This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Cromarty Nip/Tucked a new face, Sarah Connor learned the value of letting go, John learned to drive stick, and Cameron got her very own big block of metal. All in all, Heavy Metal was a fun episode with Terminator on Terminator fight scenes and chewy philosophical content.

The episode opened on the image a framed photo of a disembodied mouth. We cut to a plastic surgeon speaking into a handheld recorder, where he told us that the patient is female, thirty-three.

In the pilot, we were told that Sarah is thirty-three. While, she didn't have breast augmentation, Sarah, like the woman that the surgeon described, certainly has her share of scars.

However, Sarah bought her new identity two episodes ago. The crashing sound in the doctor's office was Cromarty, who wanted a new face for the flesh he grew in the previous episode.

Then we cut to Sarah with her opening monologue. She told us that when John was little she used to read him fairy tales. In episode 2, we learned that she used to read him "The Wizard of Oz" in Spanish. Baum opened that novel by telling the reader that there was no moral to this children's story.

The morals that you get out of fairytales depend on who wrote them and what version they wrote down.

The specific story that Sarah read John was the story of the Golem of Prague, which is an interesting story to read to a child that you know will one day fight Golem-like machines.

Since she described John as little, I would imagine that she read those fairy tales before T2, which is the era in their lives before they ever met a Protector-Terminator. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but describing something as a terminator and a protector feels like a bit of a contradiction.

The word golem means cocoon or fool, and is derived from the word gelem, which means raw materials. Crossing mythic genres, in Tarot the card for the Fool refers not to an idiot, but to someone who is innocent and just starting out on their journey.

However, Sarah didn't just read any story about a golem, she read the specific story of the Golem of Prague. Depending on your version, the Jews of Prague were being threatened either by a priest, who was going frame them for ritual murders, or by the Austrian emperor, who was going to summarily expel them from the empire. Rabbi Judah Loeb fell asleep one night and sent a question to heaven. The answer that he got was the way to make a golem to protect his people.

In a series which opened with a dream of an unstoppable machine killing John and in which Andy Goode described, in episode three, how he seemed to get the code to build the Turk from a dream, that Sarah mentioned the story of the Golem, which so dependant on dream knowledge, is very interesting to me. Although, I'm not sure what it means. I haven’t dreamed that part yet.

In the story of the Golem, the Rabbi interpreted his dream and built the Golem out of clay to be a fierce protector for his people. He gave it life by writing the word for Truth on its forehead, or in some versions placing the name of God in its mouth. The Golem had many powers, but like the picture of the disembodied mouth that opened the episode, the Golem could not speak.

Over time, the Golem grew and the larger it grew, the more violent it became. In the earliest versions of the story, no matter how violent the Golem became, the Golem could not destroy its creator, who stopped it by erasing the first letter of the word emet (truth) on its forehead, which left only the word met (dead). However, that's not the version that Sarah read.

She told us that when she started the story that she forgot how it ended. As I think of the image of her reading to her young son, I imagine Sarah trying to reach to some lost childhood of her own when her mother in Big Bear read fairytales to her. But somewhere in between, she forgot the ending where the Golem killed the people it was supposed to protect. Then again, perhaps that’s not the version that Sarah's mother, who was killed by a Terminator in T1, read her when Sarah was a child.

When Sarah read her child this story, like Cameron now, he couldn't sleep for days.

Sarah tried to comfort John by telling him that she made the story up, but that only made it worse, which makes sense. At that point in his life, all he would have known about Terminators and his destiny would have been Sarah's stories. When she told him that she made the Golem up, he could only have been left to wonder what else she made up.

The crux of John's life at this moment in this story is that he is supposed to be a hero, but not yet. He is supposed to save the world, but later.

As Sarah told us about this fairy tale, we moved to see John staring at the memorial site for the suicidal girl, who he didn't know and who he didn't save. That unknown girl must feel not unlike the three billion other people who he also won’t save from Skynet's first attack. The real difference was that this person had a name, Jordon Cowan. She had a date where she began and a date when she ended.

As John wrote his apology to an unknown girl, Sarah came into his room. She tried to start a conversation by reading the title of a school assignment about covalent and ionic bonding, and commiserating that she never understood them either.

He said that they're simple to understand, but I'm not sure that's true. Well, the chemistry is straight forward.

A covalent bond is one in which two atoms share electrons. An Ionic bond is where electrons are removed from one atom and are attached to another atom, which results in positive and negative ions that repel one another. All of which is a nice metaphor for childhood, and what happens when children pass from youth and into adulthood, or it could just be John's chemistry homework.

Clearly at this point, Sarah and John are going with polar-covalent bonds, in which those shared electrons are shared un-equally between atoms. Sarah's questions about how John is doing were met with the response of fine, and fine means fine. All of which was interrupted by their metal-bond, Cameron, who announced "Cromarty is here."

Not literally, but during Cameron’s sleepless-dreamless nights, she had found film footage of his head and glowing eyes. It would seem that the word Truth wasn't adequately rubbed off his head when Sarah blew that head off his body.

Cameron had decided based on the evidence that Cromarty must be looking for Coltan to repair himself, as it's a key element in Terminator construction.

Faced with the return of an enemy, Sarah wanted to take their money and run, but John wanted to start he journey of becoming the person he is supposed to be. He wanted to fight. He believed the enemy was vulnerable.

