(no subject)
TSCC 2.20 - "To the Lighthouse"
I confess that I actually can't stand Virginia Woolf's breathlessly headlong writing style. I gave up about 10 pages into Mrs. Dalloway, and never even picked up To the Lighthouse. So if there's an allusion to anything other than a physical lighthouse in the title, it has gone right over my head.
Learning Through Games
The episode opens with John Henry and Savannah engaging in "imaginative play." Except that for John Henry, it isn't that imaginative; his game involves the synthesis of all of his research on a preexisting story, until Savannah inserts her duckies, asks if they can change the rules. It's a revelation for John Henry: they can.
In the meantime, we flash back to Sarah and a younger John in the jungles of Latin America, where she makes teaching him about survival a game--to make it easier, to get his cooperation, to make it less scary than what it is. And when he finally wins, and scares the hell out of her in the process with his disappearance, she can't even say anything because--as he gleefully points out to her--he followed the rules. She's still rigid about those rules in the car, playing one of their road trip games.
And by the end of the episode, we see the terrible logic behind all of those rules. The explosives on the perimeter give John and Charlie just enough time to get down to the dock, just as they all planned. Charlie turns to hold something or someone off, and John follows the rules, which are always first and foremost about his own survival at any cost--gets in the boat, starts the engine. When Sarah comes back to the lighthouse, the boat is gone and Charlie is dead because John did exactly what he was supposed to do: save himself. It is, again, the opposite of what we're used to thinking of as heroic; there can never be any noble charge at the enemy in defense of a friend for John Connor. His self-sacrifice is of an entirely different sort.
(And the episode did reinforce that Charlie was an almost-father to John, that Charlie and the Connors were an almost-family, with that familiarity over the pancake routine at breakfast, and Sarah's trembling sideways request for help, her need to tell someone about what she was afraid was growing in her breast, even as she insisted that their visit was all about John. John was able to talk with Charlie about grief, and hear advice from someone for whom loss was still on an individual, human scale, not overshadowed by the blasted landscape of Judgment Day.)
Hidden Bombs
The hacking of John Henry is fascinating for several different reasons, and it's the first of a series of hidden bombs that go off inside people in this episode.
For one thing, the shutdown was, for John Henry, a near death experience. And he reacts to it spiritually: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Finally, we see real, concrete proof of Ellison's influence; John Henry has the tools to process the shutdown as an existential event. And I wanted to cry at the awesomeness of Ellison's conversation with the tech about daemons, because for once it was a piece of technobabble that was used more or less accurately on a television show, and because the writers used it to create such a beautiful analogy. Those processes running in the background are daemons; but now that something has infected John Henry, some of them could be demons as well, things that have possessed him from the outside.
For another, the virus sparks the revelation that John Henry is not alone--another key existential realization for him. And the virus contains code written by Miles Dyson, who was "killed" by the "terrorist" Sarah Connor--Ellison's case. It's all finally connecting up, and I'm afraid that it's going to be harder and harder for Ellison to hide what he already knows about Sarah and Cromartie--if Catherine Weaver hasn't already figured it out anyway.
(I am very interested in the ways in which the people who are currently after Sarah are not connected to Weaver or John Henry. They seem to be connected to the operation that ran the factory; one of the factory employees implanted Sarah with the tracker. When one of the thugs is trying to locate Cameron's chip, the other asks him where he got the specs for the T-8000 he's using. It seems like what the flunkies know is limited, and that makes it harder to discern who they're working for. And then there's the fact that John Henry finally realized he wasn't alone when he encountered Dyson's program--but he's known Catherine Weaver was a machine for some time. He did not feel that kinship with her. And Sarah had identified Dyson as the original programmer behind SkyNet.)
And then there is Sarah, who doesn't trust Cameron or Derek enough to tell them about the safe house, and who is still secretly afraid that cancer is ticking away inside her, that indeed she might have done some things--say, at a nuclear power plant--to accelerate its arrival. But the thing she's carrying in her breast isn't cancer, this time; it's a transmitter. For all of her distrust, she's the one who betrays their location this time. (Although it seems like Derek might, in the future, in the basement of that terrible house--when he insists that the he wouldn't have talked under torture, Cameron tells him confidently that he will.)
Finally, I'm not quite sure what to make of Cameron telling Derek about Jessie's miscarriage, because she did it deliberately, to provoke some kind of outcome, but her reasoning is opaque to me, and I don't think we've seen the outcome yet. It could be, as she said, that she wanted him to feel what Sarah almost felt, the loss of a child. But Derek doesn't really need further emotional motivation to protect John, does he? Maybe she thinks he does; John understands that Derek loved Jessie, and called his mistake "human," which is about the highest praise you can give on this show. Or maybe she genuinely did feel that he deserved to know, and wanted to offer sympathy for his loss, since it does seem like she's come to understand better what loss means. That people are irreplaceable, just as Jessie said, just as Sarah tells John when she says that people are the only things that really matter, and warns him that he has to hold onto that idea, maybe better than she has.
