Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

[lifeonqueen]

The short version: fuck me, we're in some shit now, eh?

The long version:

Well, we've had two episodes of name-taking and machine-kicking, time for a campfire scene.

1) When last we saw Derek Reese, he was bleeding out on Sarah Connor's kitchen island while Sarah and former fiancee, EMT Charlie Dixon, shared a Meaningful Look™. "Dungeons & Dragons" (1x06) picks up where we left off with Charlie, having gotten Derek breathing again, attempting to multitask by patching up Reese's lung while taking Sarah on a guilt-trip. Unfortunately for him, he's trying to guilt the Mother of All Destiny - when she says it's complicated, she's not fucking around.

2) "Dungeons & Dragons" picks up the thematic threads from "The Turk" where Sarah and John both, separately, faced the limits of what they can and will do to defeat Skynet. Both, ultimately, rejected the idea that murder or allowing someone to die is an acceptable trade even when billions of lives are one the line. It's like the question about going back in time to kill Hitler's parents, then his grandparents, then their great-grandparents - it it's acceptable to take one life, is it acceptable to take 10, 100, 1,000? Where do you stop and how do you draw the line? And once you've crossed it, what separates you from the bad guys?

That's essentially the message, if you like, of TERMINATOR 2 - that what separates humanity from machines is our ability to recognize and make a moral choice when presented with one. Once you lose that, the argument goes, you're no better than the machines.

3) I want to know where Charlie got the know-how to put Reese back together. I know it's Bad TV Medicine 101 (including removing bullet fragments - why? They're self-sterilizing) but just once I'd like a discussion about how a paramedic knows enough to do surgery. I'd love to know how Charlie stopped the bleeding in Reese's lungs (apart from suctioning them and hoping it clotted) - people watch a lot of ER/GA/HOUSE and I think action/sf shows need to up their game when it comes to first aid/triage type situations. Or at the very least, run some of this shit past a medical advisor. OTOH, given that Charlie's an LA EMT, I'm sure he sees more gun trauma than the average Canadian trauma doc (which is why they go on exchanges to ERs in inner-city Cleveland) but EMT is about stabilizing and transporting more than treatment. Overall, it was a minor gripe but one of those niggly things that detracts from an otherwise good hour (42 minutes) of TV.

4) I did like the Sarah is not some sort of combat medicine whiz. There was griping on TWOP (and I'm sure elsewhere) but one of the things I hate most is people who get bent out of shape because our hero is not best at everything. The answer to "What would Sarah do if JOHN were shot?" is obvious - get him to the best medical attention she find and have him treated - even if it means putting a gun to the doctor's head to do it. If it were John, Sarah would never fuck around trying to treat anything more serious than a graze herself - he's too important. His survival is essential; if it's John, they don't have the luxury of hiding out and hoping he'll pull through.

This is also why Sarah's approach to John's health is proactive - don't let him get shot in the first place.

That said, I'm sure that Sarah knows basic first aid in the field - presumably she's the one who patched or directed John to patch her up after T2 - play with guns long enough in the jungle and you'll learn what a gunshot is like. But I don't have a problem with sucking chest wounds and internal bleeding being beyond her scope. Or computer tech, for that matter.

4) Welcome to the Future, Population - um, Significantly Less. THE TERMINATOR was shot for $6.5 million dollars (say $20-30 million in today's money), so Cameron's vision of the future was commensurately low-fi, which translates well to TV. Better in many ways than straight-sf shows where anything filmed on a temp set or location looks cheap or fake in comparison or out-of-place. That said, a terminator torture facility in what looks like Emily Gilmore's living room is a bit... odd. However, nothing bugged me quite so much as the amount of noise the resistance squad was making as they moved around. I can wank that they figured they were in the clear but could they have made more noise as they climbed out of the bunker? I mean dude.

5) Hello Lucky (in more ways than one). I'm not sure I'm sold on Jonathan Jackson as Kyle Reese. On the one hand, he doesn't look hard enough. OTOH, the character was meant to have been in his very early 20s in The Terminator but mostly, he wasn't onscreen for long enough for me to decide one way or another. Also the patrol scenes where the weakest part of the episode because they were the one thing (apart from the photo of Young!Sarah) that I couldn't help compare to the original. The director, Jeffrey G. Hunt, has done a bunch of CSIs (original flavour and NY) and some Close to Home. His direction was serviceable but he doesn't make me believe that these guys are veteran soldiers on patrol in enemy territory, which leaves a bit of a hole in the episode.

