Smithology

I watched the television adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal the other day and in the tradition of these adaptations (previously The Colour of Magic and The Hogfather) it was excellent entertainment.

For those not familiar with Pratchett, he is mostly known for his Discworld books set in a flat world that rides on the back of four elephants that stand on the back of a giant space turtle. Over the last few years, a few of his books have been made into TV movies (all two parters so far)

The following may contain some minor spoilers.

Going Postal is the story of Moist von Lipwig and his charge to revive the ailing Ankh-Morpork Postal Service. Standing against him is the evil Reacher Gilt who runs The Clacks – a kind of steam-punk telegraph service using signalling lights to send messages across country. Various other characters come to aid or hinder Moist in his quest, notably the huffy and strict Adora Belle Dearheart whom Moist predictably falls for instantly. It might sound a bit boring but throw in a golem (a living clay man), some nutty postal workers, an assassin banshee, some steampunk hackers, sentient piles of mail, neat magical special effects and some tense negotiations over a crossbow bolt or two and there’s enough to keep you entertained.

The portrayal of Ankh-Morpork (and other Discworld locations in previous adaptations) is very close to how I imagine them when reading the books – perhaps because Pratchett draws on well understood shared images. While the Discworld novels are set literally on a different world, there is a familiarity to the underlying whimsical relationship between things that is very earthbound and makes the characters sympathetic and believable even while they fire crossbow bolts during quarrels and befriend golems.

The comedy in Going Postal wouldn’t make most people fall off their chairs but it does provide a steady flow of smirks and smiles. Apart from the obvious slapstick, there is a subtle form of humour which is about recognising things in strange places.

[start spoilery paragraph]
For example, I had to laugh when the evil Clacks service was brought to its knees by subverting its protocols to cause it to lock up. The perpetrators of this crime were immediately recognisable as hackers in their smug self appreciation and mastery of the arcane.
[end spoilery paragraph]

The visual effects were well done in my opinion and while I realise they were done on a budget, I felt they made the magical bits suitably magical and where the sets were a bit obviously staged, I can forgive the producers for not being able to have the whole city stretching out behind every shot.

As far as the acting goes, it was probably just a touch theatrical in approach which I suppose is needed for comedy but the levels weren’t too annoyingly high and there were still moments of genuine drama where I felt a strong affinity with the characters.

Pratchett is often compared to Douglas Adams as a writer and I agree that their style of comedy is similar. If you liked Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV Series, you’ll probably like this. Definitely worth a look if you come across it and enjoy a bit of comedy in your fantasy

Wikipedia Going Postal

Uncategorized comedy, fantasy, terry pratchett, tv

I watched the finale of Misfits (season 1) last night and it had me in stitches. I started watching of curiosity when it was mentioned on Fulltime Casual as being about incredibly unlikable people who get superpowers and somehow you just have to watch the next episode.

Some things that drew me into this show were the choice of characters, the setting, the great acting and the black humour. So many shows are about rich people doing expensive things and being out of this world. Misfits was different because it was about teenagers gone wrong doing community service. They drink, they smoke, they have no life ambition, they’re selfish and shallow and then in a freak storm they are somehow given super powers.

I liked the way the show explored each character through the episodes: There’s Kelly with the almost unintelligible accent and bad attitude – thinking everyone’s out to get her, Alisha the play girl who wants to be bad with the boys, Curtis the more straight guy who ended up on probation for possession of cocaine (which was really because his girlfriend had it), Simon the social misfit – incredibly repressed and introverted who spies on everyone and films them with his phone and Nathan: the star of the show, an insensitive, potty mouthed, overly extroverted, loudmouth prick who can’t take anyone or anything seriously.

Of these characters, Nathan and Kelly hold much of the humorous moments and their acting is just perfect. Kelly’s facial expressions, body language and look are so believable. Likewise, Nathan’s ridiculous swagger, excruciatingly insincere facial expressions and over-the-top teasing had me spilling my beer from laughter.

Apart from the comedy, the show explores some other interesting territory: there’s a Butterfly Effect like episode about time travel, an episode that makes us think about ageing and loneliness and a kind of Midas’ Curse story around Alisha. There are also many other characters that briefly come into the story and are also brilliant.

