“It wasn’t my mission.”
This show is actually pretty darn good at times and I really hope we get to see more.
Hands were a pretty blunt theme this week, and I think Sarah did the “come with me if you want to live” thing with Ellison.
Although if she is evil, she doesn’t share Skynet’s agenda, as she obviously could have killed John and Sarah dozens of times already, and we saw her work to keep that exoskeleton metal from being used, so her agenda doesn’t seem to be either to kill John and Sarah or to help baby-Skynet. (It’s vaguely possible that she works for Skynet, and that due to causality or whatnot, John and Sarah are now smaller threats than the group of resistance fighters who were sent back to prevent Skynet from being built, and she is infiltrating John and Sarah to get at those other guys, but that’s pretty weak.)
Random comment: The opening voiceover about skynet has two odd things in it, which might either be clues or weird mistakes. One is that it describes SkyNet as (quotes are inexact) “a computer system programmed to destroy humanity” or something like that… when to the best of our knowledge SkyNet is a computer system designed to be self aware which, of its own free will, decided to destroy humanity to preserve itself, which might or might not be a significant difference depending on how you interpret the word “programmed”. Also, the voiceover says that skynet send robots back through time, some to destroy, one to protect. As in, the voiceover very strongly implies that Skynet send Cameron. Again, that might just be awkward phrasing… or it might not.
I thought the same thing, I remember there was a reveal in the first (or close to the first) episode where we saw that Ellison had red “Terminator eyes”. So color me confused as well.
I thought the flash-forwards made it pretty clear Cameron was sent by John. The mystery is what John actually intends Cameron to do.
The big thing for me was the big deal they made about dancing being a mirror to the soul or some such, and then Cameron dancing for no particular reason except, duh - experimenting with that soul thing. Then the voiceover saying “they cannot appreciate beauty, they cannot create art. If they ever learn these things, they won’t have to destroy us, they’ll be us.” Cut to Cameron dancing.
Well, it would be a hell of a big difference to the season finale. Not something to be wanked about and dropped.
Don’t know, don’t care, just really glad they did it. Kyle’s brother (dammit, what’s his name?) must have been freaking out, because why would a cyborg care about something like that?
Derek.
I’m over the casting of Bruce Davison as Ambiguous Doctor / Ambiguous Professor / Mysterious Benefactor / Ambiguous Politician, but I liked this episode. It took unexpected turns.
Oh, two hour season finale* next week, so make the popcorn early.
*please be a season finale and not a series finale
So is this a real season finale, or is this where they ran out of episodes because of the strike?
Ausiello’s blog is confusing - haven’t they already run several episodes since the strike ended? Maybe his Dope wasn’t Straight.
You know, I hated the idea of this show at first, but then at the second episode the kid John Connor looks a ton like a Conan O’Brien “if they mated” between Hamilton and Biehn, and then I was drawn into it.
The thing that surprised me so much is how that guy from 90210 is such an awesomely flawed pseudo-badass wannabe timetraveling meat popsicle. I never thought Brian Austin Green had the chops.
He really does act like the sad little brother who’s big brother was the big man on campus… er, in Tech Com, doesn’t he?
That’s exactly it. I think generally the acting is pretty good but BAG is stealing the show with that big bro routine.
Just wait until it’s revealed Cameron was his interrogator.
This fembot eats pancakes, pees ethanol and shits ammonium nitrate. But is she Pinocchio? Can she crack walnuts with her kegels?
I think you’re right about Cameron being the interrogator - one thing we saw when she met John, and also with the Russians, is that she’s actually very good at building a rapport with humans. Maybe she was even built as an interro-bot?
My WAG is that she (or another Cameron, at least) was used to impersonate a another captured human in said basement, to elicit sympathy/information from him. With who knows what other seduction-or-worse elements involved.
Eh, it makes for better television than a simple strappado, anyway.
I am really liking this show and the people putting it together. You get to alternate between ‘monster of the week’ and the long-term, ongoing plot in a way that makes sense. And you’ve got all the personal dilemmas that crop up about judging people for crimes they have yet to commit – which was a key part of T2.
Why are people spoiler boxing speculation?
[spoiler]Why not? If people want to guess about the way the show is going to turn, it would suck if they read it here before they came up with it on their own.
The real question is why did I spoiler box this answer? 
[/spoiler]
Regarding the tape and Sarah’s telling John she was breaking out because of what was on the tape (her signing away her parental rights to John) that doesn’t jibe with T2. In T2 she was breaking out because she was shown pictures of the Arnold model taken at the mall that day and she logically thought it was after John.
Not that the show completely meshes with T2 anyway (the dates all seem to be off, rendering the initial time jump kinda moot - they could’ve just set it in 2007 to begin with) but this was enough of a clash to annoy the inner nitpicker in me.
She’s always been about protecting John, and breaking out because of a threat makes a lot more sense than breaking out because letting him have a semi-normal life makes her feel like she’s abandoning him.
I was mildly disappointed that they didn’t get the “real” Dr. Silberman to reprise the role, but seeing what they did with him, I don’t know that the original actor could’ve pulled off the way they decided to go with the character.
Maybe she told John what he needed to hear. Or maybe she was feeling bad, then saw Arnold, but over time she’s rationalized it to “I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself”.
Speculation:
Anyone else getting the impression this show is developing that the reason skynet hates people is because people were trying to kill it?