6) Even so - KYLE REESE!

7) KYLE REESE'S PICTURE OF SARAH CONNOR!

Part of me wishes they could have resisted showing up the photo of Sarah Connor - how many people do they think are watching this show who've never seen a TERMINATOR flick? We established in the last episode and in the dialogue that it's Sarah's pic, there's really no reason to show it (either time). In The Terminator, Cameron uses the picture to suggest that Kyle's interest in Sarah is more than professional so his profession of love doesn't come out of left field. The epilogue, where we see the picture's origin, refers back to Kyle's story about wondering what she was thinking of when the picture was taken. The answer - him. But presented out-of-context as in the ep, it just seems a bit unnecessary. Especially since that photo was presumably left behind in 1999, which begs another whole set of questions.

8) "It's Connor's mother. I don't get why he'd give you that." I love how Derek's "especially to wank perv over" is left unspoken but heavily implied. The dynamic this episode sets up between Derek and Kyle and Derek and John Connor is interesting. So Kyle and John were in a work camp together but not Derek. Now kid brother Kyle is famous for helping John Connor escape and is friends with the big man and Derek is, I think, torn between jealousy and guilt. Jealous both of Kyle's relationship with Connor and his obsession with the Connor legend and, I'm guessing, guilty for not being with Kyle in the camp in the first place. Derek is constantly questioning John Connor throughout the episode, which leads me to believe that Derek took his squad off-mission almost as soon as they arrived in 2007.

9) "Homicidal paranoid schizophrenic with an acute dislike for anything mechanical" - 50 per cent is actually a better result than most FBI profiles. That said, for two guys who did most of their work on ANDROMEDA (a show best used to induce vomiting), there's a lot of dialogue in this episode that snaps. Most of it in the Camp Connor scenes, however. Like "Heavy Metal", the episode suffers every time the main cast is off-screen. The scenes in the House of Pain are important to the overall plot but we don't care about Derek as an individual enough to be invested in torture he survives - we care about what he represents to John and Sarah, and the scene where he wakes up screaming for Kyle is ouchy.

10) The blood donor scene nicely places John as the median point between Sarah and Cameron, point of synthesis or balance between extremes.

11) "Billy" Wisher was Jim Cameron's writing partner on T2 and is credited with additional dialogue for THE TERMINATOR.

12) Okay, the TSCC is never bad but it has moments that just don't transcend the genre the way I want them to - the med and patrol scenes for example - but then it surprises me with things like Andy Goode being part of Derek's patrol. I honestly hadn't recognized him with that muppet pasted to his chin and his confession about the development of Skynet was creepy - "It got angry and scared and I couldn't reassure it." Computer's shouldn't have moods. It's bad enough my WiFI connection is tetchy.

13) The repeated characterization of the Turk and now Skynet as a child has to be deliberate, which makes me wonder about Cameron. Without woobifying the terminator, Sarah is arguably Cameron's parent, responsible for her socialization, a responsibility that she seems very unwilling to shoulder. Nevertheless, like a parent, not wanting it does not absolve you from from the responsibility for what you create. However forced on her Cameron may be, on some level, she's Sarah's problem to solve.

As for Cam, whether her somewhat adolescent response to Sarah and what seems to be approval-seeking is just imitating John's behaviours or something else is a BIG question. Cameron's irritated to be sent out of the kitchen and passive-aggressive with Charlie. She obviously doesn't want the boys around, which is the point at which I would put on my slash goggles if I had any. But then we get what I hope isn't a HAL2000 moment when Cameron swears to destroy all the T-888 components and then pockets the chip.

