Sarah Connor Chronicles Rewatch 2.1 - 2.4
Jun. 14th, 2010 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakNotes I made during the last week when the longing for a certain prematurely cancelled show made me get my s2 dvds out. I've rewatched individual episodes before, but this is the first systematic rewatch with the knowledge of the entire show in mind.
That opening narration they used for the first half of the season, introducing the characters, is as superflous as ever. I wish I could edit it out of the dvds.
Samson and Delilah has to be one of the strongest opening episodes of any season and any show. Recent memes asked about favourite pilots. Even tricker would be "favourite season openers of seasons not the first", because not many are that memorable. Deep Down, for Angel is an exception; and definitely Samson and Delilah. After a season of establishing Cameron as a trustworthy ally (albeit a dangerous one; s1 took care to show us her leaving the ballerina to her doom, and of course there's the question mark about Derek's experiences), opening with her reverting to her original programming and playing out the quintessential Terminator-chases-humans story of the franchise with Cameron as the Terminator in question was a masterstroke. It struck me again how much the show emphasizes the vulnerability of human bodies; both Sarah and John have broken bones, cuts and bleed all over the place as they run. Pain feels real in this universe, not least because it's not sexualized. Physical pain, but also emotional pain. Ellison, stunned from the death of his team and his own inexplicable survival; Sarah, to whom this episode has to be a double nightmare because it starts with a pair of human thugs getting the better of her, which leads to John killing for the first time, and goes on with Cameron, whom she might always have kept at an emotional distance but trusted enough to share codes and secrets with, becoming the oldest of all threats; and John, who finds out the hard way he can kill a human being to save his mother and himself, but not Cameron, who is a machine. "You know what she said was a trick," says Sarah, and emphasizes that "they can't feel love", but that's not the problem. (BTW, at the very least Cameron demonstrated fear and the wish to live, which hasn't been the case with previous Terminators. They wanted to complete their mission, of course, but they were following their programming; they didn't give the impression there was an "I" they wanted to preserve.) The problem is the unrefuted "and you love me", because he does, and he shouldn't, and he can't explain it away by a trick.
Cameron overrides the termination program: during the original broadcast, we couldn't be sure whether this was Cameron exerting free will for the first time or Cameron falling back on her secondary programming. Either way, though, it was only possible because John took the (incredible) risk of returning her chip and the gun to her. They are both Samson and Delilah, the roles of fighter and emotional Achilles heel keep switching, though I think it's significant for the overall characterisation - and one of the reasons why I love this show - that John's gesture is one traditionally gendered as feminine in action films and Cameron's as masculine; John acts on an emotional leap of faith, and by not only re-installing the chip but handing over the gun, he makes himself even more vulnerable, Cameron signals her return to the protector role by putting down the gun.
Catherine Weaver stating that if you give orders to humans, some inevitably will not follow them, but if you order a computer, it will fulfill them the same way, every time, so what is truly rare and what she needs is a machine that is able to exceed its programming and go against orders, if necessary: during first watching, we thought she was talking about Skynet, and possibly also Cameron. In retrospect, she's talking about developing the Turk into John Henry, and about herself.
Automatic for the People: after the mid-season revelation that Riley was from the future there were some people wondering whether it was a late retcon, but in retrospect, the show does give a few clues from the get go; her vocabulary, for starters, which contains expressions like "think of good things, carrots and apples" that make no sense for a present day high school girl but much sense for a girl who lives in an apocalyptic devastation where there is hardly any fresh food at all. (Same with her calling John "cat-fancy" an episode later.) Not to mention her ability to take the oddness of the "Baum" household, passwords and all, in stride. Knowing her fate, there is something tragic about Riley's determined upbeat-ness in her approach to John.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: SCC excelled at something so many shows with a threatening apocalypse on the horizon fail at: presenting the humanity its main characters want to save not as an anonymous mass but as people. Individuals. Both through the recurring supporting cast and through the one shot characters. No matter whether it's Kasey the pregnant neighbour or the doomed scientist at the nuclear power plant Sarah chats up, they all give you the impression of having their own story, their own lives instead of just being there to give the Connors their cue to speak. It's what makes this show so humane, in lack of a better term. Additionally, Sarah's ability to connect with strangers while keeping the people she lives with at arm's length fascinates me. It makes an odd kind of sense as a survival technique and a philosophy; this way, she doesn't lose sight of what she's fighting for beyond her son, plus it's really useful at infiltration, but she does not have to emotionally commit to those people, knowing she'll likely as not never see them again; she doesn't have to trust them. (It takes Sarah an entire season to talk about her fear of having cancer with Charley, and she only talks about with John after he asks point-blank; otoh, she's able to confess being spooked about cancer to the scientist. Not just because he's a cancer survivor, but because he doesn't know her, and he never will.)