The overall themes of the show are relational: the experience of loneliness and not fitting in and how we find others and find comfort in relationships. Maybe it’s about how relationships are formed through us being exposed to each others flaws but still finding acceptance.

A word of warning though, this is not a show for people who don’t like swearing and lots of other nastiness including lots of sexual crassness. Nathan especially knows no limits when it comes to how far into the gutter he’ll go – it seems he has engaged the best part of his obviously high intelligence and creative energy to just getting under peoples skin and hitting them where it hurts the most or just grossing them out – anything to get a reaction.

Season 1 was just aired in Australia on the ABC and season 2 is apparently airing in the UK later in the year.

Misfits on Wikipedia

Misfits Official Site

Uncategorized comedy, super heros, tv

I fixed the media centre PC when we moved to the new house (part of which was having a decent antenna and actually being able to tune a channel on my DVB card) so the kids have renewed their relationship with ABC kids. Flavour of the month seems to be Yo Gabba Gabba: a psychedelic kind of retro 8 bit computer styled show run by DJ Lance Rock and his five cuddly friends. I just can’t help laughing at some of the stuff they get up to, especially the guest band that comes on for each show complete with a film clip matching the show’s theme e.g. how to wash your hands.

Also, here’s Weezer: All My Friends Are Insects

Weezer – All My Friends Are Insects (Yo Gabba Gabba!) from Ford Davis on Vimeo.

Other favourites are Charlie and Lola, Postman Pat and In the Night Garden.

Wikipedia: Yo Gabba Gabba

Uncategorized fatherhood, tv

People are always accusing me of brainwashing my son into liking Star Wars. Admittedly it’s been one of his interests in which I’ve been able to join with him enthusiastically. But the truth is that Sol’s love of all things Star Wars grew out of us playing Lego Star Wars together on the Wii and then having to watch the movies to answer all his questions about the plot and characters. I really didn’t push it on him.

Anyway, I think it’s tradition that parents pass their interests on to their children, it’s one of the joys and privileges of being a parent. I’m sure my Dad would agree, after all it was Dad’s love of science fiction that nurtured my own interest in it. Would I have watched Doctor Who, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (BBC TV series) and countless space and nature documentaries if not for my Dad? Would I have seen Tron at the drive-in when I was in early primary school or even earlier, the original Star Wars where apparently my eyes opened wide as the first Star Destroyer roared overhead and remained fixed on the screen until the Death Star exploded in a satisfying ball of sparks at the end (oh sorry for the spoiler – yeah they blow it up)

When I was working part time earlier in the year, Sol and I would often go to the DVD shop together to rent some movies. We would stop at the science fiction shelf and I would have to say no to pretty much everything that caught his interest (apart from Star Wars) as I knew it would be either too complex for him (Star Trek) or too violent (Terminator). The only movie we managed to rent from there was E.T. (which he loved). At the fantasy shelf we found plenty of stuff that he can watch including some gems I remember from my childhood like The Neverending Story. We haven’t yet borrowed The Dark Crystal and he would probably enjoy Labyrinth (but I’m not sure if David Bowie’s tights will be too scary for him) and there’s plenty of other boy becomes wizard and rides a dragon films.

So here’s a list of stuff we’ve watched:

Movies:

• Star Wars (All of them except the Christmas special)
• E.T.

TV:

• Clone Wars
• Ben 10

Stuff we know about and could check out:

• K-9
• The Sarah Jane Adventures

Fantasy:

• The Never Ending Story
• The Dark Crystal (On the TODO list)

I’m not counting Dreamworks and Pixar movies because those are obvious and go without saying. So what else should be on the must watch list for the discerning 5 yrold sci-fi nerd?

Uncategorized fatherhood, movies, scifi, tv

Sol and I have just finished watching season 1 of Clone Wars which we had to borrow as two separate DVDs from the video shop (and they wonder whey people pirate stuff). I wasn’t expecting much from this, not being a fan of the three prequel movies but I was pleasantly surprised by this cartoon series.