However, this episode is about letting go of your little monster-messiahs, so Sarah decided to let go a little. However, Sarah took the keys and control of the plan, because she didn't feel John was ready to drive the car or the mission.

However, plans rarely survive the battlefield. The guard that Cameron took down hard wasn’t the Terminator, the Terminator at the docks was Carter not Cromarty, John ran into danger, the truck of drove off with him inside, his cell phone broke so Sarah couldn’t follow his signal, and… plans rarely survive the battlefield.

Agent Ellis could have told Sarah that. Here, I want to say just how impressed I am at the way the writers/actor are positioning Ellis as a man of quiet direction seeking the truth, rather than a mindless, relentless Javert. He feels like someone, who could become an ally, rather than obstacle and that’s new.

Ellis is someone whose purpose was redefined in 1999. He was once the golden boy at the FBI, when there was vanilla ice and sugar ray and he was a rising young star. Elllis is no longer young or rising. He has been supplanted by a younger man, who called Ellis Jim, not his actual name of James.

James Ellis has re-found his purpose in puzzling connections, despite Agent Greta’s don’t rock boat warnings that he may be going blind. He understood that if the numbers didn’t add up, like when Cameron turned the television to Video 1, the problem was that they don’t have all the numbers.

Sarah’s purpose is to protect John. When he was lost, Cameron told Sarah that she understood that without John, Sarah’s life had no purpose. What’s interesting about this version of the "mama bear who will do anything to protect her cub" story, is that when Sarah fights tirelessly to protect John, she is not just protecting her child. In protecting John, she protects the world, but only if she lets go. Then again, Rabbi Loeb could have told her, that by saving one life, she saves the world entire.

In that moment, as they sat there in that room, non-metallic and metallic women with their covalent bonds, I thought about the Golem of Prague.

I wondered how Rabbi Loeb would have felt after he created the Golem, but before he wrote Truth on its forehead and brought it to life. A more responsible sort of Dr. Frankenstein, what would that wise and learned man with clay mud on his hands have thought in that moment when the plan to save his people was just a plan, and the Golem was entirely potential born from a dream.

Sarah worried in that moment that she opened her hands too soon. But as Cameron reminded her, the world will end in four years. Like Jordan Cowan, the world has an end date.

So they move on to getting information from the sole source of information that they have. Not to be non-linear or anything, but when Sarah confronted the thug in the alley, it was interesting that she first put her hand in front of Cameron, which if Cameron were John, would have been a maternal gesture of protection. However, under the circumstances, she held Cameron back to protect the man that she knocked unconscious, subsequently squeezed for information, and left in a mine field in the middle of the desert. As Sarah told Cameron, humans are inefficient and illogical.

Terminators are all about single purpose and logic. The Carter-Terminator completed his task of gathering Coltan, that heat resisting element that will be rare after judgment day, banked it and himself in a bunker and shut himself down to sleep until the end of the world, because that was his mission, his truth. Cameron, another C name like Cromarty, does not sleep, because her mission is not yet achieved. I do wonder if as Carter stood in sleep mode, if he dreamed of electric sheep.

After all their efforts, Sarah and Cameron arrived at the bunker, which would one day be the factory where Cameron will be made. This information crumb meant that Cameron was definitely once a Terminator-Terminator. However, like the Arrnuld model, she was repurposed, reset from Video 1 to Video 2, by the ever resourceful future-John and turned from a Terminator-Terminator to a Protector-Terminator.

Sarah and Cameron arrived, but were stuck on the other side of the great doors. As with the future, it was all up to John to get the key and open the doors so the cavalry could run through. Sarah and Cameron stood outside and waited to see what present-John would do and who he would become. That’s fairly dense, and possibly heat resistant, philosophy right there, because to live is to become your future self.

Then we there was my favorite moment of the episode. While Cameron and Carter fought it out, Sarah had her most effective mothering moment. As John sat in the driver’s seat struggling with the clutch, she explained what he needed to do. She shotgun driver blasted Carter and helped her son drive out the bunker doors and leave this week’s Terminator behind.

The episode ended with the beginning of intersections. Agent Ellis went to see Lazlo, but that was just skin. I wonder if Ellis noticed that Lazlo had grown several inches since last they met. Ellis certainly noticed the slight oddities in Lazlo’s behavior as they discussed why anyone would steal someone’s identity, "steal, cheat, damage national psyche."

The episode ended with Sarah telling us that not every version of the story of the Golem of Prague ends with it killing those it was created to protect. In some cases, the Golem only destroyed those who sought to harm its maker. In some, Rabbi Loeb destroyed the golem before it destroyed the world.

Sarah told us then that the hubris of humans and parents is that we think we can control what we create. Whether our creations are made of clay or metal, we create our own monsters. As she spoke, the camera cut between John and Cameron. John sat by his sleep-dream tossed bed, his hand shaking from what had happened and what will happen. Cameron, who does not sleep, stood by her untouched bed. She looked at a bar of Coltan, which she held back from being dropped in the sea, the same imperfect alloy that was animated with technical magic to create her.

As Sarah talked about the Golem, I thought about what she didn’t say about the story. In some versions of the story, Rabbi Loeb told the Emperor that the Golem was merely turned off and hidden, just in case the Rabbi’s people ever needed it again. It is said to still be waiting in Prague for someone to rewrite the letters on its forehead from met (dead) to emet (truth).

We can only wait to see what the truths will be for the characters of this story.

Sources
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/r/rabbi_loeb.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/chemical/bond.html