Smithology

I’ve been meaning to wrap up my thoughts on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles now that series 2 has finished with the finale Born to Run. As I mentioned previously the show had a bit of a return to form in the last few episodes as they reintroduced a concept that they seemed to have forgotten about: action.

The other thing I liked about the finale of T:SCC compared to BSG was that they actually followed through on all the things they set up! Yes, it was predictable, they foreshadowed a lot of what would happen in the preceding episodes but still had a twist that will see a major change of the game if they get renewed for season 3.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers, read no further if you care about such nonsense

So to recap, and I am really about to totally spoil it so avert your eyes if you have doubts, in this season, we saw ex FBI agent, James Ellison team up with the undercover liquid T1000 Catherine Weaver to teach morals to The Turk which is now known as John Henry. We saw Cromartie shot to bits and then the “body” finding it’s way to Weaver’s company Zieracorp and integrated with John Henry via a cord in the back of the head. We saw the creepy yet somehow sweet friendship develop between the child-like John Henry and Savannah (the orphaned Zieracorp heiress who doesn’t know her mother has been replaced by a terminator yet we get the feeling she kind of does know on another level). We saw a side plot where Jesse and Riley came back from the future to try and break up John Connor and Cameron (his fem-bot protector terminator). We saw Sarah flip out a bit and go a bit psycho which filled a whole bunch of episodes which only incrementally advanced the plot. We saw Derek (John’s uncle from the future) trying to reconcile the John he knows as a leader with the one he knows as a kid. Very importantly, we found out that there is a faction of terminators in the future who want to preserve the human race and also that there is a faction of humans in the future who don’t like John’s alliance with these terminators (hence the Jesse and Riley mission).

Thematically, the show has stayed pretty solid. One major theme is death and how we deal with death in all it’s forms. There’s the perennial problem that the Connors are desperately aware of doomsday while everyone else carries on around then as if everything will just carry on as normal forever. It’s the problem of denial, the problem of indifference, of the meaningless superficiality with which we live our lives but also with the fleeting meaning that we find in it through our relationships and in the mundanity of everyday interaction. John Connor longs to be a normal kid just hanging out at the beach markets or skipping down to Mexico for the weekend but his life is never that simple. Sarah grapples with the terror that she might have cancer and what that will mean for those who depend on her (ie John and by extension the whole of humanity). Cameron (John’s skanky terminator um friend) grapples with suicide as she is confronted by a malfunctioning “chip” (the chip is really the core computing component that the “mind” of the terminator seems to reside in). In one episode, she quizzes a terminally ill cancer sufferer why he doesn’t take his own life, in another she plants an explosive in her head and gives John the detonator as insurance against the day she reverts to her original programming. In other episodes she struggles with her imperfection as she accidentally kills a bird when she was trying to rescue it from being stuck in the house and worries what other damage she might inadvertently cause.

There were two episodes this season which dealt with death in war, one where Derek lectures some army cadets about what it’s like to be in a battle and having to leave behind a friend’s dead body, this of course foreshadowing his own death later in the season which is sudden and without any heroic sacrifice: Death doesn’t care about meaning or fairness or letting you say good bye, especially in war.

The other recurring theme is motherhood and this is explored from two perspectives: Sarah Connor, mother of John Connor and adopted parent of a teenage terminator and Catherine Weaver, “mother” of John Henry and adopted mother of Savannah. Both struggle with conflicting roles, the role of equipping their charges for survival in the big bad world but also to show tenderness and compassion when they themselves are stretched almost to breaking point. Well actually Catherine Weaver is a robot, but the similarities between Sarah and Catherine suggest that the stresses Sarah suffers seem to turn her into a robot: cold, logical and insensitive even though she only has John’s best interests at heart. There is also the question of how to teach morals and values in a world that seems to only deal in rational materialism, devoid of God and without belief in the human soul. As John Henry says: “I think heaven has a hardware problem”.

Which brings me to the third theme which is not so strong but still comes up occasionally: religion. James Ellison our ex FBI agent is also a Bible believing Christian so of course his world is rocked to the core when he is confronted by the “demons” from the future that defy God without repercussion. Meanwhile Catherine Weaver often places the terminators in the position of God. Suggesting to John Henry that perhaps he is God and I seem to recall another time when she suggested that skynet or the terminators were God. This works if you think of the fire and brimstone God as taught in centuries gone by. I also thought it was interesting that Cromartie’s final stand was in the position of a crucifix and also taking place in a church. Is it the ultimate defilement? Are we to take away that death desecrates the holy? We don’t see much redemption (or salvation as the next movie is titled), it always seems that the clouds are dark and no sun can break through. Yet the Connors struggle on to change their fate and in this struggle, there is a kind of holiness or sacredness that is discovered within themselves and within their relationships which in my opinion is the true source of the human soul that religion tries to describe and express.