I put the DVD on for Sol so I could do some other stuff and then found myself wandering into the room and standing in front of the TV and getting hooked by the episodes.

Clone Wars is very much pitched at children and has a kind of nostalgic voice-over intro in sixties-newsreader style that sets up each episode. The writing is actually pretty good though. To me, good writing is all about setting up believable relationships between the characters and keeping the right pace of story progression. I really hate stories that are over-complicated and rely on characters who you thought were good guys suddenly revealing they are secretly bad guys.

So the things that annoyed me about the prequels were the way Qui Gon and Kenobi and later Anikin and Kenobi were just so cool all the time. Cracking jokes in the middle of being shot at just doesn’t do it for me and wrecks any sense of peril. As for the plots of those films, I could never figure out what the hell the bad guys were actually trying to do. It was a big complicated plot to destabilise the republic and take control but it just was too hard to follow on first viewing.

Anyway, the Clone Wars which is set between the second and third prequel does a good job of keeping the stories simple whilst working within the framework of Dooku being a bad guy who is trying to get planets to leave the republic and sign up to his separatist movement while the jedis and clones are engaging the separatists in war and trying also to win back planets that have defected to the separatists.

The series introduces some new characters who we see briefly in the third film being assassinated in another stupid plot twist where apparently clones can be given a secret order to slay all jedi. There is Anikin’s apprentice Ahsoka Tano and Dooku’s apprentice Asajj Ventress. Also a few other jedi masters who join in such as Plo Koon and Luminara Unduli.

And of course there are the old favorites, R2-D2, C3PO, Padme and (not so favorite) Jar Jar Binks.

The stories also focus on some of the clones and interestingly touch the surface of some philosophical questions about identity and the sanctity of all life. This is touched on in an early episode where Yoda and three clones must fight their way out of an ambush. The clones question why Yoda refuses to leave a wounded clone and Yoda points out that each of them has a slightly different personality and preferences and each of them perceives their own unique identity. The clones are used to being treated as dispensable resources.

The episodes tend to focus on values such as team work, use of power / ethics, thinking for yourself, loyalty (even to droids!), self sacrifice for a greater cause and friendship.

The action scenes are actually fun to watch even though it is a cartoon. Sure there is the usual million-lasers-that-miss-the-good-guys stuff but some of the light sabre duals are quite fun with the use of the force and the quips and sledging thrown in but also the space battles and clone trooper action is well done.

There is some good humour in the episodes too. I particularly laughed at the one where Jar Jar Binks pretends to be a jedi. He is much less annoying than in the movies but still a buffoon.

I definitely recommend this series for kids because the values are there without the puke-making moral lectures at the ends of the episodes and they are quite watchable for adults too.

Uncategorized clone wars, scifi, star wars, tv

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

It’s now been a couple of weeks since the BSG finale which should have given everyone a chance to reflect and get over initial reactions or just catch up. So here is my breakdown of the finale and the show in general.

HERE BE THE SPOILERS, ARRR.

For me this show went to a bad place in the finale of season 3. When Kara Thrace came back from the dead, I just thought it was getting very silly. Also the choice of “All Along the Watchtower” annoyed me but I can’t say why – maybe because Bob Dylan is such a baby boomer icon and any use of his music sends me the message that I’m watching television designed for boomers (no not that Boomer haha).

I knew the show was going to have religious elements embedded in the conclusion but like many many others who have posted their reactions on the net (like here on Tor) I found the “It was all God” explanation really weak and unsatisfying.

I would have been a lot more satisfied with an ending where a lot of the weird stuff was a conspiracy of the hybrids who turn out to have advanced powers of projection and maybe they were behind mysteries such as Kara’s resurrection, the Cathedral visions and Baltar’s and Caprica’s imaginary friends.

A few people have picked up on the idea that BSG was all about 9/11 and the war on terror and that the finale had a ring of hope to it akin to the election of Obama. I think they could have ended on a positive note without having to make such definite ends for all of the characters. I would have been happy for the series to end with the cylon and human fleet in orbit around an unidentified blue and green planet (maybe with a Gondwanaland shaped continent?) listening to Laura and Caprica reading the human/cylon peace treaty.

Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine has blogged about what he thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the series and I agreed strongly with his commentary: especially that the space battles were a real highlight and that the move towards a soap opera style show towards the end of series 3 was unwelcome.

In terms of drama, the show was at it’s best when it was exploring some pretty full-on philosophical issues: Laura and Admiral Adama’s ethical dilemmas of trying to lead and defend and preserve their humanity. The times Adama and Tigh had issues using military force to police the fleet. Questions of morality during war. Cavil’s and the cylons questions on the meaning of life given their immortality. The problem of blurred boundaries between humans and cylons in the form of Hera and the human-cylon pairings. The questions of people’s right to religion. When it became about individuals and their personal angst, the show was not as good but I still liked some of the things that were brought up on a personal level such as the brilliant episode where Kara explores her relationship with her dad through a pianist at the bar. I liked some of the plots that were about trust, manipulation and betrayal. However as Bob says, when the episodes were just drama, the show lost a lot of it’s excitement and drive.

Overall, I think BSG will be remembered fondly and I imagine we’ll be watching re-runs on telly for years to come. I’m glad that they ended the show while it was still popular and I’m looking forward to seeing more science fiction coming from the same group of people.

Speaking of related shows, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is coming to a close as well (and still no word on a third series) which is another show I’ve appreciated even if it has suffered from much the same lack of action as the latter half of BSG. More shows like these please!

Uncategorized bsg, tv

Tin Man was shown over the Christmas holidays here on channel 7 and I recorded it as I have been having some kind of spooky confluence with all things Wizard of Oz for a few months now where I keep coming across references to the story. I recently borrowed some of the Oz books off Catriona but seeing as I was reading The Merchants’ War and catching up on BSG, I haven’t read them yet.

On watching Tin Man it soon becomes apparent that we are not in Kansas anymore in more ways than one. It is clear from about the five minute mark that this is more than just a modernisation of the story and that it departs in many ways from the story as we know it according to the 1939 movie (which doesn’t exactly follow the books either I’m told). The plot roughly follows the original and the characters are roughly resembling the originals but the details are all different.

While this show had a definite B-grade feel about it, I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the script, maybe it’s the pace. Perhaps it’s that Dorothy, sorry D.G. is supposed to be eighteen but acts more like she’s twelve. Even though this is supposed to be a fantastic story taking place in a fantasy world, maybe the fantasy aspect of it was just too much: it’s just really hard to mix a fantasy world with a real world character without needing a million scenes where the real world character is just gazing about open mouthed at everything. Or maybe it was kind of how a lot of the focus was just on showing us all this neat special effects.

Actually, now that I think about it, the real problem was that they failed to really develop any of the relationships between the characters. The best parts of the series were when these relationships were being fleshed out such as the scenes where Glitch and Cain end up travelling together. The conversations between Glitch and Cain on this journey were the best parts of the script.

To me the special effects looked really good. The settings all looked pretty awesome whether it was the forest or Azkadellia’s steam-punk castle or the lake. The flying monkeys looked real enough (and the way they erupted from Azkadellia’s bosoms had a lot of entertainment value) as did the other fantastic creatures.

Despite the flaws I just mentioned, the story still had me engrossed enough that I wanted to see what happened and whether the wicked witch would end with a melting scene rivalling Raiders of the Lost Ark’s melting Nazi (but it’s a PG rating so you can guess that the melting scene was not very impressive). The end is very predictable but at least they threw in a little tie back to the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie towards the end which kind of came out of nowhere. (There’s also a hot air balloon which really literally comes out of nowhere and with no explanation which I assume is just from very bad editing to try and fit it into a timeslot).

All in all, if you’ve got six hours to waste and you like Wizard of Oz stuff, then I reckon you’ll enjoy watching Tin Man even if it’s just to play “spot the deconstructed reference to the original” or groan at the jokes in the script.

Links:
Tin Man IMDB
Tin Man Scfi.com
Tin Man Wikipedia

[tags]tin man, tv, wizard of oz[/tags]

Uncategorized tv, wizard of oz

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