"Come with me if you want to live."
Some thoughts about The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Pilot):
"There are those who believe that a child in the womb shares his mother's dreams. Her love for him, her hopes for his future. Is it told to him in pictures while he sleeps inside her? Is that why he reaches for her in that first moment, and cries for her touch?
"But what if you've known since he was inside you what his life held for him? That he would be hunted, that his fate was tied to the fate of millions. That every moment of your life will be spent keeping him alive. Would he understand why you were so hard? Why you held on so tight? Would he still reach for you if the only dream you shared with him was a nightmare?
"Would he know my love runs through him like blood?"
How great is that voice-over? I mean, really. Emotive, fierce, with that strong vein of fear running through it. Imagery nicely balanced between the abstract and the real. Undoubtedly a big part of its resonance comes from my already knowing Sarah Connor and the kind of woman she is, but still, I admire the writing. It's right up there with Dexter Morgan's monologues. (Mohinder, you sound even more dull and incoherent by comparison.)
I was a little afraid from watching the previews that this would be "John Connor in High School". The pilot, from that starting voice-over by Lena Heady, allayed those fears. This is unquestionably Sarah Connor's show.
What I gathered from previews and summaries was that the show apparently follows a different time-line to T3, taking place two years after Judgment Day. But continuities quibbles aside, there is something very different about the Terminators in The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I think has really big ramifications as far as departure from the existing canon goes. And here I think is where the influence of the new Battlestar Galactica (or Blade Runner, for that matter) really shows.
Cameron (Summer Glau) claims to have been sent from the year 2027. The original Terminator was from a later time, the year 2029. Yet Cameron - and to a lesser extent Cromatie (Owain Yeoman) too - are much more life-like and expressive than any of the supposedly more advanced models that we've seen in the films. When we first meet Cameron, we notice something a bit off about her manner as she tries to start a conversation at school with John (Thomas Dekker), but she does it with a twinkle in her eye. Cameron here reminded me a lot of Luna Lovegood in the film OotP, to be perfectly honest; an odd girl, but not at all robotic.
When Cameron's identity is revealed and we find out that she's a "cybernetic organism", she loses her twinkle and smile, but there's no way that Summer Glau's voice and eyes can match the deadpan emptiness that Arnold (or Robert Patrick) could convey. And I don't think that the creators of the show want that in Cameron. In casting Summer Glau, what they got was her unique combination of vulnerability and strength, which is comparable to Sarah Connor's own.
So now we have a Terminator who is not only in the shape of a (beautiful) young woman, but who has a name, who can pass for a human teenager in a school environment for longer than a day, and who has something very like a personality. Sarah eventually decides to trust her, John already has (or is quickly developing) a crush on her (I mean, who wouldn't?); and it's pretty clear that their relationship with Cameron will be an important part of the show, as well as the question (the mystery?) of what exactly Cameron is. (Going back to the 1960s to build and hide an isotope gun? WTF?)
What is Cameron's mission, exactly? ("I was sent here to protect John," she says, but is that the whole truth?) Was it in fact the resistance who sent her back, or could it be someone else? Is she possibly a trap?
Umm. Okay, I got a bit distracted from my initial line of thought. But here it is.
John Connor's unavoidable destiny is to be a messiah figure - saviour of mankind, the boy who lived, leader of the resistance against the machines. What, then, could it mean for that future of his if the teenaged John comes to care for a machine, not just as a father figure - like he did the T-101 (and John did send his own true-to-blood father back in time to his death, after all) - but as a friend, and potentially, a romantic interest?
If they succeed in destroying Skynet (they won't, obviously, but hypothetically), then Cameron will logically not-exist. And if Judgment Day still happens, John's attachment to her model will be a liability for him. (Remember how in T3, John Connor in the future was supposed to have been eventually assassinated by a T-101, who was chosen for that mission because of the emotional bond John had towards it as a boy.)
So what is my point? I think it's likely that Cameron will, in the end, have to be sacrificed in a way completely different to the many deaths of the T-101. I think her model (by either accident or design) threatens the human-machine dualism of the Terminator mythology, and that for that dualism to be maintained, for the future to occur as it must, she will have to be destroyed. Irretrievably. With absolute finality. That, I suspect, is her purpose.
Edited: I should mention that, looking around, the responses to the pilot seem to be very mixed, and there seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction about how it fits into the Terminator trilogy, the inconsistencies, the leaps of logic, etc. Speaking as someone who liked all three of the films (yes, even and especially the last, because Nick Stahl rocks), and who liked them not for the action (which I nearly always fast-forward through) but for the ideas they contain - these apparent shortcomings with the new series don't bother me like they must some viewers. I'm curious about how the "inconsistencies" might be explained (if not explained away). And I'm happy to accept the possibility that The Sarah Connor Chronicles will follow its own logic, and maybe carve a mythology different to the first two films.
Edited 2: Via Cynthia Littleton On The Air:
[T]he Terminator who in this incarnation is hellbent on protecting Sarah Connor and her John will be in touch with her feelings in a way that the mean-spirited robo played by Arnold Schwarzenegger the three "Terminator" pics never was. And for sure, actress Summer Glau, who masquerades as John's high school classmate Cameron (har har), has a different set of curves than Arnie's muscle-bound Terminator of pics past. "Mine will be the most human of the Terminators so far," Glau promised during "Sarah Connor's" TCA sesh on Monday, suggesting that she'll be very much in touch with her nuts and bolts even though her character "can't genuinely feel emotion."
