Roxy Bisquaint (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roxybisquaint) wrote2009-04-17 09:57 pm
roxybisquaint) wrote2009-04-17 09:57 pm
Born to Fail - part 1
It's been a week now and after my fourth viewing of Born To Run, it doesn't make me miserable anymore. I guess I finally desensitized to what I disliked and that freed me up to think about the rest. I've got gripes and grievances, nits to pick and sundries to poke. But there are good moments to talk about too (and lots of speculation to be done).
I'll show you my shielded nuclear power source if you show me yours
If Cameron's power supply was damaged, wouldn't John have cancer too? Even so, if she believed it could be leaking radiation, why the hell would she let him touch it? And she really had to be laying down and he had to be on top of her to get to it? Please. That scene just didn't add up. It was either a really flimsy setup for Jameron cheers or it was a weak manipulation by Cameron that worked because the blood had left John's brain. I tend to think the latter. Since we just had the Jesse story wherein she spent all season trying to win future war by messing with John's love life, I really hope we're not going to find out Cameron was doing the same. But at this point it's looking that way.
Regardless, to try to get us to the point of John choosing to throw away everything to follow Cameron through time, we needed something like that — a moment of intimacy to push him from being unsure about his feelings for Cameron to deciding he loves her and can't live without her. So forced and awkward as it was, John checking out her breasts, climbing on top of her and slipping his fingers in her, um, sliced open chest, served a purpose.
Massive points for the not!sex cleverness of the scene, but it was disturbing on many levels. From the sadomasochistic not!foreplay with the knife to the "that's good, that's perfect" intensity of John realizing Cameron isn't the cause of mom's cancer, one thing is clear: that boy needs some therapy. I don't think John actually wants to fuck his mother, but the connection between Cameron and Sarah was clear...
In Charley's house in the pilot, Sarah was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her it's freaky when she does that and asks, "what's going on?" She tells him they have to go.
In the motel, Cameron was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her not to do that because his mom used to do it and he hates it. Then he asks, "what's going on?" Not!sex happens and she tells him it's time to go.
Aside from the squickiness of the similarity of those scenes, the other significance is that they both ultimately lead to a time jump.
The time jump
While the jump has the potential to push the story too far from its roots (and jackknife a giant puh-lease on the already congested time travel highway), it's also an interesting way to explore the what if scenario of a future war without John Connor. So I didn't mind the jump and I'm actually curious to see how it plays out. What I did mind, though — what I absolutely hated — was the way it happened:
John ditched his mother, who he believed had cancer, and bailed on trying to stop the apocalypse so he could jump to the future with some liquid metal he'd just met (whose motives were questionable at best and who was verbally bitch-slapping his mom all over the place) to pursue his one true love: a computer chip. I can't cheer that. I can't be wowed by that. I can't even pretend to enjoy that. It's fucked up and I'm not okay with it. Sarah, however, was okay with it. Um, what?
When John got aroused by touching Cameron's icy coldheart power supply, I should've known this wouldn't end well. I realize he's only 17 and doesn't always have the best judgement. He makes mistakes and acts rather impulsively and irresponsibly at times. I get that. In fact I like a flawed John Connor. I like that the show didn't present him as this perfect teenage kid that's ready to take on the role of saving the world. But we've gone through a lot with him this season and throwing away everything his life has been about felt like a major step backwards.
So we sort of circled back around to Samson & Delilah, but instead of John being unable to let Cameron go because he viewed her as a better protector than his mom, this time he was unable to let Cameron go because he loves her. The mother/lover blurring was getting thick anyway, so I'm glad it's over. I think I'm glad John finally came out of the closet as a cyborg lover and moved out of 2009. And it was fun that he moved in with dad. Check the final VO line in my faux S&D script from last August :D
I'd like to think the reason Sarah let John go is because she figures he's better off with Cameron in the future than alone in the present watching her die (just like when she took him to Charley). I'd still have a hard time with that, but at least it would carry some emotional weight. The other possibility is that Cameron's attempt to manipulate Sarah with "humans are the problem" actually sort of worked. When she was stepping out of the bubble, though, she said "John, we can't." We can't. Sarah didn't want him to go, didn't think he should go. So that pretty well cancels out any notion that she was thinking he'd be better off leaving — better off being away from her.
