This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), John and Cameron went to a school with trompe d’oeil issues, Sarah got burningly close to a man with a Turk hobby, Agent Ellison got some non-sequitur clues, while Cromatry-Terminator continued his quest for self improvement. In other words, T:tSCC set up the plot elements for the rest of the season.

The pace of each episode thus far has been slightly different. In a way, it has felt like the creators were spending the first two episodes getting the main characters to the right place. While the third episode set up questions, but didn’t provide a lot of answers.

Well, the episode may not present answers, but there are themes a’plenty, which begins with Sarah’s opening dream.

At first, the nuclear “fathers of our destruction” walked around her without seeing her, as she shot them. However, they only lie dead for a moment. First they rise from the dead, and then these genius humans became killing machines, who surrounded Sarah and shot her. This both touched on the theme of the narrow line between human and machine, and played with the imagery of Sarah creating her own destruction by trying to prevent it.

In this dream, Sarah tells us that when she was at the mental hospital, where she was held in T2, she became obsessed with science, no scientists, no the particular scientists who built the atom bomb.

By telling us about her interest in this way, it was as if Sarah was peeling away layers of skin to get to the truth of her interest. She was in that mental hospital for attempting to stop the creation of Skynet. She was without support, considered insane, and had lost her son. In that period of loss and failure, Sarah became "obsessed" with genius that could not stop itself from creating destruction and she wondered why no one else stopped them.

The answer to that question gets at the inherent impossibility of Sarah’s promise to John to stop Skynet from being created. In essence, she has promised to stop human progress. The reason no one stopped the creation of the atom bomb was there was a race to build it. Killing those scientists would not have prevented the bombs creation. Einstein, who John later parallels with a chess playing machine, had already theorized the foundational science behind the bomb.

Clearly, neither John nor Sarah ever watched an episode of James Burke’s “Connections”* series and so they do not realize that attempting to kill the headwaters of an idea is harder than it seems. An invention may be derived from multiple rivers of thought.

Episode 1.3 is called “The Turk,” which we were told by Andy Goode was a machine in the 1700s that played chess. This is not precisely accurate. The Turk was a hoax that played very good chess.**

The Turk was a box with the mannequin torso of a turbaned Turk that moved the chess pieces on the board. The insides were full of machinery, which could be seen by opening various panels. However, the most important part was the sliding chair where a human would sit inside the box, slide away from observer’s view, and play all those very good chess games.

That inventors like Edmund Cartwright*** (power loom) and Charles Babbage (Difference Engine) saw the Turk and drew inspiration from it is one of those interconnected ideas things.

As Sarah woke from her dream, she looked at the papers assembled by the future-resistance fighters. Last week, she thought they were back in time to help John. This week, she thought they are a Skynet hunting party. I do wonder if like all the theories about the Turk, that won’t be wrong as well.

Then Cameron walked by in her underwear. Her skin is revealed to John’s admiring teen gaze, but that’s not the truth of what she is. Cameron walked like a machine, but her appearance fooled the eye. She drew makeup on her face with a pencil that was too blunt for brain surgery and that too was part of her disguise, paint/makeup that made her appear like “other” teenagers.

While there is a ST:TNG - Data-like quality to Cameron’s recitation of facts, the thing that struck me is that Cameron is both capable of being bored in her sleepless nights and alleviating that boredom through reading.

Then John and Cameron arrived at school and walked by the first of the trompe d’oeil frescos of a doorway. A trompe d’oeil is literally a painting that fools the eye into seeing something that isn’t there, which was par for the course in this episode.

When the metal detector beeped over Cameron’s metal infrastructure, John explained it as a metal plate. As this was a reasonable enough explanation, the guard waved them on. The truth wasn’t remotely reasonable.

Tarissa Dyson, visiting her husband’s grave, perceived a different sort of truth when she saw Sarah. As she said, Sarah is never dead and she always wants something. However, I’m also inclined to think that the yellow rose Sarah brought for Miles, a name which means soldier, wasn’t just a gesture. Sarah meant it when she said all deaths have meaning. The difficulty was that when Tessa asked the crucial question, if Andy the Goode would have to die, Sarah didn’t know the answer. It’s a classic moral question. If you could travel back in time and by killing X prevent y, would you do it? This episode spins the question by adding the caveat that not only is there no guarantee that killing X would prevent y, but it might even cause it.

Thus far, we have seen machines that are programmed to kill and they stop at nothing to do that. We have seen machines that are programmed to protect a person and that is the person they protect. We have yet to see a machine that is complex enough to struggle with the choice of one or the other. Given the various deaths in the episode, Sarah’s statement that no death is in vane is interesting. Also, as Cameron later reminded us, people die all the time. Death won’t wait for Sarah’s say so.

Elsewhere in the plot, Agent Ellison continued to gather facts that made no sense. As he arrived at the flop where the resistance fighters were killed, a detective joked that Ellison had not been to a crime scene since Hoover was cross-dressing at Quantico. In this episode, even the jokes were in on the cross-dressing-trompe-d’oeil theme. Ellison resisted the detective’s easy answers and continued to look into the thickening plot. When confronted with blood with no red cells and a grown man with the finger prints of a four year old child, he kept looking.

