Terminator:SCC "What He Beheld"
Fantasy series often work by having an entry point character, someone unfamiliar with the brave new world who the audience can explore it with. A Dorothy, a Lucy, a Harry Potter. Agent James Ellison seems an unlikely Dorothy but then this isn’t Dorothy’s story, this isn’t Oz where everything you wished for is waiting for you back home. Neither is it Lucy Pevensie’s reworking of the resurrection and the life, all our sins forgiven. This is Judgment Day. The day our Lord returns in fire and no human stories can keep him at bay.
The Johnny Cash song is jarring at first, so unlike the usual background music at first you think it’s meant to be playing on the car radios except that the sound balance is all wrong. It throws you out, what’s with the music video? But it keeps coming, relentless, music for terminators and when it ends sparing Agent Ellison alone of all his people then you see. Then you believe.
There are practical reasons for Cromartie not to have killed Ellison. To leave a suspect for the massacre in order to cover his tracks or because he recognizes him as the current holder of the Sarah Connor files and calculates him to be more use dead than alive. But Agent Ellison is an honourable man, a smart man and I think he’s not going to be able to avoid the possibility that the reason he was spared because he has a personal role to play in activating Skynet/or ensuring its ultimate victory.
Why did Ellison go along with the SWAT raid? He knew by then that he was dealing with something more than the standard human monster, something Book of Revelations bad. He could quote the words, I suppose, but he hadn’t beheld and until then the very familiarity of those words was a last remaining defense against the truth. He thought as Dixon did that he might be able to help, he brought them there and their blood is on his hands now. I think of all the characters James Ellison is the person I envy least at this point.
It didn’t feel like a finale, more like an opener in some ways, character introductions and world building. This makes sense given the production history, it wasn’t written as an ending but as an inducement for a new beginning but it works with the in story theme of masked identities too. The pilot showed us the masks. The finale end with Cameron’s mask being (presumably) burned away and we get to see Sarah, John and Derek at their most human and ordinary.
I don’t trust Derek. I sympathsise with him, he’s lost more than any of them, a world and a brother (and with what he now knows he’d have reason to blame John Connor for ordering Kyle to his death knowing that’s what would happen). I don’t trust him doing the male bonding thing with John, subtly (possibly unintentionally) dismissing Sarah for not being a killer for not remembering the birthday. And he covered the little girl’s eyes but left Sarah to explain things to her. This was probably a good thing under the circumstances but I don't think it even occurred to him.
Dirty Dan from Eastenders was pretty good as the fake Sarkassian, shades of The Limey, but how much does the real Sarkassian know and who was the person who came to buy the Turk before Sarah?
Who or what is the Haitian girl, is she going to be important too?