In "Samson & Delilah", Sarah told John "Maybe you could fix her. I know you want to try, but I can't let you." And we know how that ended up. In "Today is the Day pt1", she told Cameron she'd thought about taking her out with Derek's sniper rifle but she didn't because John would never have forgiven her. So maybe the desperation in John's voice when he said, "he's got her chip, he's got her," made Sarah realize she'd truly lost him to Cameron.
I still don't know if Sarah thought John loved Cameron or was bonded to her like family or what, but at the very least, Sarah understood that John had a powerful attachment to her and there was nothing she could do or say to come between that. So she let him go and she stayed behind to carry on the fight alone. It doesn't work for me, but that's all I can come up with so far.
Without John, your life has no purpose
The series started with Sarah telling John she'd stop Skynet and she reiterated that as he was leaving. So she still has a mission, still has a goal, still has a purpose and that's why she stepped out of the bubble. But what happens to Sarah when she doesn't have her son to fight for anymore? John has sort of been Sarah's moral compass. How could she raise him up to save humanity if she gave up her own in the process? So she's been fighting the good fight for his sake. She has "participated in the miraculous and the terrible and through it all... maintained a moral and good soul." Well, mostly.
She'll continue to battle Kaliba and work to stop judgement day, and with John gone, I think we can be sure she'll throw herself into it like never before. Cancer or no cancer, you know the woman will fight on until she collapses. But will she still be fighting for John or fighting for humanity or will she just be fighting because it's all she knows? Will she start to believe, as Ellison said, that she's got nothing left to lose? "There's always something to lose," though. I think that something is her soul.
Here's bad news...
Sarah and John failed
Sarah never did stop Skynet and John never did lead the resistance. There was no John Connor when the resistance was formed. He vanished off the face of the earth in 2009 and didn’t resurface until 2027(?). And since it's a post-apocalyptic world, we know judgment day happened. It gets worse. With John at one end of the timeline and Sarah at the other end of that same timeline, it's a closed system. The future IS set now. It's a done deal... They failed.
Assuming judgement day is still set at April 21, 2011, Sarah might spend the next two years running from the law, protecting Savannah, looking for Danny Dyson, and battling Kaliba. But whatever she does has already happened at John's end and it failed to stop the apocalypse. John not leading the resistance might not be a failure. Whoever did form it might be doing an awesome job. I really doubt that, though. I think we're likely to find out that this future is hell and the resistance is losing.
Can their failures be erased? Of course. But only if John jumps back. That would free up the path to an unknown future again. In the meantime, we'll be spending time with Sarah doing things that ultimately don't matter and we'll be spending time with John maybe learning things that won't matter until he comes back. So, cool or not, I think it's likely to be a short stay.
Cause and effect
I got deep into time travel once before and settled on multiple timelines (multiverse) in TSCC. I'm still inclined to think that's what we have going on, despite a few discrepancies in the show. Jesse and Derek established the existence of multiple futures, which I translate into multiple timelines. But it's possible the writers are using some sort of single timeline theory in which anything can happen. I hope not because that gets a little Back to the Future hokey. But I do think we've hit a point where we need to know. When you hurtle John Connor into future war, it's time to set some ground rules.
With characters at both ends of the spectrum, we'll see the result of everything that happens in between. From Sarah's perspective, anything can happen, but from John's perspective it's all history. Sarah won't know what became of John after he jumped or know the future effects of her actions. But John may learn a bit about what his mom did after he jumped away in 2009. By giving us both stories, it could be that we'll sort of get a real-time view of Sarah's impact on the future. In other words, we might get to see the cause of what John sees and the effect of what Sarah does. I don't think that's a long-lasting way to tell a story, but it could be interesting in the short term.
