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| Monday, November 24, 2008 03:47 PM |
| On the Viewer - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Season 2, Episodes 8 & 9) |
 by Fëanor |
(This is packed with spoilers, as usual. Sorry! I can't help myself.)
"Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today"
This episode is structured in an interesting, Rashomon type of way. It shows us the same set of events multiple times, each time from a different character's perspective, slowly revealing everything we need to know to understand what has happened. We open with "Sarah's Story." It's night, and Sarah and John are still arguing about whether he should continue seeing Riley. After John stalks off, Cameron tells Sarah she'll talk to John, and in the morning she reveals that John has agreed to stop seeing the girl. Sarah is skeptical. Cameron leaves to get more ammunition - and Cromartie sneaks in, grabs Sarah, and goes upstairs to get John, only to discover he's not there. He knocks Sarah unconscious, and we go back in time to the beginning of the night to tell Cameron's side of the story. Turns out Cameron tried to seduce John a bit when she came to talk to him. Which is hot and deeply disturbing at the same time. Later, she shows up at a secret Resistance supply cache (which is apparently where she's been getting their weaponry) and finds Derek there. Derek gets a call from John saying he's in danger. So now we jump back again for "John's Story." Turns out John and Riley ran off together to Mexico so John could show her where he grew up. There's some tension between them, but they're having a pretty good time until a dude taking pictures actually recognizes John from when he used to live here years ago with Sarah, and threatens to reveal his presence there to the authorities. This leads to John and Riley getting thrown in jail. This is when John is allowed a phone call. He calls Derek and presses two keys on the phone, clearly a code signaling that he's in danger.
But this presents a problem as I see it. It seems pretty clear to me that John ran away not the night before, but the night before that. He and Riley were on a bus during the day, and then got to Mexico, and later were having dinner at night when they got grabbed by the police. That means it's been over a day since he left the house. But in "Cameron's Story," it seemed clear that Derek got the danger call in a much shorter timespan - on the morning after John ran off. Unless I'm missing something, this is kind of a serious continuity problem.
Anyways, after John calls Derek, he's also allowed to call his mother, and he is surprised when, after punching the two buttons to indicate distress, she does not respond to the code, but keeps talking to him and asking how he is in evident concern. John quickly realizes he is not speaking to his mother, but to a Terminator. Great scene!
Later, John and Riley trick the guard, beat him senseless, and escape their cell, only to hear gunfire outside. And that means it's time to jump back in time again, this time picking up with Sarah after she regained consciousness. She's in a car with Cromartie. She tries to escape and he chucks her in the trunk. Later she hears gunfire and the car seems to be driving around at high speed and making sudden stops. Then suddenly the trunk opens and standing over her are her son and Agent Ellison. We go back in time again for "Ellison's Story," which opens with him getting a call from one of his friends at the FBI who thinks John Connor might be in Mexico. That they got this information so quickly from a jail in some random small town in Mexico is pretty hard to believe, but whatever. Ellison races right down there in the hopes of seeing John, but Cromartie comes in shortly after him and starts shooting up the place. (The scene where Ellison is waiting for the cops to come back, casually looks over his shoulder, and is shocked and horrified to see Cromartie in the waiting room, is really pretty fantastic.) Now we finally get to see the shootout, and how John and Ellison managed to get Cromartie's car. Later the Connors, Riley, and Ellison all end up in a hotel room together, and get the chance to talk for a bit. John and Sarah both agree Riley needs to leave, and finally convince her to do so. Sarah finally gets her way, and there's a very creepy mother-pulling-her-son-back-from-that-nasty-girl kind of vibe. She then calls Derek to ask him and Cameron to come down and help them out, but they're already there, checking out the jail. So time to jump back and tell "Derek's Story," which is just a really short segment that doesn't reveal much new, but just has some fun incidental scenes with Cameron and Derek in the town. The final part of the episode is "Cromartie's Story," which jumps us back to the shootout at the police station. In this sequence, Ellison does lead Cromartie to the Connors, but not in the way Cromartie had planned. Finally, after a whole season and a half of fighting him, the Connors defeat Cromartie and destroy his chip. They leave his body in a shallow grave, planning to come back and burn it later. Sarah freaks out a little while destroying the chip - all of the tensions and drama of the past few months come out in a violent screaming fit. It's a powerful moment.
So this episode had some powerful scenes, but I found the weird structure, while interesting, also a bit cliche and unnecessary. The continuity issue was pretty glaring and disappointing, too. And the way Cromartie finally goes down is a little anti-climactic. I mean, if all they ever had to do was shoot him a lot, why didn't they do that a while ago? Overall, a pretty good episode, but not my favorite. Luckily, they were back on track with the next episode.
"Complications"
This episode opens with the first of a number of fantastically surreal and powerfully effective fever dreams that Sarah will have throughout the episode. In this one, she and Cameron are watering the ground near where Cromartie was buried (but the grave is now empty). A series of cacti grow up out of the ground, but they are flexible and alive and made of liquid metal, and one of them grabs John. Sarah wakes up suddenly in the back of the car, and asks John to pull over as she's about to be sick. Cameron asks what's wrong with Sarah and wonders whether she's pregnant, which totally creeps out John (understandably!). Sarah notices a turtle on its back near the rear wheel of the car, so she picks it up and puts it on its feet at the side of the road. (I really loved this moment, and the further discussion of it later with Cameron, as it reminded me of a question in the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner - the test that's meant to separate replicants from humans. I'm certain this was not a coincidence, and the show creators were making a deliberate reference. Awesome!)