Speaking of Charley: oh, Charley. Oh, Michelle. Ellison advising them to leave is another reason why I like Ellison and of the show's attention to detail: neither the characters nor the narrative forget the civilians, or ignore the danger they could be in. (Trivia sidenote: loved that Michelle isn't upset about the news Sarah is alive and in town but that Charley kept the killer machines on the rampage news from her. Hooray for stories avoiding clichés about women!)
The Mousetrap: I had forgotten the gag about the late George Lazlo, aka the hapless actor Cromartie modelled himself on, being in a Conan-the-Barbarian-like film started as early as that. (When John repairs and connects Kasey's tv.) Gareth Dillahunt's acting in this season is phenomenal, going from Cromartie to John Henry (and you're never in danger of confusing the two, despite both being machines), with these fun tidbits of a fake movie thrown in.
And again: oh, Charley and Michelle. Also, oh, Sarah. It's a beautiful showcase of both her vulnerability and her hardness (telling Michelle "Frankly, I thought this would be easier; I thought you would be dead"). Many shows have the "hero/heroine does everything, including morally grey/dark acts for their child" topos, and it's usually done in a way to invite us to sympathize with the character (Jack Bristow in Alias is a case in point). Stories where the dark side of this is also examined, the cost to other people, are rarer (Michael in Lost comes to mind). Episodes like The Mousetrap walk a tightrope between both, with the scene where Charley yells at Sarah to stop driving because Michelle is bleeding to death while she knows Cromartie is simultanously luring John into a trap being the climax, and you really don't know whether Sarah will keep driving or will stop. But stop she does.
It's an episode where the must gut wrenching moments are silent; John getting into the van, sitting down, then noticing the blood on the seat (Michelle's) and raising his hand covered in blood; John and Charley in the hospital floor; Charley and Ellison at the funeral. In retrospect, the scene with John awkardly hugging Charley until Charley breaks down and starts to cry has two more visual parallels later this season - Sarah's breakdown in Mr. Ferguson is dead and John's breakdown at the end of the Jessie two parter. (Michelle is of course only the first of the series of deaths surrounding the Connors this season.) Generally, neither Sarah nor John are the hugging type, though Charley is something of an exception (see also: The Lighthouse) for them both. My own impression is that this is because for Sarah, Charley symbolizes her old, pre-Terminators life which for a while she hoped she could get back, while for John, he's a parent figure in a way Derek can't be because Derek can't look at John without also seeing a) John Connor, Future Resistance Leader and b) Kyle's son, whereas Charley simply sees the kid he's grown to love. Or maybe it's because Charley (in another gender-cliché reversal the nurturing/healing character on this show) is immensely huggable. Either way, he's one of the very few characters the Connors reach out to and love, and admit to loving.
Allison from Palmdale: aka the one where Summer Glau gets to play human. I'm still not entirely sure whether the premise really works for me - i.e. that a glitch in Cameron's chip would leave her with damaged memories is fine, but that she reacts with pain at her supposed mother's denial of knowing her and with joy at the fun of game playing is a bit too much too early in terms of Cameron's development. But it's still an excellent episode, providing an explanation as to why Cameron looks the way she does (and starting a mystery - if Cameron originally met John Connor impersonating Allison, who named her Cameron? Did she name herself after her discovery? Did John?) - and continuing the show's investigation of what motherhood and a life in danger can mean when Sarah stays with Kasey at the hospital. Again, see above what I said about individualizing characters outside the main cast; the cop who is Kasey's boyfriend and Kasey's mixed feelings when it comes to raising a child with someone who has a dangerous profession might thematically echo and contrast Sarah's own life and choices, but they're also their own story.
