Terminator:SCC everything but episode nine

[hazelk]

1. 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.

Comments

"knock knock robot girl..."

[ladyhelix.livejournal.com]

Check out episode 88, 1/24/08(Joss & Robots). Great fun - guaranteed!
http://www.geekson.com/archives/archiveepisodes/2008/episode88.htm

Re: "knock knock robot girl..."

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Great link! Thank you.