This week on episode 2 of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), we studied ancient Greek, friendship, betrayal and the meaning of mortality. Oh, and there was a large explosion with a metal skull sailing right at us.

I’m of two minds about having a Terminator skull projectile hurled at me. Okay, well, actually I am of three minds.

The first mind thought it looked cool and I may have had the thought “Fire pretty.” We’ll call this the “Beer Bad”* mind and ignore it.

The second mind was a little irked. One of the core precepts of the time travel mechanism used in the Terminator universe is that only living tissue - or things surrounded in living tissue - can travel through time. Thus the movies feature funny naked people popping back from the future, but no one gets to bring back any microwave cannons or fusion grenades or whatever from the future.

Therefore within this universe, it really doesn't make any sense that a metal head was shot forward in time.

But the third mind thinks that the projectile Terminator skull makes wonderful symbolic sense. Given a choice between logic (in a time travel story about the mother of the savior of human kind, who got pregnant after one time sex with a soldier from the future, while narrowly avoiding being killed by an unstoppable killing machine that was ultimately stopable) and symbolism, I'm always going to come down on the side of symbolism.

One of the most potent symbols of human mortality is a skull. Artists through the ages have made use of skulls hollow eyes and the grinning teeth to not just represent the dead individual, but the angel of death him/her/itself.

Within this series, that’s what a Terminator is, death. It's baked right into the name: termination, or as Enrique might say, el finito.

However, the moment that cold grinning skull is flung at the viewer, we know that this dead thing will not stay dead. It may sit surrounded by human junk, but it is not safe. We know that its eyes relight with red fire. There's a sense of inevitability to the moment when, in classic horror movie style, the Terminator's arm reaches out from the rubble where its body is buried. Like the Headless horseman, it wears a dead man’s head, until it can find its own.

Terminator's conceal themselves in plain site and as they relentlessly search for their targets. A Terminator is relentless like time and mortality, because it knows itself and its purpose.

A Terminator will lie in a room surrounded by its victims, pretending to be dead, and wait for the next target to come in. When confronted by an unknown target, he/it will run away, because it's course of action isn’t defined. Like time, death and taxes, that Terminator will always return and search for its target again.

We see hints of that in Cameron as well. We, the viewers, are reminded that although Cameron looks cute, she is a killing machine. That moment when the police officer questions her, he thinks he has defined her. He asks her name, but she doesn’t have one. He thinks he can just look at her and define her based on where she’s standing and who she is with. He cannot.

He cannot know what danger he is in as he makes his assumptions. He cannot know that Sarah saved him when she ran up and played the role of the cyborg’s mother. Cameron is someone who will shoot and kill an old man because she thinks he might have betrayed them. I’d say that’s because that’s who she is, but I don’t know that yet. I would guess that there are things that future-John programmed her to do that we don’t know yet. We, like the police officer, think we know who she is, but we don’t.

This, the second episode of the series, is called Gnothi Seauton, which means Know Thyself, and that is the theme of this episode.

The episode explores who the characters are, how they know themselves, and how they use that understanding to know each other.

In Enrique’s first scene, he tells us that because he knows Sarah, he is not surprised to see her. Sarah thinks she knows Enrique, but finds that his nephew, who seeks to learn Enrique’s secrets, knows him better than she does. 

Lacking the omniscient view of the audience, Sarah cannot know Enrique. She yells at Cameron for killing Enrique. For thinking that Cameron, a machine, knows Sarah, when Sarah does not know herself. Even she does not know what she will do.

Sarah’s monologues on self knowledge bookend the episode.

In the beginning, she tells us that it is impossible for her to really know herself. In the last fifteen years, from the time of her late teens, she’s spent most of her life as someone else. She has spoken four different languages. She read the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home) to her son over and over in Spanish. She has wandered the world through different cultures. She has been an outsider to herself. Perhaps, it is because she remembers being Sarah Connor full-time once-upon-a-time, it is something she longs for between lives. The interstitial time between lives is the only time she gets to be Sarah Connor. This is contrasted with John, who always been told exactly who he is supposed to be.

