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selenakOh show, why so awesome?
This show has always been very literate, drawing on literature as much as the bible for its imagery and titles - just think of Goodbye to all that, aka Robert Graves' WWI memoirs, for its episode centried around once and future soldiers, and the many Wizard of Oz allusions. The title for this week's episode comes from one of Virginia Woolf's most famous works, centred around temporility and psychological exploration of a family, transience; by the time the much longed and planned for trip to the lighthouse, imagined as the perfect haven and moment of happiness, finally takes place, WWI has happened, several characters are dead. And yet there is achievement; Lily, one of the characters, finally finishes her painting, realising that whatever legacy she might or might not leave is not as important then executing her vision, completing this painting in the here and now.
Sarah and John had only ever had temporary havens, not least because of what's following them, inevitably. At the start of this show, in the pilot, we find them in such a temporary sort-of-paradise; Sarah seems to be in love with Charley who love her, and whom John loves as well. But Sarah's nightmares persist, both the dreams and the real nightmare made out of steel, and she runs away with John again before it can come down around her. At the start of this season, Charley still thinks he can help them, in his capacity as a healer, patching Sarah and John up; after one third of s2, he has lost his wife, and the last we saw of him was in a floor of a hospital, devastated, as John attempted to comfort him. Now we meet him again (and discover Sarah found him a new place to live though she hadn't visited him there so far, trying to keep death away from him), and the show goes out of its way to paint the lighthouse as an idyllic place; blue sky, there's a dog, John is clearly happy to see Charley again though troubled his mother brought him there, and Charley while still scarred from the past and insisting he has nothing left to give to Sarah at first becomes all compassion when she in that kind of silent gesture this show does so well puts his medic's hand on her breast and lets him feel the knot there. It's fitting Charley is the first one Sarah confides in about her cancer fear which seems to have become reality at first. We get a kind of family breakfeast. The audience is invited to wonder whether she intends to leave John here, in this longed for idyll from the past, or even intends to stay herself, especially since she wants to seperate him from Cameron and Derek both now, distrusting both of them. (And btw, no wonder Sarah is massively pissed off at Derek for the whole Jesse thing; also no wonder John sees this differently.) But at the same time, we wait for hell to come after the Connors, and hell surely does.
"People matter, they're all that matters, never forget that," Sarah says to John, right after telling him he shouldn't trust Derek and Cameron anymore. And there you have the paradox of Sarah and the lessons she teaches her son, in direct conflict with each other. Through the episode, we get flashbacks to a time uncovered by movies and tv show alike so far, John's early childhood, and they are all centered around this theme as well. John the small child admires a bird for its beauty, and Sarah takes him away from this because he's supposed to focus on survival business, but when he calls the training training, it appalls her, and she wants him to think of it as a game, to make it easier for him. She wants to train him to survive under all circumstances, so she dissappears and leaves him in the night (with his charge being to track her down); but when she suddenly loses sight of him and becomes the one to search him, only to discover her son has actually managed to accomplish not just the task she set but improve on it (having dissappeared and snuck up on her), it shakes her as much as it much her proud. She wants John to become the ultimate survivor, and she wants him to remain human, but she doesn't know how he can manage both, and he doesn't know either. Sarah, who is great at connecting with strangers but only so far - she listens to their stories but rarely if ever tells them something about herself - isn't always capable of managing both herself. When she returns to the lighthouse at the end, having discovered the trap her enemies set just in time to escape herself, she finds her son has escaped as well (or has he? he's not here at any rare, and he's not dead, and because of the parallel nature of the flashback, I'm assuming he escaped as opposed to getting captured) - but Charley, one of the few people both Sarah and John allowed themselves to love and open up to, is dead. When lesson will this teach?
Meanwhile, Derek, after getting the cold shoulder from Sarah, also gets a metaphorical punch in the gut from Cameron as she casually reveals that Jesse in their past/future had been pregnant and miscarried. We still don't know whether or not Derek killed Jesse last episode, of course. Either way, it's news that both gives him a major reason for Jesse's transformation and simultanously gives and takes away fatherhood. Cameron draws a parallel in her statement between Jesse, Derek and the unborn child on the one hand, and Sarah and John on the other, indicating Cameron's growing understanding of human emotions. But the real parallel family to the Connors is in another plot thread.