After they get back home, Sarah is still ill, but insists that somebody needs to go back and burn Cromartie's body. So Cameron and John head back. Meanwhile, Jesse calls Derek and has him meet her at a warehouse full of large metal containers. In one she has a man tied to a chair with his mouth taped. (I was surprised and pleased to note that the man is played by Richard Schiff, the dude who played Toby Ziegler in West Wing. Nice!) She claims the man is Charles Fischer, and that he was sent back from the future. She says he was one of a treacherous group of people known as the Greys who helped the machines, and that he must die. (I love all the elements they're adding to the Terminator mythology, and this idea is another really interesting one - that there would be humans who would help the machines out of a desire to save themselves.) Problem is, Derek doesn't remember Fischer at all, even though Jesse insists he knew him and that they hunted him together. Interesting stuff! Anyway, they interrogate the guy for a while, but he insists he's just a regular dude and has no idea what they're talking about.
Sarah has another incredibly creepy dream, wherein she finds a nursery in the house, but where babies should be there are instead groups of three turtles. In the corner, Cameron has something wrapped in a cloth that she appears to be breast-feeding. Eee! Then suddenly she's holding a turtle. She walks past Sarah with it and hands it to Cromartie, who looks at Sarah. Sarah suddenly finds herself awake and outside and pointing a gun at the door to the shed. Woah. She has issues. And why is she seeing a pattern of three dots in her dreams?
In Mexico, John and Cameron dig up Cromartie's grave and find it empty. Dun dun dun! They suspect Ellison and go to interrogate him.
Derek, desperate to figure out what the deal is with this guy Jesse kidnapped, sends a photo of him to Cameron, hoping she will know him, but she says she doesn't.
Sarah goes to see the shrink they investigated in that earlier episode and tells him about her dreams in the hopes that he will explain the three dots and help her, but there are so many things she refuses to tell him, that eventually he gives up on her and tells her to come back when she's ready to be honest.
Cameron and John have a really interesting conversation about the turtle that ends with John asking what Cameron would have done with it, and Cameron saying the turtle didn't seem like much of a threat, and after all she wasn't built to be cruel. They break into Ellison's house and interrogate him about Cromartie, with Cameron beating and choking him, but he insists he doesn't know what happened. John believes him, so they leave.
Meanwhile, the scene with Fischer gets a lot more interesting when Jesse shows up with the young Charlie Fischer, from this time, gagged and bound, and drags him into the container, too. After some initial reluctance, Derek starts cruelly torturing the young Fischer (surprising even Jesse), stating that once you get older you can eat pain, but it's not the same for a young man, until the older man finally relents and admits he is Charles Fischer. They try to figure out why he came back in time, but he claims it's just a reward for everything he did for the machines in the future. Jesse and Derek leave old and young Fischer alone together for a bit, and the two men have an interesting moment, where the older man tells the younger he has no idea who he is and what he's capable of. Outside the container, Derek finally gets Jesse to tell him what the deal is with Fischer. She tells him this incredibly disturbing story about being captured and strapped to a bed in an operating theater while Fischer talked at her and tortured her, all while the machines watched from the next room, their red eyes and skull-like faces pressed to the windows. He was teaching the machines how people ticked, how to get information out of them. This scene is very unsettling and very well done. It gets even more unsettling when Derek asks Jesse how she escaped and she says, "I don't know; you never told me." Then she reveals that she's not the one who underwent these tortures; Derek was. This event, and his desire to get Fischer, is all they ever talked about together. Woah. Derek goes back into the container, introduces himself to Fischer again, and beats him some more. Fischer says, "I was wondering when you'd remember." But Derek says he doesn't remember, but Jesse does, and that's good enough for him. He's about to kill the young Fischer, to stop all Fischer's cruelty from ever happening, but Jesse stops him by killing old Fischer first. It's a very powerful and effective sequence.
John tells Sarah about the missing Terminator body, and she blames herself for it all, because she let that boy go at the bowling alley, and he eventually led Cromartie to them. But John tells her they're not murderers.
Jesse and Derek talk about Fischer and what it means that Derek does not remember him. Derek says he's been changing things in the past, and maybe he comes from a future where Fischer didn't do those things to him. Jesse asks if there might be a version of the future where they aren't together, and Derek answers with certainty, "No." It's a very moving and interesting scene. I like that they're dealing with the possibility of divergent timelines. The Terminator franchise is all about changing the future by altering the past, but it's never dealt before with the idea of someone from one timeline meeting someone from a different timeline.
Jesse and Derek are hoping this young Fischer won't become the dangerous and terrible old Fischer they killed, but we see him taken in for interrogation the next day by federal agents, and discover that old Fischer was back here on a mission: he used his young self's access to get into secure computers and install some kind of roving back door into the systems that the authorities can't dismantle.
As we're seeing this, it's intercut with another scene where it's revealed that Ellison, that wily bastard, really did take Cromartie's body, and that he then brought it to Catherine Weaver. "We can't allow history to repeat itself," Ellison tells her, even while it is repeating itself - the feds are throwing the young Charles Fischer in jail, thanks to the actions of his future self. "It's up to us now," Ellison tells Weaver, "the two of us." And she smiles and says, "Yes, it is." Aaaahhhh!!! So twisted and horrifying! Really excellent.
Sarah has another creepy dream, and then finally realizes the three dots she's seeing don't really have a meaning - she's just remembering three dots of blood left on the wall in the basement. It's a very dark note to end on.
The previous episode was just okay, but this one was just phenomenal - a return to the incredible high quality I've come to expect from the show. The incredibly creepy theater with all the terminators watching, the switch-around reveal that Derek was the one tortured, the scene where a man sits face to face with his younger self. Amazing stuff. The show is very fatalistic, focused on showing us that no matter what our heroes try to do to stop the terrible future from coming, they always make some crucial error that helps push that future closer and closer to becoming reality. It's disturbing, but I love it. |
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