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

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

The terminator hand is the hand that got torn off the T888 while he was trying to kill Derek Reese. Or do you mean that it will end up at Cyberdyne in a repeat of the Miles Dyson story?

[oyceter]

Yes! Yes! I am wondering if it will be a repeat of the story, if only reactive prevention just means cycling around and around Judgment Day, Miles Dyson and Cyberdyne and Skynet happening over and over and over!

[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]

Um, wow, I am totally incomprehensible when I am gibbering with excitement!

But yes, the more they try to kill the terminators, the more they end up reinforcing the future; the dead terminator from T1 ends up directly inspiring Cyberdyne in T2 with the arm and the chip, and the arm and chip from the T888 have been removed as well, though Ellison's got the arm and Cameron (?) has the chip. And I think it's like you say, they can't prevent it, not with the future constantly coming here, with the Cromartie bot taking advantage of biotech but also inadvertently teaching biotech, so their only solution is Cameron and trading the pawn in for a queen.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I got what you meant the first time. :)

Guidance Counselor

[almeda.livejournal.com]

My husband pointed out that in that interview with Cameron, he totally flunked his Turing test. Because, ok, not guessing she's a killer robot from the future: fine. But not realizing that something is VERY OFF with her, psychologically, from ordinary teenage normal? Esp. with the way she reported the blonde dead girl's conversation, COMPLETE WITH TONE AND FACIAL EXPRESSION, and then turned it on and off like a lightswitch? Dude. Where's your psych degree from, the back of a box of Wheaties?!?

Also, though, I have so much love for Cameron going all Eliza on his ass. :-> There's totally space in there for lots of single-purpose skill subroutines (I bet she plays chess decently, for example) ...

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

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.
Man. I'm already imagining the series finale of this show because it will pretty much be a countdown to the death of Sarah Connor, right? It's The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It has to end with her death, after which there's nothing left to chronicle.

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.
Right? I was so confused as to why there were people moving the pieces.

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

[vonnie-k.livejournal.com]

Man. I'm already imagining the series finale of this show because it will pretty much be a countdown to the death of Sarah Connor, right?

Yeah, I'm with you there. I think Queen's Gambit is the metaphor for the whole series, not just this episode. Maternal self-sacrifice + saving the humanity from destruction? The whole thing has a epic, tragic long-term arc written all over it. Obviously, I don't want Sarah to die at all, but it seems kind of inevitable (especially with the specter of leukemia hanging over her shoulder.)

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Also, although I am not much for maternal self-sacrifice, I could totally deal with a series ending where she dies to save the world. Especially if it is in a way that averts nuclear apocalypse.

[oyceter]

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

[oyceter]

While I usually don't like maternal self-sacrifice, I would love if this happened! Plus, it nicely inverts movie canon by making Sarah the savior of the world via what she does, as opposed to Sarah being the mother of the savior of the world.

[oyceter]

Right? I was so confused as to why there were people moving the pieces.

Yeah! I mean, I am just a beginning programmer, but I figured if I could think of a way to write a shared interface/class/cpp file for chess, it couldn't be too difficult, even though I am sure the backend stuff is insanely complex.

Also, I was dorkily trying to remember how far robotics and AI has gotten and if the humanoid-ish model Cameron sees is plausible (I think so? Esp. if it mostly just reacts to motion as opposed to learning and formulating its own reactions? But I am not sure).

Re: Guidance Counselor

[oyceter]

I thought he did pick up that something was pretty off with her, ergo calling Sarah? Though he was pretty quick to accept the PTSD explanation, which I found unlikely.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

They have: see the 'newscaster robot', Repliee, built in Japan. (1 (http://www.calico.ie/blog/2007/09/future-is-robotic.html), 2 (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=30&articleID=000E16B9-8ADE-1447-8ADE83414B7F0101)).

I found that scene sort of empathically creepy -- I imagined it must've been, for Cameron, like humans watching lemurs or something.

