T:SCC Adam Raised a Cain
I haven’t done a Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles update for awhile and frankly there hasn’t been much to talk about on the show lately. The show’s official blog comments have been awash with angry fans complaining that the show is losing its way with ratings going down and no word of whether there will be a third season. In some ways the show has followed BSG by having more drama than action and an enmeshment of characters just as complicated as any soap opera but before I say anything else:
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS GALORE, (please sir, may I have some more?)
Usually when a main character dies in an action show, there is a glorious and meaningful slow motion sequence e.g. Boromere getting shot full of arrows at the end of Fellowship of the Ring the movie. In tonights episode, as the Connors split up to enter a house that had a rampaging terminator in it, there was a bit of a gun fight and Derek was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the terminator just walked through a doorway and shot him in the head with no fuss and kept walking without giving him a second glance. The action continued without any look back at Derek, and my reaction was “did that just happen?” but later on the Connors come back and find Derek who is just dead. No reason why he died, he didn’t achieve anything by dying (like Charlie Dixon holding off the baddies so John could escape on the boat last week) he was just unlucky and his death was portrayed to us in equal measure to the death of the baby sitter who’s name was “About to die Jones” (I knew she was going to die as her first and last line was “I’m just going to go and do some body crunches in this other room” or something like that).
Apart from being incredibly bleak, I felt this was at least in keeping with some of other ways Josh Friedman (the writer) has dealt with violence and death on the show. He once commented on the blog that if we were going to see a terminator rampage through a factory and kill everyone, then we were going to have to go to their funeral and see their families in the next episode. I think by making Derek’s death completly un-heroic, he was unraveling a little bit of the myth of redemptive violence or at least a “death of the hero” cliché.
I think it also paradoxically made his death more meaningful t the viewer, by making the death such a sudden shock, it has made me think about it all day and I’ve consequently had to come to terms with it in more of the way that the characters in the show are seen reflecting on it over the next few days. If they had made the death a heroic stand-off or whatever, I would have had a neat narrative slot to put it in and would have forgotten about it straight away: “oh they killed of Derek but he died like a hero: hooray for the glory of Derek and his big gun”. Instead I have been thinking about Derek’s role in the show and what he brought to it: his intensity, a bit of a father figure to John and an emotional link for Sarah (through their shared relationships with Kyle Reese).
I’m looking forward to the last episode which is where John gets to finally meet Catherine Weaver the mysterious fembot who is building her own skynet in the basement and claims it to be the only hope for the survival of humankind.
