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T:SCC 2.12-2.13
Last week pretty well anything not work or mucus related got put on the backburner. Catching up now.
I think at one point there was a plan to shift Alpine Fields over to a February slot to make way for the Prison Break finale. Which would have been a pity. Watching these two episodes in close succession even though there was little narrative connection between the two they felt like a natural match, both dealing with human messiness, diversity and the strength of emotional connections. Alpine Fields, despite having the higher death count, showed the more uplifting and positive side of all this, the grace under pressure, the ability to set aside differences and those differences being what in the end might save us.
I’ve always liked how the show has gradually diffused the hardline messianic, one-man-to-save-us-all, underpinnings of the movies. Sure it began with the Skynet’s only goal seeming to be to kill John Connor but even in the first season Terminators with missions unrelated to John had appeared, storing up Coltan and protecting key software developers. Weaver may or may not be Skynet and may or may not be working for it but either way seems to have no interest in the Connors whatsoever. Derek Reese and then Martin Bedell were human resistance targets who weren’t John but both were lieutenants of John’s. Sidney Fields had no connection to John, she was a future savior entirely in her own right. Like John a target even before she was born but in some ways more like Kyle Reese – special for the genes she carried more than for herself. Lauren, her sister and protector, thus becomes not only evidence that Sarah is not the only Sarah in all the world but that Derek is not the only Derek. We’re all different but connected, alone but alike. If all rabbits were the same they’d all be dead of myxomatosis. California lies in ruins but the Aussies are running subs on baby formula.
Lauren took over the protector role for her baby half-sister after her parents had died in their own attempt. I suppose that’s inevitable in any apocalyptic show, the sense that the children will inherit what we screwed up, that they become a symbol of hope tinged with failure.
At first it seemed like another hopeful story, Sarah connecting with Eileen/Alan as she had with Lauren. I like the way they write people recognizing Sarah as someone to follow, they show her as actually having that quality of instinctively being taken seriously, which John is supposed to acquire in the myth of the future. It wasn’t until the end as she was listening to the posthumous therapy session that it began to feel like a less positive thing. Following Sarah lead Eileen to her death and her secret, Alan’s difference was a source not of celebration like Sidney’s but of otherness and isolation. Something that made her glad to do this work with no name and no questions asked. I think it didn’t strike me until then that as far as we knew no-one knew where Sarah was, she was on her own and her journey had become something of a nightmare, full of ghosts and accusations. And cactus plants. And she kills a man. I think he was lying, the little league coach thing came out too quickly like Charles Fischer and his watchmaker story, but he’s still dead.
If that weren’t enough on the failure side, the other two storylines pervert emotional ties from a source of strength into things to be used, to manipulate. Jesse’s relationship with Riley case in point, at best she’s treating her as some kind of cannon fodder but it comes across more as if she knows all too well what Stockholm syndrome and transference are and exactly how to use them. What happened to sympathetic flashforward Jesse who nearly died quoting Wilde? I think she lied about Derek being Fischer’s only prisoner.
Weaver is no Fischer but she still seems to know just how to draw James Ellison into her web. He wanted to fight the machines with knowledge but knowing what he now knows about the the monster in the basement why wouldn’t he go straight back to Sarah and help her terminate baby Skynet in the womb? The answer is right there in the very word he used to describe his wife’s abortion. It’s in Weaver’s recognition of his paternal qualities and in the question of John Henry’s parentage. If the machine has a soul Ellison cannot, in faith, kill it.
He’s starting by trying to teach it why life is sacred. It’s risky, this machine has already taken a life so if capable of guilt how will it deal with it? Why does it want to know? The original Skynet was a military computer that acquired sentience entirely by accident or so it was implied. It was programmed to fight and win. The Turk was a chess computer so not so different there but although John Henry seems to like to win his stated goal is to learn. Maybe future John Henry has realized that if he doesn’t learn about faith now, after Judgment Day it will always be too late.