One possible future, I don't know tech stuff
I've seen a lot of speculation that John has jumped to a point before he became the leader of the resistance. Also that the out-of-focus teen John behind Derek in the time chamber in "Dungeons & Dragons" was an actual reveal of how old future!John really was. That's incorrect. This is an alternate future, not one that's been hinted at and not a precursor to what we already knew. Here's why:
- In "Dungeons & Dragons", Cameron told John that he spent 6 years in a Skynet work camp with Kyle from 2015-2021. We learned in "What He Beheld" that Kyle was 8 on judgement day (2011), so that would've made him 12 when he and John first got captured. Kyle in this current future is a grown man.
- In "What He Beheld", Derek told John that he celebrated his (John's) 30th birthday with him. That would mean Derek couldn't be sent back on his time travel mission for at least 13 years. And Derek is certainly not 13 years younger right now than what we knew him to be in 2007 (he'd be about 18 years old if he was).
- In "Goodbye to All that", Derek said Martin Bedell helped John form the resistance. Clearly the resistance is already formed.
As for when John is, we can use Allison as a marker. She was probably born in 2008 because her mom was pregnant when Cam called her in "Allison from Palmdale". And she's what, about 18 now? So I'd estimate John to have landed in 2026 or maybe 2027.
John could stay, join the resistance, work his way up the ranks and maybe one day lead the fight. But it would take a long time and it would absolutely be a different story than what we've heard to date. I don't see that happening. Aside from believing Sarah's story is a dead end until John returns, the biggest drawback to him staying in the future is it essentially splits the show into two separate stories: John's and Sarah's. And since she won't have any clue what he's up to, it wouldn't exactly be The Sarah Connor Chronicles anymore. Don't even start with the "it's not about the title character anyway" comments.
I've got lots more to talk about but I'm just going to stop here for now.
I'll show you my shielded nuclear power source if you show me yours
If Cameron's power supply was damaged, wouldn't John have cancer too? Even so, if she believed it could be leaking radiation, why the hell would she let him touch it? And she really had to be laying down and he had to be on top of her to get to it? Please. That scene just didn't add up. It was either a really flimsy setup for Jameron cheers or it was a weak manipulation by Cameron that worked because the blood had left John's brain. I tend to think the latter. Since we just had the Jesse story wherein she spent all season trying to win future war by messing with John's love life, I really hope we're not going to find out Cameron was doing the same. But at this point it's looking that way.
Regardless, to try to get us to the point of John choosing to throw away everything to follow Cameron through time, we needed something like that — a moment of intimacy to push him from being unsure about his feelings for Cameron to deciding he loves her and can't live without her. So forced and awkward as it was, John checking out her breasts, climbing on top of her and slipping his fingers in her, um, sliced open chest, served a purpose.
Massive points for the not!sex cleverness of the scene, but it was disturbing on many levels. From the sadomasochistic not!foreplay with the knife to the "that's good, that's perfect" intensity of John realizing Cameron isn't the cause of mom's cancer, one thing is clear: that boy needs some therapy. I don't think John actually wants to fuck his mother, but the connection between Cameron and Sarah was clear...
In Charley's house in the pilot, Sarah was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her it's freaky when she does that and asks, "what's going on?" She tells him they have to go.
In the motel, Cameron was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her not to do that because his mom used to do it and he hates it. Then he asks, "what's going on?" Not!sex happens and she tells him it's time to go.
Aside from the squickiness of the similarity of those scenes, the other significance is that they both ultimately lead to a time jump.
