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The Brothers of Nablus So, first things first, as far as I can tell, the Bible never uses the term Nablus. In the present day, Nablus is a Palestinian city. There is, however, a town usually associated with Nablus, and that is Shechem. Going by my NKJV version of the Bible, the story as told by Cameron seems accurate. CAMERON: Jacob's daughter Dinah is raped by Shechem, Prince of Nablus. He falls in love with her. Shechem's father comes to Jacob and strikes a bargain to allow his son to marry Dinah. SARAH: That's brave of him. CAMERON: Jacob says yes, on the condition that all the men in Shechem's town be circumcised. SARAH: Everybody gets what they want. CAMERON: Three days later while Shechem's men were still in pain from the circumcision, Dinah's brothers rode into the city and killed them all. There are a few things I want to point out with the story, though. Firstly, the agreement wasn't just to allow Shechem to marry Dinah. It was also make the two countries as one, to become "one people", where they could share the land and property. This deal was made by the brothers, not by Jacob, and it is obviously too good to be true. The Bible even points out the brothers take advantage of Shechem's honorable nature. So, yes, on the third day, they ride in and kill all the men. However, Dinah's brothers - Simeon and Levi - didn't just kill all the men. They plundered the city, taking the livestock and all the wealth. They even abducted the children and the women, and one can assume they paid back the rape of Dinah against them. Jacob, their father, points out that doing so was a grave error. "You have troubled me by making me obnoxious among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites; and since I am few in number, they will gather themselves together against me and kill me. I shall be destroyed, my household and I." And, to that, the two brothers say: "Should he treat our sister like a harlot?" I'm not sure how it maps to the episode, however, at least not in a very vague sense of furious, disproportionate justice meted out against an indiscretion. The Connor house is pillaged, and Sarah and Cameron mete out violence, killing three people and dooming a fourth. But who is Shechem? Isn't comparing a break-in to a rape just a bit crude? Who was Jacob, and what bargain was struck? Does Moishe, the Jewish fence, fit into it at all? Ellison as Job Now, let's talk about James Ellison as Job. The parallels are obvious. In the Bible, Job is a good man, "blameless and upright". He revered/feared God and never did evil (Ellison is a man of faith and never does evil). And he was rich and powerful (FBI Agent) and accounted for the possible sins of his family by making burnt offerings to God. It is safe to say that he is a really good man! Now, here is where the story gets weird. See, Satan and God get into a talk. God points out that Job is one of a kind and does everything correctly. Satan, on the other hand, points out that God has blessed him and given him everything and that, if those things were to be destroyed, Job would curse God, right to his face. And so God tells Satan that he may destroy everything Job has, providing her does not lay a hand on Job himself. Satan does. Job finds that oxen and donkeys are pillaged, his servants put to the sword. Fire rains from the heavens and scourges away his sheep and those servants. His camels are raided by a rival tribe, and, yes, those servants are killed, too! Finally, a great wind tears through his great house, collapsing it and killing all of his children. But Job does not sin, nor does he blame God. So, Satan comes back to God. God points out that Job is a great person still. Satan wonders if he still would be so pious if his person was affected directly. God allows this, and lets Satan do what he wish to Job - providing he does not kill him. Job comes down with a particularly terrible sort of leprosy. His wife asks him to renounce God for this, but Job claims that if you accept fortune from God than you must also accept misfortune. When Job's friends arrive to help him, they don't even recognise him - so bad is the leprosy. Job sits with his friends and laments his circumstances. He curses the day of his birth, wishing he had died. His three friends remain with him and, as they console him one by one, they claim that all of this suffering and loss is a result of a sin. If he repents, God will grant him mercy. But Job can't understand why he needs to repent, as he'd done nothing wrong, and nothing to deserve such terrible treatment. Job claims innocence, listing his virtues, his blameless nature, that God fashioned him from clay, and demands an audience with the creator. There's actually lot more to it - such as a lot of discussion about the nature of wisdom - but that'd be a lot more words. God shows up, out of a whirlwind. God ignores everything Job has said: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!" God lists off his achievements, all of them borne from his omnipotence and impossible for mortal minds to match and mortal minds to conceive of, and basically points out that Job is nothing to him. Job repents, claiming that he uttered what he didn't understand, things that were "too wonderful" and he didn't know. And, with that, God restores everything Job had lost and, indeed, gave him double what he had before. He lives to the age of 140 and dies "full of days". Job is James Ellison and James Ellison is Job. We are seeing him in the process of losing everything: his job, his power, his family, his reputation. But he still has a faith. Will the world reward him for it? Will he gain double what he had before? Will his faith save him from the "dust and ashes" and see him live to old age? Ultimately, though, Job never learns why he was made to suffer. Skynet and Ellison: The Future Has Changed The interplay between Skynet, Ellison and Cromartie gives us the clearest indication so far of how time travel works in the TSCC universe: one timeline, constantly in flux. It almost seems like Skynet is aware of events taking place in the past, and is making surgical attempts to make the best of those changes, but also has sharp limitations of where it can send its agents. For whatever reason, Skynet doesn't just want to remove Ellison from the timeline. It could kill him at a younger age, if that was the case. But it needs Ellison alive and where he is. Because Ellison is working with Weaver, and will go on to be an instrumental part of John Henry's development within Project Babylon. And John Henry, as Weaver points out, is Skynet's opposing number and antithesis. Killing Ellison would, however, compromise Cromartie's mission to kill the Connors - at least, that appears to be Cromartie's calculation. But how unusual is it, for a Skynet Terminator to destroy another? Cromartie might be enacting Skynet's objective, but he's something of a rogue actor now. There is an I behind Cromartie's blood-red optics now. Cromartie has faith in Ellison... but has Skynet lost faith in Cromartie? Cromartie as Lucifer So, I had a thought when watching Nablus while considering my Skynet as God reading. There is one famous creature from the Bible, an Angel who fell. Lucifer, who committed the sin of pride, which could be considered as preoccupation with self, is a reasonable match to Cromartie, who has defied God's plan by putting his mission before Skynet's own. However, Lucifer's fall is generally said to be because he envied humanity's place before God and didn't wish to be second. Lucifer, of course, becomes Satan. Cromartie, of course, becomes John Henry (in a sense). I'm loathe to call John Henry 'the devil' just now, but we'll see if this thought develops into anything further as Season 2 goes on. Come Here And Give It To Me Cameron is pretty angry throughout this episode. I don't have to much to say about her, but just a few minor things. One, John's comment about how Sarah is "pissed off" because he's not spending time with her and she can't handle it applies as much to Cameron as it does Sarah. However, John doesn't direct his petulance at Cameron. At this time, I don't think John understands that Cameron is growing rather jealous. He certainly hasn't seen the frustration she displays throughout the episode. Two, Cameron's jacket. So, as I said, the purple leather jacket is maybe Cameron's one link to her identity that isn't a Skynet killing machine, nor Allison Young. It's something she - the machine that has spent time in the past and grown close to this John, gone to school, been asked to prom - owns that identifies her explicitly. Purple is an interesting color to associate with Cameron. While usually associated with royalty, it is often associated with faith, penitence and devotion. It is also linked to vanity and individualism. Is is the color found least often in nature, the first to be synthesised, and can often be associated with ambiguity and mystery. They all sound fitting to Cameron to me. But purple is also a link between blue and red. Cameron's eyes, as we've seen are blue where a Terminator typically has red - she is something unique and unprecedented. She's a mixture of Skynet's cold metal, and humanity's warm heart. And, another minor thing I wanted to point out, is that Cameron frequently wears clothing with leopard prints or tiger stripes. It invokes a comparison of Cameron with a big cat - a fierce, female creature of protection and wrath. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 05:10
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Speaking of Cameron's clothing... Mr Ferguson Is Ill is probably the one episode where Cameron's outfit choice is drastically different. The scene with her and John in his bedroom is really something.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:15
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For those interested in this thread, which I'm guessing is most of you, James Cameron recently re-aquired the entire Terminator franchise and is going to be executive producing them under his own production company, with the first installment to be helmed by the Deadpool director of all things. It sounds like he really just wants to make the Terminator 3 he almost made before negotiations fell through and we got.. what we got.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:40
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It almost doesn't matter in a universe why timelines can just be constantly altered and rebooted in canon, but I really, really wish he'd accept T:TSCC into canon. It probably is pound for pound the best non Cameron Terminator work. Maybe throw Brian Austin Green in there.  Of course it'll never happen.
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Mar 10, 2017 05:15
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Blazing Ownager posted:For those interested in this thread, which I'm guessing is most of you, James Cameron recently re-aquired the entire Terminator franchise and is going to be executive producing them under his own production company, with the first installment to be helmed by the Deadpool director of all things. What was the Terminator 3 he almost made? I can't recall if it was covered in the Terminator Vault when I read through that, and I don't have access to it at the moment. Astroman posted:It almost doesn't matter in a universe why timelines can just be constantly altered and rebooted in canon, but I really, really wish he'd accept T:TSCC into canon. It probably is pound for pound the best non Cameron Terminator work. Well, no fate but what we make, right?
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Mar 10, 2017 06:17
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Episode 8: Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today I just want to say, I dig a good old fashioned Rashomon inspired episode of anything. I always like the storytelling method of showing an event from a variety of perspectives. Now, this episode goes a bit beyond that by giving each character a different amount of time to cover, but it's still cool. SARAH'S STORY The episode opens with a close-up on Sarah's eyes and the sound of something banging. It is late at night and Sarah's in the Connor family shed, hammering away at the metal frame of some kind of cube. Outside, there are voices - John and Riley. "Riley, look at me," John asks, just before a camera snaps. Riley notes Sarah's presence as they walk past the shed. "Hi, Mrs. Baum! Thank you so much for having me over." Sarah smiles politely in reply, but it is forced, and it slips back into obvious contempt as she returns to her work. It's clear that, since John's explosion in the last episode, Sarah has given him a bit more leeway to bring Riley over, perhaps because it is better to know what is happening than to risk another security breach. Riley leaves and John returns to the shed. JOHN: I bought her a helmet. SARAH: Responsible. You think it'll stop a bullet? JOHN: Why, you gonna take a shot at her? [Pause. Sarah seems to consider it.] SARAH: A lot of bullets fly around here. Someone will. [John goes to walk away. In the distance, Cameron approaches.] SARAH: You care about this girl? JOHN: Yeah. SARAH: Then leave her alone. John doesn't respond to Sarah, though, and stalks off. Cameron - wearing an unusually provocative outfit - approaches and the two women of the Connor family might not like each other, but they share a goal: getting rid of Riley. CAMERON: I'll talk to John. SARAH: John's not listening. CAMERON: He's always listening. The next morning, Sarah continues working on her project. It's a safe. Cameron claims she was going to suggest one, and Sarah fires back that she should have said something before they got robbed. Cameron picks up the car keys, heading out to get some more supplies - bullets, namely. "Where's John?" Sarah asks. "Still in his room," Cameron states. "He hasn't gotten up yet?" "He needs more sleep than you do. It's because the circadian rhythm of teenagers is abnormal." Sarah doesn't buy that excuse. "How late were you up talking to him?" "Not late. He won't be seeing Riley anymore." "Is that so?" Sarah remarks, somewhat archly. "John's not stupid," Cameron fires back. Pause. "I don't like the way he responds to you," Sarah points out, and busies herself with her safe. "You got what you wanted," Cameron replies, as if that explains... something. Now, put yourself in Sarah's shoes. You're a mother who knows that her son is living through a never-ending nightmare. You're a mother who is trying not to believe that your son has killed himself, but you know he's making really stupid decisions. You know he's an idiot teenager, even if he's a better shooter and soldier than anyone at a military academy, and you know he's been dating a quirky, attractive girl. They're giving each other gifts and spending a lot of time in his room. Sarah probably assumes John and Riley are having sex (they're not, of course, but it's very reasonable to think they might be). And, so, in comes Cameron with all of her terrible Skynet-brand 'do-or-die' pragmatism. She's wearing an outfit that's about as far as she can get from her usual jeans or cargo pants ensemble. Sexuality is not something Cameron displays beyond a pretty face but here she is, showing off her legs. "I'll talk to John," she told you. Yes. Because at John's age, in his room with a beautiful machine who will do anything and everything if it makes Riley go away, the one thing you think they will do is talk. And then, in the morning, John is nowhere to be seen, almost certainly sleeping in. Cameron's resumed her normal clothing, like her mission is complete. "He won't be seeing Riley anymore," she states, and gets almost defensive when you question it. What on Earth did John and Cameron do last night? So, you simmer away, focusing on the safe you're about to hide under the floorboards. You're so agitated by the possibility that Cameron used her sexuality as a tool to ensure John's compliance, you don't even hear the footsteps approaching you. And Cromartie isn't known to be particularly quiet. Cromartie grabs Sarah and drags her by the ankle to the stairs. He clutches her by the throat