Sarah Connor Chronicles 1x05 Queen's Gambit

[oyceter]

So, I wasn't going to post on this more but there is so much! Or, in which I take a metaphor and beat it to the ground:

The title has me so worried!

So (pieced together with Mely's help), the Japanese computer sacrificed its queen, and though the Turk saw through the gambit, the human player didn't and ultimately lost.

My current theory is that Sarah is the queen -- she's one of the most powerful pieces on the board right now, mechanical yet human, armed with foreknowledge. She's protecting John, the king, the most important piece on the board but also one of the most limited. And I am now terrified that saving John or taking down Skynet (the enemy's king?) means self-sacrifice.

We know Sarah's dead of leukemia in the old future, but we don't know how their jump to 2007 has changed things. But all our stories of Sarah from the future are about the legend and not the woman; all the Reeses have of her are words and still pictures.

And all the while, there's Cameron, the pawn, the brute force and the muscle, seen as expendable by both John and Sarah at the moment, but she's learning and changing and growing and pawns can become queens (and other pieces) when they hit the outer limit of the board.

I will stop now before grinding the metaphor to a bloody pulp.

1. LOVE. Love all the different terminators and Cameron especially, who stopped being robot!River to me in episode 2. I love her offer of a pencil and her note, her attempts to understand grief (she's already progressed past the meaning of tears, echoing the Arnold terminator in T2 asking John, "Why do you cry?"). I love that Cameron sometimes seems more human than Sarah, and the contrasts and similarities between the two, both 5'6" and slim and packing a lot more punch than most people realize. Also: "I call nine millimeter" hee! And she manages to take John's metaphor and extend it without a blink of an eye; notice that she doesn't read it literally at all.
   
   And her expression when she takes out the chip! I was totally anticipating Sarah grabbing it and smashing it a la T2 (why yes, I used to obsessively watch T2, can you tell?).


2. I wonder if John will do something with the chip, given that he's a computer guy?


3. I continue to love that John remains the most emotionally vulnerable and open of the three.


4. I heart Sarah so much! SO MUCH! I love how she is mechanical and not, how she reaches for family, the extension of the family unit from the dyad of her and John to the triad of her-John-terminator (both here and in T2, where Arnold!terminator was the father), to taking in extended family. I could say more about Sarah, but then this entry would never end, so all I have is: LOVE.


5. Nitpicking: I don't get why the chess conference people didn't just write up a little piece of standardized code to represent the chessboard and have the computers directly play each other. I mean, clearly for purposes of the plot, but it seems like a very poor contest for computing power when the humans can intercede.


6. I really like that they deliberately do not play EMT guy's wife as jealous and nagging.


7. I would be more grumpy about the introduction of more adult men into the Connor dynamic, except as vonnie_k points out, they're there as people to be saved and/or as healer/nurturers. Though I do want female resistance fighters with lock picks in their tattoos because that would just be made of awesome!


8. Ew, skeevy guidance counselor trying to find out if people knew he was the one who slept with Jordan!


9. Actual Latinos in California!


10. Bored by blond girl subplot, but whatever.


11. Ellison! I love his questioning of the truck driver and how he is skeptical but also files away the improbable-sounding answer and does not dismiss it. And he has found terminator arm! I now wonder if this terminator arm will be the Cyberdyne one. [eta: another version of the Cyberdyne one that was destroyed in T2, or a repeat, or something]


12. I wonder what the Connors did with the T888 body?


13. I really love that we have not forgotten about Jordan and how her death continues to reverberate; it's a nice touch of continuity, and it's a nice way to illustrate the themes about mortality and being human and becoming human.


14. And finally, Cameron taking down ginormous trucks will never get old.

Whee! I have a show that's actually airing on US TV!

Comments

[ann1962]

And I am now terrified that saving John or taking down Skynet (the enemy's king?) means self-sacrifice.

I have a horrible feeling at some point she has to kill John to save the world. He seems to be the center of all the possible robot futures, so to take him out, will take out all those possible futures.

[oyceter]

Ohh, that would be interesting. Though doesn't most of the show rely on not having John = no human resistance?

[ann1962]

I was thinking if there was no John there would be no time lines in which humans need to resist. The technology would go another way. Just speculation of course!

[fialka.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they're taking any backstory from the books, but in the James Cameron-authorised ones which were written pre-T3, Sarah dies in a key raid early in the war. Don't have the details, cause I haven't read the books. Certainly T1 gives the sense that she had been dead a long time -- Kyle is 26 in 2029, and the original JD was 1997, so it's likely she died in that timeline before he was even born.

The Queen's Gambit does seem to bear out my theory that whatever happens, Sarah will have to die for John to become the man he has to be, because as long as she's alive, *she's* the leader.

About which ::sob::

And PS: Oyce! You're watching! YAY! (It's taken SCC to get me over the LJ-allergy I developed after the project, hee.)

[oyceter]

Oh, interesting!

Sarah will have to die for John to become the man he has to be, because as long as she's alive, *she's* the leader.

Huh. That gets me all bristly! (not at you! just at the thought of it) I think it's because I'm ok with Sarah dying to save the world, but Sarah dying to get out of the way and let a man take over the leadership feels so wrong!

And yay! More people watching!

[fialka.livejournal.com]

Sarah dying to get out of the way and let a man take over the leadership feels so wrong

Oh, gads, no! I see your point, but that's not what I meant at all. I was thinking more of the epic legendary warrior/apprentice trope, and how the apprentice would never think, never want to take over, but is always in the end forced to by the death of the master.

I just think it would be Sarah's death -- the legacy of heroism she left, and the anger and fury he'll feel at losing her -- that will compel John to go on fighting when everyone else is ready to give up, and therefore become the legendary John Connor. I've always had the feeling from the movies that the real leader everybody worships is Sarah. It's not just that she gave birth to John, she *made* him what he was.