T:SCC 2.17 “Ourselves alone”

[hazelk]

This episode was clearly meant to bring on the end game and without knowing what that is, it felt a little centrifugal.

Jesse and Derek shoot at apples and both blame the sight being off when they miss. Cameron is off. She’s conflicted, her programming tells her the bird is a threat (a fire hazard) but she’s not supposed to kill it. She tries to release it and in doing so kills it involuntarily, which she (like Jesse and Derek) interprets as a mechanical glitch. But birds continue to be terminated even when the arm is fixed. It’s a software problem then, a conflict between her programming (I’m guessing both the original and future John's tell her to eliminate threats) and something else. Sarah ordered her not to kill the chimney bird back in The Mousetrap but since when is she programmed to take orders from Sarah? Not killing is a choice and that disturbs her. Moreover, that choice is overridden, hand trumps mind. She has neither free will nor programming. She’s nothing, she’s a ticking bomb (Automatic for the People) and she puts her nothingness in John’s hands. In the form of a timepiece because she’s also out of time. Migratory like the bird. Like Riley.

This show always passes the Bechdel test without sweating a fingernail but this episode was the opposite of good for positive depictions of relationships between women. Perhaps to be expected with a title like “Ourselves Alone” and it’s not as if John and Derek were all buddy-buddy either. But the image that stays in my head is Riley looking to see Sarah looking on balefully from one side and Cameron on the other. Witches of East and West and Jesse made three. I wish they hadn’t played up the sexual element of Riley’s imprinting on Jesse because it made it all to easy to watch their final battle and think chickfight (and to cast Riley as another tragic lesbian). Contrariwise I found the reveal about the full cold bloodedness of Jesse’s plan made her come across as more human and less femme fatale. I believed her when she told Riley that she was giving her a chance for her death to make a difference. There was the faintest hint of envy in the admission, which made it seem possible that Jesse really believed such a death to be the best anyone from her future could hope for.