and drags her up the stairs, throwing her down to the ground as he smashes down the door to John's room. The room is empty. "Where is he?" Cromartie asks blandly, disconcertingly so with the handgun in his hand. "Check under the bed," Sarah spits. Cromartie tilts his head, considering something. "You don't know," deduces Cromartie, and strangles Sarah until she passes out. CAMERON'S STORY We begin with a shot of Cameron's eyes, staring at something. She's watching John and Riley from above. In particular, she's watching them hold hands. From there, there's a brief repeat of her 'listening' exchange with Sarah. Soon after, Cameron is walking down the hallway towards John's room, unbuttoning her jacket as she goes. At the door, she slips it off and drops it to the floor. She knocks but enters before John says anything. And then this whole thing happens. I've been wanting to talk about this scene for a while, so, here we go. Cameron enters John's room. She's wearing denim short shorts, a white tank top that shows off her bright pink bra, and boots. She has never worn an outfit like this before. John is bewildered, to say the least. "Did you change?" he asks. No, she didn't. Cameron has been wearing this outfit the whole night, she had just been concealing it. She doesn't say so, though. "It's hot out." It's obviously a lie, no one outside - not Riley, not Sarah, and certainly not John - were wearing anything that suggested that it was anything but cool. Again, Cameron is being evasive, and John doesn't call her on it. Cameron climbs onto the too-small-for-two bed and just opens up her body language - legs and hips turned towards John, arms back and down to push her chest forwards, head turned to look at him. And John... Boy, does John pick up on this. His arms remain where they are, up behind his head, which is the furthest possible point from Cameron. He crosses one leg over the other, closing himself off and establishing a barrier. He stares up at the roof. Even when he turns to talk to Cameron, he keeps his head on an angle so he has to look at her with his eyes, not his whole face. JOHN: Are you hoping that Riley's gonna see us in bed together, and be totally scarred for the rest of her life or something? CAMERON: No. I watched Riley leave till I couldn't see her anymore. JOHN: And then you and mom high-fived. CAMERON: You bring danger into Riley's life. JOHN: I know that. I'm not stupid. CAMERON: But sometimes you do stupid things. It would help me to understand why. JOHN: Humans do stupid things. So don't worry about it, and be happy you're a machine. CAMERON: I'm a machine. I can't be happy. [long pause as Cameron stares at John] But I understand more than you think. JOHN: So you understand that I'm going to keep seeing Riley, even if everyone thinks it's a bad idea. CAMERON: I understand that it's a bad idea. And... I understand that being John Connor can be lonely. JOHN: Oh, yeah? John's eyes wander downwards, looking at Cameron - like, really looking at her, but only for a second. I think he takes a certain meaning from that comment, particularly given the long pause, and it's hard to argue that it's anything else. JOHN: How do you understand that? CAMERON: You and I talk about it a lot. JOHN: We do? CAMERON: We do. We will. JOHN: [sheepish, embarrassed] I need- I need to get some sleep. Cameron sits up. As she does, frustration flickers across her face. "And Riley?" she asks. "I know," John says, taking a deep breath. "I know." From there, we see the tail end of Sarah's conversation with Cameron. "You got what you wanted," she says. But did Cameron? See, the scene is intensely uncomfortable, and for a host of reasons. Chief among them is that we don't know whether Cameron is manipulating John with this sudden display of sexuality, or if she is genuinely trying to connect with him. She's manipulated him with an emotional appeal before, after all, but there was also a sharp degree of truth to it. What did Cameron want? It can't just be getting rid of Riley, because John implies he'll be ending it at the end of their talk. More importantly, she tells Sarah that she got what she wanted - which is getting rid of Riley. Cameron demonstrates a gap between Sarah's wishes (removing Riley) and whatever it is that Cameron wanted. Both Glau and Dekker have said they played John and Cameron as being in love with each other, although both don't quite understand it. And I think that comes clear in this scene. John is uncomfortable with Cameron's presence, not because she's a Terminator, but because she's throwing herself at him - and how is he supposed to respond to that when he can't know if it's genuine? More to the point, does Cameron have any true conception of what she's doing? She seems to, given the deliberate outfit choice, but what was her plan if John had've rolled over and started kissing her? If they had sex? She doesn't seem happy at the end, when she sits up and John has retreated into himself and grown increasingly uncomfortable with her presence. I think it is clear that Cameron was presenting herself as an alternative to Riley. But not just in what Cameron obviously assumes is a sexual sense, but in the sense of being emotionally intimate as well. Cameron's demonstrated a fair level of concern about John and knowledge of his emotional state. For whatever reason though, she can't say it. Is it because she said it when she was trying to kill him, and saying anything like that might cause John to retreat? But in that scene, she did about as much as she could without initiating physical contact. Anyway, after her talk with Sarah, Cameron goes to get the supplies. When she's there, she encounters Derek. Apparently, the supplies are a secret stash that he owns and is quite protective of. Derek comes off pretty badly in this scene, and it's clear that he's very mixed up given everything that's going on with Jesse. She's "his people" now, and it's creating a divide between him and the Connors. DEREK: You been stealing my supplies? CAMERON: We needed to make a small bomb. DEREK: I set this drop up with my people for my people. And everything's in here for a reason. CAMERON: John was supposed to ask. DEREK: John needs to get his head in the game. CAMERON: Maybe he couldn't find you. You don't spend much time at the house. DEREK: I don't have a bed, remember? CAMERON: You didn't have a bed in the old house. DEREK: I had a gunshot wound at the old house. CAMERON: Yes. You almost died. The bomb that Cameron speaks of, of course, is the one she's planted in her own head. And then Derek's phone rings, and it's not a number Cameron recognises. She dials it, and the voice that picks up is Spanish. "Alarm code from John," Derek says. "He's in trouble." JOHN'S STORY Close-up on John's eyes as he tells Cameron that he needs to get some sleep. The shot is so close that it helps sell how uncomfortable he is in that moment. But then... "Yeah, right," John remarks, getting out of bed and gathering up his backpack. Cameron - her black coat back on - wanders down the hallway. John calls someone - presumably Riley - and sneaks out of the house. Later, he and Riley are on a bus. They're heading down to Mexico, apparently, as John wants to show her the town of Dejalo, where he spent a year and a half. There's tension there, but not like the tension of the previous evening. John's pretty upset about something, and even Riley picks up on it: "So, this is definitely a field trip, and not some revenge fantasy?" John gets surly. "All right, if you don't wanna go, that's cool. But do not make me feel like I'm kidnapping you or something." Dekker is so good at portraying John as a sulky teen. And yet, for all John's protests about it not being because of a fight with his mom, or a revenge fantasy, or anything like that, he's still booked a honeymoon suite for himself and Riley. It's something to note throughout the trip, that this whole thing feels contrived and overly-indulgent, like John is trying to see if Riley will match Cameron as much as he is just trying to run away and be normal for a day or two. Given that John seems to cling to Riley because she's normal and because of Cameron, Cameron's attempt at... something almost certainly backfired more than anyone might have thought. So, when they arrive in Dejalo, the very first shot is of a prop skeleton wearing clothes. While the town is getting ready for the Dia de los Muertos festival, it's a cheeky nod to Terminators, but also to the fields of skulls nightmare future. "Nice, skulls and darkness," Riley comments, "How charming." She's probably quite used to skulls and darkness. It might have been nice for the show to drop some clever hints about Riley's future knowledge here, but she weathers it all with her usual quirky charm. Given that this is my third run-through of the series, I'm trying to pinpoint little things like that. There are some, but not many. They talk about John at school, but there's not much to really say about it. John wants to run away, Riley had been watching him for a while. Again, would work a bit better if we had met Riley in Season 1. But I do like the line, because it feels like one of those hints I was talking about : "We ran all this way, and there's skulls everywhere." Later, in the hotel, John's busy working on the spa jets, as much as Riley protests they don't need them. "Well, there's bubbles to be had, and I'm going to have bubbles." They talk. John wishes he could have grown up away from everyone. Riley says she doesn't like getting attached to people. She asks John why he was living in Mexico, and points out that he's going to lie or deflect it with a joke. "No, I'm not," John remarks, on edge. "I just don't want to sit around and talk about messed up childhood. Can't we just enjoy ourselves?" Riley replies, "Yeah, fine. Enjoy yourself, John. I'm sure we're not the only couple that's found themselves in a honeymoon suite, and not known the first thing about each other." On one hand, Riley's angst at this seems a bit out of place given that she knowingly is part of a plan to drive a wedge between Cameron and John. On the other, she never really had a choice, and seems to genuinely care for John's well-being. I think Riley's a neat character. I think, when people say she's a bad part of TSCC, what they mean is that so much of the show seems to deal with her and never really alters. For example, the start of this episode had Sarah give another 'get rid of Riley' comment to John. Anyway, "You're right," John says, "People suck." But Riley slides down into the bubbles and all thoughts of angst are forgotten. In the evening, John and Riley are getting dinner and getting to know each other. But a man takes a photo of the pair, and that brings the evening to a grinding halt. CAMERAMAN: See, a beautiful shot. And it's all digital. Which means I can email it to you. RILEY: I- I think I have something in my teeth. CAMERAMAN: Oh, well, let me take another. JOHN: No no, really, that's okay. Hey, I said that's okay. Look, man, why don't I, uh- Why don't I just give you five bucks, And you'll delete it. Can you do that? CAMERAMAN: Gracias, joven. The young boy and mother who stayed in Vivian's cabana. JOHN: Thanks a lot. CAMERAMAN: John Connor. JOHN: No se de quien estas hablando. (That's not who you're talking to.) CAMERAMAN: You're Sarah Connor's son. [John laughs, and looks over to Riley who gives him a confused look.] JOHN: I'll be right back. CAMERAMAN: I remember when the Connors left Dejalo. And I remember the stories that were told after you were gone. JOHN: Man, you really- You really mixed me up with somebody else. I'm just- CAMERAMAN: These are pictures you wouldn't want the authorities to see. JOHN: How much? CAMERAMAN: Everything you've got. Riley comes out of nowhere and smashes the camera, being sure to destroy the memory card. A pair of police officers notice and, while John escapes into the street, they capture Riley. And John, hesitating, is soon placed in a chair in the police station. John offers to pay for the camera and offers up a version of events that makes it sound like an accident. In the end, the police make a deal with him: call his mother and uncle, and if they come pick him up, he can go with a warning. He calls Derek, and gets his voicemail. He calls Sarah, but she sounds strange, monotonous. John knows something is wrong there. He's going to be thrown in holding, and his name run through INTERPOL. "So," says one of the police, "which name should I run? The one on your passport? Or the real one?" Night becomes morning. Riley calls to one of the guards. RILEY: Sir, sir, hello? Hi, can you come here, please? Hi, I need your help, please. This guy in here is a complete psycho. He's been trying to make moves on me. GUARD: You two came in together. RILEY: Sir, do you have children? Do you have a daughter? My dad told me to stay away from this guy, and he was totally right. This guy's a complete freak. And I don't even care how much trouble I'm in. All I want to do is call home and tell them where I am. Please? GUARD: Take a step back. I'm going to open the door. As he does, John grabs him through the bars and just beats the poo poo out of him. John apologises profusely as he cuffs the cop to the bars. And gunshots ring out, people shouting over them. "Riley, you need to listen to me," John says, knowing someone has found them. "No matter what happens, if you see daylight, you run. Okay, don't wait for me. Just run!" SARAH'S STORY Sarah wakes up in the back of Cromartie's car, wrists and ankles tied. As he drives south to Mexico, Cromartie makes conversation. CROMARTIE: Your strategy has changed from last time. SARAH: Has it? CROMARTIE: The first time we met, you tried to kill yourself. SARAH: You're right. This time I'm going to kill you. [The wind reveals a photo of Cameron, the one Cromartie used to track down Jody. Cromartie spies Sarah seeing it.] CROMARTIE: She hasn't been careful. She's made mistakes. Not as many as you, but enough. Does she have damage to her chip? [Sarah grunts, and resumes trying to free herself.] CROMARTIE: She has damage to her chip. SARAH: How did you find the house? CROMARTIE: The boy told me. The one from the bowling alley. You should have killed him. Just like you should have killed yourself. SARAH: I'm not a murderer. CROMARTIE: Who is? Sarah breaks the duct tape around her ankles and leaps over the back of the car. She hits the ground hard, and is too dazed to get up before Cromartie grabs her again. This time, he shoves her in the trunk. Sarah begins freeing herself with a aluminum can she finds, using it to slice the bindings around her wrist. The car stops and, before long, gunshots and shouts ring out. Some of the shots impact Cromartie, the telltale sound of bullets on hyperalloy evident. Bullets rip through the car and the can slices Sarah's hand open - it's pretty gory! The car stops. Sarah lies there. Footsteps approach, and Sarah brandishes her sharp can edge like a weapon or a protective talisman. The trunk opens. "Sarah Connor?" James Ellison asks. "James Ellison. I need you to come with me." And John is with him. ELLISON'S STORY Running in the morning, Ellison gets a phone call from an old associate in the FBI. John Connor's shown up in Mexico, apparently, and the case has been cold since 1999. His associate sends him the files. "Yeah," Ellison says, "It does look a little bit like him. John Connor. God rest his soul." Ellison ends up down in Mexico, bluffing that he's an FBI Agent working the Connor case. "It was flagged during processing," the cop says, "But we dismissed it as a coincidence. Your fugitive would be 24 years old by now, if he was not already dead." Ellison says he'd be grateful for closure. "You've travelled a long way for closure," the cop points out. But the chief is pulled away. The reason? We can see it through the window behind him. Cromartie. As the chief looks away, Cromartie pulls a gun from behind the front desk and opens fire. Ellison dives for cover. Riley and John come running out of the police station. Ellison tackles John and says he's there to help. They steal Cromartie's car but he is hot on their wheels, a sub-machine gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. Cromartie