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

It's not very empowering, but the lack of female resistance fighters could be due to humanity's near extinction. Women are needed to make _more_ fighters, not be fighters themselves.

As I said, not very enlightened, but realistic, and a possible justification if we don't see any going forwarded

[oyceter]

*nods* Hrm. I don't know, my main sense of it was that they weren't even trying to avert humanity's near extinction in the present/future, just trying to avert it by sending more and more people back into the past. And because we know John's alive through the entire resistance (unlike Kyle, who seemed to be born after Judgment Day), and given John's tactics, my general impression is that he's more going for short-term survival to get to the time machine, nothing long term.

But that could also be info I'm missing from T3?

[fresne.livejournal.com]

Or even possibly, there are women resistance fighters, but given near extinction, they aren't prime candidates to volunteer to go into the past.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, interesting idea. But in one of Kyle's flashbacks in T1, he's on patrol with a female soldier who gets killed in combat. And he specifically refers to the women of his time as good fighters. So I'd say it doesn't seem all that likely, assuming they're sticking with previous canon. In the flashback (flashforward?) inside the base, it looked like the soldiers were mostly adults (although more men than women), and the non-combatants were children and old people of both sexes.

On the other hand, from a genetic diversity POV, it might make more sense to send back males rather than females because there's no way they can get home again. A man who's already fathered children and/or provided sperm samples for deep freeze is more disposable than a woman. Gestation can't occur without a woman doing the gestating, and egg donations mean a series of hormone shots to bring on hyper-ovulation, plus a minor surgical procedure to remove the eggs. It's not just a question of jerking off in a cup. And obviously it's a huge assumption that they might have that level of technology, but if they can reprogram Terminators it's possible.

The problem with the whole makign more fighters thing is that quite often the math doesn't work out. It takes 15-20 years to grow a new fighter, during which time they have to be fed, protected, and taught. If the situation is desperate, it may make more sense in the short term to throw every capable person into combat. Yeah, it could very well come back to bite you in the ass in the long term, but if all your society's healthy young women are pregnant or have infants instead of being soldiers, you could all be annhilated, and there wouldn't be a long term to worry about. Plus, if your food supply is unstable, you'd want to keep your population pretty stable to avoid famine [cutting irrelevant stuff about hunter-gatherer societies, lactational amenohrrea, and other fascinating topics].

Er, based on all the above, is it terribly obvious that I am a traumatised veteran of Battlestar Galactica fandom? If you've seen one ragtag band of survivors fighting genocidal robots, you've seen 'em all. Or at any rate, the meta proves applicable to the next fandom (and SCC hasn't stomped all over its viewers by having the writers un-learn how to write. Yet).

[oyceter]

Ooo! I knew I shouldn't have dozed off on rewatching T1. I missed the bit with Kyle's comment about women soldiers.

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.

Gaaah time travel makes my brain spin.

[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!

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

there totally needs to be a spontaneous program item on this at wiscon. please announce it a day ahead of time so i can try to hack time out of my schedule to be there.

but i love this show in a drooling rolling around on the floor why did i miss the first few episodes am i just dumb sort of way.

[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.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Sarah Connor dying as a series finale: maybe. It's not what I was imagining, but it could go that way.

But this show has done a great job of dangling familiar SF plots in front of us, and then folding them aside to reveal that more is going on. "The Turk" was a straightforward plot: guy is inventing dangerous machine, how do we stop him/it? And at the end of 44 minutes it was resolved, only *not hardly*. That machine in his basement wasn't the threat. Now we have the chess competition and military contract. Cameron was poised to kill him, but we're watching the screen saying *That's not the threat* -- you don't erase a technology by killing one player. The episode title is a lie. And the writers *go there*. The game had three players, there's a third motive, now Andy is dead and Turk v2 is still in play.

