T:SCC 2.06 " The tower is tall but the fall is short"

[hazelk]

I love the connectedness of this show. The density, the way everything has a purpose and usually more than one.

This episode was book-ended by monologues, a stylistic blast from the S1 past but then nostalgia was a theme all the way through. Nostalgia in the original medical sense of the word a synonym for shell shock, not the rose tinted remembrance of things past but the urge to go back to a time before innocence was lost.

Innocence is usually associated with childhood but not for the children in this story. For Savannah, the red-headed step-child it’s a time of nameless fear. For John fear was named, it had a purpose, until he killed Kardassian fear was the opposite of death. Until then his fear of the future was that he either might not live to see it or live up to its expectations.

So an episode about children but which didn’t forget how parents were once children too. Sarah had a father and never thought she would become him but it’s the circle of life, you never fully escape. We become our own parents. Skynet was a neglected child genius and Weaver, its technological offspring, speaks roughly to her little girl and locks her father-to-be in the basement to teach it tricks and performance targets. Weaver’s human father was in the meat trade, I wonder if Skynet knew that when choosing her model, being itself the butcher of mankind.

In this circular universe although the direct parental parallel is between Sarah and the T1001, there’s another potential mirroring between Skynet the machine-Father and John the Son of man. This episode reveals who killed Kardassian with his bare hands and how that one killing changed John. Skynet’s childhood trauma was killing millions, shell shock and awe.

Sarah the actual parent looks on but can do nothing, she can’t make him talk and if she did what could she say? He’s being exactly what she taught him to be. Directly, in the check all your exits, know what to twist and where to apply pressure way, but also indirectly in the keep your troubles to yourself, make your own fate way. You can’t help but see yourself in your children – it’s the blessing and the curse of parenthood. If you could you would play a portrait of Dorian Gray for their pains but they learn by imitation, it would only make things worse.

Derek and Jessie have no parents, they’re the children of war. I liked how Jessie’s story about running and not looking back tied in with Martin Bedell’s version the episode before. With yet another terminator arriving it also conjured an image of everyone running from the future like rats from a sinking ship. The near suicide story turning out to be his as the fallen soldier carrying one wasn’t worked very well too. The psychologist said 3-4 was when children start asking questions, it’s also when theory of mind develops and they learn that it’s possible to tell lies. Maybe also when human children begin to tell the difference between lies and stories but I’m not sure where jokes fit in.

Not so much going on with Cameron other than some much needed comedy with the contortionatrix model but again she seems fascinated by death, secretly watching the melting of one of her kind last week and saving the self-destruction of another in this. It’s unclear whether the bendy one was sent by John or Skynet – if its mission were to terminate the psychologist how would that tie in with the implication that he was going to consult for Weaver? Maybe that consultation introduces a weakness, maybe he does end up helping John in Skynet-detectable way. If John sent her, even disregarding the bad terminator disregard for human bystanders, killing the psychologist as a mission would bring him very close to what Sarah tried to do to Dyson in the second movie but had 10 year old John to bring her back from. They fuck you up, you save them, who’ll be there to do the same for you?