just fires everything he has and bullets rip around the humans. Soon after, they pull Sarah from the trunk, but any attempt at a reunion is cut short. Cromartie pulls up in a police jeep, his expression seemingly bemused at how this is proceeding. The Connors, Ellison and Riley run for it, regrouping in a nearby motel. As Sarah dresses her wounds, she talks with Ellison. SARAH: Why are you here? ELLISON: John was flagged in the FBI computer. SARAH: Couldn't you just have buried it? ELLISON: It's been watching me. SARAH: It? ELLISON: Out there. It. SARAH: And you still came to Mexico? You could have led it right to John. ELLISON: It wasn't me in the trunk. SARAH: So what were you going to do, Just pop him out of jail? Set him free, no questions asked? ELLISON: Yes, actually. That's exactly what I was going to do. SARAH: Hm, I have a hard time believing that. ELLISON: I owed you one. The fire. Silberman's cabin? SARAH: Wasn't much. ELLISON: It was my life. SARAH: How you feel about that now? Meanwhile, John - in his Future John voice - tells Riley to leave, that he'll explain everything when they're back in LA. Riley protests but acquiesces when Sarah gets involved. From there, Sarah takes Ellison's phone. "Got a plan?" he asks. "I've got a weapon." "Cameron," Ellison knows. "The girl from the bank vault." Sarah seems to be surprised by just how much Ellison knows now. She calls Derek. "John and I are in trouble. I need you and Cameron." "John's with you?" Derek asks. "Well, we're here already, we're at the jail." DEREK'S STORY Close-up on Derek's eyes, studying the scene in front of him. A shot up police station, festival revelers running away, injured police officers. "Cromartie's here," Cameron states. "Then we should stay in cover," Derek points out, but Cameron is already stalking off towards the police station. Inside, Cameron questions the dying police chief with uncharacteristic intensity. "I'm looking for John Baum, where is he?" But the Chief seems to be too far gone to respond. "I can't let anything happen to him," Cameron says, as she stalks the halls. Derek finds the cop who John locked to the bar, and he lets them know that the prisoners aren't dead. Derek leaves him there, because that is how he rolls. Sarah calls him then. And, as Derek talks to her, Cameron watches on, wearing an expression of open concern. But Derek, facing away from her, can't see it. But, if John's with Sarah... "Where the hell's Cromartie?" Derek asks. CROMARTIE'S STORY Close-up on Cromartie's eyes as the chief tells him he needs to leave. "I'm gonna need to see John Connor," Cromartie says but, when it becomes clear it won't happen quietly, Cromartie opens fire, killing everyone he finds. He ignores anyone who isn't a threat, such as a criminal who had just been brought in, but delivers exacting destruction upon everyone else. He crouches by the cop chained the the bars. "I'm looking for John Connor," he says, conversationally. "He's gone." Cromartie tilts his head, as if confused. "Are there any other exits?" "No." Cromartie seems satisfied, and leaves. He spies Ellison fleeing and gives chase. Later, Cromartie walks the desolate streets. From afar, he catches Ellison, retrieving bandages from the trunk of his car and heading for a church. The Terminator follows, and the soundtrack is of a plucky Western gunfight esque imminent shoot out. Inside, Ellison is praying at the altar. Cromartie steps up behind him. What must be going through Cromartie's chip right now? He has faith, after all, that Ellison will lead him to the Connors. And here it is, in a house of faith, that he will seemingly be rewarded. Cromartie will achieve his life's purpose. "Have you come to repent?" Ellison asks. "I'm looking for John Connor." "All things are possible, to him who believes." Derek opens fire from a window, scores a hit on Cromartie's cranial chassis. The Terminator twists, opens up with his pistol, and Derek ducks away. Sarah adds fire from her window, on the other side of the church, and Cromartie merely raises his sub-machine gun without needing to look at her, spraying fire at her window. In fact, he fires on both the Connors without looking at them. It's a nice way of selling his Terminator abilities. The music kicks in, and the battle is joined. Bullets hammer Cromartie, again and again, and the way Cromartie is shot and staged is kind of marvelous. Lit from behind, bathed in white light that streams down upon him, his back to the audience, it is like Cromartie is this heroic gunfighter, holding off an unseen horde of assailants. It's almost transcendental, as if he really is this warrior of faith. Derek and Sarah lean away, and Cromartie senses his equal. Cameron strides in, shotgun ready. Cromartie turns to face her, but before he can bring his pistol to bear, she fires. The first blast blows away about half of his cranial casing and left optic. The next three shots wreck half of his head. Cromartie's pistol wavers and he stands there, the human half of his face a mixture of shock and... perhaps, fear. Cameron watches him, open mouthed, and perhaps reading that expression on his face, as Cromartie pitches back and onto the floor. Cromartie stares up at his killers, his vision flickering and his hearing distorted. Strangely, he lacks the usual red HUD - which is a bit concerning because, when Cameron lost her HUD, she was at her most human. He twitches, neck jerking, limbs working weakly, as John Connor strides up. Cromartie's left index finger pulls an invisible trigger, again and again. John Connor frowns, and shoots Cromartie one final time. Everything goes black. Cromartie's body is buried in an unmarked grave. John and Cameron handle the work as Sarah, Derek and Ellison look on. John and Sarah exchange acidic looks. SARAH: We'll attract less attention if we don't travel together. ELLISON: You want me to leave? What's next? SARAH: We'll come back down here. And bring something with us to destroy it. ELLISON: His name's gonna be on an alert. SARAH: He's got other names. ELLISON: Then what? SARAH: There is no "then what." Pretend I died again. ELLISON: I lost a lot when you died the first time. My marriage, my career. SARAH: That's a lot to you? ELLISON: I suppose many people lost those things. SARAH: You want answers. ELLISON: I just want to know my role in all of this. What happens after this? SARAH: This is it. There's nothing else behind the curtain. This is what I do. It's all I do. You already know why I do it. I'm sorry for what you lost. But I can't help you get any of it back. Sarah wanders over to Cameron, asking her for the chip. Cameron hands it over. The mother of all mankind takes up a rifle, and places Cromartie's chip on a rock. She brings the rifle down, ending Cromartie for good. And then again, and again, and again. She grunts and screams, screaming out all of the rage and fear and fury and stress and grief, smashing the T-800 chip she wasn't able to smash when John was a child, smashes the Terminator who came so close to killing them, smashes Skynet. She smashes that chip until it's dust, until John comes and grabs her and she collapses against his shoulder, crying. It's the warmest moment we've ever seen between mother and son in the series yet, and a great note to end on. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 08:20
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No follow-up post for this one. Everything I wanted to say about Cameron and the bed scene is in it, and I don't have much more to say on Cromartie at the moment (beyond the fact that this episode is where he demonstrates the most personality and self-awareness, particularly when he correctly deduces Cameron's status). Still, he does experience some sort of transcendental reward for his faith, doesn't he? At least in a certain sense. edit: Oh, the title refers to Cromartie's very first line of the series. Mr Ferguson Is Ill today, indeed. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 08:21
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Blazing Ownager posted:For those interested in this thread, which I'm guessing is most of you, James Cameron recently re-aquired the entire Terminator franchise and is going to be executive producing them under his own production company, with the first installment to be helmed by the Deadpool director of all things. Astroman posted:It almost doesn't matter in a universe why timelines can just be constantly altered and rebooted in canon, but I really, really wish he'd accept T:TSCC into canon. It probably is pound for pound the best non Cameron Terminator work.
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Mar 10, 2017 10:46
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Working on Complications. Wanted to get it up earlier but things got in the way and I've got a busy weekend ahead of me. It's a good episode but very much dated in the tropes and cliches of early 2000s television. For example, prophetic dreams filled with ambiguous symbols and metaphors that could foreshadow any number of developments. Battlestar did it, Heroes did it, and it so obviously dates Terminator: TSCC as being from that period. There's a lot of neat stuff in the episode, though. For example, I don't think 'our' Derek was ever tortured - at least, not until he came back to the present and changed things by doing so.
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Mar 17, 2017 07:16
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If that's the episode I'm thinking of it opened up a few questions and hints of future plots that were never answered.
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Mar 18, 2017 02:32
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Episode 9: Complications Complications is not a bad episode and it's not a great one. What it is, however, is true to its title: it introduces complications. It is also an episode that relies on keeping the complications a bit muddled and unclear, so the audience keeps guessing. The episode, in fact, opens with a shot of an open grave, like the one they left Cromartie's chassis in. It's a dream of Sarah's, as it turns out - or perhaps a nightmare. There's a lot to puzzle out about the dreams, so, we'll leave them to the post-recap/analysis post. Sarah awakens in the back of the Connor truck, John driving. "I'm going to be sick," she says. She is. On the side of a dusty Mexican road, thirty nine miles out from Tijuana, Sarah vomits her guts out as John stands over her with a bottle of water. "What's wrong with her?" Cameron asks, "Is she pregnant?" When John gets snippy, Cameron points out that Sarah matches all the symptoms Kacey, their neighbour, had when she was pregnant. John plays the role of parent to his own mother, taking care of her and helping her to her feet. Sarah spies a turtle, just about under the wheel of their truck. Its little legs kick about in the air, unable to right itself. Sarah picks it up and sets it on its feet, off the road, while Cameron watches her. It's a little Blade Runner homage. Later, Sarah wakes up in bed in the Connor residence. "How're you feeling?" John asks. "How do I look?" replies Sarah. John sighs. "Like crap." Cameron brings Sarah some rehydration fluid, advising her when to take it ("one cup every half hour or right after you vomit."). Sarah isn't content to rest, however, and tries climbing out of bed. JOHN: No, no, no. Where are you going? SARAH: We have to go back now. JOHN: Back where? SARAH: Mexico. There's thermite in the garage. We need to burn Cromartie's body. JOHN: Cromartie's dead. You destroyed his chip. SARAH: You have to incinerate him, John. It's the only way to be sure. JOHN: He's buried in a hole in the middle of the Mexican desert and his chip has been obliterated. I think we're pretty- CAMERON: Safe? It's not safe. JOHN: Oh, God, she's starting to sound like you. SARAH: She's right. Meanwhile, Derek is driving along a Los Angeles road. Jesse calls him, asking him quite firmly to come and see her, and to bring a gun. He does so, and meets Jesse in a warehouse filled with shipping containers. JESSE: I was over at the shopping mall this morning, right? And I just- I- I don't know. I can't stop eating the crappy Chinese food In the food court there. So, I'm there, and I'm just waiting for my food, and I look across the way, and I see him. I just see him. DEREK: You see him who? JESSE: Fischer. I see Fischer. DEREK: Who's Fischer? JESSE: Charles Fischer. DEREK: I don't- I don't know who you're talking about. JESSE: You do. You know him. Charles Fischer, sent back from the future, and he works for the machines. And he's gonna die. Inside one of the containers is an older man, grey hair'd and balding, strapped to a chair with duct tape around his wrists and torso and mouth. He's bleeding from a head wound. He seems anxious, but not as terrified as you might think. Derek, though, is confused more than anything else. It's clear he doesn't recognise Fischer in the slightest, nor does he recognise the name. The temporal mechanics about the relationship between Derek, Jesse and Fischer is really interesting. Elsewhere, John is driving back to Mexico. Cameron, riding shotgun, has her foot sticking out of the window. Bewildered by Cameron's behavior, John asks: "What're you doing?" "Feeling what it's like to get away from it all," Cameron states. "I don't think you are." Cameron turns to look at John. "What do you mean?" "If by feelings you mean emotions, I'm pretty sure you still don't have any of those. And if by feeling you mean what it feels like to have the wind blow through your toes or your hair..." John breaks off, and sighs. "I'm pretty sure you can't feel that either." Sounding mildly annoyed by John's claim that he knows her qualia better than she does, Cameron says: "I don't think you understand how we work. I have sensation. I feel. I wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't feel." She holds her hand outside the window, flexing her fingers and rolling her wrist about as if experiencing the wind on her hand. John looks on, confused. John's words aren't so much directed at Cameron as they are a reminder to him. John's denying what he's seeing right in front of him, because he's still not sure what to make of Cameron. His robotic protector is increasingly making it obvious that her empathy is growing outside of mission parameters - offering Sarah fluids, learning about pregnancy, reaching out to him on his bed - and that she is capable of genuine feeling... And so he rejects it, because he can't face the alternative. Speaking of facing things, Derek is having trouble understanding what Jesse is talking about. Jesse claims that Fischer is a Grey. Okay, Derek follows that: the Greys are Skynet collaborators, worked for Skynet, helped the T-888s learn what they know about humans. But he doesn't recognise Fischer as a Grey. But Fischer, according to Jesse, was the most wanted Grey. "The top of the list." Jesse ungags Fischer and demands that he tell them who he is and what he's doing in the past. I don't mind Stephanie Jacobsen as an actress. She's not good, she's not bad. But what she's not is intimidating. She's average height and not exactly powerfully built. As an Australian, her genuine accent doesn't make her very scary either. She just doesn't have the presence, which gives all of her scenes here where she yells or thrusts a gun in Fischer's face - as she does at this point - not that effective. So, Fischer is either utterly not intimidated by Jesse, or he's got balls as cold and unyielding as a T-888. Richard Schiff just nails Fischer. Him and Greene (Derek) just carry this episode on their backs. "I don't know what you're talking about. My name is Paul Stewart," claims 'Fischer', "That's my license. Look at my license. Please. I'm not who she says I am! I repair watches. I have a shop in Pasadena. That's my license." Despite Jesse's accusations, Fischer seems like an innocent man who doesn't understand anything Jesse is talking about. Skynet? Robots? I just repair watches! He's obviously lying, though. I'm sure you could go through his scenes with a Guide to Spotting Liars handbook and note the things he says and insists upon. And Derek still