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selenakOurselves Alone: starting with this episode, the final run of SCC is among the awesomest ever, offering all the best this show has, and it breaks my heart again that this was rewarded by cancellation. Whhhhhhhyyyyyy, Fox?!?
Anyway. The title, as all British reviewers observed when waching it the first time, is a translation of "Sinn Fein", the name of the political wing of the IRA. Though Jesse's actions here also resemble more modern terrorist tactics: the creation of martyrs, the bullying if the martyrs don't want to die for the cause, finally the killing. Note: it's a mark of quality for this show that they tell this story first and then, in the following two parter, deliver the full emotional background for Jesse, which makes her understandable without marginalizing the enormity of what she does here. Lost pulled off something similar, but I can't think of many other examples. Now I've seen a split re: Jesse in what there is of online fandom: either she's roundly condemmed, or people go in the opposite direction and declare what she did wasn't any different from what everyone else - Derek, Cameron, Weaver, Future John - has been doing, yet she gets condemmed for it more.
Personally, I like Jesse and find her an interesting character. But then I like a great number of characters who do appalling down to unforgivable things (helloooo, Londo Mollari). What makes Jesse's actions in the course of the season towards Riley, culminating in this episode, truly horrible is a combination of factors. First of all, on a Doylist level, it's good old emotional connection of the viewer to a character you know versus characters you see only briefly. To wit, Riley. No matter whether you were among the Riley haters, or indifferent to her, or liked her: as opposed to, say, Andy Goode, or Charles Fisher, let alone Moishe the Fence or poor Allison, Riley has been around for longer than two episodes. Also, this particular episode shows Riley fighting for her life, not wanting to die, and that's something we didn't get to see with the others. Moving on to the Watsonian level, there is another important difference, the one of long term calculation on Jesse's part versus trust and love on Riley's part. Riley didn't volunteer to be a human sacrifice, not in this way. Young Andy Goode didn't volunteer to get killed, either, no matter how guilty older Billy Wisher was going to feel, but then young Andy Goode didn't know Derek and didn't consider him his friend. The nearest equivalent action that we know of for sure by a human isn't by Derek, it's by Future John, sending Kyle Reese back with the awareness that Kyle will die to protect Sarah (and before that ensure that John will be born). Even there we have a difference, though: while Kyle himself didn't know for sure that he would die, he knew he'd be up against a Terminator and most likely would, and he had volunteered for that fight. Riley hadn't volunteered for anything beyond becoming young John Connor's girlfriend.
This doesn't mean Riley's death is utterly and completely Jesse's fault. We'll see in the next two episodes what transformed Jesse. In addition to those factors, there are also the choices both (young) John and Riley make. John, early in the episode, says to Riley supposedly re: her suicide attempt but more and more obviously talking about something else, "I'm not saying you should forget it; I'm just saying it is the past". And in the last conversation they'll ever have, with that highly symbolic visual of John and Riley in middle, Sarah and Cameron at two opposite extremes of John: "Is there something you want to tell me?" A question Riley returns to him. If either of them had made that final step; if John had said "look, I know you're from the future, you don't have to pretend anymore" or if Riley had said "I'm from the future, I know your sister is really metal and I'm afraid she'll kill me, plus I've just realised my best friend has set me up for that", then Riley would not have died. But they each wanted the other to make that step first. It's what John refers to when later talking to Jesse as his own guilt for Riley's death; "maybe I wanted to win".
Sarah, in one of the story's ironies, actually thinks that John must have told Riley everything already, that her outburst about the coming Judgment Day towards her foster parents can't have come from another source. A few episodes earlier, Sarah told a stranger, because it's the kind of thing she only can tell strangers, "my son doubts me; henever doubted me before"; here the reverse is true, and thus she misses that the problem isn't John having told Riley too much, and that Riley talked too much, but that he told her too little, and that Riley didn't talk at all.
In all fairness, though: Sarah just passed through a hellish experience involving drugs and kidnapping, plus as we later find out she has a lump in her breast. And then supposed councillors show up, one after another, which is a nightmare of its own, and as if the Riley situation isn't bad enough, there's the Cameron situation. Note, though, that Sarah does not order Cameron not to kill Riley. She simply says to John he should prepare himself for what will happen when Camero finds out what Riley supposedly told everyone. Not that I think Sarah actively wants Riley dead, but I think if it had been, say, Charley who had had a nervous breakdown and been reported telling people about robots and an apocalypse, she'd have made damm sure to
tell Cameron, and to have John tell Cameron, that Charley was off limits.