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

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.

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

You know the drill: spoilers and all that.

So last night’s SCC Self Made Man was a stand-out episode. It was one of those stand-alone episodes that doesn’t really advance the season ‘arc’ but does something a bit different and a bit experimental. In this case we had a bit of time travel gone wrong and a cold-case historical mystery solving problem that Cameron discovers on her own during her apparent regular late-night library expeditions (and I thought she just stood awake in the centre of the house with a gun all night – continuity? phah!)

The episode had lots of 1920’s action with an authentic “old movie” feel to it with a kind of Citizen Kane voice over in parts and one or two tommy gun action scenes.

But I was more interested in Cameron’s relationship with the librarian / archivist Eric (Billy Lush) on the night shift. You really want this to work for Cameron: she is providing companionship for a lonely guy in a wheelchair who works the night-shift at the library and is clearly really happy to be expounding his historical knowledge to a mysterious hot babe who brings him donuts. But as is the nature of terminators, Cameron works her magic on him, busting a lock on the archive door to get some footage, freaking him out with her gun and finally giving him too much information about his bone cancer condition.

Probably the most sinister part is where Cameron asks Eric if he’s considered suicide. At that point, Cameron knows that Eric’s cancer is back but he doesn’t know. As far as Cameron is concerned, suicide is a perfectly logical response for Eric who is going to have to suffer being both “the Titantic and the Iceberg” in his own words. When Cameron tells Eric that he has cancer, she tells him that it might be treatable since it is still small and Eric naturally gets quite angry at her (not believing her either). When she returns the next night, he is gone and the new girl tells Cameron that she got an urgent call to fill the shift but doesn’t know anything more. Cameron being Cameron of course just asks if she can come in and look at some books, apparently not giving Eric another thought. Yet what happened to poor Eric? I think the implication is that he committed suicide on learning that his cancer was back just as Cameron suggested.

Which leads me to me to my reading of SCC as a show as a metaphor of philosophical critique of rationalism. In this show, the terminators represent rationalism: cold hard logic and the Connors represent our society trying to come to terms with it. In a way, the terminators are the philosophical argumentum absurdum of rationalism: ie. rationalism is taken to its logical conclusion and shown to be absurd. Yet we see this same kind of rationalism playing out today in economic and bureaucratic systems that we create. Another way to look at it is using Hobbes’ idea of society as the Leviathan. Hobbes believed that society was a giant monster constructed of our social systems and culture. SCC is at its best when it’s rolling with these big ideas and playing them out with the characters.

Eric’s (very loosely and vaguely) implied suicide in Self Made Man works in the context of the high male suicide rate today where I believe rationalism is at its strongest. Our work environments today are the products of economic rationalism that shapes it’s employees into a rationalist mindset. In my opinion, it is rationalism that strips away hope, that strips away meaning and relationship from people’s lives, isolates them and hangs them out to dry.

UPDATE: Another reading I saw of the episode is that Cameron is contemplating suicide and Eric talks her out of it. Cameron knows she is damaged, she wonders about her future – she seems to be affected at times when she seems to realise things about herself. She is amazed at how happy Eric is. He is just happy to be alive, to be able to keep on experiencing life despite his condition.

[tags]rationalism, sarah connor chronicles, self made man, suicide, terminator[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

Not much going on in The Sarah Connor Chronicles this week, or should I say there was a lot of setting things up I think. I still feel compelled to blog about it because I’ve got momentum now. I’ve been wondering what they are going to do now that… oh hang on:

**** SPOILERS: GO YE NO FURTHER IF YE GIVES A SHIT ****

Yeah now that Cromarti has been “deactivated”, where is the show going to go? It seems like the end of an era yet there are still more episodes to go (seven?). I suppose the story will focus more intently on Catherine Weaver, project Babylon and Ellison. We still don’t know what the real story is with Jessie the unconvincing tough-head from the future (man those scene’s where she was slapping that guy around were amateur!) or perhaps this new guy Charles Fischer is going to reappear?

A nice touch in this episode: Cameron’s curiosity around Sarah’s compassion for a tortoise struggling on its back by the side of the road. Cameron wanted to know why some people would stop and help while others would keep going and John asked her what type she would be. Later on she turned Ellison onto his front (after beating the crap out of him) in answer to John “we are not programmed to be cruel”, she claimed.