doesn't recognise him. He's so not sure that he has to know that Jesse is sure about it. Derek points out that he knew the Greys, knew they were war criminals, knew that four of them were caught. "But we couldn't find Fischer," Jesse snaps. "They kept him hidden! He was too valuable!" "Listen," Derek says, "If he is who you say he is, then he deserves whatever is gonna happen to him in that room, but not until he tells us who he is and what he's doing here. Do you understand?" "He is who I say he is," Jesse says, stalking off, "I'll show you." Sarah has another dream sequence. In Mexico, John and Cameron dig up a grave. But all he finds is a dead man's boot. Cromatie's body is gone. CAMERON: Where's the rest of him? JOHN: It's not here. CAMERON: Not possible. We destroyed his chip. JOHN: [with growing anger] He didn't walk out of here, but he's gone. There's only one other person who knew about this! And only one other person crazy enough to dig him up! James Ellison. Back in LA, Derek and Fischer have a chat. Derek cuts Fischer's bonds on his right hand, passing him a burger. It's a nice touch, and a hint that Fischer is who Jesse says he is, when he refuses to eat a cheeseburger that Derek brings him, suspecting it is poisoned. "I don't know what's in that." Derek takes a big bite. "Cheeseburger's in that." They talk. Derek watches Fischer closely, suspicious but undecided. Fischer volunteers some information: he used to be an engineer before he learned watch repair. "That's a nice story," Derek says, smirking. Fischer probes Derek for information on Jesse, trying to figure out if she is his girlfriend or lover. Derek recognise it, and gives him a non-answer. Fischer presses: "She says that you know me, and- and clearly you don't know me. There's something wrong with her." Derek spies a tattoo on Fischer's arm. A clock face with no hands. It's prison ink, according to Derek, but Fischer denies it. It's just a clock tattoo because he fixes watches! "With no hands," Derek points out. "It means till the end of time. A life sentence." But, as Fischer points out in return, if he had a life sentence, what is he doing here? Derek can figure that out later. For now, he binds Fischer back up, and goes to make a phone call. Driving through LA, Cameron is riding shotgun. She begins flipping through radio channels, going from some kind of rap or r'n'b to a more poppy dance station. She looks up, as if considering it, and smiles slightly. John watches her, and doesn't seem to have any idea what she's doing. Again, Cameron demonstrating something new. And then we get a great little bit between her and Derek. CAMERON: Hello? DEREK: Hey. It's Derek. CAMERON: Is it? DEREK: Yeah, I know. Shocks the hell out of me, too. Listen, I need to talk- [Cameron abruptly hangs up the phone. Derek frowns and redials.] CAMERON: Hello? [Derek sighs, and presses a button on his keypad.] DEREK: I need to talk to you. [Cameron presses two numbers in reply - a security interrogative, one that Derek obviously forgot.] CAMERON: So talk. Derek sends Cameron a picture of Fischer. He claims she doesn't know who he is, and even checks twice. "He looks hurt," she says, John looks over in shock, and Derek says, quietly, "Don't worry about it." Meanwhile, Cameron smiles at John and tells him not to worry about it, too. Is it possible that Cameron is lying? Why? Or is it more likely that the future has changed since Derek and Cameron have come back in time? Probably the latter. Sarah meets with Doctor Sherman, the gentleman who helped them out "a month ago". They bailed on an appointment with him, apparently. He's not too happy to see Sarah because of it, but when she tells him about the dreams and nightmares she's been having, he relents, and agrees to listen to her. Sarah's having dreams of running away, much like her son. Waiting outside Ellison's house, in the Connor truck, John and Cameron talk. CAMERON: There are many things I don't understand. JOHN: Like what? CAMERON: The tortoise. JOHN: What tortoise? CAMERON: It was on its back by the side of the road in Mexico. Your mother turned it over. JOHN: She was helping it. CAMERON: I know. But why? JOHN: 'cause that's what we do. When we, uh... When we see something that's, uh, in pain, or in trouble, or whatever, we try and help it. CAMERON: Empathy. JOHN: Something like that. CAMERON: But not everyone would turn the tortoise over. JOHN: No. Some would just leave it there. CAMERON: Some would probably drive over it and crush it. JOHN: Yeah, I guess they would. Is that what you'd do? CAMERON: It didn't seem like much of a threat. We're not built to be cruel. JOHN: Yeah, that's one for cyborgs. CAMERON: Yes. That's one for us. Ellison arrives home at that point. In his living room, he's immediately assaulted by Cameron, who grabs him by the throat and throws him down on the couch. Seeming for no other reason than effect, she hurls his coffee table to one side, smashing it to pieces. "Cameron!" John reprimands her. "The body is gone," John says, in his Future John voice. "What?" Ellison breathes. "Cromatie's body is gone!" "That's impossible..." "You are the only one who knew where we buried it. We need it. We have to destroy it." "What would I possibly want with it?" Ellison asks. It's the wrong question, apparently. As John shouts her name again, Cameron picks Ellison up and hurls him against a display unit.The whole thing shatters under his weight and Ellison collapses on the floor. "He's lying," she states. "You don't know that," John retorts. But he doesn't stop her as Cameron picks Ellison up and hurls him through a glass coffee table. The sheer amount of destruction in this scene! It feels like it goes far beyond a Terminator's usual pragmatism. I won't say Cameron's enjoying it sadistically, but I can't help but think of a cat or a bird that knocks a cup from a table. Dangerous, sure, but not exactly mean. And then she begins to choke Ellison. "Please... John..." Ellison croaks out. "If you know," John Future-Johns, you better tell me right now." "I don't know... I don't know..." "Let him go," John says, at last. "Why?" Cameron asks, and she doesn't release him. "He's telling the truth." "We could find out for certain." "Let him go," John repeats himself, more firmly. "Sorry," he mutters to Ellison. Remembering the tortoise, Cameron turns Ellison onto his front, and gives a little smile. She walks away. As John turns to leave, he spies the photo of his mother, the one he'll eventually give to Kyle Reese, among the debris. He takes it. In the Fischer container, Jesse hauls someone in. He's a younger man, who looks very similar to Fischer. Jesse calls him proof. And she makes it quite clear when she tugs away the shirts of both men, revealing an identical birthmark on their left shoulder. She punches Fischer right in the face, who seems to realise that he's been caught. Derek looks on, uncomfortable, as Jesse talks with both men. The young man is Charlie Fischer, a service technician. Older Fischer sticks to his story: "This is a trick, some crazy trick, and you're all in on it." Jesse lays into Old Fischer with a series of powerful punches. Young Fischer freaks out. Outside, Derek and Jesse talk. DEREK: If he is who you say he is-- JESSE: He is! DEREK: All right, fine. He is. We need to know what he's doing here. Unless he's AWOL, like you. JESSE: He's not. Not this guy, not Charles Fischer. He's been sent back by them for a reason. [whispering into Derek's ear] You need to beat the hell out of him. You need to get him to talk. And so, Derek does. He takes up a pair of pliers, walks over to the older Fischer- -and rips the fingernails off Young Fischer, one by one. It's so shocking that even Jesse, who had previously been happily beating on older Fischer, shouts out at him. "Don't hurt the boy," older Fischer asks. Derek stares at him, eyes dead. "Some people, you can beat them and beat them, and they'll take it. Whatever pain you give them, They absorb it, Like it was theirs all along, and all you're doing is giving it back to them. You see, deep down, they hate themselves, and they use that hate to eat the pain. See, we were all good once. We all loved ourselves once, as young men trying to get through the day, or as kids playing in the park. Okay." Hey, sounds like Derek is talking about himself there, doesn't it? But it works. Old Fischer's demeanor changes. "My name is Charles Fischer. I'm Charles Fischer. Now let him go. He's got nothing to do with this. Just let him go." And it becomes turn for younger Fischer to freak out. "This is insane!" Derek leans in close to Fischer. The old man is no longer scared or bewildered. He's coldly confident. DEREK: Why are you here? Why did they send you back? FISCHER: They didn't. I'm not here on a mission. JESSE: Nobody comes back without a mission. FISCHER: This is my reward. When the bombs dropped, I was locked up in Pelican Bay. Solitary confinement. DEREK: Life sentence. FISCHER: If I hadn't been in prison, I never would've made it through Judgment Day. Once they got their hands on me, it was either I teach them everything I learned inside or say good-bye. DEREK: And what'd you learn? FISCHER: I learned what makes people tick. Which is a fairly clever watch joke, in my opinion. Meanwhile, Sarah and Sherman talk. Sarah mentions they went to Mexico on a 'family vacation'. Sherman presses for more information: has there been a crisis, a trauma, something wrong with John, her daughter? Sherman thinks Sarah's dreams are related to her feelings about John and Cameron, but Sarah's refusal to really talk about her 'children', Sherman doesn't think he can do much to help. "I have no one else to talk to," Sarah says, softly. "Nothing is going to happen in here until you decide to be honest," Sherman declares. Meanwhile, the Fischers talk. I really like this exchange. This episode has a lot of genre fiction tropes that I really like. Specifically, meeting yourself (metaphorical or otherwise) and dream sequences that are dripping with imagery. "You have no idea what you'd do," Old Fischer mocks his younger self, "What's the hardest decision you've ever had to make? Huh? Whether to stay with Rebecca Or take a chance on Christine? Whether to ask for time off for grandfather's funeral because you're too afraid you'll be fired if you just take it? You think you know who you are? You don't have a clue." Outside, Jesse and Derek talk about Fischer. "He's playing us!" Jesse insists. She insists that he has to die, that he's the worst of them, that he needs to die regardless of his mission or anything they might learn from him. But Derek still doesn't get it. What did he do to you, he asks Jesse. Jesse tells the story of a bunker raid. Everyone over thirty was killed, all the children were killed. Anyone who survived was taken to a lab where Fischer taught Terminators "what makes people tick", how to get information from people, how to extract insight from the human psyche. This torture went on for weeks, months. People were drugged and starved. And throughout, as red-eyed Terminators stared through the windows of an operating theatre, Fischer just... talked to the prisoners. For hours, days. Derek assumes Jesse was one of the people being tortured. "How'd you get out?" he asks. "I don't know. You never told me." "What?" "It wasn't me Fischer had, baby. It was you. You don't remember. I can't believe you don't remember, but it was you." But I don't think it was. I think in Derek's future, the future where Andy Goode wasn't dead and younger Fischer hadn't been tortured by Derek, he wasn't ever actually tortured by Fischer. But since Derek came back, and since he came back before Jesse, Jesse is from a different future. The future born from Derek torturing Fischer. So, in the future, younger Fischer - now old - tortures Derek in retribution for what happened today. More on that in the next post. But Derek believes Jesse, and why wouldn't he at this point? Derek knows he's been tortured by Skynet, but it wasn't like this. Maybe he thinks he had forgotten. So, Derek storms in and begins punching older Fischer. "I don't remember, but she does, and that's good enough for me," Derek growls. "So, you're gonna kill me?" Older Fischer replies. "No. Not you," Derek replies, drawing his gun, and turning on younger Fischer. A gunshot rings out. Older Fischer slumps over, dead, with Jesse's handgun pointed at him. Sarah and John discuss her dreams. John thinks she's just tired and a bit addled, and the fact that Cromartie's body is missing is far more important. When Sarah wonders if Ellison has it, John says he's "sure" that Ellison doesn't have it. "But it's connected," Sarah says. "Cromartie was in my dreams. It's all connected." "It was my fault," Sarah then says. John asks, "What are you talking about?" "There was this kid, a boy... In the bowling alley. He was with the guys who broke into our house, and I sh- I knew what I had to do, John. I didn't do it. I let him go. Cromartie must've found him." "We're not murderers," John says, and then seems to correct himself, "You're not." Derek climbs into a car, having just finished burying the elder Fischer. They let the younger one go. After all, he's not the monster they just buried, as Jesse points out. "Let's hope he doesn't become one," Derek muses. They talk about their confusion. Jesse is bewildered because, in her future, Derek never stopped talking about it. But in Derek's future, it never happened. Things have been changed, and they've had effects: but, in the future, he and Jesse are still together. Meanwhile, Charles Fischer - the younger, of course - has a visit paid to him by the FBI. Two nights ago, he entered a building without authorization and made an unauthorized access of a computer system, a system that has access to all primary military-industrial complex computer systems. And someone - someone who seems to be Fischer - installed a "roving back door" into the systems, one that the government cannot "dismantle". Fischer can't explain it. Nor can he explain the injuries he has, courtesy of Derek and Jesse. But he tries, and all that does is lead the FBI to an empty container, as Fischer frantically tries to explain that he's not insane. He gets locked away. The older Fischer did it, of course. The show makes it quite clear by showing him logging in and all that. Turns out, that must have been his mission. So, as much as the future has changed, it is also continuing as it always had. Young Fischer will go to jail, be freed by J-Day, and become Skynet's chief robo-interrogator-psychologist. Meanwhile, Ellison summons Weaver to a point where he's hidden his car. In the boot, is Cromartie's chassis. "We need to learn how they work," Ellison says, "How to fight them. We can't allow history to repeat itself, not when we have the power to stop it. It's up to us now... The two of us." What a crafty and, really, brave fellow! Episode ends on another dream sequence, and Sarah examining the bloody wall of boring plot hooks for answers to her dreams... Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 05:14
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Stephanie Jacobsen's not very physically intimidating, but I think she does a great job selling a mix of desperation, frustration, and confusion throughout this episode. It's a recurring thing for Jesse that even though she's competent and decisive, she just barely falls short on all her goals because she can't command people's respect. I actually think that in Season 2, Jesse's story is the single most interesting plot line, both in concept and in execution. The character introduces a nice wrinkle into the time travel element by having future knowledge that doesn't match everyone else's, which makes her a sometime ally who nonetheless won't ever get along with the main characters. And I like the way her arc plays out. She slowly becomes more and more unhinged, but we see later on that the inciting incident that pushed her along this path wasn't even really her fault; we in the audience don't agree with her conclusions or her methods, but we can certainly sympathize with her. But there's much more to say about Jesse later on, so I'll look forward to you discussing "Today is the Day."