In addition to everything else they are to each other, John and Cameron also have the dysfunctional siblings vibe from last season, in the way he covers for her here (though that has another dimension as well; if Sarah and Derek knew Cameron malfunctioned again so soon after the last disaster, there's no way they would let her stay or remain undestroyed).
I had forgotten that the backstory with Ellison's ex-wife involved children (or rather, did not), and that one of the first things Catherine Weaver asks Ellison is whether he wants one after watching him with Savannah. He really is auditioned that early on for his role re: John Henry in addition to her needing him to provide her with another Terminator body. The discussion about good and evil is also fascinating in hindsight; Ellison's insistence that the machines are not just destructive but evil (a term which allows for a deliberate choice) and Catherine Weaver's reply that if you take apart a machine, evil will not be what you find. Certainly to be good or evil (instead if simply following a program to kill or protect, whatever the programmer wants) there has to be free will, and one of the big questions this season is whether an artificial intelligence other than Skynet itself can have it. (Otoh, free will alone does not guarantee goodness; see also, most of human history.) By the end of the season, it looks like Cameron likely does; John Henry and Catherine Weaver herself as well. And the implication of this is vast, because while you cannot have a truce with machines whose only purpose is to kill you, you can with machines that are capable of finding other or additional goals. We'll never know for sure, but I think the show points towards the fact that while Judgment Day is inevitable, no matter how hard Sarah fights to avoid it, the extinction of the human race is not because the delay of Judgment Day by some years Sarah achieves and John's affinity to AIs means there is also time for various machines to come to their own, not-Skynet dependent conclusions, which results in Weaver and her own attempt to rewrite the past, not by destroying but by creating something new.
Trivia footnote: every time I watch a scene between Ellison and Catherine Weaver I am frustrated there is no fanfiction, because theirs is a fascinating relationship.
That opening narration they used for the first half of the season, introducing the characters, is as superflous as ever. I wish I could edit it out of the dvds.
Samson and Delilah has to be one of the strongest opening episodes of any season and any show. Recent memes asked about favourite pilots. Even tricker would be "favourite season openers of seasons not the first", because not many are that memorable. Deep Down, for Angel is an exception; and definitely Samson and Delilah. After a season of establishing Cameron as a trustworthy ally (albeit a dangerous one; s1 took care to show us her leaving the ballerina to her doom, and of course there's the question mark about Derek's experiences), opening with her reverting to her original programming and playing out the quintessential Terminator-chases-humans story of the franchise with Cameron as the Terminator in question was a masterstroke. It struck me again how much the show emphasizes the vulnerability of human bodies; both Sarah and John have broken bones, cuts and bleed all over the place as they run. Pain feels real in this universe, not least because it's not sexualized. Physical pain, but also emotional pain. Ellison, stunned from the death of his team and his own inexplicable survival; Sarah, to whom this episode has to be a double nightmare because it starts with a pair of human thugs getting the better of her, which leads to John killing for the first time, and goes on with Cameron, whom she might always have kept at an emotional distance but trusted enough to share codes and secrets with, becoming the oldest of all threats; and John, who finds out the hard way he can kill a human being to save his mother and himself, but not Cameron, who is a machine. "You know what she said was a trick," says Sarah, and emphasizes that "they can't feel love", but that's not the problem. (BTW, at the very least Cameron demonstrated fear and the wish to live, which hasn't been the case with previous Terminators. They wanted to complete their mission, of course, but they were following their programming; they didn't give the impression there was an "I" they wanted to preserve.) The problem is the unrefuted "and you love me", because he does, and he shouldn't, and he can't explain it away by a trick.
