selenak

Complications: Seeing "Complications" directly after "Mr. Ferguson is ill today" instead of seperated by a mid-season hiatus makes it far more noticable that both Sarah crying and John holding her at the end of the later and Ellison being sent away from Sarah really makes a turning point for all the characters involved. Also, it's the episode which starts the exploration of Sarah's psyche (or rather, a prologue, the trilogy of episodes dealing with this is yet to come), the episode that first showcases how driven and traumatized Jesse is, the episode which points out the possibility of multiple time lines and the episode which guest stars the great Richard Schiff. No wonder I love it.

Temporal headache: Derek, at the end, concludes that he comes from a timeline where he wasn't tortured by Charles Fischer, while Jesse (and Fischer himself) come from one where he was, and that this might be because of the changes he has affected since his return to the past (read: killed Andy Goode). But Jesse left Derek did, and given the ending of the episode, I wonder whether it's not the other way around: Derek originally wasn't tortured by older Charles Fischer, but now he will be, because young Charles, minus a few nails and locked up in
prison for something he hasn't done, will remember Derek very well indeed. As when first watching, I admire you can set aside the pop culture amazement of having Toby Ziegler and Warren Mears play the same character at different points in his life very quickly; Richard Schiff and Adam Busch are both excellent. (And while not exactly twins, the scene where they stare at each other makes the whole old and younger self really believable.) It's the first time the show explores the "human collaborators" theme, and I like that Charles Fischer isn't presented as a moustache twirling villain a la original Baltar in old BSG (as opposed to Gaius B. in new BSG, who is something more complicated). He's entirely human. This time around, what additionally made sense to me in regards of the overall season is that Jesse shoots the older Fisher, and not his younger self (which was what Derek intends, at least for a moment). Jesse's entire self-given
mission in the present lies in the belief that you can change people in radical ways, that if you get young John attached to a human girl and have a cyborg kill that girl (or at least make him believe this), it will ensure he'll grow into a version of John Connor who never, ever will get close to anything metal again, let alone allow it in every resistance camp. If she believes that, she also has to believe that if young Charles Fisher sees his older self murdered, it will make him into a faithful human instead of a collaborator.

Sarah's dreams in this episode, starting with the one in the teaser, are visually stunning, and a good look at her anxieties. Cameron and herself wear the same clothes; Cameron takes her place in the children's ward, holding a baby which really isn't one. Cameron waters the desert and from the water grows metal, and that metal encircles John in what is both imprisonment and embrace. Sarah's fear of being replaced by Cameron and of her son being captured by machines in a way that might not be lethal, it's all there.

Dr. Sherman interprets the three dots as Sarah, John and Cameron, and says he can't help her as long as she refuses to talk about two of the dots. Now as we'll find out by the end of the season, the dots are a subconscious memory of the Turk (Sarah presumably saw them when she visited Andy), but that doesn't mean Dr. Sherman's interpretion is invalid. Certainly Cameron's prominent position in Sarah's dreams goes hand in hand with Sarah's outright refusal to have a relationship with her in real life. Cameron presents a conundrum: on the one hand, she's a ticking time bomb, which went off once already, on the other, she more often than not saved both Sarah's and Cameron's lives, and if you're hunted by deadly killing machines all the time, it's certainly of advantage to have one of them at your side, fighting against the others. Sarah's compromise - to never stop distrusting Cameron and keep the interaction with her to a necessary minimum, but keep her around - is probably the emotionally healthiest, but it also means the thing that makes her most uneasy about Cameron, her relationship with John, strengthens instead of lessens because John is the only one who talks to Cameron beyond those bare necessities.

The John-Cameron conversation in front of Ellison's house in this episode, about Sarah turning the turtle back on its belly, about the human capacity for mercy and sadism alike, leading to Cameron's observation that machines don't derive joy from cruelty and John's agreement is a case in point. Incidentally, you can interpret this as Cameron and John learning from each other or as manipulation (which the more sophisticated Terminators are certainly capable of), or both. Certainly both compassion and cruelty are two edged swords on this show. When Sarah - whose relationship to John is improving again, aided by Sarah being sick and taken care of instead of being the care taker for once - tells John that she blames herself for Cromartie tracking him down, because she didn't kill the last thief, he assures her that she couldn't have done anything else - "we're not murderers". Which is Sarah's ongoing struggle since T2 - how to ensure her son's survival, her own and that of the human race without starting to regard some humans as expendable, without killing in a not immediate life and death situation. Without applying the relentless logic of a machine. Derek and Jesse, facing a similar dilemma, did/will come down on the side of murder, Derek with Andy Goode, Jesse with Moishe the Fence, the older Charles Fisher and ultimately Riley. The overall narrative doesn't present a crystal clear answer. On the one hand, Jesse's and Derek's murders don't produce any of the desired (by them) results. Andy Goode has already created the Turk when Derek kills him, and his death is irrelevant to what will become of the Turk (and we don't know yet what that may be - whether John Henry will be a force for human-cyborg reconciliation or will join Skynet). Derek committed murder for nothing. The death of Charles Fisher the elder most likely does not change anything for the future. Riley's death definitely doesn't result in John swearing off Cameron in particular and general alliances with AIs once and for all and hating them instead. Jesse, too, committed murder for nothing. On the other hand, this also isn't a universe where mercy instead of murder will always have good results. Sarah's mercy did lead to Cromartie tracking her and John down. John telling Cameron to let Ellison go - whether it's because he believes him, as he says, or because he can't bear to see a human get strangled (yet?) - results in Ellison delivering Cromartie's body to Catherine Weaver. (Which results in John Henry gaining a movable interface, and whether that's for good or ill, well, see above.)