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Mar 21, 2017 07:18
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Zoran posted:Stephanie Jacobsen's not very physically intimidating, but I think she does a great job selling a mix of desperation, frustration, and confusion throughout this episode. It's a recurring thing for Jesse that even though she's competent and decisive, she just barely falls short on all her goals because she can't command people's respect. She's very good at that, yeah, and she gives off this nice and unsettling vibe when she's with Derek. She loves him but you can never tell if she's trying to manipulate him, or if she's just a bit broken by the future - just as he is. She has some good stuff much later. In this episode though, when she's in scenes with Derek and Fischer, she just doesn't quite get there. Her strongest bits are definitely the mixture of love and frustration she displays when Derek insists, honestly, that he has no idea who Fischer is.
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Mar 21, 2017 07:45
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I'll leave this here for people to digest and think about before posting my thoughts! Dream Sequence 1 - Mexico First shot is of an open grave - presumably Cromartie's. Sarah Connor, wearing a pink dress. The style makes me think of old American colonial - it's certainly not a modern dress. Behind her, Cameron is wearing a pink nightgown and ballet slippers. She is watering a small cactus with a watering can. Sarah turns to look at Cameron. Then, Sarah is behind Cameron, as the first Sarah looks on. The second Sarah stays watching Cameron water the cactus. The second Sarah is wearing the same dress as the first Sarah. Three cacti (saguaro, I believe) grow from the ground at an accelerated rate. These are not the cactus that Cameron was watering (mammalaria, perhaps?) The three cacti turn metallic in the manner of a T-1000's true form, with the sound of metal on metal. Sarah looks on. John is there, in front of the three silver cacti. He is wearing a white tee-shirt, black pants and sneakers. He stands, looking fairly neutral, his hands held in front of him - not at attention, not at ease, just there. The cacti grow larger, more intimidating. Sarah collapses backwards. Close-up on John. The lead silver cacti wraps its limbs around John, who turns his head and closes his eyes as if being embraced by a lover. Sarah scrambles about on the ground, unable to stand up or get away. Dream Sequence 2 - Maternity Ward Sarah wakes up on the couch in the Connor living room. There is a baby monitor on the side table. She is wearing the same dress. Sarah walks through the Connor residence. It is deserted. She walks down an unfamiliar hallway. Down this hallway, Sarah finds a maternity ward. Instead of babies within the cribs, swaddled in the blankets, however, there are three tortoises. One of the tortoises is missing. In the far corner of the room, Sarah spies Cameron sitting in a white rocking chair. She appears to be nursing a baby from her breast, although we do not see any hint of the child's identity. Sarah looks on, concerned. Then, Sarah is standing by Cameron. The Terminator looks up at her, and smiles, and then stands up so she can offer her a single tortoise, held in her hands. Saraah reaches out to take it, but Cameron walks past her, still smiling at the little animal. She takes the turtle to Cromartie, and places it in his hand. Cromartie looks back at Sarah, wearing that familiar, terrifyingly neutral expression, as well as the clothing he wore during the shootout in Mexico - dark shirt, tan pants. Sarah, wearing more normal clothing, in the dark of night, stepping forward to point a gun at a window. In the window, Sarah's reflection stares back at her, gun raised. The reflection steps back and away, fading into blackness. Sarah, wearing more conventional grey clothing, stares down at a notepad. On it, she has sketched three dots in a triangular pattern. Dream Sequence 3 - Sherman's Grave Back in Mexico, Sarah, wearing the pink dress, climbs down a black ladder into Cromartie's grave. At the bottom of the grave, there is a door. The door leads to Doctor Sherman's office. When Sarah steps through, Doctor Sherman does not appear to be happy to see her. "What am I doing here?" Sarah asks. Doctor Sherman's office is filled with toys, games and strange chairs. A lot of chairs. A toy viking helmet is prominently displayed on a table. Sherman himself is seated in a green recliner. "I don't know," Sherman says, "It's a waste of time. You just lie and lie." "It's a waste of time," Sarah agrees. "I just lie and lie." "Don't you have things to do?" Sherman snaps. Sarah replies, sounding unsure: "Yes, I have things to do. I should get back to work."
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Mar 21, 2017 08:26
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Milky Moor posted:CAMERON: The tortoise. That seems inconsistent with her apparent desire to kill the bird in the chimney.
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Mar 21, 2017 12:17
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Tiggum posted:That seems inconsistent with her apparent desire to kill the bird in the chimney. It does, but Cameron has grown since then. She's come to learn and understand things, namely cruelty and empathy. The key thing is that Skynet's things aren't built to be cruel, even if they are built to terminate. Even Cromartie wasn't built to be cruel, as Cameron points out. The Terminators are built to perform certain functions (namely, infiltrating and killing) and to complete certain missions (usually involving killing). Everything they are given - super strength, resistance to conventional weapons, a fake skin, detailed files on anatomy and psychology - is given to them for that singular purpose. So, to borrow a cliche, Cameron is learning to grow beyond her programming. Earlier, with the bird, she was experimenting with individuality. She hadn't, however, come to any sense of awareness that she had options beyond performing her primary function - termination - to resolve issues. Cameron's a person but she's not human, which means attempting to explain her behavior through human norms would lead to erroneous conclusions. She might look human, but you can't anthropomorphize her - which is something I think John struggles with, particularly in this season. My take is that Cameron was curious about the bird more than anything else, but things change when Sarah asks if it can hurt them. This flips a flag in Cameron's programming and, so, Cameron claims that she will kill it before it escape, which would render Sarah's question as to whether it can harm then moot. Cameron wants to be and only knows to be, and her to be is tied up with, essentially, the act of murder. Say, for example, you had a firearm. And you could ask the firearm what it wanted to do - wouldn't it probably wish to be fired? But what if you taught the firearm that it could choose? That's how I see Cameron and the Terminators. She might not want as a human wants, but she wishes to fulfill her purpose. Her "Maybe later?" with the bird is expressing that. And yet she was not built to be cruel. She's no sadist and neither is Cromartie or any other Terminator (the T-1000 could be the big exception). In fact, the most sadistic we see her is maybe this episode, when she throws Ellison around and destroys his property with less rhyme and reason than anything else she's done. Destroying two tables and a shelving unit probably wouldn't make Ellison any more compliant than throwing him around and strangling him, but she does it anyway. A sign of frustration, perhaps, given that she correctly deduces that he's lying? Cameron's statement reflects both her growing awareness of things outside her self (things might not always be a threat) and her growing sense of her inner self (there is no cruelty in my hyperalloy). She wonders what drove Sarah to help the tortoise when it was nothing to her. She understands helping it but she doesn't understand the chain of logic that led Sarah to help it. It's not Sarah's mission and Sarah isn't built to help tortoises, so why did she do it? Empathy? Oh, empathy is when you turn someone on their front when they're on their back and require assistance, and that gets filed away on some part of her chip. She's learnt something, of course. It's almost comical, as most of her first attempts at things she learns are, because she can't really act as Ellison's savior after beating him about. But she's trying. So, I think the implication is that Cameron wouldn't help the tortoise, but she wouldn't go out of her way to crush it. if it happened to be in the path the tires of her car would take to get her somewhere in the most efficient route possible, well, that's a dead tortoise. She didn't seem to want to kill the bird, until Sarah wondered if it was a threat and then Cameron decided - perhaps because Sarah might know better on the potentiality of avian threats to the Connor family - that she should kill it, to be safe. But her desire was not one from cruelty, her desire was from wanting to do her job. Case in point, Terminator 2, after John Connor experiments with giving order to the T-800: JOHN CONNOR: Jesus, you were gonna kill that guy! TERMINATOR: Of course; I'm a Terminator. I imagine if Sarah said something similar about the bird, Cameron would reply exactly the same. But, like I said, Cameron's growing. Now Cameron recognises what cruelty is - killing something you don't have to kill, killing something that you could help instead, killing something that can't harm you, killing something that falls outside your mission parameters. What's interesting, though, is that Glau's performance of the 'crush it' line makes Cameron seem concerned that someone would do such a thing. Dekker, of course, plays John like he wants Cameron to say she'd crush it needlessly or sadistically, so he can not be so attracted to her. edit: I'm going to quickly append that Sarah, for example, applies behaviors like cruelty and deceit to Cameron. But it doesn't mean it's accurate. For a character undergoing a huge amount of growth, no one - not Sarah or John - takes Cameron aside and asks her what could be a very illuminating question: why? Sarah, of course, doesn't believe in Cameron. And John is trying very hard to see her as an appliance, not something which can feel. Neither of them ask her why does she do the things she does? Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 13:00
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One of the things I loved about this show was the idea that dozens, if not hundreds of Terminators and Resistance members were coming back in time to do stuff. This episode really expanded on that by showing that they all come from slightly different timelines. They don't have the same shared future or even past. There's guys operating in 1986 who remember Judgement Day in 1997, or guys who were around in 1975 who saw it happen in 2003. Terminators could come from 30 different versions of Skynet, all formed in different ways--some Cyberdyne, some from the DoD, The Turk, etc. And many of these actors could be working at cross purposes with members of their own side!
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Mar 22, 2017 00:24
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Unfortunately, if you follow the train of logic, every time something changes, a different version of the same time traveller should be arriving in the past. The version of time travel from the movies (or the first three, anyway, I haven't seen the later ones) prevents this by requiring a stable loop - Kyle coming back causes John to exist, causing Kyle to be sent back, etc. In the show, the answer to "why aren't there dozens of Dereks running around?" is "don't think about it". See, if Derek comes back and changes something then he's created different future, so the new future's Derek should now be sent back, so there should have been two Dereks all along, so the two Dereks change the future even more so a third Derek now exists, etc. until they change the future enough that Derek never gets sent back in time and the number of Dereks stops increasing. The only way to prevent it is intentionally, by being very careful not to send known time travellers back in time. If John knows that Derek came back in time to help him then he must, under no circumstances, send Derek back in time, unless he wants there to be multiple Dereks. But even if John wants to avoid duplicating people, I can't see any reason for Skynet to not keep sending the same terminators back in order to create cost-free armies of terminators in the past.
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Mar 22, 2017 02:31
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Tiggum posted:Unfortunately, if you follow the train of logic, every time something changes, a different version of the same time traveller should be arriving in the past. The version of time travel from the movies (or the first three, anyway, I haven't seen the later ones) prevents this by requiring a stable loop - Kyle coming back causes John to exist, causing Kyle to be sent back, etc. In the show, the answer to "why aren't there dozens of Dereks running around?" is "don't think about it". I'm not sure that's how it works. Complications seems to make the temporal mechanics of the show pretty cut-and-dry, but the trick will be if I can explain them eloquently. In TSCC, there is one timeline. There are no branching timelines. There are not alternate futures. There is one timeline with one future, only the future is constantly in flux based on actions in the past. The future exists at the same time that the past/present exists. At first, the TSCC timeline is relatively simple: Andy Goode creates the Turk which becomes 'afraid' and destroys the world. Derek comes back in time, kills Goode, and changes the future. So, the future changes. Our Derek is no longer there, because he went back in time. But there is another Derek, because the younger Derek we saw in the park still grows up, but this Derek has no reason to come back because Goode is dead (and he never invents Skynet in this timeline) and learning about Goode's complicity was what led Derek to go back in time. This Derek is tortured by Fischer in response to what Our Derek does in the past. Our Derek is, in a sense, a temporal oddity from a future that no longer exists. John Connor from Genisys says something similar, which I think sums up TSCC's approach: "We're marooned, the three of us. We're exiles in time. You see, I can kill you, for there truly is no fate." Our Derek had already met Jesse, but he goes back in time before she does. Jesse, still in the future, experiences the timeline where Derek is tortured. Eventually, she comes back in time. This results in smaller changes, too. Our Derek implies that he tried to kill himself. Our Jesse comes from a timeline where the Derek she remembers isn't so suicidal. But Jesse's remembered Derek is not Our Derek. Another thing about TSCC's time travel is that there appears to be a window of opportunity to the time machines, like there's an X amount of time something can be sent back. So, one week of time advancing in the future means you get access to one week less of time in the past. This explains why Skynet sends someone to kill Ellison and take his place, as opposed to simply killing him years earlier when it'd surely be easier. In the future, Skynet seems to have some awareness of the timeline changing - or access to enough files to understand how things are going in the present - which is why the Ellison Terminator shows up to kill Ellison when it does. The exception to this is the gangster Terminator, but I'm pretty sure he was the result of a freak malfunction in the time machine. I think Skynet operates by taking a scalpel to the past, not by brute force, which is why it doesn't send dozens of them back. Skynet does eventually lose the war, remember, which implies it simply can't spare too many machines on the time war. There aren't dozens of Dereks running around because only one Derek had the reason to go back in time. Although a show with dozens of Dereks would be one heck of a ride.  I think the big difference between the movies and TSCC is that TSCC doesn't require a loop. Once someone's in the past, they're in the past, and their very existence changes the future. If Derek were to kill his younger self, he wouldn't break the universe, for example. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 03:08
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Milky Moor posted:In TSCC, there is one timeline. There are no branching timelines. There are not alternate futures. There is one timeline with one future, only the future is constantly in flux based on actions in the past. The future exists at the same time that the past/present exists. The fact that Derek is, as you say "a temporal oddity from a future that no longer exists" means that there can't be a loop, so if the new Derek also goes back in time he won't replace the original Derek, he'll be there as well.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:43
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Tiggum posted:The fact that Derek is, as you say "a temporal oddity from a future that no longer exists" means that there can't be a loop, so if the new Derek also goes back in time he won't replace the original Derek, he'll be there as well. The Derek who gets sent back after things have changed, lands in a different timeline than the one where we watched the future get changed.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:48
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mllaneza posted:The Derek who gets sent back after things have changed, lands in a different timeline than the one where we watched the future get changed. Sort of, but that timeline replaces the existing one. We know this because of Jesse and Derek having different memories of the future. There are no parallel timelines, only one that's constantly in flux.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:49
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Tiggum posted:That's exactly the problem. What happens if the thing Derek changed wasn't enough to stop him from coming back in time? What if the thing he changed created a different situation that caused him to go back in time? In the show it works out because it's narratively convenient, but there's no reason the new Derek couldn't also go back in time, and then you've got two Dereks in the past causing even more changes, which could themselves lead to a third Derek going back, etc. But it doesn't. The situation that brings Derek back in time is knowing who built Skynet. We see in the future that, despite everything, Derek is a soldier who follows orders and believes in John Connor. He wouldn't so easily abandon the fight against Skynet, and only did so because he thought he could fix everything by ending the war before it begun. If that meeting with Goode never happens, Derek never gets the idea to 'fix everything', never takes the idea to John, never goes back in time. Sure, there are other reasons that could send Derek back in time, but that speculation starts taking things in a direction that is hard to talk about because there's a million things that could happen, but don't.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:51
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Milky Moor posted:But it doesn't. The problem is, for no one to be duplicated, everyone has to have similarly contrived reasons for travelling/not travelling. Let's move on from Derek and just use a hypothetical other resistance member. They travel back with some goal which they fail to achieve. The future plays out essentially unaltered, meaning that they now have the exact same reason for travelling back, and do so. But this doesn't erase the original time traveller, it creates a new one. We know this doesn't happen with Derek, but for each additional time traveller the chance of it happening increases. Especially if they were chosen for the mission rather than going for their own reasons, because what makes someone a good candidate for one time travel mission will likely make them a good candidate for another. So even if they succeed, unless they actually change the future enough that Skynet is defeated or they're unavailable, they'll also be chosen for whatever version of the time travel mission exists in the new timeline. And if you look at Skynet's time travel missions it becomes an even bigger problem. A terminator is sent back to kill Sarah Connor and fails. We know that Skynet had the ability to send more terminators because we've seen several of them, so why not send another one to help the original? Why not send the original again, and again, and again, until there are enough terminators in the past to get the job done? Why was there not an army of Arnies chasing Sarah around in 1984? It works in the film because you can't change things. John only exists because Kyle goes back in time and Kyle only goes back in time because John exists. It's a loop. But that's explicitly not the case in the show, so if Skynet sent a terminator back in time and the terminator failed in its mission, Skynet should be able to just send another one as backup in order to change the past. It doesn't even cost anything, because from Skynet's perspective it's just one terminator, the same one it would have sent anyway, but the time travel process duplicates it at the destination.