"There are those who believe that a child in the womb shares his mother's dreams. Her love for him, her hopes for his future. Is it told to him in pictures while he sleeps inside her? Is that why he reaches for her in that first moment, and cries for her touch?
"But what if you've known since he was inside you what his life held for him? That he would be hunted, that his fate was tied to the fate of millions. That every moment of your life will be spent keeping him alive. Would he understand why you were so hard? Why you held on so tight? Would he still reach for you if the only dream you shared with him was a nightmare?
"Would he know my love runs through him like blood?"
How great is that voice-over? I mean, really. Emotive, fierce, with that strong vein of fear running through it. Imagery nicely balanced between the abstract and the real. Undoubtedly a big part of its resonance comes from my already knowing Sarah Connor and the kind of woman she is, but still, I admire the writing. It's right up there with Dexter Morgan's monologues. (Mohinder, you sound even more dull and incoherent by comparison.)
I was a little afraid from watching the previews that this would be "John Connor in High School". The pilot, from that starting voice-over by Lena Heady, allayed those fears. This is unquestionably Sarah Connor's show.
What I gathered from previews and summaries was that the show apparently follows a different time-line to T3, taking place two years after Judgment Day. But continuities quibbles aside, there is something very different about the Terminators in The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I think has really big ramifications as far as departure from the existing canon goes. And here I think is where the influence of the new Battlestar Galactica (or Blade Runner, for that matter) really shows.
Cameron (Summer Glau) claims to have been sent from the year 2027. The original Terminator was from a later time, the year 2029. Yet Cameron - and to a lesser extent Cromatie (Owain Yeoman) too - are much more life-like and expressive than any of the supposedly more advanced models that we've seen in the films. When we first meet Cameron, we notice something a bit off about her manner as she tries to start a conversation at school with John (Thomas Dekker), but she does it with a twinkle in her eye. Cameron here reminded me a lot of Luna Lovegood in the film OotP, to be perfectly honest; an odd girl, but not at all robotic.
When Cameron's identity is revealed and we find out that she's a "cybernetic organism", she loses her twinkle and smile, but there's no way that Summer Glau's voice and eyes can match the deadpan emptiness that Arnold (or Robert Patrick) could convey. And I don't think that the creators of the show want that in Cameron. In casting Summer Glau, what they got was her unique combination of vulnerability and strength, which is comparable to Sarah Connor's own.
So now we have a Terminator who is not only in the shape of a (beautiful) young woman, but who has a name, who can pass for a human teenager in a school environment for longer than a day, and who has something very like a personality. Sarah eventually decides to trust her, John already has (or is quickly developing) a crush on her (I mean, who wouldn't?); and it's pretty clear that their relationship with Cameron will be an important part of the show, as well as the question (the mystery?) of what exactly Cameron is. (Going back to the 1960s to build and hide an isotope gun? WTF?)
What is Cameron's mission, exactly? ("I was sent here to protect John," she says, but is that the whole truth?) Was it in fact the resistance who sent her back, or could it be someone else? Is she possibly a trap?
Umm. Okay, I got a bit distracted from my initial line of thought. But here it is.
John Connor's unavoidable destiny is to be a messiah figure - saviour of mankind, the boy who lived, leader of the resistance against the machines. What, then, could it mean for that future of his if the teenaged John comes to care for a machine, not just as a father figure - like he did the T-101 (and John did send his own true-to-blood father back in time to his death, after all) - but as a friend, and potentially, a romantic interest?
If they succeed in destroying Skynet (they won't, obviously, but hypothetically), then Cameron will logically not-exist. And if Judgment Day still happens, John's attachment to her model will be a liability for him. (Remember how in T3, John Connor in the future was supposed to have been eventually assassinated by a T-101, who was chosen for that mission because of the emotional bond John had towards it as a boy.)
So what is my point? I think it's likely that Cameron will, in the end, have to be sacrificed in a way completely different to the many deaths of the T-101. I think her model (by either accident or design) threatens the human-machine dualism of the Terminator mythology, and that for that dualism to be maintained, for the future to occur as it must, she will have to be destroyed. Irretrievably. With absolute finality. That, I suspect, is her purpose.
Edited: I should mention that, looking around, the responses to the pilot seem to be very mixed, and there seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction about how it fits into the Terminator trilogy, the inconsistencies, the leaps of logic, etc. Speaking as someone who liked all three of the films (yes, even and especially the last, because Nick Stahl rocks), and who liked them not for the action (which I nearly always fast-forward through) but for the ideas they contain - these apparent shortcomings with the new series don't bother me like they must some viewers. I'm curious about how the "inconsistencies" might be explained (if not explained away). And I'm happy to accept the possibility that The Sarah Connor Chronicles will follow its own logic, and maybe carve a mythology different to the first two films.
Edited 2: Via Cynthia Littleton On The Air:
[T]he Terminator who in this incarnation is hellbent on protecting Sarah Connor and her John will be in touch with her feelings in a way that the mean-spirited robo played by Arnold Schwarzenegger the three "Terminator" pics never was. And for sure, actress Summer Glau, who masquerades as John's high school classmate Cameron (har har), has a different set of curves than Arnie's muscle-bound Terminator of pics past. "Mine will be the most human of the Terminators so far," Glau promised during "Sarah Connor's" TCA sesh on Monday, suggesting that she'll be very much in touch with her nuts and bolts even though her character "can't genuinely feel emotion."