The goings on around John Henry kept overturning my expectations in jawdropping ways. First I thought the crucial element here was Savannah's innocent statement "we can change the rules" which teaches John Henry that he can go against his programming; then when Mersh mentioned that switching John Henry off equalled the experience of slow death for him and we got the Golgatha quote "my god, why hast thou forsaken me?", I thought that this was THE experience, the one that turned Skynet against humanity, the experience of fear and lashing out in same. And then, of course, we got the mother of all revelations, to wit, that John Henry might not be Skynet after all, because there is a second sophisticated AI around, based on Dyson's original work, which already has infiltrated 80% of the world's computers and is trying to infiltrate and attack John Henry, who calls it its brother and says it wants to survive. All of this also seems to be connected to what is going on in the Sarah and John as well as in the Derek and Cameron plot threads, since Sarah discovers the knot in her breast isn't a tumour but the result of an implant given to her during her recent kidnapping, and used to track her down (upon which she does an Irina Derevko to escape), while the guys who capture Derek and try to extract Cameron's chip have Terminator schematics available they can only have gotten from Skynet.
Right now, I see various possibilities:
a) Future Skynet, having gotten wind from what Catherine Weaver is trying to do with John Henry - who is its younger self , but altered now - , has transported enough of itself to the past to try and counteract Weaver as well as do the usual old goal of trying to take out the Connors; this is why John Henry recognises they both share some basics (they used to be identical but are now from different timelines)
or
b) John Henry is not future Skynet, and the network attacking/infiltrating right now isn't future Skynet, either, but it IS current day baby Skynet, developed from some prototype both Dyson and Sarah missed.
More immediate questions: now that John Henry has gone through an experience which is equalled with starvation and slow death, does he still trust Ellison and/or Weaver? Or will he ally with his "brother", seeing his survival threatened by the people with the power to switch him off? I think it depends on how strong whatever ties formed between John Henry and his "family" of Ellison/Weaver/Savannah are, and what consequences he draws from Savannah's lesson that one can change the rules, which don't necessarily have to be bad ones (changing the rules, being flexible, would have saved the Jimmy Carter if Queeg had been able to do it and confide in Jesse, for example), but could be.
Lastly: the whole "brother" talk also made me think of how the show keeps paralleling John Connor and John Henry, both as future saviour/doom figures, with the potential of being both, and in one future engaged in a giant chess match. And much as I wonder when Catherine Weaver and Sarah will meet, I want a John C. and John H. meeting. (Savannah equals Cameron in a way, but Derek and Ellison don't match really, not least because Ellison is more of a Cameron parallel in that they both teach about their nature - human and robot respectively - to the two Johns by example - plus the father figure aspects are divided betwen Derek and Charley anyway.) And of course I want to know whether Jesse is alive or dead!
This show has always been very literate, drawing on literature as much as the bible for its imagery and titles - just think of Goodbye to all that, aka Robert Graves' WWI memoirs, for its episode centried around once and future soldiers, and the many Wizard of Oz allusions. The title for this week's episode comes from one of Virginia Woolf's most famous works, centred around temporility and psychological exploration of a family, transience; by the time the much longed and planned for trip to the lighthouse, imagined as the perfect haven and moment of happiness, finally takes place, WWI has happened, several characters are dead. And yet there is achievement; Lily, one of the characters, finally finishes her painting, realising that whatever legacy she might or might not leave is not as important then executing her vision, completing this painting in the here and now.