It is all mapped out and written, unless the Terminators kill him first. For John, not having a new identity means being a statue, which is unmoving, dead stone. He can only come to life again and move when he has a new name. Added to that, John must experience some small release in letting go of being John Connor.

John Connor is the hero. John Reese/Baum/Whoever is just a teenager. A teenager for whom, in an odd way, his older self is a father figure at 3^rd remove. John “Baum” tells us that his father is always a hero and always dead. He may as well be speaking of John Connor as much as Kyle Reese. From across the divide of time, older-John, sent someone to protect Sarah Connor. He sent back a companion/savior when John was ten. He sent back a pretty girl to save young-John when he’s fifteen. He sent back resistance fighters. He moved John in time.

John knows they have leaped form 1999 to 2007, but it’s a move with no real meaning other than time lag. He jumped almost a decade and all it means at first is a certain difficulty in adjusting to a new time-zone without any reference points to hold onto. The episode shows us a brief montage of  John attempting to define himself in the only method that has been left to him. He tries to define a unique message to leave on his voice mail. However, his attempts to be funny or refer to his "destiny" devolve into a bland recitation of, “You have reached, please leave a message”

It is no wonder that he wanders off in time-lag boredom to the mall where he can see other people. John needs to reconnect with the world to overcome his time-lag. However, in his attempt he does a vanity search on himself and reads about his own death, which must be a startling thing.

Then he searches for Charley Dixon, his brief living father figure, the EMT. While Sarah Connor is positioned as the best fighter that John ever knew, Charley is positioned in the story as a rescue worker. He is someone who fights death and sometimes wins. John gives into the desire to revisit the life of dead John Reese.

However, Charley has married and moved on. John is (naturally enough) exactly the same. How this plot arc will play out remains to be seen. John is a teenager. He is still defining the “himself” that he is trying to know.

She’s a mother. The episode is careful to point that out in several scenes. She tells John where food is. She looks at him and understands at a glance that he snuck out and did… something. She doesn’t need fancy Terminator abilities to tell that.

She’s a believer. Enrique said that his nephew wasn’t a believer. He clearly defines both himself and Sarah as a believers, but exactly what they both believe isn’t clear.

She’s a fighter. I'll note that Cameron does not say that they jumped forward in time to save Sarah’s life and bring her to a time when some new life saving technology exists that will prevent cancer, or even before the cancer started to grow. She says that it was to bring the best fighter that John knew to this key point in time. Future-John even seeded the past with people to help them in their fight before, presumably, time-lag-paradox cut that time stream off.

She’s dead. The newspaper said so. Cameron told us the same thing. Sarah Connor died in 2005. Except that she didn’t, having skipped the year, but she still could. Cancer  is not about who is the best fighter.

We end the episode where we began. The Terminator is now reunited with his head. His red eyes glow as he searches for the names and faces of the people he was defined to kill.

We end with Sarah thinking about identity. She tells us that John, every conscious of that sort of thing, once told her that, “Know thyself and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe.” was written on a temple to Apollo.

Sarah defines meaning differently. She embraces only knowing herself, that person she never gets to be, because what else is there to know. She tells us that old friends cannot be trusted, even time can be manipulated, and the world that is all around her can and could crumble beneath the metal feet of the Terminators. In a world where there are no constants, she decides to rely only on love of family (her-John, not the future-John that she does not know) and the body God gave her, as she sits in an oncology lab and looks at her blood in a vial.

Terminators are not the only kind of death. However, even facing cancer, she is the fiercest fighter that John ever knew.

~~~~~

I’d say "the end," but I have one final thoughts that didn’t really fit in the review. Did anyone else laugh when John recited his new background from Lawrence, Kansas, which the hometown of Supernatural’s main characters?

*S4 - Beer Bad – “Fire Pretty” This is one of my most frequent Buffy quotes. As opposed to the equally often used “Tree Pretty. Fire bad,” of S3 Graduation, which is elemental-ist against fire.