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

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's in the scene in the motel, when Sarah is oh-so-subtly trying to find out if he has/had a girlfriend back in 2029, and he fesses up the whole thing about saving himself for a dead woman in a photograph. And then instead of filing for a restraining order, Sarah jumps him and they get to the baby-makin'. Naturally at the age of 13 or 14 when I first saw the movie, I found all of this terribly romantic, and not the slightest bit creepy.

My current theory is that future!John doesn't care about the survival of the human race on his end; he's just trying to keep the resistance alive until they can get their hands on the time machine and hope that past!John and Sarah can do something to ensure the human race survives before it's future!him's problem.

Sounds pretty plausible to me. You need to have some degree of security before you can start contemplating questions like possible genetic bottlenecks. And in light of your comment, it occurs to me that if 15-year-old John is an unlikely and reluctant messiah, maybe future!John hasn't changed irrevocably, maybe he's faking it until he makes it. The movies had a lot about people remaking their current selves to do what's necessary, but the triggering event for all this necessity is Kyle coming back and telling Sarah all this stuff. She starts out as a fairly ordinary student/waitress, and over time turns herself into the person Kyle told her about. I mean, it's a fair bet that if Sarah had had a normal life she probably still would've been resourceful, competent, etc. But she only turns herself into a human weapon and raises her son to be the same because of this whole message from Gabriel schtick.

What we've seen of John thus far (both in T2 and SCC) suggests that he's not a natural warrior/leader who's destined for glory, he's someone who goes against his natural inclinations because he feels he has no choice. He's been told from birth he has a destiny that has already been written (if I may mix fandoms for a moment)/ But the intervention from the future is the trigger that makes both him and Sarah consciously strive to emulate idealised versions of themselves from the future. And that brings us back to the time travel paradoxes and now I need more codeine because it makes my head hurty.

[oyceter]

Oooh, good points about remaking yourself. I can especially see John thinking of the time travel as a way out, and also as a way of providing himself with stable figures -- I was rewatching some of T2 yesterday, and John's first real exposure to a terminator is actually fairly positive. The poor kid tries so hard to reach out!

And, of course, it's a two-edged sword, because time travel encounters make him and Sarah who they are, but it's a way out as well. And I wonder if the message he makes Reese memorize is a coded way of telling past!himself and Sarah to make it so the future doesn't have to happen, so he doesn't have to do the whole leader schtick.