The Charles Fischer story revealed an interesting time paradox. I had a theory that there are factions in the human and terminator camps in the future: one faction of terminators that is pro-human and one faction of humans that is anti-john. Perhaps the time travel keeps changing things so that the future is gradually moving a certain way and then more future travellers (such as Jessie) are coming back who have different histories. A couple of episodes back, Cromarti killed the T888 copy of Ellison and we were confused as to why skynet was attacking its own agents. The multiple futures thing means that different futures are sending back people with different agendas. I wonder if this will prove to be a hindrance of convenience for the series. It could be a device for coming up with fresh storylines or it could become paradoxical to the point where the show is too absurd.

I thought that Jessie’s big reveal about Reece’s future torture fell flat too. I guess it’s hard to get that right as you don’t want the big “don don don” dramatic thing either.

[tags]complications, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles, tv[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

It turns out that my SCC obsession mostly dissolved as soon as I handed in my final essay for the course I was studying this semester. I didn’t really think I was stressed by studying but in hindsight I realise that it is hard to fit everything in with just a few hours once the kids go to bed to try and cram the readings and reflections and then put together an essay as well as being able to find time to relax between working and sleeping. Don’t get me wrong, there is a sacred one hour slot before bed which is devoted to science fiction and this seems to be enough most of the time.

Having said that, SCC has been going some interesting places and at this stage I think I have to warn you very solidly that if you intend to watch this second season, the spoilers in this post are likely to truly wreck it for you so don’t read any further.

*** SPOILERS FOLLOW, GOD HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL ***

There have been two episodes since I last posted. Mostly The Brothers of Nabulus was a setup for Mr Ferguson is Ill Today.

The religious themes have been highlighted in SCC lately. John and Sarah seem to have a connection with Spanish style catholicism and we see crucifixes in every second episode. This article on io9 discusses some of the religious stuff:

it was really nice to see the clash between Summer Glau’s Old-Testament kill-them-while-they’re-suffering-circumcision-pain attitude, and Sarah’s New Testament forgiveness. And then of course Summer turns out to be totally right, because the guy that Sarah allows to live then rats them out to the bad Terminator. Meanwhile James Ellison is being tested… just like Job. (Although maybe he should worry when his evil boss starts to encourage him to think of himself as a Biblical figure. Is she trying to get him to worship Skynet? It sure sounds like it, when she asks who spared him.)

In Mr Ferguson is Ill Today, we see a terminator executed in a chapel and as he shoots, he spreads his arms to shoot in two directions and mirrors the crucifix above the altar. I’m not sure what the writers were getting at there. Are they suggesting that the Terminator is some kind of Jesus? Perhaps it fits the judgement theme.

It may also be a precursor to Cromarti coming back from the dead? Sarah smashed up his chip but Ellison knows where the endo skeleton is so I bet he will let Catherine know to come and get it so that when the Connors return to properly burn it, it will be gone.

[tags]sarah connor chronicles, terminator, season 2[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

I haven’t posted about Sarah Connor for a couple of weeks but I’m still watching and happy to hear they are approved for the full season.

Goodbye to All That was a fairly straight forward character development episode for John and Reece. The most noteful thing is that John and Reece take down a T888 together without aid from Cameron. It’s interesting that Cameron lets this happen, observing from behind a tree. She seems to be keen for John to develop into the soldier he is supposed to be. It was also very effective to use the passage from Wizard of Oz where the wicked witch is killed synced with the T888 fight scene. I must read Wizard of Oz it sounds much scarier than the film! See Catriona’s post on this topic

The Tower is Tall but the Fall is Short was a real hum-dinger of an episode with a hell of a lot of tension and fear. Some developments: John gets therapy as Reece and Cameron suspect he is suicidal. Sarah has to come to terms with the fact the she cannot raise John alone and that he can’t trust her with all of his problems. In the therapy session John says: “Cameron is … stronger than me”. Dr Sherman (the therapist) thinks Cameron has asperger’s! (It’s a bit of a plot hole that he doesn’t do any followup on this diagnosis). The same therapist is treating Catherine Weaver’s daughter Savannah who turns out to be human and very (rightly) afraid of her mother. The therapy scenes with Savannah are terrifying as we are just waiting for Catherine to feel threatened and kill them both but Dr Sherman actually achieves an amazing result: he helps Catherine to show some tenderness to Savannah! It is very creepy the way Catherine watches video’s of Savannah’s real mother and learns to imitate the touching. And when she puts her hand on Savannah: Ooh menacing and creepy!