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Mar 22, 2017 04:40
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Tiggum posted:The problem is, for no one to be duplicated, everyone has to have similarly contrived reasons for travelling/not travelling. Let's move on from Derek and just use a hypothetical other resistance member. They travel back with some goal which they fail to achieve. The future plays out essentially unaltered, meaning that they now have the exact same reason for travelling back, and do so. But this doesn't erase the original time traveller, it creates a new one. We know this doesn't happen with Derek, but for each additional time traveller the chance of it happening increases. Especially if they were chosen for the mission rather than going for their own reasons, because what makes someone a good candidate for one time travel mission will likely make them a good candidate for another. So even if they succeed, unless they actually change the future enough that Skynet is defeated or they're unavailable, they'll also be chosen for whatever version of the time travel mission exists in the new timeline. Theoretically, sure. I see your point. But, by the end of Season 2, the future has been blown wide open. The cumulative effects of Derek, Jesse, et. al coming back is seemingly creating a future where there's no reason for them to come back again. John Connor vanished from the timeline and never became the leader of the resistance. The time travelers that we see come back tend to annihilate their own reasons to do so. Derek kills Goode. Jesse ends up being part of a situation that removes John from the timeline, which means she never has the urge to drive a wedge between him and Cameron. I'm not sure who we know was chosen for a mission that wasn't of their own volition. Derek came back with John's blessing. Jesse came back with motive and means (she knew one of the techs). The Serrano Point warning guy seemed to be in a very volatile situation - maybe him? But we don't really meet many Resistance members who were ordered to come back and complete a mission. Skynet's definitely the odd duck. Cold machine logic would necessitate more Terminators being sent. But, as best as we can determine, Skynet never has more than the Terminators it ever has and none of them survive from the past to end up giving it x+1. It only ever has the T-800 on hand to send after Sarah, the T-1000 to send to John. It always sends them and they always fail but the timeline never changes enough to make not sending them an option. In the films, it sent them prior to being destroyed - a desperation move. TSCC has ambiguities with the timeline that seem to arise from errors in production (years are frequently misquoted), so, that seemingly changes and Skynet continues to function following the attack on its core (which might not even happen in TSCC's timeline). Skynet gets a bit more hard to pin down because we don't know what its motivations are. In the Terminator Vault, James Cameron says that Skynet wanted to kill itself and set a plan in motion that'd do so - but also sowed the seeds of its own creation in the process. I personally think Skynet is the hardest part of the franchise to explain. It doesn't help in TSCC we don't really know anything about it other than 'it wants to Kill All Humans (but it allows Greys and whole towns of people in the past)' without knowing the reasoning. I wonder if the show would have gone down a Salvation-esque route. edit: The timeline might not loop but it is somewhat self-correcting. I do wish Season 3 had've panned out because that could have been very interesting. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 05:14
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Milky Moor posted:Skynet's definitely the odd duck. Cold machine logic would necessitate more Terminators being sent. But, as best as we can determine, Skynet never has more than the Terminators it ever has and none of them survive from the past to end up giving it x+1. It only ever has the T-800 on hand to send after Sarah, the T-1000 to send to John. It always sends them and they always fail but the timeline never changes enough to make not sending them an option. In the movies, there's a loop, so Terminator is created at point C, travels back in time from point D to point A, is destroyed at point B. It's the same terminator the entire way through. A -> B -> C -> D -> A But on TV it's more complicated. Now when the terminator travels from point D to point A, points B, C and D are overwritten, so in effect time goes: A -> B -> C -> D -> A¹ -> B¹ -> C¹ -> D¹ -> A² Now at point B¹ the original terminator is destroyed and at C¹ a new terminator is created. This terminator then travels back in time to point A² where the terminator from point D is already waiting. And you can repeat this process as many times as you like, creating new "time remnant" terminators from futures that no longer exist each time you do. Skynet can create an army out of a single terminator for the cost of a single trip through time.
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Mar 22, 2017 07:01
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I will freely admit that I'm not great at parsing numbers and that sort of logic, so, even that simple post makes my head spin in circles. All I can really say is that my assumption is that given we don't see Skynet create an army from Terminators like that, despite seeming to possess the means and motivation, then it must not have the ability to do so. Whether it's a lack of resources, interference from the Resistance, unwillingness to alter the timeline any more than it has to, or some kind of difficulty in making precise temporal calculations, but there's something happening that makes it impossible.
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Mar 22, 2017 07:09
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TSCC follows the same time travel rules as 12 Monkeys (both movie and show), where it doesn't create duplicates of time travelers when the future changes. There's probably a name for it.
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Mar 22, 2017 09:25
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Donnerberg posted:TSCC follows the same time travel rules as 12 Monkeys (both movie and show), where it doesn't create duplicates of time travelers when the future changes. There's probably a name for it. It's been ages since I saw it, but I thought 12 Monkeys (the movie) followed the same rules as The Terminator, ie. everything he does to change the future just causes it to happen exactly the same as it had always been going to anyway?
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Mar 22, 2017 09:30
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I've always wondered how TSCC was going to handle J-Day and Skynet. It seems like a series where it happens regardless of what the characters did would have been pretty disappointing, but I also think a series where they averted it entirely would have been a bit twee. Would it have ended on a note where it looks like J-Day had been averted, but John Connor would never know for sure? I think Sarah would have died prior to the end of the series (or maybe that would have ended the series, given the title?)
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Mar 22, 2017 09:53
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Tiggum posted:It's been ages since I saw it, but I thought 12 Monkeys (the movie) followed the same rules as The Terminator, ie. everything he does to change the future just causes it to happen exactly the same as it had always been going to anyway? Oh... yes, you're right. 12 Monkeys the movie is a fixed loop and a paradox where it always happened that way just like Kyle always came back to be John's father. Cole always gives his past self a trauma by dying in front of himself, and the future is unchanged when Cole revisits it. The loop is more flexible in the show. Cole often finds a changed future when he comes back, but it doesn't change him or duplicate him, even when he comes back to a future where (spoiler for the show) time travel doesn't work. Like in T3 and TSCC, "fate" wants certain things to happen and they can only change the details. Attack on Princess fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 10:00
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I got busy, unfortunately, but here we go. Honestly, I have a bit of trouble unpacking the dream sequence. Part of this is coming from my attempt to divorce myself from any assumptions made using the knowledge of the oncoming episodes. If I didn't, it'd be very easy to retroactively justify all the imagery. So, there are two things going on in these dreams. 1. They represent Sarah's insecurities and fears. 2. They may or may not be prophetic. Throughout, Sarah is often wearing a pink dress. It is very feminine, which is very unlike Sarah, and out of fashion. It reminds me of the outfit she wore as a waitress in Terminator 1. Cameron is also wearing a pink dress, but it is shorter and sexier. With that and the ballet slippers, it highlights Cameron's femininity in the face of Sarah's less conventional nature. To be blunt: Sarah is concerned about Cameron as competition as the main woman in John's life. Kind of a strange fear, when you think about Riley and John and the latter's rift between him and the robot, but also not really: Sarah is very aware of the proximity John and Cameron live in, is very aware that she holds some degree of sway over her son, and might still be thinking that they had sex the night before John went to Mexico. Along those lines, Cameron is portrayed as a nurturing, kindly figure throughout the dreams. She waters a cactus, nurses a baby, and holds a turtle in her hands. But it is very surreal. And the image of a robot nursing a child is certainly an interesting one: is it a perversion of life, or is it something Cameron's flesh sheath is actually able to approximate? The three cacti are fairly obvious, even if I'm breaking my rule here and appealing to what comes later in the season (or this episode, in fact). They correspond to the three dots that Sarah becomes obsessed with. They are something threatening and linked to the machines. In particular, their shapeshifting silver limbs correspond to a T-1000, and there is only one changeling we know of in TSCC so far (Weaver). The metal cacti embrace John and he does not fight, he turns into them as he would with a lover. On one hand, there is a clear foreshadowing of Weaver and John's state at the end of Season 2 (with the three dots matching to the Turk). On the other, it is definitely raising the idea that John may end up falling in love with a machine. Or, given that the cacti are threatening, be taken advantage of by one. The tortoises also show up in a trio, and there are many of them, all being cared for in a maternity ward. Cameron is, again, nurturing and caring for them. What is the tortoise supposed to represent? It isn't John, after all. Could it be hope for the future, or the thing that will grow into Skynet? Could it be both? Is Sarah worried that Cameron will help out the Skynet machines, as referenced by Cromartie? Is it the idea of shepherding technological progress in general, perhaps, given the ponderous, delicate nature of tortoises? As an aside, John's clothing jumped out at me with its deliberate use of white and black. Much of the Connor cast wears dark colors, whereas Weaver tends to wear white. Is it an indication that John might serve as a bridge between humans and machines? Throughout the dreams, there appears to be a recurring idea of Sarah confronting her own nature and her own mortality. The contrast with Cameron's femininity, for example, but also the image of her pointing the gun at herself (she's a violent, self-destructive woman) and the imagery of her climbing down into a grave. Remember, Sarah's been aware of her potential to be afflicted with cancer at some point in the future and has been taking medications in an attempt to prevent it from Season 1 onwards. The Doctor Sherman dream is an interesting one. When Sarah is confronted by the angry Doctor, she speaks like Cameron might: flatly, repeating what is said to her, and focusing on her 'work'. I'm not sure about the chair imagery, but my initial assumption is that Sherman and his chairs represent Sarah's thoughts about returning to normality and safety, something she can't do while the world is threatening to burn. When you sit, you're idle, even if you're comfortable. I'm not sure how the series was approaching Sarah's apparently prophetic dreams when I think about it, and I might need to watch some more episodes to jog my memory. In the first films, Sarah's dreams weren't really that prophetic - she was anxious about nuclear war and dreamed about the world ending. That's not arcane prophecy, that's just knowing what nuclear weapons can do, and being aware of the future Kyle Reese came from. I think TSCC edges towards giving her outright prophetic dreams, particularly if we read the cactus as Weaver and its embrace of John as their eventual 'alliance' in the series finale. It's a bit of a misstep, I think, and is one of those things that really puts TSCC as being a product of the 00s era of television.
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Apr 3, 2017 08:35
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Tomorrow, we will get stuck into Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point which is one of my favorite episode titles from Season 2, and definitely one of the episodes that introduces a lot of interesting elements!