Sarah and John had only ever had temporary havens, not least because of what's following them, inevitably. At the start of this show, in the pilot, we find them in such a temporary sort-of-paradise; Sarah seems to be in love with Charley who love her, and whom John loves as well. But Sarah's nightmares persist, both the dreams and the real nightmare made out of steel, and she runs away with John again before it can come down around her. At the start of this season, Charley still thinks he can help them, in his capacity as a healer, patching Sarah and John up; after one third of s2, he has lost his wife, and the last we saw of him was in a floor of a hospital, devastated, as John attempted to comfort him. Now we meet him again (and discover Sarah found him a new place to live though she hadn't visited him there so far, trying to keep death away from him), and the show goes out of its way to paint the lighthouse as an idyllic place; blue sky, there's a dog, John is clearly happy to see Charley again though troubled his mother brought him there, and Charley while still scarred from the past and insisting he has nothing left to give to Sarah at first becomes all compassion when she in that kind of silent gesture this show does so well puts his medic's hand on her breast and lets him feel the knot there. It's fitting Charley is the first one Sarah confides in about her cancer fear which seems to have become reality at first. We get a kind of family breakfeast. The audience is invited to wonder whether she intends to leave John here, in this longed for idyll from the past, or even intends to stay herself, especially since she wants to seperate him from Cameron and Derek both now, distrusting both of them. (And btw, no wonder Sarah is massively pissed off at Derek for the whole Jesse thing; also no wonder John sees this differently.) But at the same time, we wait for hell to come after the Connors, and hell surely does.
"People matter, they're all that matters, never forget that," Sarah says to John, right after telling him he shouldn't trust Derek and Cameron anymore. And there you have the paradox of Sarah and the lessons she teaches her son, in direct conflict with each other. Through the episode, we get flashbacks to a time uncovered by movies and tv show alike so far, John's early childhood, and they are all centered around this theme as well. John the small child admires a bird for its beauty, and Sarah takes him away from this because he's supposed to focus on survival business, but when he calls the training training, it appalls her, and she wants him to think of it as a game, to make it easier for him. She wants to train him to survive under all circumstances, so she dissappears and leaves him in the night (with his charge being to track her down); but when she suddenly loses sight of him and becomes the one to search him, only to discover her son has actually managed to accomplish not just the task she set but improve on it (having dissappeared and snuck up on her), it shakes her as much as it much her proud. She wants John to become the ultimate survivor, and she wants him to remain human, but she doesn't know how he can manage both, and he doesn't know either. Sarah, who is great at connecting with strangers but only so far - she listens to their stories but rarely if ever tells them something about herself - isn't always capable of managing both herself. When she returns to the lighthouse at the end, having discovered the trap her enemies set just in time to escape herself, she finds her son has escaped as well (or has he? he's not here at any rare, and he's not dead, and because of the parallel nature of the flashback, I'm assuming he escaped as opposed to getting captured) - but Charley, one of the few people both Sarah and John allowed themselves to love and open up to, is dead. When lesson will this teach?
Meanwhile, Derek, after getting the cold shoulder from Sarah, also gets a metaphorical punch in the gut from Cameron as she casually reveals that Jesse in their past/future had been pregnant and miscarried. We still don't know whether or not Derek killed Jesse last episode, of course. Either way, it's news that both gives him a major reason for Jesse's transformation and simultanously gives and takes away fatherhood. Cameron draws a parallel in her statement between Jesse, Derek and the unborn child on the one hand, and Sarah and John on the other, indicating Cameron's growing understanding of human emotions. But the real parallel family to the Connors is in another plot thread.
The goings on around John Henry kept overturning my expectations in jawdropping ways. First I thought the crucial element here was Savannah's innocent statement "we can change the rules" which teaches John Henry that he can go against his programming; then when Mersh mentioned that switching John Henry off equalled the experience of slow death for him and we got the Golgatha quote "my god, why hast thou forsaken me?", I thought that this was THE experience, the one that turned Skynet against humanity, the experience of fear and lashing out in same. And then, of course, we got the mother of all revelations, to wit, that John Henry might not be Skynet after all, because there is a second sophisticated AI around, based on Dyson's original work, which already has infiltrated 80% of the world's computers and is trying to infiltrate and attack John Henry, who calls it its brother and says it wants to survive. All of this also seems to be connected to what is going on in the Sarah and John as well as in the Derek and Cameron plot threads, since Sarah discovers the knot in her breast isn't a tumour but the result of an implant given to her during her recent kidnapping, and used to track her down (upon which she does an Irina Derevko to escape), while the guys who capture Derek and try to extract Cameron's chip have Terminator schematics available they can only have gotten from Skynet.