Apropos: Ellison lying to John and Cameron and keeping this up in the face of one lethally dangerous Terminator underlines that post-Mexico, he appears to have written off anyone named Connor as a means of how to deal with the oncoming apocalypse. "It's up to us now," he tells Catherine Weaver at the end of this episode. As I mentioned before, imo the reason why he does decide to trust Weaver to a certain degree, enough to hand over robot bodies, is that she as opposed to Sarah appears to have a concrete plan beyond running away. What she told him was that she wants to reverse-engineer the machines in order to understand how they work. He takes this as a way to find a method to fight them. It's something only someone with Catherine Weaver's financial and technical resources can pull off, so if you know only what Ellison knows and not what the audience knows, it certainly makes sense. (More than Sarah's plan to prevent the creation of Skynet, not that Ellison knows that plan, because it was always doomed. You can't really prevent an invention. At best, you can postpone it a bit.)

Lastly: timey-wimey-ness ahoy as John finds THAT photo of Sarah at Ellison's and keeps it.

Strange things happen at the one-two point: here we get the first post-Mexico encounter between Riley and John, and with the benefit of hindsight, his demeanour towards her has definitely changed. (Which is why I believe the later statement he figured out the truth not to be a last minute retcon.) He's more restrained and tries to break up with her. Simultanously, the audience, though not John yet, both sees just how troubled Riley has become by her outburst towards her foster parents and -siblings about bleached skulls in the sand and machines, and discovers she's in league with Jesse. With the result that the last scene with Riley, when she's back to her outwardly cheerful attitude, telling John "I reject your rejection", is doubly heartbreaking now that we know she's faking under orders.

Back when SCC started, there were some complaints Lena Heady didn't have the same fire Linda Hamilton had as Sarah Connor. (Meaning Sarah in T2, presumably, not Sarah in T1.) Certainly Lena Heady's Sarah for the most part is more quiet, more thoughtful, but her Sarah is also older and more mature. Her capacity for rage, however, is still there, and this episode showcases it as once again Sarah's compassion results in near-disaster courtesy of a fellow human she empathized with, and she beats up the businessman in question. It's clever of the show that this man's motivation is "I did it all for my son"; Sarah is surrounded by mirrors and contrasts, which makes the narrative so rich as they ensure that wee see parental love as a powerful motivation, but not necessarily as one that will always work for the good of everyone.

This is also the episode where Derek finds out Jesse has had surveillance on John, and makes the decision to trust her with the "he's my nephew" news. Derek's doubts about the Connors aren't overwhelming, but are there, and they are growing. Not least because he's in a half-in, half-out position with both of them. A few episodes earlier when he vents about John towards Sarah with "that boy behaves more like John Baum and less like John Connor every day", Sarah immediately shoots him down. Now, in this episode, he's critisizing Sarah (and her increasing fixation on the three dots mystery), and John's reaction is "if you want to talk about my mother behind her back, when she's not there, don't". (In conclusion: the only ones allowed to critisize John and Sarah are Sarah and John.) I do wonder whether Jesse originally planned on telling Derek the truth about her plan and whether the "nephew" news made her reconsider, or whether she wouldn't have told him either way.

Self Made Man: this one and the next one are the closest this season has to stand alone episodes, and what's going on still has connections to the overall arc. For example, we might never see Eric the librarian - who is a very endearing character, btw - again, but his past and possibly returning bone cancer makes him an obvious compare/contrast to Sarah, the other person Cameron knows with cancer in her future. The terminator who arrived decades too early into the past, inadvertendly killing someone upon arrival and needing to replace that person's main contribution to history so that he in turn can fulfill his mission connects for me to one of the questions the season finale poses through its last minutes: for all the multiple timelines in this 'verse, are there fixed patterns that keep reoccuring no matter what happens and which factors change? (By going into the future, John creates a timeline where he never became head of the resistance, yet the resistance evidently is still around, with roughly the same members. We just don't know yet whether it's doing better, worse or just the same. But it's there.)