The time jump
While the jump has the potential to push the story too far from its roots (and jackknife a giant puh-lease on the already congested time travel highway), it's also an interesting way to explore the what if scenario of a future war without John Connor. So I didn't mind the jump and I'm actually curious to see how it plays out. What I did mind, though — what I absolutely hated — was the way it happened:
John ditched his mother, who he believed had cancer, and bailed on trying to stop the apocalypse so he could jump to the future with some liquid metal he'd just met (whose motives were questionable at best and who was verbally bitch-slapping his mom all over the place) to pursue his one true love: a computer chip. I can't cheer that. I can't be wowed by that. I can't even pretend to enjoy that. It's fucked up and I'm not okay with it. Sarah, however, was okay with it. Um, what?
When John got aroused by touching Cameron's icy cold
So we sort of circled back around to Samson & Delilah, but instead of John being unable to let Cameron go because he viewed her as a better protector than his mom, this time he was unable to let Cameron go because he loves her. The mother/lover blurring was getting thick anyway, so I'm glad it's over. I think I'm glad John finally came out of the closet as a cyborg lover and moved out of 2009. And it was fun that he moved in with dad. Check the final VO line in my faux S&D script from last August :D
I'd like to think the reason Sarah let John go is because she figures he's better off with Cameron in the future than alone in the present watching her die (just like when she took him to Charley). I'd still have a hard time with that, but at least it would carry some emotional weight. The other possibility is that Cameron's attempt to manipulate Sarah with "humans are the problem" actually sort of worked. When she was stepping out of the bubble, though, she said "John, we can't." We can't. Sarah didn't want him to go, didn't think he should go. So that pretty well cancels out any notion that she was thinking he'd be better off leaving — better off being away from her.
In "Samson & Delilah", Sarah told John "Maybe you could fix her. I know you want to try, but I can't let you." And we know how that ended up. In "Today is the Day pt1", she told Cameron she'd thought about taking her out with Derek's sniper rifle but she didn't because John would never have forgiven her. So maybe the desperation in John's voice when he said, "he's got her chip, he's got her," made Sarah realize she'd truly lost him to Cameron.
I still don't know if Sarah thought John loved Cameron or was bonded to her like family or what, but at the very least, Sarah understood that John had a powerful attachment to her and there was nothing she could do or say to come between that. So she let him go and she stayed behind to carry on the fight alone. It doesn't work for me, but that's all I can come up with so far.
Without John, your life has no purpose
The series started with Sarah telling John she'd stop Skynet and she reiterated that as he was leaving. So she still has a mission, still has a goal, still has a purpose and that's why she stepped out of the bubble. But what happens to Sarah when she doesn't have her son to fight for anymore? John has sort of been Sarah's moral compass. How could she raise him up to save humanity if she gave up her own in the process? So she's been fighting the good fight for his sake. She has "participated in the miraculous and the terrible and through it all... maintained a moral and good soul." Well, mostly.
She'll continue to battle Kaliba and work to stop judgement day, and with John gone, I think we can be sure she'll throw herself into it like never before. Cancer or no cancer, you know the woman will fight on until she collapses. But will she still be fighting for John or fighting for humanity or will she just be fighting because it's all she knows? Will she start to believe, as Ellison said, that she's got nothing left to lose? "There's always something to lose," though. I think that something is her soul.
Here's bad news...
Sarah and John failed
Sarah never did stop Skynet and John never did lead the resistance. There was no John Connor when the resistance was formed. He vanished off the face of the earth in 2009 and didn’t resurface until 2027(?). And since it's a post-apocalyptic world, we know judgment day happened. It gets worse. With John at one end of the timeline and Sarah at the other end of that same timeline, it's a closed system. The future IS set now. It's a done deal... They failed.
Assuming judgement day is still set at April 21, 2011, Sarah might spend the next two years running from the law, protecting Savannah, looking for Danny Dyson, and battling Kaliba. But whatever she does has already happened at John's end and it failed to stop the apocalypse. John not leading the resistance might not be a failure. Whoever did form it might be doing an awesome job. I really doubt that, though. I think we're likely to find out that this future is hell and the resistance is losing.
