Automatic for the People
Episode 2 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season 2 is called Automatic for the People.
I’ve figured out what my problem is. I am using SCC to avoid doing work on the philosophy subject I’m studying. It’s similar to how I became obsessed with gardening during exam week when I was in second year engineering. I’m on the Fox SCC blog and podcast. Hopefully I’ll regain control of my senses soon but in the meantime, I give you:
*** SPOILERS AAAAHHH! ***
So this episode introduces two female characters, the new landlord Kacy who is heavily pregnant, a bit of an air-head but very warm and John’s new girlfriend Riley who is also likeable and warm despite appearing to not have parents and wags school to be with the clearly disturbed new kid (i.e. John). I guess this balances the less typically feminine female characters, two of whom are terminators all of whom are psycho.
The action in this episode was pretty toned down. The most we see is a CG future air to ground battle and Sarah commando rolling a security guard and taking his gun. I guess you could count Cameron’s leopard print singlet-top and pool game in the bar as action but I wish she’d given those sleezy guys a kick in the nuts as well as winning all their cash. Well I guess she throws a terminator into some kind of big capacitor bank but it’s nothing like the money they spent wrecking things in the first episode.
In terms of character development, John continues to emancipate himself from Sarah: His rebellion? To be a normal kid and bring his girlfriend home. Meanwhile Cameron is still flakey and Reece and Sarah continue to have conflict over Reece’s preferred method of dealing with problems which is to just kill everyone.
We also have an incident which sets up the rest of the season: a dying soldier from the future buzzes in and leaves them a list of missions. The first of these missions is to stop a terminator from melting down a nuclear power plant.
The really interesting stuff in this episode is around Sarah’s cancer scare. Last season we learned from Cameron that Sarah was supposed to die of cancer in 2005 or so but because they have time jumped, we no longer know if that will happen. Sarah meets a guy who has cancer in a bar and he talks about what it’s like to her. She is naturally freaked out. We see Sarah learning to confront this fear as she is required to enter a room that contains dangerous radioactive levels. The first time she goes in there, she has a panic attack and believes she has been “crapped up”. Later in the episode, she has to run through the room with no protection on in order to help Cameron (who is flaking) and save the plant. Reece opts not to enter the room (he also advocates running away when the plant starts to melt down but Sarah makes him stay). Sarah’s grappling with her own mortality has in a way made her brave. It could be that she is taking more risks because she almost wants the certainty of death rather than hiding from it. Or it could be that she realises that she can’t escape death so she must prioritise other things above prolonging her own life in the longer term, in other words, she continues to sacrifice everything she has to protect John and save the world.
Oh I almost forgot Atomic Al: the look on their faces as they watch this is priceless: they are in the middle of this intense mission and find themselves sitting in a waiting room watching cartoons)
[tags]automatic for the people, cancer, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles[/tags]
