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selenakAs with BSG, it's frustrating that this is a cliffhanger episode and I won't see the sequel for ten more days. However, oh, show, don't you dare get cancelled. Being ever so good.
We finally get Jesse's background from her own pov, not Derek's, which makes me believe she'll die in an episode or two. Pity; it's not that I like her, but she's intriguing. Also smart; see her way of coming up with something that would explain her bruises and cuts to Derek. The flashbacks are clearly working to a denoeuement explaining what caused Jesse to become as ruthless as she did in her mission to retroactively change John Connor to someone who would never trust any Terminator. At the moment, I suspect that alternate mission in her flashbacks - which are actually flash forwards, if you want to get technical with the timeline - will get all her people on the submarine killed. But there's probably even more to it than that, as this show tends to surprise me. Jesse in her personal past, while still the fellow warrior Derek also remembers, is pointedly different in that she's concerned for her crew, seems to have a bond with them all, and trusts the Connor-programmed "metal"; a reminder that just as she was Riley's tragedy, she had her own.
If Ellison hasn't figured out yet that Catherine Weaver can't really be Catherine Weaver, Savannah's mother, I'm a tad disappointed in the show for making him deliberately obtuse in this regard. On the other hand, I loved pretty much else about this subplot; T-Catherine simultanously simply in-human - not cruel, just utterly lacking in what a human mother would feel - when Savannah is missing, and proud when John Henry exceeds his programming again, which oddly enough is also maternal; John Henry playing with Savannah, which manages to be chilling and adorable at the same time - in a way, they really are the same age - and Ellison going from outrage to teaching John Henry in what seems to work: classic parental guilt-tripping. (How could you do x, your brother/sister/friend could have gotten hurt!) Note that part of the lesson also is that keeping secrets can be harmful if someone else could be in danger through said secret. If Ellison hasn't figured it out yet, methinks John Henry will apply that lesson and inform him Catherine isn't human next.
If John Henry and Savannah are both children, John Connor and Cameron are and are not adolescents. I so love that show simply never allows us to think of Cameron as "harmless", whether via by gags like her "there is a 51% chance I wouldn't have killed you!" statement to the bird or far more serious stuff like the mindgame she plays with John on the phone. Whether or not Cameron thinks of it like this is another question. She could simply have done what she said - tried to be convincing as Riley so Riley's foster parents would assume she's still alive and not send the police the "Baum" family's way before the Connors have a chance to leave and wipe out their traces. Or she could have been deliberately manipulative. Or she could have stated the truth. Or all of the above. But it was cruel. Sarah, when bringing up Cameron's identical statement from the season opener, misses the point, though, as she leaves out the second part of that statement. It's not that John trusts Cameron completely (he doesn't), or that he believes she loves him (I think he does believe it, though he's not sure just what love means to her); but as Cameron said back then, he loves her, too. It occurs to me that Jesse's insistence (when talking to Derek) that John should kill Cameron himself could be about more than changing teenage John so adult John would never trust Cameron to begin with; it could be meant as a punishment.
The scene with Riley's dead body in the mortuary is another great layered moment. On the one hand, it's about saying goodbye to a dead girl he was in love with. On the other, Sarah didn't raise a stupid son, and John finds the blood under Riley's fingernails and the bruises and scratches on her body, and seems to put 2 and 2 together; Riley didn't die fighting a Terminator (he's seen Cameron kill often enough to know how she does it), she died fighting a human being. It seems this particular game of hide-and-seek is about to be over. (When I get this season dvd, I'm going to check whether John Henry's and Catherine's remarks about hide-and-seek-games, and clues, can be applied to the show as a whole; it seemed like a very meta scene, and not just for the Ellison subplot.)
We finally get Jesse's background from her own pov, not Derek's, which makes me believe she'll die in an episode or two. Pity; it's not that I like her, but she's intriguing. Also smart; see her way of coming up with something that would explain her bruises and cuts to Derek. The flashbacks are clearly working to a denoeuement explaining what caused Jesse to become as ruthless as she did in her mission to retroactively change John Connor to someone who would never trust any Terminator. At the moment, I suspect that alternate mission in her flashbacks - which are actually flash forwards, if you want to get technical with the timeline - will get all her people on the submarine killed. But there's probably even more to it than that, as this show tends to surprise me. Jesse in her personal past, while still the fellow warrior Derek also remembers, is pointedly different in that she's concerned for her crew, seems to have a bond with them all, and trusts the Connor-programmed "metal"; a reminder that just as she was Riley's tragedy, she had her own.
If Ellison hasn't figured out yet that Catherine Weaver can't really be Catherine Weaver, Savannah's mother, I'm a tad disappointed in the show for making him deliberately obtuse in this regard. On the other hand, I loved pretty much else about this subplot; T-Catherine simultanously simply in-human - not cruel, just utterly lacking in what a human mother would feel - when Savannah is missing, and proud when John Henry exceeds his programming again, which oddly enough is also maternal; John Henry playing with Savannah, which manages to be chilling and adorable at the same time - in a way, they really are the same age - and Ellison going from outrage to teaching John Henry in what seems to work: classic parental guilt-tripping. (How could you do x, your brother/sister/friend could have gotten hurt!) Note that part of the lesson also is that keeping secrets can be harmful if someone else could be in danger through said secret. If Ellison hasn't figured it out yet, methinks John Henry will apply that lesson and inform him Catherine isn't human next.
If John Henry and Savannah are both children, John Connor and Cameron are and are not adolescents. I so love that show simply never allows us to think of Cameron as "harmless", whether via by gags like her "there is a 51% chance I wouldn't have killed you!" statement to the bird or far more serious stuff like the mindgame she plays with John on the phone. Whether or not Cameron thinks of it like this is another question. She could simply have done what she said - tried to be convincing as Riley so Riley's foster parents would assume she's still alive and not send the police the "Baum" family's way before the Connors have a chance to leave and wipe out their traces. Or she could have been deliberately manipulative. Or she could have stated the truth. Or all of the above. But it was cruel. Sarah, when bringing up Cameron's identical statement from the season opener, misses the point, though, as she leaves out the second part of that statement. It's not that John trusts Cameron completely (he doesn't), or that he believes she loves him (I think he does believe it, though he's not sure just what love means to her); but as Cameron said back then, he loves her, too. It occurs to me that Jesse's insistence (when talking to Derek) that John should kill Cameron himself could be about more than changing teenage John so adult John would never trust Cameron to begin with; it could be meant as a punishment.
The scene with Riley's dead body in the mortuary is another great layered moment. On the one hand, it's about saying goodbye to a dead girl he was in love with. On the other, Sarah didn't raise a stupid son, and John finds the blood under Riley's fingernails and the bruises and scratches on her body, and seems to put 2 and 2 together; Riley didn't die fighting a Terminator (he's seen Cameron kill often enough to know how she does it), she died fighting a human being. It seems this particular game of hide-and-seek is about to be over. (When I get this season dvd, I'm going to check whether John Henry's and Catherine's remarks about hide-and-seek-games, and clues, can be applied to the show as a whole; it seemed like a very meta scene, and not just for the Ellison subplot.)
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Date: 2009-03-15 01:12 am (UTC)English was just not made to deal with this show.
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Date: 2009-03-15 04:12 am (UTC)