I love how the show continues to walk the line with Cameron - we feel she's bonding with the librarian, she seems to sympathize as much as she can with him having a part inside that "is damaged and can poison everything" (an obvious analogue to her damaged chip), but in the last scene, when she finds a new librarian and sees that Eric is gone, she simply repeats the spiel with the donuts with the new girl without hesitation. It's logical, and it's not human.

The subplot with Riley and John continues to gain by the unsaid things as well as the said ones. I can't decide whether Riley simply wants to make him jealous with the other teenage boys in order to get an unguarded reaction or whether she's self-sabotaging in the sense that part of her wants him to question her. It's Riley at her most openly manipulative and admitting as much, and I find it interesting that after this, not before, John does open up to a remarkable degree to her emotionally, talking about Charlie and the fact he misses him, about his guilt regarding the death of Michelle. (Which he didn't talk to anyone else about, including Dr. Sherman after the bug was removed.) He's still self-editing in the sense of not using the words "terminator" or "future", but it's still the most open we ever see him with Riley, including the times pre-Mexico when he didn't know who she was.

Alpine Fields: and thus my theory about Sarah and girls bites the dust, because she's doing fine with Lauren. (Maybe I should rephrase it to "girls who get into contact with her son".) Also, the "does your son know you're kidnapping people?" "Yes" "Well, you know that means he'll become a delinquent himself, don't you?" exchange still cracks me up. This show does black humour well. I strongly suspect that if the show hadn't been cancelled, we'd have met Lauren again in the future; as it is, she, her parents and her sister are yet another example of how SCC manages to individualize humanity.

Earthlings Welcome Here: this starts a trilogy of episodes focused on Sarah's psyche, which at the time of broadcast was condemmed as boring. Personally, I loved them. What strikes me most upon rewatch is the way Alan/Abraham/Elaine is used as another alter ego for Sarah, and not in the way she suggests at first with the "what made you so hard?" question. "I killed her, too," says Sarah about Sarah-the-waitress, the Sarah she used to be before transforming herself into a warrior. But. The former Alan has come to see the life on the run, becoming a woman, as liberation. The old life as a man was the one with a secret, where (s)he wasn't truly herself; without the threat to her life, the necessity to flee and leave the past behind, Alan would not have had the courage to become a woman, to become her real self. Without the horror of the future constantly interfering with her and sending assassins, Sarah would perhaps not have become her real self, either. She would have lived a much safer and saner life, absolutely, but would it have been a freer or more honest one? Not necessarily.

While the life on the run has hardened but also liberated Sarah, the life in luxury and surface safety is what together with the pressure to lie continues to break Riley. (Note that when Cameron says to John that Riley is lying, he doesn't deny it or ask for details, he simply says that Riley's pulse is heightened because she's afraid of Cameron.) What she says in the next episode puts a slight question mark about her suicide attempt (more about that in a moment), but for the most part think it's a genuine and unplanned response to the double life and the fact that Jesse, who was her primary reason for coming into the past and a saviour figure until this point, turns against her to the degree of striking her. (BTW, John jumping immediately to the conclusion that it must have been her foster father makes me wonder how life with the foster parents during Sarah's time in the asylum went.) Jesse, of course, sees Riley as a soldier failing in her duty, because there are no civilians in the future, and Jesse is long past the point where she sees pity for the individual as acceptable when to her mind the entire future is at stake.

The Good Wound: featuring Sarah's inner Kyle. I didn't see this as the show implying Sarah could never love another man after Kyle. Or even that, had Kyle lived, the two of them would have remained together for the rest of their lives. Sarah was eighteen when she met Kyle and spent a few intense days with him before he died to protect her and left her pregnant, with her old life gone forever. That is not the same as really getting to know another person. But he never had the chance to disappoint her, either, to be someone around day by day with flaws and strengths. And thus he's lost love and spiritual guide in one, the one man she trusts completely, because he's dead, the father of her son who never knew that son in the way she does and yet knew him in the way she won't. Also Derek's brother, and what this episode shows, imo, is why Sarah will only let Derek get that close and no further, leaving aside her awareness he killed Andy Goode and lied to her about it. He's the other person mourning for Kyle, which she feels guilty for - Kyle died to save her life - and he has just enough in common with her memories of Kyle to make her call him "Reese" as she did with Kyle when she's in danger of dying, but he is also real, as opposed to Kyle, and thus prone to screw up, with all the flaws she never go the chance to discover in Kyle.

