Sarah Connor Chronicles - Ep. #2 - Another Little Mini-Review
Not sure why it didn’t click yesterday, but the name of the show is “Sarah Connor Chronicles,” not “John Connor’s Super Excellent Adventures,” so it would make sense that the show focus on her.
Spoilers follow, so watch ya step, kid.
I cannot imagine the apocalypse. I cannot imagine three billion dead. I can imagine planes hitting buildings… and I can imagine fire. If I would have witnessed it, I’m sure I would have thought the end was near. I’m sure I would have thought, ‘we have failed.’
That little quote was the highlight of the show, (second only to a scene that came later that I’ll get into in a second.) So now that John, Sarah, and Cameron, the Terminator girl, have skipped ahead eight years into the future to what is now 2007, they missed 9/11 and had to be filled in on the details.
Of course, we don’t hear the story, just that quote, spoken as a voice over during slow fades of the Mexicans telling Sarah what happened during the eight years she was “dead.” It stuck with me because, while watching the coverage of 9/11 that morning, I really did think the end was near, and I really did think we failed.
The other highlight of tonight’s episode was when Cameron walked past John and lightly brushed the back of his neck with her hand. Read my last post for clarification, but I’m sure you get the idea. 
But then she said no, she was just running a quick skin analysis to see how he was holding up.
Seems to me she could have just asked. Seems to me that she might have just told that whole analysis story to his mother, because if you’re trying to hook up with someone, you’re not going to tell that person’s mother the truth. Seems to be, then, that if you are really just doing a skin analysis, you don’t turn around and smile.
And as we saw in the scene where she was mimicking the silent Mexican girl’s movements, she’s learning how to interact with humans… could she be learning how to interact with John? It would be cool, but kind of backward. John should be teaching her, not the other way around.
Rambling!
Some other quick thoughts:
- John’s trip to the mall of 2007. Think about how much technology has changed in the last ten years. Better yet, imagine traveling almost 10 years in the future and then going into a computer store. I didn’t consider this until he walked into the store and experienced Windows Vista and cell phones.
- The Tin Man reference. Okay, this isn’t award winning writing. But Cameron admitting later, “I know the story and I understand the reference… I need a heart,” was pretty ace.
- Enrique (from T2) is now an informant! “I got some interesting information for you, coppo! El Finito will not let you down.” He was going to sell out Sarah. I knew that sonofabitch was bad news since I first saw ‘im in 1992.
- The terminator that was chasing them in 1999 got caught up in the temporal wake and unknowingly traveled with them to 2007. I hope they keep the name “Chet” for him, and I hope he wears that creepy mask in the preview for next week’s episode all the time.
- John’s terminator girl’s name is Cameron. It just clicked that this is no doubt a reference to James Cameron, writer and director of the first two movies.
- Speaking of the movies, it appears that the third one is being taken into account after all. Last night I thought maybe that was being ignored. Tonight it looks like it actually plays just as much of a role as the rest of them with the realization that if Cameron had not taken John and Sarah into the future, Sarah would have died of cancer as was revealed in the third movie. The mind-bender (or potential plot hole) here is that if future-John sent Cameron back with those directives, he saved his mother, and therefore doesn’t experience the same events that caused him to send Cameron back with those directives in the first place. That’s how alternate realities are created, folks, and if you’re not careful, it’s also how you lose viewers.
- Did anybody else catch Penny from Lost as the current wife of Sarah’s ex? The photo that John saw upon breaking into their house reminded me of her photo with Desmond on Lost.
- “Know thyself.” The more time you waste watching movies and television, the more pieces start falling together. This was printed above the Oracle’s door in the Matrix, and came into play tonight when Sarah spoke the full quote: “Know thyself, and thou shall know all the mysteries of the Gods and the Universe.” Fits better in the Matrix, but… what if the Terminator series is just a prequel for the Matrix trilogy anyway? It could happen.
Bear McCreary, the composer, seems to be going with a more metallic/industrial feel for the score as compared to the Celtic themed score for Battlestar Galactica, which works. The action sequences and the scene where they tell Sarah about 9/11 all sounded very good.
I still believe that the show probably won’t last past week eight, despite the fact that it’s reportedly Fox’s highest rated scripted premiere in 8 years. Whether or not that’s a shame remains to be seen.
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The Matrix
Back in 1999 when I saw the original Matrix, I had it all understood. Really, there wasn’t much to “get” beyond the philosophical stuff, which is all up to interpretation so there really is no wrong answer. Then, in 2003, came the 2 sequels: Reloaded and Revolutions, essentially a 5 hour long movie cut in half. Those movies introduced WAY MORE concepts than the first one, so much that when I saw them in the theater I was thoroughly confused and did what I do best: procrastinate. I actually figured, “I’ll analyze it later…”
Four years later, I did!
I watched the Matrix, the Animatrix, and then Reloaded on DVD and it just so happened Revolutions was on HBO-HD so I stayed up until 4am to catch that one as it aired in high definition. And the conclusion I now have is: it’s all about the Oracle.
She’s just as much a main character as Neo, if not more. Everything that happened was set in motion by her. Everything. In the theater, I was disappointed by the end of Revolutions, because I had no idea what just happened or what the conversation meant. But the Architect (the creator of the matrix) says to her: “That was a pretty big gamble.” Essentially, she risked everything–humanity, her own kind (machines), the very matrix itself–because she was a program built to study humans so well that she knew coexistence between man and machine was the only right thing to do. The problem was, she was only a computer program. She had no physical body in the real world and even if she did, she’d be a machine. She needed bigger players to go up against the mainframe, so she got them.
The Oracle eventually sacrificed herself and allowed Agent Smith to ‘assimilate’ her into his programming, so that he could use her eyes to see the outcome of his final battle with Neo, with him the victor. But the Oracle is just that good. She told Neo from the beginning “every beginning has an end,” and when Smith inadvertently said it to Neo just before he beat him in the final battle, Neo put the pieces together: “…and every end is a new beginning.” So Neo lets Smith win… he gives himself to Agent Smith, whose sole purpose at that point was to grow so large as a virus that even the machine mainframe couldn’t touch him… except at that time, Neo was jacked into the Matrix using the machine mainframe itself. Since Smith assimilated Neo and essentially became him in the ‘real world,’ the machine mainframe now had a direct connection to Agent Smith, and killed (er, deleted) him. Unfortunately, that also means that Neo dies, right? This part is up to interpretation but I think the mainframe “backed up” Neo before Smith assimilated him, and therefore Neo now exists as a program within the Matrix (possibly even given the ‘purpose’ of locating and freeing the minds that are rejecting the matrix, but that’s speculation).
As a way of saying “thanks for taking care of our computer virus,” the machines would now free whoever rejected the Matrix, and reloaded the Matrix itself to be a little more loving. Because that’s the bottom line: love. As soon as the programs within the Matrix starting having kids and creating other, new programs (like Sati, the kid in the train station at the beginning) they learned the value of love.
Or something.
Also, the “human resistance” in the real world was all set up by the machines. They built Zion (the last human city) for those that rejected the Matrix (the ‘anomolies’) in order to keep those people under some form of control. Zion could have even been another layer in the Matrix, and not actually the “real world,” but that’s all speculation.
Seems obvious now, but for some reason, none of this clicked when I watched the movies the first time. I think I actually tried to think too hard about it the first time around.