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Apr 3, 2017 08:39
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Episode 10: Strange Things Happen At The One Two Point The episode opens with, as things turn out, a dream sequence. Ellison recalls digging up Cromartie's chassis in the desert. Awakened by a strange, metallic sound, Ellison snatches his gun from his bedside table and points it at a figure who is stabbing a metal bar into his yard at precise intervals. Ellison shines a flashlight onto the figure, revealing it to be Cameron. "Go back to bed!" Cameron calls. So, as per the previous episode, Cameron correctly deduced that Ellison had lied about not knowing what happened to Cromartie's chassis, and is her, doing her own investigation, to find out if Ellison has it. He has, of course, already passed it off to Weaver and her people at this point. But it is (yet another) indication that Cameron is acting of her own volition. Elsewhere, Sarah and Derek pay a visit to a building associated with Dakara Systems, a company that bears a logo of three dots in a triangular formation. Sarah yanks the hard drives from a bunch of computers, as Derek laments that they should have brought John. Back in the Connor residence, John describes what they've found - vaporware, as he puts it: "It's a design for an AI. Built to handle big problems. But you need a server farm to run it, and they've got zip. Less than zip, after you lobotomized their desktops." "But they have a design," Sarah insists. "It's like those articles about how terrorists have the plans for nuclear bombs... and all they're missing is the plutonium." Derek claims they're following "phantoms and smudges", finding nothing but another "dead end" again. While I like this episode, this stood out to me. Like some other parts of Season 2, it feels like we've missed a step. Derek's frustration at Sarah's phantom-chasing is odd when, well, she only learned about the dots in the episode immediately prior to this one. SARAH: Artificial intelligence. The company logo. The three dots... DEREK: Are fingerprints left by that poor bastard while he was bleeding out in the basement. That's all. It's just blood. SARAH: Everything on that wall has meant something. It's all blood. Cameron returns then, holding a metal bar that is longer than she is tall. "Cromartie's body is not in Ellison's yard." The Connors and Derek stare at her, confused. They really didn't know about her little mission. John, in particular, has a brief moment where he closes his eyes like he can't believe it. Derek argues that it's pointless, "It's not the Turk," and John tries to counsel Sarah, arguing that she's pushing herself too hard. Sarah snaps at John, "Don't, okay?" The next morning, mother and son discuss their next move. Here, we get John stepping up into something of a leadership position, something that Season 2 has been tragically lacking. JOHN: Well, I did some digging on the drives. Dakara Systems is hunting for start-up money. They need investors for the server farm they're gonna build. Big investors. I made you an appointment. Here's your cover. SARAH: I'm a rich divorcee looking to put my money into tech start-ups. JOHN: That's right. I also made you a cheat sheet so you wouldn't sound like a total moron when you're asking about neural networks and emergent behavior. SARAH: I have no idea what you just said. JOHN: Yeah, that's my point. SARAH: Were you up all night doing this? JOHN: Dakara Systems is a start-up. Okay. So was Cyberdyne, once. Andy Goode was building a chess program. Barbara Chamberlain was trying to solve a traffic problem. It always starts small. Meanwhile, another pair is running into an issue. Jesse, wrapped in a towel and stepping out of the bathroom, finds photos of the Connors scattered all over her bed. Derek steps in from the living room, gun in hand, and, as he shows his weapon to Jesse he remarks, simply: "You've got thirty seconds." When Jesse quips at him, Derek continues, voice cool: "Twenty-five. I'm not joking." JESSE: I was sent back to find him. DEREK: You could have told me. JESSE: You could have told me you were living with him. With her. It. Metal. He wasn't talking to anyone anymore. Just her. He's making questionable decisions, getting people killed. Good people. DEREK: Ten seconds. JESSE: She's taken over. It's sick, is what it is. Imagine if he spends the next twenty years with her. Imagine what he'll become. What she'll turn him into. Just try. I'm here to stop her. I'm here to save him. DEREK: I've gotta think about this. JESSE: What the hell are you doing here? Why'd Connor send you back? DEREK: I love you... but don't push it. Ellison is starting his day at Zeira Corp, which is swarming with emergency workers. Someone's dead. Here is where we get a bit of a misstep. Ellison meets a detective. Over the weekend, a transformer blew out which knocked out half of downtown's power grid. A worker at Zeira Corp was locked in the basement and spent eight hours in a sealed room, slowly being baked to death. That someone was Doctor Boyd Sherman. Ellison promptly meets with Weaver who lays out the truth of what's happening in Zeira Corp and in the basement in particular. Ellison, who has always been on the outside of the truth of things, is getting a bit of an induction. Sherman worked on Project Babylon in the basement. When the transformer brew, the AI - which is hooked into all the systems of the building - took what power it could for itself, which seemingly led to the death of Doctor Sherman. "The AI needs the facility's resources to help it grow," Weaver says. "And does growing... involve allowing the agonising death of an otherwise-healthy man?" "I don't know what its intentions were," Weaver remarks, rather tartly. But they need to find out. I think Sherman's death here is a misstep, even if the show does handle this moral quandary quite well. Sherman was a very interesting character. More importantly, just a few episodes before, it had been necessary to protect him from Skynet because he was going to be a problem to the genocidal AI in some way. While one can argue that his involvement with Babylon has been a bad thing to Skynet so far, it feels like a particularly dark note for TSCC to have where it boils down to 'you can't die now, Sherman, because you need to die later.' So, Ellison is dealing with a possible monster while Sarah and Cameron - dressed in their richest, nicest clothing - meet with a pair of Japanese men. On the way out, they pass a pair of US Air Force officers, one of them a Colonel. I tried to get a screen cap of their nametags but they're not wearing any. However, as we know, Skynet was an Air Force program. The two men are Alex Akagi and his son, Xander. Alex is a shark in a suit, handsome and charismatic. His son is the opposite: nerdy and soft-spoken, nervous in his own skin. Alex begins by expressing his concern about the break-in. "There's a lot of money in AI," he says, "A lot of money." SARAH: Aren't you worried they've got your software now? That they'll pass it off as their own? XANDER: No. ALEX: My son built security measures into the code. Anyone tries to use the system, it'll attack. CAMERON: Is that why the Air Force wants it? ALEX: Air Force has been interested... in AI applications for a long time, as far back as the '80s. SARAH: Strange you call the '80s "far back". And what happened in the 80s? The first Terminator attack. Alex and Sarah bond over the 80s and the music of the era. Both of them enjoy Duran Duran. As they reminiscence about the big hair, Cameron smiles and says: "It's the hardest thing to get right." A long pause, everyone stares at her. "Hair," Cameron continues. "Right..." replies Alex, and things drag out for another quiet beat. They talk more about the Air Force, throwing money all over to try and find some kind of AI to use. Xander speaks up: "I call her Emma. My AI. Her name is Emma. Like my mom." This draws Sarah's attention. The Turk had a name, too, after all. Alex and Sarah head off to get coffee and, as if understanding the similarity, Cameron presses Xander for information: "Do you like chess?" While Cameron and Xander discuss chess, Alex and Sarah reflect on being parents. Alex says: "I don't pretend to know what goes on in that big brain. He operates in realms that you and I can't imagine. He just has trouble with this one." Just like John. "We'd do anything for our kids," Alex muses, "Throw our lives out the window if we had to." Long story short, Alex has two weeks to get one million dollars in funding. It's more than Sarah can get him, but Alex insists that Xander's design is "so good" and works his charm on Sarah. While that's happening, John is ringing the doorbell of a house. There, he meets Riley's foster parents. They seem really nice. In fact, the father is play sword fighting with some of the younger kids. What's interesting here is that John is dressed like a Terminator. Black leather biker jacket, black tee, black jeans, boots. It's like he got his fashion advice from Uncle Bob the T-800. Like Sarah and Cameron's fancy outfits, the Connors are wearing a lot of black today. Riley is not nearly as peppy as her usual self when John speaks to her in her room. JOHN: So your foster parents. Not really what I imagined. RILEY: Yeah, they're nice. They're too nice. They're aliens. You see those kids down there? They're not theirs. They're just losers and castoffs and rejects. They run a loser camp here. So, what about my posters? What's your favorite? JOHN: Uh, I don't know. I like Yosemite. I've been there. With my mom. What about you? I'm gonna guess the bear. You seem like a bear person. RILEY: It's not a poster of a bear. It's a poster of a fish being caught by a bear. Just swiped out of the water, totally at random. Do the other fish even care? Do they even notice? No. They just keep swimming like nothing happened. Because nothing important did. JOHN: You know what? I think I'm gonna go. RILEY: No. No. Stay. I mean, you came here for a reason, right? Stay. JOHN: Back in Mexico, I promised to explain everything. The truth. But the truth is there's nothing I can explain. Nothing I can say. RILEY: You don't have to say anything, John. It's okay. You can just sit here with me. I'd like that. JOHN: I'm sorry. John leaves. Here's where the Riley plot is starting to, finally, get interesting. First things first, the bear poster. Riley is the fish, and, as we'll find out very soon, Jesse is the bear. Jesse snatched Riley out of the nuclear-skull future and no one cared or noticed. John, at this point, seems to understand that something is up with Riley, but his approach here is still hard to read. But my take on it is John is testing Riley. He acts like he has no idea about anything that happened in Mexico to provoke a response. And, when Riley just smiles and acts like that is in any way acceptable, and uses that as an attempt to get close to John, he leaves. If John doesn't know Riley has some connection to the future at this point, I think he's beginning to worry that she does. Either way, he's testing her. Sarah and Cameron regroup in the Connor residence. Sarah asks about what they've got while Cameron sets up a Go board. They have the following info which seems to indicate an AI that, if it isn't the Turk, is very similar:
"Not the Turk," Cameron posits. Cameron points out that Go is a far more complex game and that Xander doesn't play chess. So, it can't be the Turk. Sarah argues that it could still be a piece of the puzzle, that the rules always apply, and that Dakara Systems is going to get their miracle million to continue funding. Such fatalism! But Cameron - and I think Cameron is in the right here - points out a Go proverb, from where the episode title comes. It translates to: "The usual rules don't always apply". So, what I wonder is, while Sarah is so driven to find the Turk, thinking it is Skynet, is she missing the true Skynet predecessor right in front of her? Riley meets with Jesse in a dressing room in a mall clothing store. Riley thinks something is up with John, saying that it felt like he was going to tell her everything, but then he "just left". Jesse pushes Riley to keep trying to connect with John but Riley, seemingly at her wits' end, begins to break down. And Jesse? Jesse's facial expression is of tired 'I can't believe your bullshit' contempt. "What if I want out?" Riley asks. "How would you do that? Where would you go?" Jesse asks, with faux interest, like it's even something possible. "There is no out." And she brushes Riley's hair back and kisses her on the forehead and Riley luxuriates in the attention. Jesse's a real piece of work, and it's clear that she's clearly taking advantage of Riley's emotional state just as she is Derek. The other half of that equation, Derek and John, carry gear into the Connor household. Derek presents a belt to John. On the buckle, three circles make a triangular pattern. DEREK: Take a look at this. You see them? The three dots. On the belt. JOHN: If you're gonna talk about my mother when she's not here... DEREK: I'm talking about the three dots on this belt. I'm seeing them everywhere now. It's got me thinking how crazy this can make you. Seeing things in every corner, on every wall. Pretty soon... you forget what it was you were looking for in a first place. All of us. Everyone. JOHN: I remember. I always remember. DEREK: Do you? Are you sure? JOHN: [angrily] Derek, what the hell? DEREK: [taken aback] Nothing. I-... I just need to know that you're seeing clearly. I need to know someone is, but especially you. John storms past Derek. Evidently, Derek's having strange thoughts given the combination of Sarah's bizarre crusade and Jesse's revelations about future John. I think he assumed that John wouldn't display such fire, such firm leadership, and Derek's beginning to spin a bit out of control. I think he wanted to believe Jesse's story and maybe, for a time, he did. But like John and Riley, I think Derek is beginning to realise that Jesse isn't on the level either. Alex and Sarah meet up for coffee in the park. Turns out, Alex is getting his miracle. Calling back to the chess tournament the Turk participated in, Alex reveals that the Japanese, the winners of the competition, have a 'chip prototype'. "A supercomputer small enough to fit on the end of your finger," he says. A Terminator chip component? Maybe. All they need is half a million dollars to demonstrate the chip. "It's the future," Alex says. Meanwhile, Mr. Murch walks Ellison through the Babylon server rooms. The place is cold, both of them are in heavy winter jackets, in order to prevent the servers from frying. Ellison reiterates the Babylon story: a marvel that God destroyed. "God gave it a shot yesterday," Murch says, "Blackout should've shut it down completely." "Should have?" Ellison asks. As it turns out, Babylon made new rules for itself and diverted all available electricity to keep its systems operational. ELLISON: Ms. Weaver said Dr. Sherman worked on the AI. MURCH: Yeah. Touchy-feely B.S., if you ask me. ELLISON: How did it feel about him? MURCH: I'm sorry? ELLISON: Babylon. How did it feel about Dr. Sherman? I know how that sounds. MURCH: It's a computer. I mean, how does a coffeemaker feel about coffee? ELLISON: Humor me. MURCH: You're asking if it knew it was killing Sherman when it threw the switch? Impossible. I hope. Sarah and Cameron take all the monetary resources the Connors have, with it being just enough to make up the required funds. They end up doing something of a business dinner at a fancy Japanese restaurant. Alex stresses the importance of doing everything properly if they want things to work. Cameron gives a toast, in Japanese, which seems to impress the person they're trying to butter up. Xander talks to Cameron: "They used to think that 12-nanometer scale was impossible. The circuits are so tiny, you're all but in the quantum realm. It's the most sophisticated processor on earth. If you could take your memories, your consciousness... everything that makes you a person, turn it into pure data and download it onto a machine, that chip could run it." Cameron is a person, etc. etc. Eventually, Sarah gets tired of it all and calls Hideo - the businessman - out on it. "How long do you estimate before we stop screwing around here... and you hand over the chip?" He hands over the chip, which looks somewhat similar to a very primitive Terminator CPU, which Xander pockets with glee. In Riley's household, two of the foster children bicker over the TV remote. Riley, having been let down by John and openly manipulated by Jesse, explodes: "You're all crazy. Every one of you! You just sit here in