I confess that I actually can't stand Virginia Woolf's breathlessly headlong writing style. I gave up about 10 pages into Mrs. Dalloway, and never even picked up To the Lighthouse. So if there's an allusion to anything other than a physical lighthouse in the title, it has gone right over my head.
Learning Through Games
The episode opens with John Henry and Savannah engaging in "imaginative play." Except that for John Henry, it isn't that imaginative; his game involves the synthesis of all of his research on a preexisting story, until Savannah inserts her duckies, asks if they can change the rules. It's a revelation for John Henry: they can.
In the meantime, we flash back to Sarah and a younger John in the jungles of Latin America, where she makes teaching him about survival a game--to make it easier, to get his cooperation, to make it less scary than what it is. And when he finally wins, and scares the hell out of her in the process with his disappearance, she can't even say anything because--as he gleefully points out to her--he followed the rules. She's still rigid about those rules in the car, playing one of their road trip games.
And by the end of the episode, we see the terrible logic behind all of those rules. The explosives on the perimeter give John and Charlie just enough time to get down to the dock, just as they all planned. Charlie turns to hold something or someone off, and John follows the rules, which are always first and foremost about his own survival at any cost--gets in the boat, starts the engine. When Sarah comes back to the lighthouse, the boat is gone and Charlie is dead because John did exactly what he was supposed to do: save himself. It is, again, the opposite of what we're used to thinking of as heroic; there can never be any noble charge at the enemy in defense of a friend for John Connor. His self-sacrifice is of an entirely different sort.
(And the episode did reinforce that Charlie was an almost-father to John, that Charlie and the Connors were an almost-family, with that familiarity over the pancake routine at breakfast, and Sarah's trembling sideways request for help, her need to tell someone about what she was afraid was growing in her breast, even as she insisted that their visit was all about John. John was able to talk with Charlie about grief, and hear advice from someone for whom loss was still on an individual, human scale, not overshadowed by the blasted landscape of Judgment Day.)
Hidden Bombs
The hacking of John Henry is fascinating for several different reasons, and it's the first of a series of hidden bombs that go off inside people in this episode.
For one thing, the shutdown was, for John Henry, a near death experience. And he reacts to it spiritually: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Finally, we see real, concrete proof of Ellison's influence; John Henry has the tools to process the shutdown as an existential event. And I wanted to cry at the awesomeness of Ellison's conversation with the tech about daemons, because for once it was a piece of technobabble that was used more or less accurately on a television show, and because the writers used it to create such a beautiful analogy. Those processes running in the background are daemons; but now that something has infected John Henry, some of them could be demons as well, things that have possessed him from the outside.
For another, the virus sparks the revelation that John Henry is not alone--another key existential realization for him. And the virus contains code written by Miles Dyson, who was "killed" by the "terrorist" Sarah Connor--Ellison's case. It's all finally connecting up, and I'm afraid that it's going to be harder and harder for Ellison to hide what he already knows about Sarah and Cromartie--if Catherine Weaver hasn't already figured it out anyway.
(I am very interested in the ways in which the people who are currently after Sarah are not connected to Weaver or John Henry. They seem to be connected to the operation that ran the factory; one of the factory employees implanted Sarah with the tracker. When one of the thugs is trying to locate Cameron's chip, the other asks him where he got the specs for the T-8000 he's using. It seems like what the flunkies know is limited, and that makes it harder to discern who they're working for. And then there's the fact that John Henry finally realized he wasn't alone when he encountered Dyson's program--but he's known Catherine Weaver was a machine for some time. He did not feel that kinship with her. And Sarah had identified Dyson as the original programmer behind SkyNet.)
And then there is Sarah, who doesn't trust Cameron or Derek enough to tell them about the safe house, and who is still secretly afraid that cancer is ticking away inside her, that indeed she might have done some things--say, at a nuclear power plant--to accelerate its arrival. But the thing she's carrying in her breast isn't cancer, this time; it's a transmitter. For all of her distrust, she's the one who betrays their location this time. (Although it seems like Derek might, in the future, in the basement of that terrible house--when he insists that the he wouldn't have talked under torture, Cameron tells him confidently that he will.)
Finally, I'm not quite sure what to make of Cameron telling Derek about Jessie's miscarriage, because she did it deliberately, to provoke some kind of outcome, but her reasoning is opaque to me, and I don't think we've seen the outcome yet. It could be, as she said, that she wanted him to feel what Sarah almost felt, the loss of a child. But Derek doesn't really need further emotional motivation to protect John, does he? Maybe she thinks he does; John understands that Derek loved Jessie, and called his mistake "human," which is about the highest praise you can give on this show. Or maybe she genuinely did feel that he deserved to know, and wanted to offer sympathy for his loss, since it does seem like she's come to understand better what loss means. That people are irreplaceable, just as Jessie said, just as Sarah tells John when she says that people are the only things that really matter, and warns him that he has to hold onto that idea, maybe better than she has.