He should. There are a lot of answers for him to find.

Cromarty-Terminator made a type-O withdrawal and a house call to a “bleeding” edge medical scientist, just as that scientist was talking about someone eighteen months ahead of the Germans. It may as well have been a monologue from WWII about the race to the atom bomb. The pen that Cromarty used to write the medical formula on the wall wasn’t sharp enough for brain surgery, but it was sharp enough to get the idea across. The medical scientist was so filled with excitement at the ideas that even when confronted with the truth of what Cromarty was, he closed the door on escape and continued the experiment with his wide eyes and tiny scalpel. Cromarty, true to his programming, took those wondering, wide eyes and overwrote formulas with blood on the wall.

Sarah didn’t have it so straight forward. Sarah followed one of the clues in that pile of Skynet hunting papers to Andy Goode.

As she prepared for her date with Andy the good man, she sat in the bath and shaved her legs. The drop of blood that splashed in the water looked like a nuclear cloud. It also looked like a drop of blood from a surface cut. “If you prick me, do I not leak.”**** As she sliced and soaked, she monologued the story of Mo Berg, an OSS agent, who was sent to see if Heisenberg and the Germans were close to building the bomb and if so, kill Heisenberg. Sarah told us that Mo had never killed anyone. What she didn’t say is that he made the choice not to kill Heisenberg.

Sarah spent the episode trying to make that decision about Andy. His version of the Turk is a machine with moods. Although, depending on how you look at it, the original Turk was a machine with moods.

What’s interesting about Andy’s description of Turk is that while he had a poster of Kasperoff versus Fritz, which shows a human hand versus a Termanoid one, he said that Fritz would have wiped the floor with Blue, as Kasperoff did Kramnick. He envisioned not a competition of machine against human, but machine against machine, just as humans compete against humans.

He was so dedicated to the idea of Turk, that going with the theme of eyes/loss of sight, he once went blind for three days. He had dedicated eight years of his life to creating the Turk, which if we count the years, is around when Sarah made her jump. He spent these years, coding as if from a dream, like the writing on the wall, because he wanted one day to communicate with his machine. He imagined conversation, not Singularity.

Sarah’s conversation with John about Andy’s creation displayed the first flashes of, "Oh, that John Connor,” with John’s questions about bandwidth, network access, etc. In the next moment, John reminded his mother of her promise to stop human progress. He actually asked his mother if she’d heard of the Singularity, the point machines don’t need us. I could take this as letting the audience know, but instead I’ll think of it as typical teenage self-absorption.

John was after all going to school with a fresco fetish. The paintings progressed from one of closed door to closed door with a painted bra hanging off a door handle, which sent one mystery girl into a tizzy.

In the bathroom, there were girls painting their faces with makeup called rash. Although Cameron had read the dictionary, their words had no contextual meaning. If they painted their faces with rash, bitch-whore could well mean anything. Cameron then offered the tight makeup to the crying-end-of-the-world-girl, because that’s what you do. She called her a friend, because that’s blending.

However, after the third kissing fresco was discovered, and the weeping girl fled to the rooftop to kill herself, I must admit that after watching thirty years of t.v., I expected Cameron to leap to the roof a la Bionic Woman, or climb to the roof a la Buffy, or, something. I’ve been trained by years of television to think that someone will always save the random person on the roof. That far from saving the girl Cameron prevented John from doing anything was stunning.

After this experience, John asked the essential question, if as we fight the monsters, we have to become them, what is the point? If he is supposed to be someone who saves people, how can there be a magic switch on point. He should save people now, not let it sit like waiting potential in his gut.

Speaking of which, when Sarah visited the oncologist, he told her she was healthy. She had no way to tell him her reasons for fearing she will have cancer. It’s a fear with no “reasonable” explanation. She knows that she will die of cancer, if something else doesn’t get her first, but she cannot know how to prevent it.

We end the episode with another monologue about the scientists who created the atomic bomb.

Sarah, who has clearly decided to kill the machine and not the man, watched as Andy’s house burned. She told us that the white light of the first atomic bomb was so bright that a blind girl claimed to see it a hundred miles away. So in this episode, we have two instances of creation leading to blindness, and one instance of destruction enabling sight.

In that remembered white light of created destruction, she quoted Oppenheimer himself quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." She then followed up with Ken Bainbridge’s reply, “Now we are all son’s of bitches.”

As we switch to a non-linear shot of Cromarty rising from his blood bath, his red eyes gleaming through his embryo like face, she repeated the line in case we missed John’s earlier point about becoming the thing we fight. Especially, when the thing we fight can appear to be like us.

~~~~~

Sources

*Connections - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series), http://www.k-web.org/

**The Turk - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/books/05/30/the.turk/

*** http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/cartwright02.htm
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QQB39JSD0JUU

**** Data, the Naked Now.