncomfortable with the Matrix movies for this reason but I still find lots of things to like about this show (as I did with the Matrix movies).
The stuff that attracts me to SCC is the philosophical aspects of the characters and the questions and statements it makes about the nature of humanity. The show accomplishes this by contrasting humans with machines in many aspects such as the physical, emotional as well as intellectual possibilities of machines and how we differentiate ourselves as humans from mere “thinking meat”. If we are able to see ourselves as transcending our bodily reality of biological machines then are we able to envisage ever seeing synthetic machines the same way?
The show toys with all these questions whilst delivering an action packed plot with explosions, chases and gun fights. There is also a bit of robot-on-robot combat which is fun (despite my former stated discomfort with violence, it is still entertaining the way it unfolds).
Before I issue a spoiler alert, I’ll let you know that the show can be watched streaming online at the Fox website
*** SPOILERS FOLLOW ***
I was taken by a couple of scenes in the first episode especially the opening music “Samson and Delilah” sung by Shirley Manson. The show sometimes picks themes to run with through an episode and I thought this was a really clever one to start the season with (I wish I could remember some themes from season 1 but it’s a bit of a blur now, there were a lot of chess references but that’s because one of the pre-skynet computer’s they’re trying to destroy is a chess computer).
I was also knocked off my chair by the scene where John had to deactivate Cameron. While Sarah kept Cameron pinned between two trucks, John started to remove her chip, as he did this, Cameron pleaded with him very convincingly that she was afraid of dying, that she had fixed the error in her programming (which had made her revert to the “kill John Connor” program) and the real clincher “I love you and you love me”. I was really sucked into this scene and could forgot that they were acting, the pain as John hesitated and then did the job was heartbreaking. I think this part of the story illustrated the problem of trust really well because we know Cameron is capable of perfectly emulating an emotion if she chooses and knows how to manipulate John, John has to make his decision based purely on logic and not rely on his feelings so in a way he behaves like a terminator himself. Later on, he has to find a way to establish trust with Cameron again which involves putting the gun in her hand. This made me think about the dynamics of trust and how it always involves risk.
I’m also anticipating the change in Cameron now as we know that upon reactivation she was not completely restored but is instead internally resisting her programming to kill John. It makes her character more interesting that she now has this inner conflict. Not that her character has been boring: In the previous season, there was more of a Pinocchio thing (was Pinocchio one of those themes I was talking about) where she would at times seem to be becoming more human only to suddenly jolt everyone when she failed to “get it”. (e.g. at one point she listened sensitively to a teenage girl crying about her problems, gave advice and seemed to genuinely care but agreed with her that perhaps suicide was the way to go: the girl jumped off a building later in the episode). There is a shocking-ness to Cameron’s inability to understand the intricacies of human society despite her best efforts (of course there is a big plot hole here because when it suites the plot, the terminators are able to draw upon encyclopaedic knowledge of human psychology in order to manipulate people).
UPDATE: On looking up pinocchio references in SCC, I came across a post on Critics Rant which also reminded me that one of the themes used in season one was the development of atomic physics leading to the invention of the nuclear bomb (paralleling the idea that development of intelligent software leads to skynet and the terminators).
Some other notable character developments are less dramatic but create interesting dynamics. I like it how John’s uncle from the future Derek advocates a “show no mercy on anyone involved in Skynet” approach where as Sarah is more understanding because of her encounter with the widow of the scientist who was killed at the end of the Terminator II movie. Strangely, there is a relationship now between Cromartie (the main bad terminator) and the FBI agent Ellison who he spared after shooting 17 FBI agents at the end of the last episode of season I. In “Samson and Delilah”, Ellison encounters Cromartie again and Cromartie confirms that he only left Ellison alive because he thinks Ellison will inadvertently help him find John and Sarah.
So anyway, I’m glad I’ve got all that off my chest. This is the kind of show that I might need to blog about a bit just to process it as it is quite intense and I watch it on my own. Oh yeah, and Shirley Manson’s character Catherne Weaver is delightfully creepy, maybe I’ll blog more about her as her part develops.
[tags]philosophical themes, samson and delilah, terminator,the sarah connor chronicles, violence[/tags]
Oh yes. We really need to finish off season one and get to this.
Season one needs to provide more one-armed shotgun racking, then.
Do you mean that you can’t watch it due to a deficiency in one armed shotgun racking in the ones you watched so far? They completely wrote off four cars in this episode (including an excellent 4WD throw by Cameron).
The one-armed shotgun rack is, for me, what makes Sarah Connor. And I think I’ve made this point before, but I suspect that if you’re not a woman (and a feminist, and perhaps an action-film star) in, probably, at least her early thirties, it’s hard to explain the impact she had on those of us who are those things. I was fifteen when the film came out in 1991 and for me and my contemporaries, we’d just seen nothing—nothing—like this woman before on the big screen. It was mind-blowing.
I know Ellen Ripley preceded her, but Sarah Connor was something else.
I’m not trying to marginalise the film’s effect, or say that if you aren’t a thirty-year-old feminist you’re just not going to understand Sarah Connor. I’m just trying to explain, very badly, that for me (and many of my contemporaries: there was even a joke about it in Red Cap at one point) this was a landmark film.
What if I was to say that Sarah throws John out of a second story window and then leaps out herself? Then says “can you walk? Good, ‘cause we’ve got to run”
Yeah, that’s the Sarah I like. The odd thing about Sarah is that she’s not actually a very good mother, by normative standards, in T2. She’s a superb mother from the perspective of her own unique situation: she does have to train her son up to lead a guerilla war against killer cyborgs. But for all she’s associated heavily with John, she’s not actually that maternal. She does love him, but the overwhelming impression she gives in T2 is not that she loves him—not until the end, anyway—but that she recognises his value to humanity.
There’s no self-abnegation in Sarah.
Given the limitations on women in films (and look at that Charles Stross post you Pownced a few weeks ago), that’s kind of awesome.