Right now, I see various possibilities:
a) Future Skynet, having gotten wind from what Catherine Weaver is trying to do with John Henry - who is its younger self , but altered now - , has transported enough of itself to the past to try and counteract Weaver as well as do the usual old goal of trying to take out the Connors; this is why John Henry recognises they both share some basics (they used to be identical but are now from different timelines)
or
b) John Henry is not future Skynet, and the network attacking/infiltrating right now isn't future Skynet, either, but it IS current day baby Skynet, developed from some prototype both Dyson and Sarah missed.
More immediate questions: now that John Henry has gone through an experience which is equalled with starvation and slow death, does he still trust Ellison and/or Weaver? Or will he ally with his "brother", seeing his survival threatened by the people with the power to switch him off? I think it depends on how strong whatever ties formed between John Henry and his "family" of Ellison/Weaver/Savannah are, and what consequences he draws from Savannah's lesson that one can change the rules, which don't necessarily have to be bad ones (changing the rules, being flexible, would have saved the Jimmy Carter if Queeg had been able to do it and confide in Jesse, for example), but could be.
Lastly: the whole "brother" talk also made me think of how the show keeps paralleling John Connor and John Henry, both as future saviour/doom figures, with the potential of being both, and in one future engaged in a giant chess match. And much as I wonder when Catherine Weaver and Sarah will meet, I want a John C. and John H. meeting. (Savannah equals Cameron in a way, but Derek and Ellison don't match really, not least because Ellison is more of a Cameron parallel in that they both teach about their nature - human and robot respectively - to the two Johns by example - plus the father figure aspects are divided betwen Derek and Charley anyway.) And of course I want to know whether Jesse is alive or dead!
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 10:00 am (UTC)the guys who capture Derek and try to extract Cameron's chip have Terminator schematics available they can only have gotten from Skynet.
I was quite interested in the "How do you know this?... Your brother?" comment the guy made when he was about to cut into Cameron's head to remove her chip. It's so totally random, unless he was getting orders directly from the AI that infiltrated John Henry, ie. JH is the brother who gave it the information about how to disable a Terminator permanently.
So I'm tending towards your theory (b), that neither AI are Skynet yet (although as soon as I heard the word "brother" I started imagining a Neuromancer/Wintermute scenario where the two brother AI's have to merge in order to become a superintelligence), but that the other AI learned about the designs of the Terminators from the future through John Henry, who still has memory left from Cromartie.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 10:28 am (UTC)Oohhh, that is intriguing. Though if so Cromartie can't have been JH's source because Ellison delivered the body without the chip (which the Connors did destroy), and the chip contained all of Cromartie's memories. But JH could know via Weaver; after all, he can access all her files, and she could have that particular information stored somewhere. (Incidentally, something I'm curious about is whether Catherine Weaver herself could interface with John Henry if she wanted to, because her body is different from the other Terminators in its fluidity - does she have a chip as such? Can she be linked to a computer?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 12:09 pm (UTC)Yes, that was the impression I got, as well - that the guy cutting into Cameron was getting the schematics from Skynet, and Skynet told him that it got them from its brother. (From the earlier episode where Sarah was captured by the guy she thought she'd killed, I got the impression that these people might not actually know that their bosses are machines; they just think that they are following orders from some larger corporation that they work for.)
But I don't think it was necessary for JH to consciously tell Skynet how to disable a Terminator. JH is in Cromartie's body, and Skynet invaded that body and had a plenty of time to explore it. (Skynet was inside JH for least a minute our time, so by Dr. Merch's argument about time being different for computers, it would have had more than enough time for Skynet to learn everything there was to know about JH's body.) Cromartie's body might have been damaged, and the original Cromartie chip might have been missing, but I think that would probably have been enough for a computer as advanced as Skynet to figure out the original schematics of the terminators.