The characters are thinking chess, they're thinking a war between two polar opposites, and they're wrong.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched this show at all, but am reading for Terminator-universe and SARAH CONNOR goodness. I love this idea -- oh, you think you're going to eliminate the important, useful man? Well, you shoulda fucked with someone besides his BAD ASS MOM.

[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.)

[fialka.livejournal.com]

But that could also be info I'm missing from T3?

I think that's okay, since TPTB have said they're basically ignoring T3. Though they have had to deal with the main piece of info about Sarah dying of leukemia, their timeline for her death is 2005, whereas T3 has it at 2007, two years before the series even begins.

Also...it's not very good. You're probably safe to give it a miss :)

[oyceter]

Oh, that would be awesome! I would so go to that as well.

[oyceter]

Yees! I really like how it's rapidly not about stopping one thing or person anymore (and probably never was, even with Miles Dyson, because people at work do things like collaborate). It's pretty clear that everyone is moving toward AI. And I just rewatched some of T2, and the interesting thing is Skynet doesn't attack until people try to pull the plug. So it's actually a human act of aggression that begins the war, and now I'm wondering if stopping it means getting humans to be less paranoid.

[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!

[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.

[oyceter]

Bwahaha, I know! And I love that this bad ass woman comes out specifically because they try to kill her when they think she's not a threat.

[oyceter]

I... I am masochistically inclined to rent it anyway for canon completeness. I think I will have some complicated knitting at hand though...

[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.

[fialka.livejournal.com]

lol. I understand. I have the completion thing too. :)

yeah, dead on with the "breed new fighters" thing--

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

IRL that doesn't happen until AFTER you've won the war, because as you note it takes over a decade to even have child soldiers (! a sign of serious failure anyway) and besides, humanity bounces back very very quickly even after massive die-offs - see also the Bubonic Plague, which killed off almost half of Europe, and yet didn't by any means mean the extinction of the human race there (causing a 17th century proto-nerd to start working out mathematically how fast we can recover as a species when there was a recurrence of the Plague in Britain, with proto-spreadsheets.)

Which is why you have RL examples of female Partisans and guerilla fighters, not to mention the MUCH larger number of ordinary women who have ended up going to work in male non-combat jobs (even quite dangerous ones) during major wars, because going off making babies is *not* going to be the best use of resources while under attack (Gold Star Mothers notwithstanding) - the odds of those children thriving or even surviving is slim, the odds of them doing so in any kind of timely way to turn the tide of battle, none.

History and common sense trump phallocentric status-quo-validating Ev Bio nonsense every time.

Re: yeah, dead on with the "breed new fighters" thing--

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

(causing a 17th century proto-nerd to start working out mathematically how fast we can recover as a species when there was a recurrence of the Plague in Britain, with proto-spreadsheets.)

Really? Snicker.

One small correction. I think you mean Evo Psych. Evo Bio is actually quite a well-respected field, although it does have its nutcases, of course. Evo Psych is the one with most of the just so stories about how we're genetically programmed from our cave women days to decorate our caves in pink, cower behind our big strong cave dude while he clubs the prehistoric beasties, and be hopelessly attracted to whichever cave dude has the Cro-Magnon version of a Porsche.

Your point about women being of much more immediate use in the workforce or military during a major war is of course valid. And yet another reason why Roslin banning abortion in BSG Season 2 was just so incredibly stupid. Oh wait, we're talking about SCC, not BSG. Sorry, rant over. I keep forgetting that there are fandoms where I don't have to get all batshit at the dumb canon. But I do have to say that SCC is doing some VERY interesting things with gender roles, particularly when your main cast are two ass-kicking women protecting a vulnerable young male damsel in distress. And then there's Charley in the traditionally female role of the loyal nurturer who dresses the battle-wounds of the active fighters. Show's certainly not perfect, but it's not showcasing the usual dynamic. I just can't figure out how they got the greenlight on a series that lacks an ass-kicking adult male hero to save the day.