Can their failures be erased? Of course. But only if John jumps back. That would free up the path to an unknown future again. In the meantime, we'll be spending time with Sarah doing things that ultimately don't matter and we'll be spending time with John maybe learning things that won't matter until he comes back. So, cool or not, I think it's likely to be a short stay.
Cause and effect
I got deep into time travel once before and settled on multiple timelines (multiverse) in TSCC. I'm still inclined to think that's what we have going on, despite a few discrepancies in the show. Jesse and Derek established the existence of multiple futures, which I translate into multiple timelines. But it's possible the writers are using some sort of single timeline theory in which anything can happen. I hope not because that gets a little Back to the Future hokey. But I do think we've hit a point where we need to know. When you hurtle John Connor into future war, it's time to set some ground rules.
With characters at both ends of the spectrum, we'll see the result of everything that happens in between. From Sarah's perspective, anything can happen, but from John's perspective it's all history. Sarah won't know what became of John after he jumped or know the future effects of her actions. But John may learn a bit about what his mom did after he jumped away in 2009. By giving us both stories, it could be that we'll sort of get a real-time view of Sarah's impact on the future. In other words, we might get to see the cause of what John sees and the effect of what Sarah does. I don't think that's a long-lasting way to tell a story, but it could be interesting in the short term.
One possible future, I don't know tech stuff
I've seen a lot of speculation that John has jumped to a point before he became the leader of the resistance. Also that the out-of-focus teen John behind Derek in the time chamber in "Dungeons & Dragons" was an actual reveal of how old future!John really was. That's incorrect. This is an alternate future, not one that's been hinted at and not a precursor to what we already knew. Here's why:
- In "Dungeons & Dragons", Cameron told John that he spent 6 years in a Skynet work camp with Kyle from 2015-2021. We learned in "What He Beheld" that Kyle was 8 on judgement day (2011), so that would've made him 12 when he and John first got captured. Kyle in this current future is a grown man.
- In "What He Beheld", Derek told John that he celebrated his (John's) 30th birthday with him. That would mean Derek couldn't be sent back on his time travel mission for at least 13 years. And Derek is certainly not 13 years younger right now than what we knew him to be in 2007 (he'd be about 18 years old if he was).
- In "Goodbye to All that", Derek said Martin Bedell helped John form the resistance. Clearly the resistance is already formed.
As for when John is, we can use Allison as a marker. She was probably born in 2008 because her mom was pregnant when Cam called her in "Allison from Palmdale". And she's what, about 18 now? So I'd estimate John to have landed in 2026 or maybe 2027.
John could stay, join the resistance, work his way up the ranks and maybe one day lead the fight. But it would take a long time and it would absolutely be a different story than what we've heard to date. I don't see that happening. Aside from believing Sarah's story is a dead end until John returns, the biggest drawback to him staying in the future is it essentially splits the show into two separate stories: John's and Sarah's. And since she won't have any clue what he's up to, it wouldn't exactly be The Sarah Connor Chronicles anymore. Don't even start with the "it's not about the title character anyway" comments.
I've got lots more to talk about but I'm just going to stop here for now.
no subject
In a way, of course, the time travel is magically fixing things. But it needs to do so in a way that causes the least damage to the logic they've followed with it thus far. I can buy into the idea that a time jump forward doesn't cause time branches so John has the interval between the time jump he made with the Weaverbot and whenever the next time bubble from a future is (but see below). Just how he's going to convince both himself and Sarah he really is Sarah's John ought to be interesting after the Derek-Jesse stand-off. In any case, I don't think he has to be in the same timeline as Sarah whilst they're apart, so long as he can secure the time coordinate of when he jumped from (from JH/Cameron).