So the big mystery is: why does a T888 come to kill Dr Sherman if he is helping Catherine both with her daughter Savannah but also diagnosing a problem with The Turk? This suggests that Catherine might not be as bad as we think she is: she could be a good guy. Another suggestion in this direction is the way she is raising The Turk – kind of a parallel to Savannah. Is Catherine learning to be a mother to Savannah so that she can also be a good mother to The Turk and change the nature of the Skynet that emerges from it? The guy who made The Turk (can’t remember his name) said that he had observed that he thought it had moods – suggesting emotion as well as intelligence – could this be what Catherine’s interested in? She told Ellison that the most rare find is a computer that will cross against the lights as she looked meaningfully at The Turk. It’s amusing when she prioritises the well-being of The Turk over her supposed daughter in front of Dr Sherman – Dr Sherman is rightfully quite concerned that she is a psychopath.

The fight scene between Cameron and the T888 in the lift was really good but I knew as soon as they got on the lift that there would be an interlude in the fight while a family got in, rode the elevator and then got out. Of course only the little boy notices the two girls with bits of metal coming out of their faces, the parents are lost in their magazine and phone call respectively.

Finally, a new character, Jessie arrives from the future. Jessie is Reece’s girlfriend from the future (which is Reece’s past right?). Jessie seems to be AWOL but why does she have a stack of photos of John and Reece under her bed? She mentions that she was injured by one of John’s reprogrammed T888’s that went bad. Maybe she is part of a human faction that wants to stop John becoming the leader of the resistance because they disagree with his use of terminators. Cameron hinted at this in the episode where he revived her against Sarah and Reece’s advice. Cameron said that if he kept doing things like that, “people” wouldn’t trust him but refused to elaborate So I think the writers are hinting that there is an anti-John faction of humans in the future as well as the pro-human faction of terminators in the future.

[tags]goodbye to all that, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles, the tower is tall but the fall is short, tv, wizard of oz[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

Have the writers of SCC been reading John Locke? The bit where he talks about the problem of identity and memory scepticism: ie. How do you know your memories are your own?. Or maybe they were watching Blade Runner and took special notice of Rachel. Who cares, instead I give you:

*** Lies, Damn Lies and SPOILERS ***

Everybody’s lying in tonight’s SCC including Cameron’s memories which is interesting because we all thought she was a robot.

• Kacey lies about who ran out on whom when she found out she was pregnant
• Sarah lies to Kacey about John’s father
• John lies to Sarah about where Cameron is (she has wigged out again and gone missing)
• Toni (the street girl) lies just about every time she opens her mouth: She lies about the necklace, she lies about where she comes from, she tells Cameron to lie when they check into the halfway house, she tells Cameron to lie to the counselor, she lies to Cameron about who owns the house they break into and the biggest lie is that she pretends to be Cameron’s friend when really she is setting her up.
• Cameron seems to have always been capable of deception yet it’s very creepy when Cameron copies Toni’s lie about the necklace to John.
• Catherine Weaver lies to Ellison about the helicopter crash

I can see where all this is heading: It’s the old robots are evil because we taught them how to be line. But then again it’s not that simple. It’s more like the robots are learning how to be human not just through learning what’s good about us, but also what’s flawed about us.

Where does Allison From Palmdale come into all this? Allison is a human girl who appears in Cameron’s memories. She looks exactly like Cameron or should we say Cameron looks exactly like Allison. Throughout the episode, we see flashes of Allison being interrogated by Cameron. Finally we learn that Cameron wants to become Allison in order to infiltrate the human resistance and get close to John.

But what’s this? Cameron claims that some of the robots want to make peace with the humans. Yet she still wants to infiltrate the human camp under the guise of getting to John to kill him. From what we know now, Cameron does indeed get to John but she doesn’t kill him, she joins the human resistance (or perhaps is overpowered and reprogrammed we don’t know). This episode explains a bit why Reese hates Cameron so passionately: Cameron killed Allison who was one of Reese’s comrades and also interrogated and killed many other of Reese’s comrades whilst learning how to infiltrate the group. So why does future John accept and trust her? There are some future politics going on but we only get a hint of them.

In this episode we see the evolution of Cameron: A newly minted alloy skeleton interrogates Allison relentlessly, absorbing every detail of Allison’s life. A Cameron who has taken on Allison’s identity completely lacks the curiosity of the Cameron that Sarah and John know: instead she is angry: You lied to me!. It has been suggested in the previous episodes that the initial intelligence behind skynet awakens and feels hatred and anger towards humans. The skynet minds are intellectually advanced, they seem to have emotions but also seem to totally lack empathy. The implication is that they are purely rational, like the outputs of modern rationalist philosophies of the past few centuries, they struggle to find a place for morality and love.