Cameron starts the episode with a dead bird - a season long black gag which will end in a bird surviving and flying two episodes later - and then proceeds to open her arm and make John repair it, which is one of those curiously intimate gestures between them that started the first time she entrusted him with her chip. One of the things that gets me, upon rewatching as it did the first time around, is that John has no squick factor towards Cameron's machine-ness, that figuring out which spare parts she needs to replace the damaged ones and inserting them he does by now without the slightest hesitation. (Whereas the sight of human bleeding bodies still triggers teenage horror and clumsiness.) The other thing that gets me is that John, as he tells Cameron later, is well aware she could have conducted those repairs by herself. There is a parallel with Riley post-Mr. Ferguson is ill today there; he knows he's being manipulated, but he goes with it. It's a difference between John and Sarah, because if Sarah knows you lie to her, let alone manipulate her, you're out. And yet Sarah, if she wants to, can be excellent at lying and manipulation. Not with Riley's foster dad in this episode, obviously, but as mentioned before, Sarah is in bad shape. But she's great in undercover situations with Andy Goode, Felicia the Doctor or the scientist in 2.2.; in all cases, she uses something emotionally true about herself to wrap around the lie, which is of course what Riley and Cameron do as well with John and what he does in return.
Trivia detail: in their early conversation when Riley tells Jesse she observed Cameron's open arm, Jesse kept referring to Cameron as "it", but Riley consistently called Cameron "her".
If the Connor plot thread were all this episode had to offer, it wold already be great, but no, the other part is as awesome, for this is when John Henry and Savannah Weaver become BFFs, and James Ellison does parental duty by giving John Henry a stern "I'm disappointed in you, young man!" lecture (which totally works). This show constantly mixes the creepy - and Savannah being lured to the basement is certainly filmed as if in preparation for a horror movie - with the sweet, a pre condition for which is Gareth Dillahunt's versatility. Just as he made Cromartie menacing, he keeps John Henry quintessentially innocent. He might still get Savannah killed by accident, as Ellison points out to him, but the audience (at least yours truly) is sold on him never doing it intentionally. If John Henry doesn't go the Skynet road, it will be in great part to having a play fellow in Savannah to care for instead of a lot of military guys wanting to use him.
Also: consider the irony. Ellison has a "what kind of mother are you?" moment with Catherine Weaver when she agrees to John Henry's wanting to play hide and seek, when she answers his clue questions instead of demanding that he hand over Savannah right now. At the time, there were a lot of reviews saying that this at the latest is when Ellison should have figured out he's dealing with a robot, because no human mother would behave this way.... and a few eps later, with To the Lighthouse, we get the series of flahsbacks of Sarah Connor playing hide and seek with her five or so years old son in the jungle, which involves leaving him with a gun and the challenge to find her.
Today is the day I and II: awesome, awesome two parter which works even better in retrospect because you can admire the artistry even more. In the first flashback we get for Jesse, her goodbye with Derek, Derek advises her not to trust Queeg, and thus the audience is led to suspect that the crucial event in Jesse's life we're about to see involves a terminator she trusts turning against her and going on a rampage. Which is not what happens at all. It's not a little heartbreaking to see early flashbacks Jesse, not only able to call her robot pilot "a good guy" but being on great terms with her crew, going through silly age old equator-crossing rituals in a post-apocalyptic world, while present day Jesse starts out contemplating Riley's body and then makes the smart and ruthless decision to get herself an alibi for her Riley-induced bruises by starting a bar brawl. The self-punishing element in this, however, is something that's more striking if you already know part II, because Jesse gets beat up twice in this two parter, and in the flashback it's by her own (human) crew turning against her, in one of the most disturbing scenes of a disturbing show. In the bar, she basically repeats that experience, deliberately.
"Humans will disappoint you," Catherine Weaver tells John Henry in the present, whe he asks her why she has prepared just-in-case documents covering for James Ellison's unfortunate demise, should he turn against her. We don't know for sure whether the T-1001 the Jimmy Carter picks up is identical with Catherine Weaver, or simply allied with her, but it just makes more sense if it's Weaver herself both in this two parter and for the season finale. Because consider what the T-1001 observes on board the Jimmy Carter: firstly, the people opening its casket aren't who it expected to meet (John Connor) but evidently some humans who didn't obey orders. Yes, it kills one of them, but in direct response to the woman pointing a gun at her, and it doesn't kill anyone else despite having ample opportunity. (We've seen Weaver with the unfortunate Kaliba factory workers. If a T-1001 wants you dead, you're all dead within five minutes.) Subsequent events involve the human crew turning at each other, all of them ganging up to beat up the human captain, who gets rescued by the T-888 and executes him for his troubles. Would you want to ally with this bunch? "Humans will disappoint you", indeed. No wonder the T-1001 tells Jesse to tell Future John "the answer is no" and then high tails it the hell out of a sinking submarine.
For Jesse, of course, what happens is that "hell came out of that box". One of her crew gets killed, all of them turn against her and beat her up so badly she has a miscarriage, and all because her supposed resistance leader sent her on a mysterious mission he didn't bother to explain and which turns out to be an offer of alliance with the very machine who has killed one of her people. And then she can't even talk to him because yet another machine essentially has taken his place. Queeg saving her from her crew doesn't make things better, it makes things worse, because the quick way he kills another human in order to do so underscores how easy this is for the machines. In fact, Queeg NOT going on a rampage makes things worse. He's not malfunctioning, he's not being evil or working for Skynet. He's simply being a machine and following instructions as given by Connor, to wit, retrieve the package, do not open, to not speak about the content, bring it safely back to Serrano Point. Both Queeg's machine nature (not being flexible enough to talk to Jesse when she asks him to) and John Connor's instructions (given to a machine instead of the human captain) that are the problem for Jesse, the root of the evil that overwhelmes the Jimmy Carter. Now, her solution could be to get rid of John Connor and replace him with someone else as resistance leader (though that would have the practical problem of all those terminators in resistance quarters by now, all reprogrammed by John Connor, but still, there are ways around that), but no: her solution is a long term strategic one, just like Skynet's, except that instead of erasing John Connor from history, she wants to transform him into someone who'd never, ever cooperate in any way with machines. No matter what.
