John Henry, where's your trousers?
Apr. 29th, 2010 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roxybisquaintYou guys already know that I don't think John Henry time-jumped. I think he used Cameron's chip (or repaired and used the water cooler terminator's chip) and left Zeira Corp to go find his AI brother in present day. This post isn't really about that theory, though. This time, I'm just analyzing the situation.
"You can't bring anything through when you come—not weapons, not clothing, nothing."
If John Henry did jump, where is his clothing? It should've been in a pile on the floor, but it wasn't. Clothing doesn't go through, so it either gets disintegrated by the time bubble or left behind by the time bubble. Since Cameron's clothed body was sitting there in the chair (and the chair and table were there), we can rule out disintegration. She was clearly within the sphere of the time bubble when Weaver and John left, so she would have been within the sphere when John Henry left too. Yet Cameron's body was clothed and intact and John Henry's clothes were not there.
Was that a hint that he didn't actually jump ahead or was it just a gaff?
"You can't bring anything through when you come—not weapons, not clothing, nothing."
If John Henry did jump, where is his clothing? It should've been in a pile on the floor, but it wasn't. Clothing doesn't go through, so it either gets disintegrated by the time bubble or left behind by the time bubble. Since Cameron's clothed body was sitting there in the chair (and the chair and table were there), we can rule out disintegration. She was clearly within the sphere of the time bubble when Weaver and John left, so she would have been within the sphere when John Henry left too. Yet Cameron's body was clothed and intact and John Henry's clothes were not there.
Was that a hint that he didn't actually jump ahead or was it just a gaff?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2010-04-29 09:55 pm (UTC)In T1/T2, you had to be naked to go through at all. Pre-production detailed that. You never see it because it was cut and not necessary since Kyle explained as much, so the show took liberties with that, which really isn't a big concern of mine in enjoying the show, but I always think that when I re-watch it.
John Henry's clothes should be there in that room if he jumped!
Were the trio's clothes left in the vault? I'm trying to understand how the clothes would be left behind if it was never shown or explained that clothes were left behind when people/machines time traveled.
no subject
on 2010-04-29 10:42 pm (UTC)Cam: "You can't bring anything with you when you come — not weapons, not clothing, nothing."
Kyle: "Nothing dead will go."
I don't think those contradict each other. But if T1 meant that you actually had to be naked to enter the TDE, that's clearly not the case in TSCC. The story evolved, though, so it doesn't have to be the same. Things changed after Sarah blew up Cyberdyne and time travel tech could work differently now than in the previous timeline.
In TSCC, it doesn't matter what you have with you or on you, the only thing coming out the other end of the jump are living bodies (or powered cyborgs). Things that don't go through would either have to get disintegrated in the process or left behind by the bubble. So if John Henry jumped, we've got a contradiction — Cameron and furnishings are there but John Henry's clothing is not.
no subject
on 2010-04-29 10:57 pm (UTC)I guess my opinion is that John Henry's body went through. Which program was in the body is unknown. While I am definitely not ruling out your theory, this is my reasoning on how the clothes are not there: they disintegrated upon John Henry entering the TDE and going through time, since you see people/metal enter the TDE fully clothed and arrive naked.
no subject
on 2010-04-30 04:52 am (UTC)The problem with that is Cameron, her clothes, the knife, the keyboard, the cable, the table and chair did not disintegrate. And we know all of those things would've been within the time bubble when John Henry jumped.
Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.
on 2010-04-30 03:17 pm (UTC)The thing is - This is what I LOVE Cameron (director)'s method of time travel. It solves SO many problems I have with most time travel - What happens to the air where you were standing? What happens if you accidentally time travelled into a rock? All that shit is resolved - if you appear at a truckstop, the time machine *carves* that truck apart as you enter. There's no messy worrying about matter sharing the same space - a molecule-size bubble appears, then rapidly expands, annihilating all matter in its path.
Mind you, that doesn't explain how annihilating matter like that doesn't result in a fission explosion, but I'm letting that go.
Anyway - we've *never* seen the outgoing trip, just the incoming trip. Your friend is right, I own the first draft screenplay to Terminator 2, in which Kyle is naked because he has to be naked, and then he steps into some floating rings and they descend into a tunnel. But you're right, that never made it to screen. Thus, I'm prepared to accept almost any model they want to make for out-going time travel wormholes. In the premiere, I was shocked they could time-travel without concentric rings like in the screenplay, but that's not how it is in TSCC, as you said.
The pseudo-scientist in me finds it objectionable for scientific and utter *hotness* reasons that when the gang walked into the time vortex, the time vortex didn't immediately disintegrate their clothing. "Nothing dead will go," said Kyle - so how is it that they're walking INTO the time vortex and they're not naked? The field should have stripped off their clothing, the outer layer of skin (and hair, Kyle should have been bald, but I'm letting that go too), and then sent them. It makes no sense.