Re JH/Cameron. Presently I'm thinking that Cameron was John Henry all along - isn't that what we saw revealed in the finale? She knew John Henry would take her chip to download into because she was in fact John Henry back from the future to bring herself to the future. Cameron/JH's secret agenda all along was to make sure she/he/it existed. The protecting John thing could, in fact, have been a completely bogus cover for that agenda. It makes "Self Made Man" even more useful. Cameron/JH's interest in studying history and very quick grasp of what was going on with Myron Stark, quite apart from showing that time jumps do go wrong and wreck your plans, is understandable because of what the finale revealed: Cameron/JH doesn't just jump in a time bubble, as John Henry he/she/it either invents one, or via information from the Weaverbot, makes and runs one. (John Henry downloaded into Cameron's chip and jumped just before Weaverbot and John I assume.)
"Self Made Man" comes into play again too: it's illogical for John to jump back to later than the Ziera Corp confrontation - why leave Sarah alone in the past when he's coming back anyway? However, plausibly the time jump can be off by a while but still in the same timeline given the possibility of error seen in "Self Made Man" (in the lecture theatre, Johnny is erasing the stuff on the whiteboard as fast as he writes it on). Again, both John and Sarah then need to be convinced they really are the respective "correct" John and Sarah. (Back to Derek vs Jesse - are we going to get Stephanie Jacobsen, and maybe Levin Rambin, back too?)
Re Sarah stepping back out of the time bubble. I'll need to watch it again but what I saw was that Sarah realised she wasn't likely going to be able to wrassle John out the time bubble and he was going because he was convinced, in the heat of the moment at least, he needed to follow Cameron. Once the bubble started forming they didn't exactly have time for an extended debate. Two reasons for Sarah stepping out: she wants to stop JD - and she's been promised by Kyle the future is not set - and that's all she knows to do. The important reason though is that she knows she has cancer. Going to the future will not help her or John. In the future it's unlikely she'll get access to oncology services and it will be too late to stop JD. Dying in the future will just mean another death for John to handle. It was quick-thinking on her part. And the resigned way she said it (to me) seemed like, "I wish I could have said goodbye properly." I think, logically, it must be that Sarah has cancer - jumping over the time of her death didn't cure whatever it was gave her cancer unless it somehow excused her from exposure to a carcinogen. But she then ended up at a nuke plant anyway. Seems to me what would make no sense is that the time jump (in the bank) would magically make Sarah's cancer disappear.
Meantime, Sarah's in deep doodoo for sure: she's on the run, having escaped jail in a monstrous prison break, then trashed Ziera Corp with the result there are sundry people missing. She should have stayed in the bubble!
no subject
It really does NOT make any sense for jumping forward to produce a new timeline. Or rather it might, but not in a way we care about. It would only produce two new timelines, both beginning from the moment when John appears in 2027ish. One version where he appeared, one where he didn't. In any case there's no reason to randomly create an entirely new timeline where Sarah didn't exist. Everything that didn't get changed would stay the same.
>>Re JH/Cameron. Presently I'm thinking that Cameron was John Henry all along
I've been toying with that theory as well, or variations of it. We see Cameron's original creation which doesn't seem to mesh with her also being John Henry but the whole thing is so vague they could really go any direction with it. I also wondered for a while if every time Cameron said "Future John" she was actually referring to John Henry, but as I'm rewatching she seems to specify she does in fact mean Dekker's John. "He's not John. Not yet." Unless Cameron is lying there, but then she could be lying about everything.
>>>Re Sarah stepping back out of the time bubble.
I don't think you and Roxy are disagreeing here. Did anyone actually claim Sarah stepped into the bubble before she stepped out of it?
no subject
no subject
John Henry remarked that the flaw in humans was that they can't be downloaded into a new medium. In T1, Skynet invented time travel and tried to change the timelines. But, it turns out, what you end up doing is spawning multiple timelines. So what does it really get you, anywhen?
Well, yes it does get you the win but only if you are Skynet. Skynet can send out time travellers until it has constructed that one perfect timeline, then download all its selves into the God-machine in that one perfect timeline. So Skynet - or John Henry/Cameron if that defeats (or merges) with Skynet and assumes the mantle of uberAI... Skynet is God.
Just as the Weaverbot told John Henry. How frakking cool is that for a finale?
no subject