(Young) John has always been a work in progress on this show, and yet another irony is that Jesse does play her part in transforming him; only not in the way she intended. The scene of their first and last meeting in the present is the first time we don't just see brief flashes of what and who John might become in the future but get, for an entire scene, John Connor (tm). In any other show, this confrontation would have played out as an upset "you killed my girlfriend, prepare to die" scene. Not here. Leading up to the meeting with Jesse were the scenes throughout the two parter, starting with the one where John goes to the morgue to see Riley's body, with its mixture of human grief and ruthless intelligence, taking her hand, he notices the blood under her nails, the skin torn at her knuckles, all the bruises; something you get from fighting with another human being, not with a machine. As I've said in earlier reviews, the show never forgets human physical vulnerability; both dead Riley and living Jesse are full of bruises and blood through this two parter. And in the final scene with Jesse, John brings it up. "I used to wonder why" - re: Future! John's reason for sending machines instead of humans, post-Kyle. It's the explanation from John Connor Jesse has been waiting for as well, and she finally gets it. "Humans die, and when they die, they never, ever, come back." (Neither do machines if you destroy their chips, but that's far more difficult to do.) The immediate effect of Riley's death on John is to let him conclude it's better to trust machines, to allow yourself to feel for machines. The opposite of what Jesse wanted. But not in a teenage anger kind of way; another startling element in the scene is John telling Jesse that Riley's death is his fault as much as hers, and that "if I have to live with this, then so do you".
The confrontation with Derek, by contrast, is all about mutual accusations and raw feelings, and it's heartbreaking in a completely different way. By the way, I'm still of the opinion the show deliberately didn't show Jesse dead because the tv role of "only dead bodies mean dead characters" holds, and because they wanted to leave her fate open so they'd be able to bring her back if they wanted to. She's Schrödinger's Jesse, caught between equally possible life and death. Though if Derek killed her? It wouldn't be for strategic reasons, or for Riley, or for humanity, or to make up for the fact he did to some extent betray Sarah and John. It would be because he can't live with the mirror she became for him.
Sarah through this two parter takes something of a back seat, which is, much as I love it, my choice for favourite and/or best episode of the season wouldn't be it but either "To the Lighthouse", which shall get raved about next time, or "Adam Raised a Cain" or "Born to Run", which are impossible to choose among. Here, though, the most memorable Sarah scene is the one with Cameron. "Do you know how bad that would make me feel?" "Very bad?" "Not bad at all." Snerk. Sarah proceeding from there to use psychology to land an emotional hit on a robot is amazing if you think about it, not because Sarah is above being manipulative - see earlier examples of Sarah being undercover - but because Sarah never bothered to be so towards a machine before. Earlier in the same episode, she repeats what she told John already at the start of the season, that Cameron telling him she loves him is a lie because machines can't feel, and yet the verbal manouevre she performs with Cameron here - "why do you think (future) John sent you away?" - only works with someone you implicitly assume has feelings.
Whether or not she has is something the show itself still leaves ambigous, though it does commit to Cameron having free will at least post Samson and Delilah, imo. The fact she doesn't kill Riley when it would have been the most logical thing to do, eons ago, from her pov, is a case in point, and there aren't that many logical reasons for monologueing towards birds, either. Where the feeling/not feeling question really confounds me because it makes a true difference on how you read the scene in question is when she uses her imitation of Riley's voice to say "I love you" to John. Yes, she gives him a strategic reason for that afterwards, but neither John and the viewer are that convinced by it. It's something you couldn't call but messed up and bordering on cruel if a human being had done it, precisely because of the emotional factor, and possibly even retaliation for the entire Riley relationship. But Cameron isn't human. It could as well be to make the scene more real for Riley's foster father, and/or to remind John himself of her machine nature. I honestly can't make up my mind on this.
The very last scene, in which John's self possession and John Connor (tm)ness give way to what Sarah did at the end of Mr. Ferguson is ill today, being human, breaking down, crying and clinging to each other, has Cameron not looking at mother and son but straight ahead; it's Cameron at her most inhuman after the earlier scenes emphasizing her own vulnerability when she gave John the means to destroy her, and it's a reminder.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 11:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 01:15 pm (UTC)Watsonian-wise, however, my problem with Derek only thinking he killed Jesse would be that I can't believe he wouldn't personally dispose of her body. He wouldn't just leave her somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 07:44 pm (UTC)