Sarah Connor Chronicles - Week 3 of 8

There is a company out of California that has developed a camera that can actually see into the future.

Essentially, it has to do with tachyon particles. They’re apparently just as important here as they are in Star Trek when they’re employed every week for some new piece of technology. Something about the waveforms and how the light hits the camera… for example, imagine yourself taking a picture with a regular camera. The light beams (specifically, photons) travel forward through time, hit your lens (and your eyes) and an image is imprinted on the film. You essentially have a snapshot of the past, right? Well, operating along those same principles is the theory that tachyon particles actually travel backward in time. So when a certain company–in this case, EniTech Research–comes up with a prototype that uses tachyons instead of photons, you have the ability take snapshots of the future.

I’m not sure of the science behind it, but the properties of tachyons operate in a way that allows the camera to see exactly 1191 days into the future (3 years and some months, roughly).

How cool is that!? Imagine sitting in your apartment and taking a photo of your living room and getting a picture of a party the future tenants will have. Or taking a photo of a piece of land you just purchased to see what your future house will look like! Or, if you were patient and punctual enough, taking a picture of a mirror where you’d make a point of standing in front of 3 years later… you would see what you look like in 3 years!

But what if you took a picture of yourself in the mirror, wrote yourself a reminder to stand there in 3 years, got the picture, and nobody was there? What if you took a picture of your living room and saw a mysterious looking figure glaring back at you? What if you took a picture of your house-under-construction only to see a bare spot of land?

What happened?

Of course, EniTech is just a fictional company and another example of how television writers are branching their ideas across a lot of different media. Just as The Hanso Foundation’s website for Lost, or Slusho’s website for Alias and Cloverfield, we have EniTech Research for The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

They have developed a camera that can see into the future, and have been “concerned” at the results, because apparently every picture they’ve taken has shown something strange. When taking a picture of San Francisco, for example, the resulting image shows the city completely destroyed.

When taking a picture of a housing complex in 2008…

The image that develops from 2011 looks like this…

They don’t know it, but they’re looking at a post-Judgment Day world, where the machines have already taken over.

It’s going to be interesting to see if Sarah, John and the gang end up working with EniTech Research in the show, because they’d likely be a strong ally. Of course, if their name really is EniTech (as in, Initech from Office Space), it’s going to be hard to take them seriously.

Props to A Mike Life for bringing this to my attention!

As for tonight’s episode, nothing like that really happened (yet!?), but, it was still pretty good. (spoilers from here on out)

There continue to be a couple inconsistencies, like, if Cameron the Terminator Girl was really in high school before she found John, wouldn’t she already kind of know how to behave? She is a lot different than the girl from the first episode who smiled and introduced herself, then later caught up with him in the hallway and was all flirty saying things like “sucks for you!” But it was kind of funny to see her in the girls’ bathroom tonight trying to adapt to the culture, calling things “tight.”

Even though it’s the Sarah Connor chronicles I hope they’ll go into more of Cameron’s quest to appear more human. I don’t think it’ll be like Data in Star Trek who wanted to actually become human, but developing the desire to be someone’s friend doesn’t seem out of her… programming. I was hoping she’d save the suicidal girl before she jumped.

It was creepy to see the T-800 (Cromarty) looking for skin. This is, of course, the terminator that got caught in their temporal wake and traveled to 2008 with Sarah, John, and Cameron, unbeknownst to them and without skin. The scene in the bathroom with the tub full of blood when he’s just a metal skeleton standing there creeped me out. Even creepier to see that he needed to take the guy’s eyes.

And I know I keep talking about Bear McCreary (the composer) when I write these Sarah Connor blogs, but I have to point out that I really liked how he used that ominous industrial-sounding chord from T2 whenever the T-800 was doing something nasty. It was all T2 meets Battlestar Galactic-y sounding and gave the show a little bit of the credibility it still needs to last past week eight.

Did you watch it? What did you think?