There are two possibilities - she's acting under prior orders or she's developing her own agenda. What I don't think is happening is that the Summernator has gone bad or is some sort of Skynet sleeper agent (although since we know there were at least 3 T-800 models that looked like Arnie, her presence in John Connor's HQ guarantees nothing). But between the coltan and the chip, I wonder if she's stockpiling her own terminator parts to build a T-800 to send back in time to ensure that John Connor is born once they wipe out Skynet to back up her hard-drive or something. Or, more likely, Cameron wants to see what files the terminator has one her (know thyself).

14) It's amusing to see that Cameron was John's "pet" terminator (assuming that it was her). As creepy as her announcement that "sometimes they go bad" (which was set-up by Cam's earlier revelation to Sarah that they scrub a terminator's memory to increase the chance of successfully reprogramming them - and boy, did Sarah love that nugget of intel) is, it does explain one more WTF moment from T3. In that movie (which was writing by flying buttmonkeys, I swear), we find out that John Connor was killed by an Arnie-model T-800 (possibly the one sent back to protect him). I never understood how a terminator model that everyone could recognize would get that close to the most important man on the planet. If a reprogrammed model snapped while inside the complex, OTOH...

15) I guess I was wrong last week, Derek does know how to duck but really does want to die being that he's all emo and guilt-ridden about his brother. Which means the emo does run in families and it's not John's fault. Like the lady said, "genetics are a bitch."

16) I think it was cofax who mentioned the interesting role of white males in TSCC and I wasn't surprised by the end of the episode to learn that Derek did kill Andy and lied to Sarah about it (explaining why he ran from her at the hotel). His "we can fix all the mistakes" has a terrible cowboy ring to it. That hubris, thinking you can make it all better, never leads anywhere good. I have this feeling that Derek Reese is an object lesson - who Sarah could have become without John to keep her anchored to her own humanity.

17) Speaking of Sarah, Lena Headey really knocked it out of the park this week, shifting her performance seamlessly from her girlish recollection of Kyle, to stern mother, to pissed-off soldier, to a sort of yearning resignation in her scenes with Charlie. She made me believe and believe utterly that Sarah was still in love with Kyle Reese and would always be - how could you not be in love with the man who crossed time for you, gave you a child, died for you. It's an awful big shadow. At the same time, I believe that Sarah does love Charlie, as much as they both know that their chance to be together has passed (albeit far longer ago for Charlie) - their scenes were tender but awfully mature about the whole thing (keeping in mind that there's no way in hell Charlie's going home to tell the wife how he spent his afternoon). It was practically un-sf that much maturity about a relationship.

18) Also good but slightly more clumsy in presentation was John's desire for a family, connection, the normal life that Charlie represnts. All John's ever had of his father are Sarah's stories, most of which are not suitable for viewers under 18. But Charlie and Derek are tangible and John's desperate to make a connection with both of them. Given the fact that Derek a) lied through his teeth to Sarah b) is apparently running a one-man hit team for Skynet Developers and c) resented John Connor - I can't imagine this is going to work out well for John. Which begs the question of why he sent Derek in the first place, leading to...

19) My theory of the time-travel in the TERMINATORverse - basically that when you go through, you go through with memories of knowledge of your life to that point and these remain constant. If your actions change your past, your memories stay the same because they have already happened in your past. So, Derek Reese goes through from a timeline affected by Kyle's trip to the past but not Cameron's because she goes through later. John Connor's memories, however, would change with each permutation... possibly it's better not to think about it but I believe that yes, Andy = Dead even thought Derek met him in the future. But it also means that there's a possibility of another timeline, one in which Sarah and John didn't jump forward, where Derek's not sent back and Andy lives to create Skynet but until John's sent Derek back, he can't know the effects of that decision because the timeline doesn't change until after he goes through. The exception to this rule would be sending Kyle because that action predates his own birth and the information comes from his mother. The only paradox there would be if he didn't send Kyle, I think. God... this is better left uncontemplated.

20) "He also left me an unborn son to whom he bequeathed what remained in the box when the nightmares fled: hope." Okay, it's purple as hell but it's also exactly what THE TERMINATOR is about when you get past the killer robots and the big guns and explosions - the hope that our children (actual and metaphorical) can make a better world.

Bonus: from last week's episode, we've got director Matt Earl Beesley leading us behind the scenes on the Cameron's take down of the T-888. Dude looks exactly like a guy named "Matt Earl" should.