Plus, I think Sarah shooting the Terminator while nude would've been the hottest thing ever done :D
But my point is, the outgoing wormholes in TSCC have *never* made sense by the rules, since the premiere, so I'm prepared to forgive the Cameron-still-exists-instead-of-being-vaped theory.
Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.
on 2010-05-01 12:33 am (UTC)Yeah it bothered me we were supposed to accept a completely undamaged room at Zeira as having had a time bubble depart from it when the bank was destroyed by the time bubble departure in the pilot. Was that also a gaff or was it intentional?No way to know, but if it was a gaff, it was a pretty freaking big one. If it was intentional, then the characters were stupid for believing John Henry had time jumped.
The popular fanwank seemed to be that time bubbles don't carve anything away from their point of departure, only from their point of arrival (to prevent landing in a wall or something, like you said). And the reason the bank blew up was because it had been rigged with explosives by the engineer so that there would be no evidence of the TDE after it was used.
Leaving explosives sitting in a bank vault for a few decades probably isn't the safest thing to do, so I think it's a stretch. It's the
bestonly explanation we've got, though. It's either explosives at the bank or total fail at Zeira.The pseudo-scientist in me finds it objectionable for scientific and utter *hotness* reasons that when the gang walked into the time vortex, the time vortex didn't immediately disintegrate their clothing. "Nothing dead will go," said Kyle - so how is it that they're walking INTO the time vortex and they're not naked? The field should have stripped off their clothing, the outer layer of skin (and hair, Kyle should have been bald, but I'm letting that go too), and then sent them. It makes no sense.
Since the departure doesn't happen the second the bubble appears (it seems like it sort of powers up to full strength first), I just figure nothing really happens until it leaves. That's when it carries the living things through time, leaving behind the non-living things. And I think it has to leave them behind as opposed to disintegrate them because of what's implied by the Zeira jump. Even after they arrive in the future, Weaver tells John "it doesn't go through" about Cameron's body. She doesn't say it gets destroyed.
Plus, I think Sarah shooting the Terminator while nude would've been the hottest thing ever done :D
If they'd done that in Born to Run, we might've had better ratings and gotten a third season ;)
Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.
on 2010-05-01 10:23 pm (UTC)Yeah, that... doesn't seem right. Also, what really bothered me about that scenario was, why did Cromartie's flesh peel off? Because it exited the bubble before completion? I don't understand. Much about that 2nd episode really did not make much sense to me.
And as for Cameron, yes, I don't think that scene was thought through. To hear Josh write on his blog, I think by the time Season 2 ended, he was under so much stress from impending cancellation and the network execs, he wasn't really focussed. I think that entire ending was ... weird. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it didn't come off right.
And yes, nude!sarah should have equalled ratings. Curse those network execs! :D
Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.
on 2010-11-22 01:06 pm (UTC)Of course, Cameron removed the second soldier entirely from the story in later revisions, and what's shown in T2 (with the bubble annihilating everything in its path) makes it pretty clear that the TDE physics has also changed. But I think it's interesting to note that the idea was at least considered, even if it didn't make it into canon.
I think that it's not unreasonable to assume, as Roxy mentions below, that the annihilation only happens at the destination point. I love the extended future war scenes from T2 script (they're in the novelization, BTW), and don't see a conflict. It's doubtful that the humans in the future would've known everything there is to know about time displacement physics. IIRC, in that scene they also had Kyle slather himself with conductive jelly in addition to simply disrobing, but it's been years since I read it and I could be mistaken. But between that and the fact that they set his destination point above the alley rather than risking him merging with the ground could indicate that they were just playing it safe.
The matter displaced doesn't undergo fission- it simply ceases to exist. This leaves open the question of what happens to the individual atoms whose nuclei are stuck right on the boundary of the bubble. I'd love for a nuclear physicist to tackle this question, but my seat-of-the-pants guess would be that nuclei are so small (even compared to atoms) that it would be statistically unlikely for a critical number of them to be split by the bubble, and brownian motion would cause most of the atoms along the edge to be completely annihilated in the few seconds that the bubble is in existence. You could however wind up with quite a bit of ionization due to annihilated electrons, which would provide at least a weak explanation for the electrical disturbance (at least while the bubble exists, though not before). The handful of atoms that did get split wouldn't be near any fissile isotope, so you'd get a flash of light and a burst of radiation, but no chain reaction.
Wow. Did I really just geek out that much? I'll stop now before someone calls the authorities. :-)
no subject
on 2010-04-30 09:25 am (UTC)Wasn't the bank reduced to rubble? Charley says there was just a "hole in the ground" where the bank used to be when he got to LA. Which was useful cos that would also have conveniently destroyed what was left of Cromartie's endo, and allowed Ellison to think the Connors were dead for a few years.