Cameron overrides the termination program: during the original broadcast, we couldn't be sure whether this was Cameron exerting free will for the first time or Cameron falling back on her secondary programming. Either way, though, it was only possible because John took the (incredible) risk of returning her chip and the gun to her. They are both Samson and Delilah, the roles of fighter and emotional Achilles heel keep switching, though I think it's significant for the overall characterisation - and one of the reasons why I love this show - that John's gesture is one traditionally gendered as feminine in action films and Cameron's as masculine; John acts on an emotional leap of faith, and by not only re-installing the chip but handing over the gun, he makes himself even more vulnerable, Cameron signals her return to the protector role by putting down the gun.
Catherine Weaver stating that if you give orders to humans, some inevitably will not follow them, but if you order a computer, it will fulfill them the same way, every time, so what is truly rare and what she needs is a machine that is able to exceed its programming and go against orders, if necessary: during first watching, we thought she was talking about Skynet, and possibly also Cameron. In retrospect, she's talking about developing the Turk into John Henry, and about herself.
Automatic for the People: after the mid-season revelation that Riley was from the future there were some people wondering whether it was a late retcon, but in retrospect, the show does give a few clues from the get go; her vocabulary, for starters, which contains expressions like "think of good things, carrots and apples" that make no sense for a present day high school girl but much sense for a girl who lives in an apocalyptic devastation where there is hardly any fresh food at all. (Same with her calling John "cat-fancy" an episode later.) Not to mention her ability to take the oddness of the "Baum" household, passwords and all, in stride. Knowing her fate, there is something tragic about Riley's determined upbeat-ness in her approach to John.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: SCC excelled at something so many shows with a threatening apocalypse on the horizon fail at: presenting the humanity its main characters want to save not as an anonymous mass but as people. Individuals. Both through the recurring supporting cast and through the one shot characters. No matter whether it's Kasey the pregnant neighbour or the doomed scientist at the nuclear power plant Sarah chats up, they all give you the impression of having their own story, their own lives instead of just being there to give the Connors their cue to speak. It's what makes this show so humane, in lack of a better term. Additionally, Sarah's ability to connect with strangers while keeping the people she lives with at arm's length fascinates me. It makes an odd kind of sense as a survival technique and a philosophy; this way, she doesn't lose sight of what she's fighting for beyond her son, plus it's really useful at infiltration, but she does not have to emotionally commit to those people, knowing she'll likely as not never see them again; she doesn't have to trust them. (It takes Sarah an entire season to talk about her fear of having cancer with Charley, and she only talks about with John after he asks point-blank; otoh, she's able to confess being spooked about cancer to the scientist. Not just because he's a cancer survivor, but because he doesn't know her, and he never will.)
Speaking of Charley: oh, Charley. Oh, Michelle. Ellison advising them to leave is another reason why I like Ellison and of the show's attention to detail: neither the characters nor the narrative forget the civilians, or ignore the danger they could be in. (Trivia sidenote: loved that Michelle isn't upset about the news Sarah is alive and in town but that Charley kept the killer machines on the rampage news from her. Hooray for stories avoiding clichés about women!)
The Mousetrap: I had forgotten the gag about the late George Lazlo, aka the hapless actor Cromartie modelled himself on, being in a Conan-the-Barbarian-like film started as early as that. (When John repairs and connects Kasey's tv.) Gareth Dillahunt's acting in this season is phenomenal, going from Cromartie to John Henry (and you're never in danger of confusing the two, despite both being machines), with these fun tidbits of a fake movie thrown in.
And again: oh, Charley and Michelle. Also, oh, Sarah. It's a beautiful showcase of both her vulnerability and her hardness (telling Michelle "Frankly, I thought this would be easier; I thought you would be dead"). Many shows have the "hero/heroine does everything, including morally grey/dark acts for their child" topos, and it's usually done in a way to invite us to sympathize with the character (Jack Bristow in Alias is a case in point). Stories where the dark side of this is also examined, the cost to other people, are rarer (Michael in Lost comes to mind). Episodes like The Mousetrap walk a tightrope between both, with the scene where Charley yells at Sarah to stop driving because Michelle is bleeding to death while she knows Cromartie is simultanously luring John into a trap being the climax, and you really don't know whether Sarah will keep driving or will stop. But stop she does.
