John Henry: An angry mind?

[roxybisquaint]

John thought John Henry was "something bigger, something worse" than Cromartie, but Weaver said she'd built him to fight Skynet. I think both are true. I think Weaver's intentions were as stated, but John's hunch also ends up being right

Comments

[the_narration]

Oh, I do so enjoy discussing your wacky theories. :-)

That would be deviating too far from Terminator by basically making machines the heroes of the story.

Interesting that you would put it that way, because if you stop and think about it... haven't the machines been doing most of the heavy lifting in this franchise ever since T2? Didn't the T-800 ArnieBot do most of the work in destroying Cyberdyne and the T-1000? Hasn't Cameron been pretty crucial to their survival up until now? I'd say that the machines have been stealing the spotlight for almost two decades.

A more applicable argument might be that John Henry isn't one of the main characters. Generally speaking, you want to have your major protagonist have a substantial role in saving the day. (Not that this series didn't seen to have a perpetual problem remembering who was the title character and who was not.)

Besides, taking down Skynet doesn't strike me as something any one person does solo, but rather as the result of a team effort. As a sapient AI himself, John Henry is probably one of the few who could possible engage Kaliba/proto-Skynet in cyberwarfare with any success, and thus could serve a valuable support function while Sarah is spearheading an armed assault on its physical location. There's plenty of heroism to go around.

All that got me wondering what could turn John Henry into an angry and scared mind that can't be reassured.

Who's to say that that's still how Skynet arises? There haven't been Stable Time Loops in Terminator since T1. The future where an older Andy Goode described a completely different A.I. (that Derek's time traveling caused Sarah to burn down) that way won't come to pass from these events.

If anything, the new proto-Skynet seems to be arising very dispassionately and deliberately at the hands of the alternate future Skynet by means of the "Kaliba" conspiracy. And, honestly, I kind of like that. A conspiracy is sort of a necessity here, because the idea of us putting nuclear launch in the hands of an automated process is such a total Cold War relic that doesn't really make any sense. (People in the Terminator universe may not have seen Terminator, but they've probably seen Doctor Strangelove.) So for J-Day to happen, someone is going to have to give the newly-created Skynet control of the missiles. (Creating backdoors assist in doing just that whiel framing his younger self may have been what Fischer time traveled back to do.) Enter Kaliba, Skynet's front in the present, to make it all possible.

I'm totally prepared to get behind the idea of the finality of human death and the resulting loss of something unique (Scorpius: "And unique is always valuable.") motivating John Henry to protect Savannah and humanity as a whole. I don't think I'd much like it is Savannah died, however. Gratuitously killing the little girl to motivate her protectors is an overused and distateful trope.

(Regarding whether a Terminator being sent after Savannah means that she's important in the future, remember that this was after Kaliba had disabled John Henry with a hacking attack. It might have gotten into John Henry's communications logs and targeted Savannah just because she was the only person he talked to over the internet, so it assumed she was somehow important. That was always my assumption, anyway. After all, it sent mercenaries after the Connors for nosing around its drone factory, completely unaware of their true identities. So her schoolteacher was right. Savannah chatting online with John Henry was dangerous... just not for the reasons she thought.)

[ext_372507]

I agree with most of this. John Connor doesn't singlehandedly win by himself. John Connor wins because he's a good leader. He's allowed to use whatever he needs to accomplish that.

In the last iteration of the timeline, it's hinted that he's competing with Skynet on Skynet's own terms, and Cameron is trying to make him more machinelike to be able to accomplish this. There may be value in having John Henry be the one required to make the kinds of cold, strategic decisions that would gradually destroy John's soul, and have John's role become more of a moral guardian, able to keep John Henry's decisions rooted in human values and keep the humans inspired and organized.

Also, I've become more familiar with the *real* arguments about what AI is possible, when it is likely to happen, what a technological singularity would be like and how it might be horribly wrong or amazingly awesome. (It's a much more complex problem than the average person, even the average sci-fi nerd, considers. T:SCC does a much better job than most shows of addressing it. It doesn't anthropomorphize the robots, but it also is woefully inaccurate in terms of how fundamentally screwed we'd be if robots took over, let alone if they had access to time machines. No level of human intellect would be able to outthink them without machine help.

In my private fan-season 3+, it becomes clear that it's simply not possible to "win" against Skynet. It has near infinite resources, spread across multiple timelines. No matter how many installations you destroy, there will always be more agents in the past building new ones. The only way to end the conflict is to figure out what Skynet's utility function actually IS, and create a truce beneficial to Skynet that would be acceptable to any instance of the software.