I just always figured that, if they had the time, people using the TDE would get undressed beforehand but, if you were in a rush (a la the Connors in the bank) then you just got stripped off by the process. I also guess that all the TDEs must work slightly differently, otherwise - if we're going along the lines of the bank destruction - Sarah and Ellison and Zeira would all have been obliterated when John and Weaver jumped.
But then, this show certainly did have its fair share of gaffes...
Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-04-30 01:21 pm (UTC)Since encrypted radios have had auto destruct features all along, wouldn't such a feature be expected in TDE?
Since Sarah was still alive after John and CW jumped, we can just assume that Weaver didn't set the auto-destruct sequence.
Never mind that there was a "not really" nuclear plasma rifle ("Hope") in the bank vault bubble when the TDE was activated.
Re: Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-04-30 11:15 pm (UTC)Re: Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-05-01 12:45 am (UTC)Oh hey! Now that's actually an explanation I can get on board with. I have always rolled my eyes at the notion that the bank vault was rigged to blow when the TDE was used. I just don't buy explosives sitting in a bank for decades. It's too risky. But the plasma rifle... yeah! I can believe the that when the "not really" nuclear isotope solution encounters the energy of the time bubble departing, it could have enough of a reaction to blow the bank to bits. Nicely done!
Re: Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-05-01 04:00 am (UTC)Oh, I don't know about that. It's not really outside the realm of possibility when you consider that people are still being killed by unexploded landmines from World War I. Modern explosives are pretty stable, and really hard to set off by accident. I mean, compared to having a time machine with super-advanced power source and a "not really" nuclear isotope sitting around....
They kind of don't need explosives, tho. The TDE or whatever was powering it was packing so much energy that all you'd probably have to do to cause an explosion is breach containment or overload it.
Re: Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-05-01 06:29 am (UTC)Re: Bank Vault TDE
on 2010-05-01 04:04 pm (UTC)There's nothing wrong with the "not really nuclear gun + TDE = BOOM" theory. It's entirely possible that firing the gun during the transfer damaged something in the TDE and resulted in the explosion. Like I said: lot of energy = big chance of going boom.
But given that the Resistance is frequently trying to prevent future tech from contaminating the timeline and accelerating Skynet (or at least the Connors are... it occurs to me that we don't know how the Resistance feels about it) and that a time machine is about as dangerous as technology can get, it wouldn't surprise me if they had a self-destruct built into it.
no subject
on 2010-05-01 12:41 am (UTC)Yeah, the bank was destroyed, so Zeira should've been too. A lot of people explained that away as there having been explosives planted at the vault to destroy the evidence once the TDE was used. I don't really buy that, but it's either that or we have a bigger contradiction than missing clothing.
Despite Gnothi Seauton being my favorite episode, I hate hate hate Cromartie's headless endo emerging from the rubble, killing people and going on a quest to find its head. That was just... dumb. Equally dumb was that the endo was even still in that pile of rubble. The bank explosion was a crime scene involving grade-A whack-a-mole Sarah Connor. The FBI would've combed through every bit of that rubble. But instead, it gets carted away to some junkyard to sit for 8 years. Uh huh.
no subject
on 2010-05-01 07:14 pm (UTC)*giggles* I have been known to employ sarcasm when the situation has warranted it.
A lot of people explained that away as there having been explosives planted at the vault to destroy the evidence once the TDE was used.
Naw, they just gaffed. I like the "not really" nuclear explanation, but that's a pretty specific and remarkably contained not really nuclear explosion that doesn't then warrant any mention at any future point. Consequently, I think we're just left to choose our own fave fan wank and get on with it.
I hate hate hate Cromartie's headless endo emerging from the rubble, killing people and going on a quest to find its head.
I'm such a bad fan. I never even realised that Cromartie's body had remained intact despite the explosion. Oh Sarah, you did leave a few endo parts lying around didn't you? And yes, the police absolutely would have combed that bank for remains and found the damn thing (and then also realised Sarah and co weren't actually dead but let's not be adding gaff to gaff to gaff to...)
I'd never actually considered how stupid it was to have a brainless endo reconstituting itself... and now I have, it's very silly. But I kinda liked the way that storyline ran (with the plastic surgery and the blood) so I think I'll give it a pass. It's easier that way *sticks fingers in ears* la la lalalala...I can't hear your logic now... ;-)
Head + Endo + WiFi
on 2010-05-03 02:41 am (UTC)There should have been an episode where John Connor hacked that channel.
Of course, CroMo's body should have been running into things, or tapping a white cane or something: no vision in the chassis. Comic relief?
Re: Head + Endo + WiFi
on 2010-05-03 03:47 am (UTC)