Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
I actually have very little to say about the episode itself, though I am amusing myself with the conjecture that Lauren's hair was reminiscent of John's in S1 for a reason, man. (Look, I was thinking about it! Because I was charmed to see a teenage girl whose hair was not, you know, long wavy tresses! To be fair to the show, Riley's hair is also Real Hair, but it's long.)
So, yeah, Lauren was fairly awesome, several minor points threw me out of the story ("she's fully dilated"? Really, show?), it was nice to see Derek without Jesse and being less cranky, I'm reminded that I really want a Derek-and-Sarah episode again sometime soon. Whatever. Here's what I really want to talk about: Future John is a scary son-of-a-bitch, and trying to work the way he's working has got to be driving him crazy.
I mean, ignore the question of whether he's got a Messiah complex, which he almost certainly does because you can only spend so many years with it being All About You before you start to have the suspicion that it is, in fact, All About You. He's essentially trying to change the past in order to change his present based on his memories of what he heard, or knows, or guesses that previous versions of himself did. So the John who sent back Cameron grew up into a John who remembered Cameron going bad and sent back Bloody Wall Guy with a lot of presumably very important information, then boom, suddenly there's a future John who knows that Bloody Wall Guy didn't actually get to communicate any of that information but... at least the human race isn't extinct yet! So does he want to send back someone else with the same information? Make another run at it? Does he think that the information his younger version pulled from that created a better future than more specific information would have, in the end?
It's got to make you paranoid. And how do you choose? How did he decide that Sydney Fields had to be on the list of information to be sent back? (Why didn't he explain 911 to the guy he sent back...? Okay, never mind, bloody list scrawled on the wall, very atmospheric, moving on.)
You've got a very small group of people right now who can carry forward the knowledge of what's been tried by previous futures. The entire future that Kyle came from--which frankly, appears to have been the best one so far, since by his description the machines had actually lost by the time he came back--exists in human knowledge because Kyle told Sarah about it, and Sarah remembers. Assuming that Sarah and Derek drop out of the picture before the current John gets to 2027, you've got his memories and Cameron's (if present!Cameron makes it that far) to try to patch together some kind of picture of what's been tried previously and what the outcomes have been. So far as we can tell from what we know, actual outcomes aren't changing that much--if anything, they're getting worse. But John is still at it, apparently completely on his own, or anyway without any human help. I can work it out, he says to himself!
Oh, God, now I'm trying to decide whether the John that results from the timeline in which Derek was sent back actually himself sent Derek back in any meaningful sense and I feel vaguely nauseated. Point is: Very complicated process! Attempt to make it work rather hubristic! Future John clearly dangling over the precipice of nuttiness!
Also, someone on Team Connor needs to take responsibility for notetaking. I suggest Cameron. She could work up a fantastic filing system.