"That memory, the warder of the brain/Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason/A limbeck only"
The Sarah Connor Chronicles 1.06 - "Dungeons & Dragons"
A great deal in this episode revolved around memory; we are, after all, the sum of our memories. So Cameron is what she is now because her memory was scrubbed when she was reprogrammed, to increase the chance of success; success here being defined as an overwriting of the fundamental purpose for which she was created. ("Sometimes they go bad. No one knows why." What a chilling possibility, one that under the circumstances seems less tied to faulty reprogramming and more to a fundamental kind of memory leak, a return to the past.) What she is now is what she remembers from that moment, and what she has learned since, and the glimpse of terminator mortality that leads her to hold onto the memories--and therefore the consciousness--of a killing machine like what she'd once been. To me, that act seemed less like a malicious betrayal, more like a dangerous curiosity: Cameron trying to understand who she is and needing that glimpse of what she was in order to do it, Pandora and a box.
Interlaced with the events of the present, we have Derek's memories of the future, of how he has come here: we see, through his eyes, Kyle preserving Sarah's memory in a photograph, and Andy Goode, unburdening himself, confessing that he helped create SkyNet. Derek's memory of that conversation doesn't make his murder of Andy any less hard, but does make it understandable. This show is all about the balance sheet, deaths in the present weighed against deaths in the future. What we don't see, what Derek doesn't remember for us, is what happened when the damaged terminator took him into the room in the basement, the one with the music. His escape was too easy, and once he escaped, he met up quickly with John Connor; I wonder about that. I also wonder if Andy is as responsible for SkyNet as he believes himself to be, whether his death will really raise the total on the future side; I suspect that it came too late, because the Turk was already out of his hands.
In the meantime, Derek's presence brings up Sarah's memories of Kyle Reese, and emphasizes how much of her interior life has been built around savoring those memories, and taking lessons from them; she has literally rebuilt her life, and fashioned her son's life, from them. John, on the other hand, doesn't remember his father; all he has are his mother's stories, and now Derek's face, and whatever he can tell him, and you can see how hungry John is for that connection.
So far, one of the things that has pleased me the most about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is how unrelentingly adult and complicated the choices the characters make are. That holds true for Sarah and John's decision to risk exposure by getting help for Derek, and is especially the case with Charley and Sarah's parting, dictated by circumstances that utterly trump feelings in this situation; as Charley observes, he never really had a chance. Their goodbye reinforces the separation between insiders and outsiders in this world: Charley can leave, because it's not his fight. He hears the stories, but it's something that John and Sarah and Cameron remember, have experienced; so has Derek, and beyond the ties of blood, that shared memory makes him a part of this family. I have some ambiguous feelings about Derek, because the triumvirate of fierce mother and strong robot and teenage boy is, I think, a successful formula, and something that should only be altered with care; but I have no idea how long he'll be around for, and so far, he's been an interesting mechanism for introducing more information about the future.
Those myopic jerks at FOX are totally going to cancel this show, aren't they. *cries*