On the other hand, the fact that it needed to rely on JH for Terminator schematics implies to me that it's not from the future, but from the present, a baby Skynet who is trying to survive. Future Skynet would probably already have Terminator schematics, after all. And remember, Andy Goode used to work for Myles Dyson (which was how Sarah found him in the first place), so he probably based the original Turk on his work with Dyson, so it makes sense that their codes would appear related.
This also fits with the possibility of there being a separate non-Skynet machine faction in the future that will be fighting, if not on the same side as Future!John Connor, but with similar enough apparent goals that Future!John will think that there is a chance that they might agree to become allies. John Henry might not be Skynet, but the future head of that other machine faction that John Connor sent the Jimmy Carter to.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 12:40 pm (UTC)This also fits with the possibility of there being a separate non-Skynet machine faction in the future that will be fighting, if not on the same side as Future!John Connor, but with similar enough apparent goals that Future!John will think that there is a chance that they might agree to become allies. John Henry might not be Skynet, but the future head of that other machine faction that John Connor sent the Jimmy Carter to.
*nods eagerly* I had wondered in the previous episode whether the Terminator from the box was identical with Weaver, but it hadn't occured to me then that John Henry might also be around in the future as something other than Skynet. Now that definitely looks like a possibility. If so, would Cameron now? (Since we now know current day Cameron came from a timeline where she left after the Jimmy Carter incident, not before, as evidenced from her remembering her conversation with Jesse.)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-30 07:54 pm (UTC)Which really blew my mind. Given the radical divergences between the two timelines, how likely is it that they both include that same conversation? I'm still trying to work out the temporal mechanics of it.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 06:15 am (UTC)- gets created by Skynet, modelled on Allison, to infiltrate the Resistance
- gets reprogrammed by John and becomes his confidante (whether or not this John has had Cameron in his adolescence as well is up for debate, but this is the first time Cameron meets him from her pov)
- John sends Derek Reese back while the Jimmy Carter is on its mission; stuff happens
- Cameron has that debriefing with Jesse; Jesse finds Riley and travels back with her in time
- John sends Cameron back to his younger self and Sarah.
While we the audience met Cameron first she must have travelled back after Derek and Jesse, because neither of them, while coming from different timelines, remembers John being without her.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-31 10:10 am (UTC)Since in Cameron's timeline John and Sarah didn't jump ahead into the future (we know this because of Sarah's cancer) I'd have to wonder what Cameron and John ended up doing during his teenage years, if they met then, if not that.
While we the audience met Cameron first she must have travelled back after Derek and Jesse, because neither of them, while coming from different timelines, remembers John being without her.
I'm not sure what you mean by this--clearly Cameron can only have travelled back from one timeline (the T3ish one where Sarah dies from cancer) as there aren't three versions of Cameron running around, each remembering Judgment Day as having happened at a different date, So in Derek and Jessie's timelines, Cameron doesn't travel back in time at all--she doesn't need to. Similarly, in Derek's timeline Jessie doesn't travel back, and in Jessie's timeline Derek doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-29 01:49 am (UTC)Right. Future!Skynet did build and design the Terminators.
From the earlier episode where Sarah was captured by the guy she thought she'd killed, I got the impression that these people might not actually know that their bosses are machines
You know, I considered the possibility that maybe we've got the two AI's mixed up - that it might be John Henry who is behind the attacks on Sarah and John, and who is referring to the other AI (Skynet) as his "brother", all the while keeping everything from Weaver. But then I get stuck on motivation. All the same, I think it's too early to consider John Henry "safe".
Rewatching the episode, I noticed the timing of the John Henry incident in relation to the attacks on the Connors was interesting. Someone implanted Sarah with a transmitter, but why did they wait until this episode to take out a hit on her and John? Instead, the attacks happened after JH was infiltrated, and also after JH came back online. If the voice on the phone giving orders was Skynet or a proto version of Skynet, it must have learned something from John Henry that initiated the attacks: maybe it was Weaver who planted the tracer to begin with; or maybe baby!Skynet wasn't aware of John Connor's importance until JH/Weaver's files told him. And if the voice was not Skynet, but John Henry, the decision to kill John and Sarah looks almost like a reaction to having experienced "death" and wanting to avoid any possibility of that happening again.