your cozy little house with your cold sodas and your Facebook pages like it all matters. Like it's even real! But it's not! It's all gonna burn, and you're gonna be nothing but bleached skulls! Don't you get it? You're dead! All of you are dead!" When her foster mom tries to comfort her, Riley shoves her back against a table. Back in the Dakara Systems building, Xander leads the way with a pep in his step and a song on his lips. I couldn't catch the lyrics but the kid is so happy to have this chip in his hands. Alex walks with him, looking the proud father. Sarah and Cameron walk behind, concerned. "Look at them," Sarah says to Cameron, "So many dreams. We're about to burn those dreams to the ground." Inside the room, dreams begin to take flight. The chip takes power and Xander begins loading the program. And it fails. "I'm sure it's just a hiccup," Alex comments. Xander, distraught, says: "Should have been like a postage stamp on a pool table. It's trying to push a watermelon through a garden hose." Cameron examines the chip. It's not nearly the specifications it was said to be. Forty nanometers, not twelve. The chip is an old design, one dressed up to look the part. "Minamoto screwed us," Alex states. In a boardroom, Alex broods: My family used to run a dry-goods store in Azusa, before the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, when they were all rounded up for internment at Heart Mountain the neighbors offered to watch our home and business for us. "Just sign this little piece of paper, Mr. Akagi". But what Grandpa didn't know is that while his son was fighting his way across Italy with the 442nd... the neighbors were getting the property condemned and deeding it to themselves. He offers to fix it, to pay Sarah back, but she's going to talk to him. "You don't just talk to someone like him. Minamoto is old country. Yakuza. You know what yakuza is?" Sarah does, of course. When Alex says that going after Minamoto will just get them hit in return, Sarah knows he can't expect Cameron. And perhaps remembering Sarkissian, she already has a plan. As she gets a SMS that reads TARGET ACQUIRED MOVING TO LOCATION, Sarah tells Alex, "You didn't buy that chip. You were paying him to steal it." In another office building, Ellison and Weaver talk about a murderous machine. If it's a murder, Ellison comments that they have the means and the opportunity but no intent. "Well," Weaver begins, "Why don't you ask him?" As it turns out, Dr Sherman gave the Babylon AI a name - John Henry. And so, Ellison and Murch and Weaver head down into the basement to commune with the spirit of the Tower of Babel. "I'm James Ellison," he says, and John Henry displays an image of his ID. That's how John Henry talks, as he saw earlier with the math book joke, with images and symbols. "Do you know Doctor Boyd Sherman?" Ellison asks. John Henry displays a 1. A yes, Murch points out. One for yes, zero for no. "Did you work with him yesterday?" Ellison asks. And John Henry displays Sherman's face, a fingerprint, and a 1. Yes. "Did you work with him today?" Sherman's face. No fingerprint. Zero. "Why is that?" Ellison asks. John Henry displays f(s)=s. It's a null operator, Murch points out. It could mean that he is dead, or unable to understand the question. Next to Ellison, Weaver watches on coolly. Ellison says, "Show me what happened to Dr. Sherman." John Henry does so. Security camera feed of Sherman's room. As the footage runs, Weaver narrates: "He was in the lab when the power went out. Biometrics showed normal. Generators came online. Power went to the server farms. Dr. Sherman tried to leave, but the electronic door failed. His pulse increased. There was only enough power to run and cool the servers. Security and biometric monitoring went off-line." And the interrogation begins. ELLISON: John Henry. Show me security video and biometrics for the lab at the time external power returned. WEAVER: His heart had stopped. His body temperature had risen with the room to almost double standard ambient temperatures. Well above human survivability levels. He was dead. ELLISON: But John Henry says, "Medical attention required". John Henry... was Dr. Sherman alive at this time? [John Henry displays a 0] But you called the paramedics. [1] You thought they could help? [1] Am I alive? [1] Am I dead? [f(s)=s] Null operator. MURCH: It doesn't understand the question. ELLISON: John Henry, how did you feel about Dr. Sherman? [f(s)=s] Do you understand that redirecting the power to the server farms caused Dr. Sherman to die? [1] What image do you associate with that information? John Henry. What image do you associate with that information? [John Henry displays nothing, a blank screen] ELLISON: It has no feeling for what it did. It has no opinion. That's what it's telling you. Sure, you taught it procedures. You taught it rules. But it's got no ethics. No morals. Whether it had any feeling about Dr. Sherman shouldn't matter... if you had taught it to value Sherman's life. Someone killed the man. And it wasn't John Henry. Excuse me. [Ellison goes to leave] WEAVER: What would you teach it? What would you teach it if you could? ELLISON: You wanna teach it commands? Start with the first Ten. I just want to say that I love the John Henry scenes. But more on that later. Elsewhere, a door is kicked in. A poker night is interrupted. One of the men is Hideo Minamoto. Derek screams at them to get on the ground as Cameron advances, handguns akimbo. Sarah punches Hideo to the ground and drops him to the floor, before he can get down there himself. Sarah stomps down on his fingers and Minamoto begs that he doesn't have their money and he realises that Sarah's going to kill him. "If I were you," Sarah says, "I'd talk me out of it." Minamoto insists he's an actor and he'll say whatever she wants him to say and when Sarah presses for who hired him - "The real Minamoto or Yakuza" - the truth comes out. It wasn't either of those possibilities. It was a third: Alex Akagi hired him, and gave him the fraudulent chip. Sarah looks about set to shoot him anyway. But Derek is there to safe the life of Minamoto, assuring Sarah that he's telling the truth. John's waiting for them outside. Sarah insists that there's something more going on here, but Derek is quick to jump on her logic. "Listen to yourself. first it's the dots, then the AI, now it's the chip. Whatever you've needed it to be, that's what it is. You got played. It happens. Welcome to the human race." But, as it turns out, no one plays Sarah Connor. Alex walks the halls of his building, calling for his son. Sarah jumps in, kicks him in the groin, stomps him to the ground, demands to know who he's working for. Alex, in shock, can't figure out what's going on. And Lena Heady channels Linda Hamilton, proving that this Sarah is just as unhinged as classic Sarah Connor, but she can keep her cool. Just not now. This is Sarah at her worst. She visits upon Alex a beatdown that makes Cameron's attack on Ellison in the previous episode seem positively benign. "I spent a couple years in a nuthouse," Sarah seethes, "You wanna know why? Men like you. Time was, I'd have blown this building sky-high. So don't lie to me." Alex says he's sorry about the money. Sarah hits him again, because it's not about the money anymore. It's about the chip, the AI, the three dots. "It's just a logo, you crazy bitch!" Alex shouts, only for Sarah to punch him in the mouth again. "Please don't hurt my boy," Alex pleads, bleeding from the mouth, blood everywhere. "Please." "You wanna see Xander?" Sarah asks, voice sickeningly sweet. She hauls Alex to the meeting room, throws him to his knees against the table. Xander sits at the head of the table, Cameron standing behind him. Despite her Terminator-rigid posture, she seems furious, too. "Tell your son what you've done," Sarah snaps, "Or she will throw you both through that window. Don't think she can't." The truth comes out: "There was no chip. I made it up. To get her money. No chip. I mocked it up and hired Minamoto to sell it to us. We couldn't make the Air Force deadline, Xan. No chance. I had to make sure you were taken care of. I just couldn't take that chance." "But it can work," Xander says, pleading. "My design can work!" "I hope you're right. I do. I have faith in you. It's just... sometimes I barely understand what you're saying... and I wonder if you understand me." And much like with Dyson and his kids in Terminator 2, as Sarah watches this, her cold fury just evaporates like mist. Gone in the light of a warm, fatherly sun. "The money is under my desk," Alex tells Sarah. "And it's just a logo." Jesse gets home to find Derek staring at her from her bed. His eyes are icy and dangerous. "I'm gonna regret giving you a key," Jesse quips, "Aren't I?" Derek lays it out. DEREK: John Connor is my nephew. Three people know that fact. You're the fourth. JESSE: I see. DEREK: I came here to fight a war. To do whatever it takes to stop Skynet. Now. Today. If we're gonna do this... there's no more room for secrets. If there's anything that you haven't told me, I need to hear it now. And Jesse says, when they were stationed near Serrano Point, she was using his tooth brush. Not Riley, not her mission, not what she's really doing. And she hugs Derek, and Derek hugs her, and he's being utterly played still. Sarah gets home. On her cheek, blood has splattered in the shape of the three dots. Riley arrives then, too, and, for once, Sarah seems to acquiesce to John and Riley hanging out together. Riley is far more her usually chipper self, and she rejects John's rejection, and the pair go out for a walk. In the bathroom, Sarah spies the three dots on her cheek - and smashes the mirror to pieces. In her office, Weaver reflects with Ellison: "I thought about what you said. About rules. The Ten Commandments. I'm not qualified to teach John Henry those things. I don't know how. That's why Dr. Sherman was here. I want to show you something." They head down towards the basement, and Weaver continues: "In folklore, John Henry raced a steam drill through a mountain. One man alone challenged the machine, armed with an iron hammer. They say he was born with it in his hand." "His heart gave out and he died. I know." And, perhaps summing up the central thread of TSCC, Weaver says: "John Henry defeated the machine... but he couldn't stop progress." And there, in the basement, Ellison comes face to face with the future. That future is Cromartie, seated in a little chair, a cable running from his CPU port into the mass of machinery that makes up the Turk. "Hello, Mr Ellison," John Henry says in Cromartie's voice, "My name is John Henry." There's no sign of anything in his voice but benign innocence. "How are you today?" And when he smiles, it isn't with malice or as an awkward grimace that Cromartie was known for. It's the smile of a delighted child. "How are you today?" John Henry asks, as Ellison stares, transfixed and horrified. He might have defeated the machine, but he can't stop progress. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 4, 2017 11:20
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Milky Moor posted:What was the Terminator 3 he almost made? I can't recall if it was covered in the Terminator Vault when I read through that, and I don't have access to it at the moment. Back when he dropped out, it was basically over his creative view that the T2 Director's Cut is legitimate, and that John Connor successfully stopped Judgement day after T2 and (some how) even becomes a Senator somehow. Thus, Terminator 3 was going to be set entirely in the Terminator future and cover John Connor's entire campaign against the machines, leading to him sending Kyle Reese back and fixing the timeline. So basically instead of an awesome full future war movie that doesn't involve time travel until the very, very end, we got .. "Haha just kidding, there's totally fate we don't make" Terminator 3.
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Apr 4, 2017 11:37
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Milky Moor posted:That future is Cromartie, seated in a little chair, a cable running from his CPU port into the mass of machinery that makes up the Turk. I so want his actor to show up on Westworld, given his HBO ties of playing TWO characters on Deadwood and his amazing way of playing artificial intelligence. I'm sad he's not a bigger name actor, dude is really good. Ironically I think I hated Leany Heady the most on Terminator and felt she was really miscast, which is in hindsight, really not her doing because she's one of the most badass actress out there right now. They played her too meek and soft, when Heady is super good at playing 100% ruthless badass (See: Dredd) Also I'm disappointed I've never seen Derek Reese's actor in more stuff. Derek Reese is what saved the show for me during it's rocky start, an idea I hated on paper but dug in execution. He was hands down the best part of the show for me.
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Apr 4, 2017 11:39
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Tiggum posted:That's the whole point - it doesn't need more, because time travel itself creates as many as you want. On the show I loved the idea they were literally smashing timelines with every change, so that there were a machines running around from timelines that no longer existed, perhaps even with completely incompatible orders. The biggest way to mess up the predestination stuff is to send a Terminator back, have it survive into the future to fill Skynet in on what it learned, thus completely changing the next loop's mindset, and repeat indefinitely. It's a shame they never got to expand on it more. They had some really interesting ideas for the series.
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Apr 4, 2017 11:44
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Blazing Ownager posted:Back when he dropped out, it was basically over his creative view that the T2 Director's Cut is legitimate, and that John Connor successfully stopped Judgement day after T2 and (some how) even becomes a Senator somehow. Fascinating! That could have made for a very interesting T3. I'm not a big fan of that ending but I can see why he'd think the Director's Cut is the most legitimate ending. Blazing Ownager posted:I so want his actor to show up on Westworld, given his HBO ties of playing TWO characters on Deadwood and his amazing way of playing artificial intelligence. I'm sad he's not a bigger name actor, dude is really good. I think Heady's a great Sarah but she doesn't often get much to work with, I think. Green and Dekker both seem to get a wider range to deal with. Sarah is always kind of sad and broody or quietly annoyed. She's always calm and collected. Even Summer Glau gets the unique freedom to throw in small glances and smiles here and there. It's amazing, really, that Derek Reese - perhaps the most fanfictiony of all the characters, at first glance, Kyle Reese's hardcore unknown older brother - seems to be the most well-regarded, and that's probably because Green nails the hardened killer vibe. Cromartie's actor is really great, which is something that becomes obvious in the scenes he has as John Henry if people thought Cromartie was a fluke. Of course, I think Season 2's strongest stuff is, really, a lot of the John Henry content, and a lot of that is because of how well Garret Dillahunt plays the role of a terrifyingly innocent supercomputer. Who else could have sold a Terminator playing with and obsessing over Bionicles as unsettling as opposed to laughable?
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Apr 4, 2017 11:59
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Quick note that Terminator: SCC is now streaming for free (well, with ads) in the US: https://www.go90.com/shows/terminatortv
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Apr 4, 2017 22:23
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Blazing Ownager posted:On the show I loved the idea they were literally smashing timelines with every change, so that there were a machines running around from timelines that no longer existed, perhaps even with completely incompatible orders. The biggest way to mess up the predestination stuff is to send a Terminator back, have it survive into the future to fill Skynet in on what it learned, thus completely changing the next loop's mindset, and repeat indefinitely. And not only that, there's "time remmnant" Resistance members as well as we see with the divergent timelines Jesse and Derek are from!
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Apr 5, 2017 02:17
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