T:SCC 2.11 "Self made man"

[hazelk]

So I was wrong about Cameron and cable porn but still liked the episode. The tone was reminiscent of when I used to work late in the labs. Or before then, student days, haunting the college stack rooms. The building empties and the sound reduces down to distant traffic leaving you alone with shelf after shelf of arcane knowledge. It gets to the point where if a strange girl were to knock bearing donuts you’d let her in even though you don’t much care for baked goods.

I like the idea of Cameron seeking after knowledge. Or not just knowledge, she could plug herself into the net if that were all but the knowledge in the library is tangible. It has texture and smell, it crackles and ages and has to be searched for slowly by hand. Terminators have sensation, she’s feeling her way into the world. Into Eric’s world, someone who doesn’t know she’s not a person. Really, I think the whole Myon Stark story was a big old McGuffin even though Stark’s name is on the wall of blood. At its core the episode was about the meeting of two misfits – John said as much in the B plot.

Although just being different doesn’t really mean you have that much in common and they ending up hurting each other without meaning to. More obviously Eric with each of Cameron’s attempts to turn the turtle over just rubbing his face in the glass a little more. It’s interesting the way she seems to be trying to generalise by matching little snippets of memory to new circumstances like existential echolia. Bathrooms and suicide, cancer and bombs. With other terminators, Stark for instance, playing “what would I do” invariably gives the right answer (and there he is) but people are different, empathy unreliable. Eric talks about how wonderful it would be to be like a movie reel, unchanging, frozen, eternally young and I almost expected Cameron to say “No.”

One for the machines: Stark’s arrival causing an accidental kill was no more intentful than Dorothy landing on the witch. Although interestingly Cameron doesn’t differentiate between wicked and innocent bystanders, death is death.

She also tried to apologise to Eric, which suggests some ability to sense pain. At least when confronted with it but she showed neither sadness nor curiosity at his later absence. Machines can feel rage and possibly fear because those are useful emotions, they generate action. But not joy, they can’t be happy, or feel grief or regret. Or there’s no function to expressing those things, what’s done is done?