I think at one point there was a plan to shift Alpine Fields over to a February slot to make way for the Prison Break finale. Which would have been a pity. Watching these two episodes in close succession even though there was little narrative connection between the two they felt like a natural match, both dealing with human messiness, diversity and the strength of emotional connections. Alpine Fields, despite having the higher death count, showed the more uplifting and positive side of all this, the grace under pressure, the ability to set aside differences and those differences being what in the end might save us.
I’ve always liked how the show has gradually diffused the hardline messianic, one-man-to-save-us-all, underpinnings of the movies. Sure it began with the Skynet’s only goal seeming to be to kill John Connor but even in the first season Terminators with missions unrelated to John had appeared, storing up Coltan and protecting key software developers. Weaver may or may not be Skynet and may or may not be working for it but either way seems to have no interest in the Connors whatsoever. Derek Reese and then Martin Bedell were human resistance targets who weren’t John but both were lieutenants of John’s. Sidney Fields had no connection to John, she was a future savior entirely in her own right. Like John a target even before she was born but in some ways more like Kyle Reese – special for the genes she carried more than for herself. Lauren, her sister and protector, thus becomes not only evidence that Sarah is not the only Sarah in all the world but that Derek is not the only Derek. We’re all different but connected, alone but alike. If all rabbits were the same they’d all be dead of myxomatosis. California lies in ruins but the Aussies are running subs on baby formula.
Lauren took over the protector role for her baby half-sister after her parents had died in their own attempt. I suppose that’s inevitable in any apocalyptic show, the sense that the children will inherit what we screwed up, that they become a symbol of hope tinged with failure.
At first it seemed like another hopeful story, Sarah connecting with Eileen/Alan as she had with Lauren. I like the way they write people recognizing Sarah as someone to follow, they show her as actually having that quality of instinctively being taken seriously, which John is supposed to acquire in the myth of the future. It wasn’t until the end as she was listening to the posthumous therapy session that it began to feel like a less positive thing. Following Sarah lead Eileen to her death and her secret, Alan’s difference was a source not of celebration like Sidney’s but of otherness and isolation. Something that made her glad to do this work with no name and no questions asked. I think it didn’t strike me until then that as far as we knew no-one knew where Sarah was, she was on her own and her journey had become something of a nightmare, full of ghosts and accusations. And cactus plants. And she kills a man. I think he was lying, the little league coach thing came out too quickly like Charles Fischer and his watchmaker story, but he’s still dead.
If that weren’t enough on the failure side, the other two storylines pervert emotional ties from a source of strength into things to be used, to manipulate. Jesse’s relationship with Riley case in point, at best she’s treating her as some kind of cannon fodder but it comes across more as if she knows all too well what Stockholm syndrome and transference are and exactly how to use them. What happened to sympathetic flashforward Jesse who nearly died quoting Wilde? I think she lied about Derek being Fischer’s only prisoner.
Weaver is no Fischer but she still seems to know just how to draw James Ellison into her web. He wanted to fight the machines with knowledge but knowing what he now knows about the the monster in the basement why wouldn’t he go straight back to Sarah and help her terminate baby Skynet in the womb? The answer is right there in the very word he used to describe his wife’s abortion. It’s in Weaver’s recognition of his paternal qualities and in the question of John Henry’s parentage. If the machine has a soul Ellison cannot, in faith, kill it.
He’s starting by trying to teach it why life is sacred. It’s risky, this machine has already taken a life so if capable of guilt how will it deal with it? Why does it want to know? The original Skynet was a military computer that acquired sentience entirely by accident or so it was implied. It was programmed to fight and win. The Turk was a chess computer so not so different there but although John Henry seems to like to win his stated goal is to learn. Maybe future John Henry has realized that if he doesn’t learn about faith now, after Judgment Day it will always be too late.
no subject
Teaching a computer that may develop delusions of Godhood itself that things only matter because God created them seems suicidally dangerous to me. But then, I lack Ellison's faith myself...
*uses SHODAN icon*
no subject
Which is a very long winded way of guessing at Skynet's motivation for wanting to be taught religion and ethics at an earlier stage than in the last iteration of the timeline. Still I'm with you, especially being a BSG fan as soon as Ellison began the "God made the world" spiel the knee jerk reaction was Noooo! Please not to be teaching the cybernetic organsim about God. It *really* never ends well.