It's an episode where the must gut wrenching moments are silent; John getting into the van, sitting down, then noticing the blood on the seat (Michelle's) and raising his hand covered in blood; John and Charley in the hospital floor; Charley and Ellison at the funeral. In retrospect, the scene with John awkardly hugging Charley until Charley breaks down and starts to cry has two more visual parallels later this season - Sarah's breakdown in Mr. Ferguson is dead and John's breakdown at the end of the Jessie two parter. (Michelle is of course only the first of the series of deaths surrounding the Connors this season.) Generally, neither Sarah nor John are the hugging type, though Charley is something of an exception (see also: The Lighthouse) for them both. My own impression is that this is because for Sarah, Charley symbolizes her old, pre-Terminators life which for a while she hoped she could get back, while for John, he's a parent figure in a way Derek can't be because Derek can't look at John without also seeing a) John Connor, Future Resistance Leader and b) Kyle's son, whereas Charley simply sees the kid he's grown to love. Or maybe it's because Charley (in another gender-cliché reversal the nurturing/healing character on this show) is immensely huggable. Either way, he's one of the very few characters the Connors reach out to and love, and admit to loving.
Allison from Palmdale: aka the one where Summer Glau gets to play human. I'm still not entirely sure whether the premise really works for me - i.e. that a glitch in Cameron's chip would leave her with damaged memories is fine, but that she reacts with pain at her supposed mother's denial of knowing her and with joy at the fun of game playing is a bit too much too early in terms of Cameron's development. But it's still an excellent episode, providing an explanation as to why Cameron looks the way she does (and starting a mystery - if Cameron originally met John Connor impersonating Allison, who named her Cameron? Did she name herself after her discovery? Did John?) - and continuing the show's investigation of what motherhood and a life in danger can mean when Sarah stays with Kasey at the hospital. Again, see above what I said about individualizing characters outside the main cast; the cop who is Kasey's boyfriend and Kasey's mixed feelings when it comes to raising a child with someone who has a dangerous profession might thematically echo and contrast Sarah's own life and choices, but they're also their own story.
In addition to everything else they are to each other, John and Cameron also have the dysfunctional siblings vibe from last season, in the way he covers for her here (though that has another dimension as well; if Sarah and Derek knew Cameron malfunctioned again so soon after the last disaster, there's no way they would let her stay or remain undestroyed).
I had forgotten that the backstory with Ellison's ex-wife involved children (or rather, did not), and that one of the first things Catherine Weaver asks Ellison is whether he wants one after watching him with Savannah. He really is auditioned that early on for his role re: John Henry in addition to her needing him to provide her with another Terminator body. The discussion about good and evil is also fascinating in hindsight; Ellison's insistence that the machines are not just destructive but evil (a term which allows for a deliberate choice) and Catherine Weaver's reply that if you take apart a machine, evil will not be what you find. Certainly to be good or evil (instead if simply following a program to kill or protect, whatever the programmer wants) there has to be free will, and one of the big questions this season is whether an artificial intelligence other than Skynet itself can have it. (Otoh, free will alone does not guarantee goodness; see also, most of human history.) By the end of the season, it looks like Cameron likely does; John Henry and Catherine Weaver herself as well. And the implication of this is vast, because while you cannot have a truce with machines whose only purpose is to kill you, you can with machines that are capable of finding other or additional goals. We'll never know for sure, but I think the show points towards the fact that while Judgment Day is inevitable, no matter how hard Sarah fights to avoid it, the extinction of the human race is not because the delay of Judgment Day by some years Sarah achieves and John's affinity to AIs means there is also time for various machines to come to their own, not-Skynet dependent conclusions, which results in Weaver and her own attempt to rewrite the past, not by destroying but by creating something new.
Trivia footnote: every time I watch a scene between Ellison and Catherine Weaver I am frustrated there is no fanfiction, because theirs is a fascinating relationship.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 12:53 am (UTC)I'm going to pick up the DVD packs and make my husband watch it this week.
Also the ensemble acting - I've seen the cast seperately, and they're good, bit they became so mich more on tscc, playin off each other and meshing
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 03:09 am (UTC)*hearts show so much*