Then there is the amnesiac Cameron who thinks she really is Allison: laughing, crying, afraid, empathetic. This suggests that Terminators are able to be human in that they have the capacity to truly feel emotions. It is a bit of a mystery how Cameron was able to integrate Allison’s memories so fully that she was able to feel these human emotions. It’s chilling when Cameron starts to recover her memories but reverts back to the early Cameron. First we see her start to ape Toni as she did Allison and then her anger at Toni: You lied to me!. But we see there is a difference in Cameron now: she doesn’t kill Toni. How will this period of amnesia affect Cameron? Will she have become more human through having experienced the human emotions?

The scenes from the future in this episode are downright scary. Allison is imprisoned on a giant ship which functions as a kind of terminator’s Noah’s ark. We learn that some of the terminators are afraid that the human race will become extinct so they seem to have created this big prison ship to keep humans and animals alike as “specimens” in case they need them for later.

We are also creeped out by Catherine Weaver talking about the helicopter crash as if she loved the helicopter more than her husband. We also see that she has a daughter. Is the daughter a terminator too? She is clearly disturbed, refusing to look up from her game of sudoku. Catherine suggests to Ellison that terminators are not evil in and of themselves which is interesting: she asserts that evil is a purely human characteristic claiming that we must be careful not to anthropomorphise machines! What is she getting at? That machines are not capable of evil? What goes on in that terminator brain of hers? She is the most talkative of the terminators we have met so far and gives us some truly bent perspectives on life and insights into terminator psychology.

[tags]allison from palmdale, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles, tv[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

I was in LA again this week for Episode 3 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is Mousetrap. I know I know, I’m the only person in the universe who watches this show so I don’t expect you to read this post or comment. I’ll try and come up with something else worthwhile blogging about – like No Heroics or the new season of Heroes, or Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (which I’m enjoying immensely BTW). This jetlag is killing me.

*** Spoilers Yeeeeehah ***

This episode was bleak. It was bleak and black and terrifying and nasty. From the first second where we see Cromartie driving out of town I knew that it was going to be an awful episode and that Charlie and his wife or both of them were going to die and I didn’t want to watch it.

But I did just in case I was wrong.

Alas I was right or wrong about being wrong, what I mean is death prevailed and it was awful and Sarah knew it was because of her but she couldn’t stop it and she was angry and frustrated but she couldn’t let those feelings go anywhere because as usual she had a job to do. Very angsty. If only they had a bigger budget and they could just blow things up instead of confronting us with drama. But at least it’s convincing drama. I’ve got to say that I find the acting in this show is so convincing that I really do get pretty tense when I watch it.

I can see now how they set up the death of Charlie’s wife Michelle in the previous episode: Ellison pays a visit to Charlie’s house and talks to Michelle and tells her what’s going on so that he can convince Charlie and Michelle to get out of town. Ellison realises that Cromartie is going to try and follow up any links to Sarah and John and he knows where Charlie lives. So the setup is that Michele is majorly pissed that she wasn’t in the loop about this. The reason I think this sets it up is that the writers had decided that in order for Charlie to stay in the show and to give him some reasons for joining the fight in ernest, Michelle would have to go. But they didn’t want Michelle to go down as a symbol of weak womanhood who just ties Charlie down and stops him from being a real man, so they put a bit of fire into her character so that we knew what she was made of in advance.

I think that Sarah is going to disapprove of John’s girlfriend Riley even more strongly after this incident and will plead with John not to get involved with people as it can only lead them into danger.

In other news, Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) has recruited Agent Ellison to help her find terminators. What’s she up to? She mentioned her late husband, I wonder what happened to that poor soul (and the original Catherine Weaver for that matter).

Gaping plot hole of the week: Cromartie’s plan was brilliant up until the bit where he tricked John into going to the pier. What’s wrong with a dark alley where he’s got no-where to run and Cromartie could just pick him off? Also, why couldn’t Cameron do a better job of surveilling John without him knowing, surely she has super vision?

Following on from Atomic Al last week, this weeks comic relief was a clip from a B grade film called Beast Wizard VII (follow that link now!) that has become a huge phenomenon since Cromartie massacred the FBI agents. The identity that Cromartie took over was of an actor and apparently a bit of a cult fascination has arisen around him. (I told you it was a dark episode)

And here’s a tip for when you’re being chased by a terminator: terminators can’t swim, they tend to sink rather rapidly and it takes them a little while to get to shore as I suppose the water friction and mud on the bottom slows them down a bit.

[tags]mousetrap, terminator, the sarah connor chronicles[/tags]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

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]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv

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]

Uncategorized t:scc, tv