Riley explaining her suicide attempt to Jesse by telling her about the s1 incident of the girl who killed herself at John's and Cameron's school ("he tried to save her, but the metal stopped him; he feels guilty about that, he told me"), resulting in Jesse declaring "so this was all for his benefit?" and reevaluating it as a good tactic instead of a screw-up puts, as I said, a question mark to her action, but I think in this case Riley is lying to Jesse, not wanting Jesse to be disappointed in her; her earlier breakdown was the genuine article.

Meanwhile, chez Zeira Corps, we get to see Gareth Dillahunt being awesome as John Henry starts to develop a personality via interaction with Ellison and Catherine Weaver. Ellison's intial refusal to teach John Henry giving way to agreement after talking with his pastor about his wife's abortion underlines the show-long question of parents and children and their responsibilities to each other. Much as Ellison will deny it in the season finale, John Henry is actually his and Catherine Weaver's child in a very real sense, and he has accepted that responsibility when he came back after that conversation about children. Then as now, though, the BSG watcher in me cannot but grimly smile at Ellison's choice to justify the sanctity of human life to John Henry on specific monotheistic reasoning. (This, err, could result in John Henry concluding that maybe God wants to move on to another creation. I'm just saying.) Not that it's not entirely in character for Ellison, being the man of faith he is. Catherine Weaver killing everyone at the factory looks differently in hindsight in that when first watching, one assumes this is her factory and she's covering her tracks, whereas with hindsight and because the next episode tells us it wasn't her factory and she's investigating the owners just as the Connors are, she's committing anti-Skynet sabotage. Either way, though, the whole sequence underlines just how ruthless and how lethally dangerous she is.

Desert Cantos: see, yet another reason why I love this show. In other shows, redshirts are killed off with maybe five minutes of mourning by one of the main characters at the utmost; if and when regulards die, this is signaled ahead and followed by several episodes of grief. On SCC, main characters get killed off while the rest of the regulars has no time to mourn and no time for a funeral, while we spent an entire episode on the funeral of the 36 factory workers from the previous episode. Because at its core, the show shares Ellison's view: every life is sacred. Also, this is another proving into Sarah's psyche, in this case via confronting her with the widow of the man she (thinks she) killed. It's not that we suddenly discover this was one misunderstood woobie. Just that he was/is a person, not a nameless tool, leaving people behind. As I said: a very humane show, SCC, and I love it.

Some must wach while some must sleep: in which SCC pulls off a "two realities, which one is real?" episode. When done well, I really appreciate those, starting with the TNG version, Frame of Mind; then there was Normal Again on BTVS, and more recently Amy's Choice on Doctor Who. In the SCC version, initially both realities have some moments of plausibility and factors in them that make them questionable; the one where Sarah is kidnapped features a man we and Sarah considered dead, while the one where Sarah is in a hospital has the problem that well, Sarah is in a hospital. And with her history, it's next to impossible she'd voluntarily go there. Otoh, the show somewhat unfairly gives us a few scenes Sarah is not witness to in the hospital reality (John and Cameron in front of the vending machine, John watching Cameron while talking to Sarah on the phone), while we're never out of her pov in the kidnapping scenes. Still, about half way through the episode my money was on the kidnapping reality for sure.

Rewatching, this isn't a question any more, which meant more focus on what Sarah's hallucinated reality tells us about Sarah. The most heartbreaking scene is when John tells her she had to kill the guard in order to save her life, and she replies "but I'm not meant to save my life, I'm supposed to save yours". (Doubled when she tells John to delete her patient record, because what she says is "delete me, there should be nothing of me left".) Accordingly, most of her anxieties are John-related as well, ranking from the small and petty (imaginary!John congratulates Cameron on her pancakes, which she can prepare perfectly, as opposed to Sarah) to the psychologically murky (imaginary!roommate confesses to a weakness for young men and promptly hits on John; actually, I wouldn't interpret this the Freudian way but I think John is on to something when in Earthlings Welcome Here he said to Riley Sarah wants to keep him an eight years old) to the big one (in the kidnapping reality, Sarah refuses to call John; in the hospital reality, she did, he comes, she has failed to identify the nurse as a terminator and John and herself promptly get killed).

Sarah freeing herself without calling anyone for aide and killing her captor, this time not in a struggle for the weapon but deliberately, is a first on this show where Sarah and humans are concerned (she could have rendered him unconscious instead; she didn't), and in a way the reply to all the previous scenarios where Sarah's mercy led to more danger later on. (And yet the show itself doesn't say that killing is always the better way, see above as to the results Jesse's and Derek's actions have.) "You're real," she says, and shoots; it's important she doesn't do thinks still doubting which reality counts. "The first one is always the hardest," he told her earlier, but he's her first and second both; it's what comes after that counts, whether or not Sarah is still able to connect with humans or concludes kill-or-be-killed is all that is left.