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hazelk1. I have a big fangirl crush on Sarah Connor. She’s hardened but human, a survivor, a fighter, a mother. A single working mother. Lena Heady’s performance has a charismatic but entirely real quality to it, which makes it not only believable that John Connor thinks she the best and that other people follow where she leads but also that she was once just an ordinary waitress working her way through college. In the later half of the season the focus has shifted a little away from Sarah, broadened and deepened which is a good thing really but my inner fan girl is dismayed by the reduction in screen time. WHERE SARAH? SARAH GONE. BAD SHOW!
2. Between this show and Battlestar I think robots are quite my favourite fantasy/sci-fi thing. Having said that terminators and cylons are actually very different things. Cylons are more biological. Not human biological but still more like living things, more than a token veneer of flesh covering a metal reality. Even so the show continually makes the point that this masking of the true self may be one of the terminators' more human attributes.
It started in the second episode, when the Connors had just arrived in 2007 naked and unidentified with Sarah briefly savouring the freedom to be herself because it was a luxury she so rarely got to enjoy. Later specfic parallels between terminator and human behaviours. When Cameron hid the T888 chip in Dungeons and Dragons, the doubts raised about her were matched by hints that Derek Reese was also concealing something - that he’d employed a T888 style solution to the problem of Andy Goode. In the episode scanning the chip’s memories one scene of the terminator calming/seducing its supine wife formed a striking visual parallel to the later sequence of John deactivating Cameron. That episode was disturbingly cynical about the wife’s low expectations of any male partner (to quote Buffy “you guys couldn’t tell me apart from a robot!”) but also from within the story in the way it hinted at the young John’s fascination with his future nemesis. It’s interesting how future John haunts the story much as Skynet does, both faceless manipulators with their true goals unclear.
3. I think the inhuman aspect of Skynet and its terminators lies more in their disconnectedness from the world. Impervious to pain they shrug off even complete physical dismemberment. Cromartie spends half the season reconstituting its component parts much as Skynet strives across timelines to reform itself. These machines are not bound to one body in the way living humans are, they don’t die they reassemble and that supreme self-sufficiency is the most terrifying thing about them. No part of nature they just take what they need and destroy the rest, they don’t give back, don’t need to. Even Cameron, she seems to connect to the ballet teacher but when her mission is accomplished walks away without blinking, clomps down the stairs without looking back. Sarah doesn’t need to go back to help Ellison, in fact it’s quite dangerous for her to do so but she has to reach out, to make contact. That’s why Cameron’s dancing is so strange. It’s art but also a very particular art, an art that depends intimately on the body and an art that reaches and yearns and has meaning only through the way it calls and responds to the music or even to the absence of music. A dancer dancing becomes part of something larger than herself, renounces self-sufficiency at least momentarily.
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Date: 2008-04-17 10:43 pm (UTC)Hee! Me too. I was sad that she was so not present in the finale, but mollified by the awesome of Ellison. I so wasn't expecting the climactic scene to go to him.
Still, needs moar Sarah.
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Date: 2008-04-18 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-19 08:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 11:02 pm (UTC)One of my favourite scenes of the whole series is the one where we see Derek kill Goode while Sarah talks about machines. Her monologues were annoying at first, but I love how they went on to have the camera constantly subvert what she was saying.
It’s interesting how future John haunts the story much as Skynet does, both faceless manipulators with their true goals unclear.
That's one of my favourite aspects of the show, too. For all of the backstory in both the movies and here, we really know very little about adult John...
A dancer dancing becomes part of something larger than herself, renounces self-sufficiency at least momentarily.
Beautifully put.
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Date: 2008-04-18 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-21 09:13 am (UTC)"knock knock robot girl..."
Date: 2008-04-17 11:05 pm (UTC)http://www.geekson.com/archives/archiveepisodes/2008/episode88.htm
Re: "knock knock robot girl..."
Date: 2008-04-18 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-18 05:32 am (UTC)In the episode scanning the chip’s memories one scene of the terminator calming/seducing its supine wife formed a striking visual parallel to the later sequence of John deactivating Cameron.
And when he's reactivating her, touching her cheek in a near identical gesture. I noticed that in my own season meta. Also, Cameron watching the memory before together with John and commenting "that was very effective, what he did, she liked that".
That episode was disturbingly cynical about the wife’s low expectations of any male partner (to quote Buffy “you guys couldn’t tell me apart from a robot!”) but also from within the story in the way it hinted at the young John’s fascination with his future nemesis.
Something else that comes across even without movie knowledge: between Sarah, Derek and John John is the only one who actually had a positive first experience with a terminator, and I think that imprinted him. He's also the one to notice Cameron's steps towards - something - answering her questions about reactions to death etc; I think it's clear he sees her as a person, and can't not, whereas Sarah tries to keep her at arm's length out of sheer survivor instinct, which is sensible, but also makes her ignore Cameron's efforts like the thing with the pen.
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Date: 2008-04-18 04:13 pm (UTC)John seems to be predisposed to believe in people even when they're scary robots. I suppose he's different from Sarah and Derek in that they had normal lives which were destroyed while he had Judgement Day hanging over him from before he was born and then it went away. You could make a case for his character being formed by eucatastrophe rather than catastrophe or I don't know not being a psychologist but is the constant fear of trauma less PSTD inducing than a sudden unexpected trauma?
Also with John he instinctively thinks of Cameron as a person but I think he's also interested in her as a machine. Partly intellectually but it could be practical in the long term. He has that conversion with Reese about the law that chip power increases exponentially and the logical upshot of that is that Skynet becoming sentient is inevitable, they can't stop it by destroying The Turk because sooner or later another Turk will be made. So it becomes a problem not of stopping Skynet being born but understanding why it grew up the way it did and could we change that.
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Date: 2008-04-18 04:19 pm (UTC)Skynet and John sort of depend on each other anyway: if Skynet had not set the original Terminator after Sarah, John would never have existed. And yes, the show seems to indicate even without that particular temporal paradox to think of, Skynet is inevitable, so the question indeed is why it is the way it is. I also found it intriguing that Derek asks how they know Cameron didn't become Skynet in Vic's Chip. Maybe she will, one day, and that's what will change Skynet in the future?
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Date: 2008-04-19 08:56 am (UTC)