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| Sunday, April 5, 2009 11:04 AM |
| On the Viewer - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Season 2, Episode 18 - "Today Is the Day, Part 1 of 2") |
 by Fëanor |
We get to see when Jesse and Derek went their separate ways in the future, her to a mission in a submarine with a Terminator, him to his mission in the past.
Ah, the Connors are moving again.
Jesse just casually mentions Terminators to a guy in a bar? Admittedly, it sounded like a joke, but... D'oh. And now she's started a fight with a bunch of military guys. Clearly she's not handling all this very well.
Sarah's neighbor: "We can still totally keep in touch." Pfft. Like that's going to happen.
Sarah's neighbor's boyfriend responded when the cops got a call about a body in the river. The description matches poor Riley perfectly. It's a bit of a coincidence, but I'm willing to accept it; it made for a good, dramatic scene. Also, it looks like Jesse has set things up so that it will look like Cameron did it after all. Nicely done. But if John destroys Cameron, how will it really affect the future? Will it be... good?
Sarah asks Cameron to leave the room so she can tell John about Riley. Cameron finds another pigeon outside the house. As she steps toward it, it flies away. Cameron: "Good-bye bird. There's a 51% chance I wouldn't have killed you." Fantastic.
Cameron walks in to find John playing with the button she gave him to destroy her. Heh heh.
Jesse: "I got in a fight."
Derek: "With four naval aviators."
Jesse: "Really just three. One of them went down pretty quick."
Looks like we're going to get to see what happened on the submarine mission! Cool. For some reason I get a kick out of the fact that the sub is called the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter.
Oh no! More creepy scenes of Catherine and her "daughter" Savannah. Catherine's trying to teach a young child patience. Good luck with that!
Doors are opening by themselves in front of Savannah. I guess John Smith wants to talk to her. Now I'm even more creeped out. It's interesting that Smith seems to know much better than Catherine how to play with a child. Why is he, a theoretically more primitive AI, better at things like this than Catherine? Hmm...
Savannah wanted to play hide and seek, and John Henry is obliging her. This is very cool.
Important fact learned from Derek Reese: when fighting someone, never go for the mouth. The human mouth is filthy. You can get an infection and die.
Jesse asks Derek if he knows for sure that Cameron killed Riley. He says, "Who else could've done it?" Uh, maybe the woman sitting in front of you?
I like that the Terminator driving the sub is named Queeg.
Interesting confrontation between John and Sarah over Riley and Cameron. Sarah is certain Cameron killed Riley; John is not so sure. John insists he knows Cameron. I think some part of John really did believe Cameron when she said she loved him. He's so starved for affection he'll even take it from a Terminator!
John has a really, really uncomfortable and extremely disturbing conversation with Cameron-as-Riley while over Riley's foster parents' house. Cameron and John pretend he's speaking to his girlfriend, but he's actually speaking to the robot that may have killed his girlfriend. Oh, and there's the "I love you." It's all part of a plan to convince the foster parents Riley is all right so they won't go to the police. But it's still deeply twisted, and it went further than John thought it was going to go.
Jesse let's her cards show a little bit and suggests to Derek that maybe some good can come of Riley's death, if it means John will learn what the machines are really capable of. But Derek says an innocent kid is dead, and no good can come of that, ever. In other words, if the whole of Jesse's plan ever becomes known, Derek will not be sympathetic. I like the way they ramped up the tension there.
These flashbacks to Jesse's sub mission are making it clearer why she wants so badly to turn John Connor from his trust in machines. The mission was commanded by a Terminator, and John gave it secret, special instructions that altered the mission into something far more dangerous and deadly. It's actually an exchange with the machines for some piece of technology. Wow. Interesting stuff.
Cameron: "We're all a threat to John. He worries about us. It makes him vulnerable. He cares."
Sarah: "I am not John's problem."
Cameron: "John is John's problem. Humans are the problem. There's only one way for him to be safe. And that's to be alone."
Sarah: "What kind of life is that?"
Cameron: "John's life. Someday."
Pretty brutal! I like how future John remains a mystery to us. It's an interesting choice to end the first part of a two-parter without a cliffhanger. Good episode, regardless. A further examination of the complex relationship between humans and machines. |
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