Sarah Connor Chronicles - Week 4 of 8

Robots have always been interesting to me, but lately they’ve been on my mind more than usual. It has something to due with the Terminator being on TV (the name Sarah Connor Chronicles still makes me cringe), and this book, called Love + Sex with Robots, which I heard about somehow. I also just watched a special on the History channel about artificially intelligent machines, so it made me look into it a little more.

Basically, we’re a lot further along than I thought in creating a robot that acts human.

And once you act human, who is to say you’re not human? The above examples are far from perfect, and they are not “self-aware,” but once that happens (if it happens, I suppose), who’s to say what is alive and what isn’t? It becomes a very fine line.

It’s that fine line that I think a show like the Sarah Connor Chronicles has a great opportunity to explore. It’s too early to say “they’re missing it,” because for all I know they might jump into that concept sooner or later. It would be different than Battlestar Galactica or the Matrix at this point, because for the first time we’d see a self-aware machine before they decided to go all ape-shit. And since the robot in question (Cameron) is from the future and knows what happens, all the while learning about humanity and self-sacrifice and worth from Sarah and John, maybe she’d grow and learn and end up saving the world before it’s destroyed on her own, rather than just because she’s programmed to.

Then again, that opens up a pretty big plot hole. In the opening monologue of tonight’s show, Sarah says, “Today we fight Skynet so that it’s never created.” Let’s say they’re able to complete that mission. Great, right?! No Skynet means no death and destruction, no six billion dead. It also means no John Connor leading the resistance, and no one going back in time to make Sarah Connor crazy about saving the world. And since nobody went back to make Sarah crazy about saving the world, she doesn’t. She stands by and lets it’s happen. So she fails the mission and Skynet is created, starting the cycle all over again. It kind of shoots free will in the face, too, because no matter what John does, we know that he’ll live. If he doesn’t, there is no future resistance leader for the machines to worry about and go back in the past and get everything started. So Sarah might freak out when John runs off into an empty warehouse filled with Terminator-making materials in tonight’s episode, but she should really just relax, because if he were to have failed, they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

Kind of makes you wonder if John’s purpose isn’t exactly what’s been established in the first three movies. Maybe his destiny is completely misunderstood at this point. Or something.

The bottom line is that Lost’s Desmond may be right about the universe “course correcting” when minor things happen in the past that aren’t supposed to, but major things, I think, would take a lot more time for the universe to correct. Destroying all the seeds of Skynet would send enough ripples through spacetime, I think, to destroy what was left of the universe at that point in time.

So, I guess I should shut up and enjoy the show for what it’s trying to be, right?

I like Cameron’s new outfit, and I like the story about the Gollum that Sarah told in the beginning and the end. I like Cameron’s T-model, whatever it is, and how pleasant she is when she says, “oh, thank you for explaining,” when learning something new. I like how Sarah Connor was her T2-badass self tonight, telling someone she’d “beat him to death” if he didn’t tell him what she wanted to know — and then essentially following up with it. I loved how Cromarty killed his new human counterpart, and while doing so studied his facial reactions to appear more human. That’s creepy as hell.

Most of all, I love how much effort the writers are clearly putting into the show, covering up cheesy scenarios like John tracking a truck using his cell phone by having a character say, “that actually works?” It’s such a small line and a bit of a cop-out, but Smallville could learn a thing or two from this show by not taking itself too seriously.

I still say the show would be 10x more interesting if it revolved around Cameron and her part in the birth of Skynet. But that’s just my opinion. It’s also my opinion, hence the blog title, that the show is still not strong enough to last past episode eight. I’d bet all the coltan in the world on it! (Don’t get me wrong, though… I’ll still watch all eight!)

*****
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