This week on the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (T:tSCC), Sarah Connor was kind of awesome, John Connor gained a relative, Cameron lost one, Cromarty talked to a cell phone, and Agent Ellis got a hand. There was carnage and there was philosophy, which is always a win with me.

The episode begins with a memory. Sarah Connor walked purposefully through a jungle with a machine gun in her hands. As she walked, she told us that the most important training that John received in their time in a war zone was learning the game of chess.

As I watched her patrol through that verdant Eden with a gun, I thought about the title of the episode.

The Queen's Gambit is an opening move in chess where one player attempts to take control of the board. That makes sense. Even five episodes in, this is still a young show.

In the blocking of that scene, Sarah Connor was the very epitome of the Queen of the board. While young John, the King, sat still and learned a game. The Queen is the most powerful piece in chess, able to move purposefully in any direction. However, checking the King ends the game.

Sarah told us that the lessons of chess are those of war: patience, boldness, calculation, and, as we switched to the present, the willingness to sacrifice.

The words sacrifice was spoken over the image of Sarah doing pull-ups on a child's swing set. Clearly, childhood and innocence, both John and Sarah’s, had been sacrificed for the purpose of winning this non-linear war.

At this point in the series, both John Connor and Skynet have/had/will have potentially sent legions of guerrilla troops to sink into the overall population. Whether we consider those fighters advancing pawns or castling rooks, bad bishops or grim knights, the key thing about the future-guerrillas and the terminators is that they are in opposition to each other. Kyle fought Arnold. 888 pursued Derek. Cameron opposes Cromarty, while the overall population has no idea of the battle occurring around them. The sole exception thus far has been Carter in “Heavy Metal.”

In T:tSSC, the Connor’s goals are splintered between keeping John Connor alive and preventing Skynet’s birth. In “Heavy Metal” Skynet progressed from the first movie’s goal of preventing John’s birth to actively working toward laying the foundation for it’s own birth.

Poor Andy Goode, he was so excited to have completed Turk II. It’s interesting that John Connor compares good code to a song. Since that good code will create artificial intelligence that implies that art creates sentience. That the aphorism is not, “I think, therefore I am,” but “I create, therefore I am.”

Looked at another way, Cameron did John’s homework, but that didn’t help him. John needed to know the information if he was to pass the test. Cameron and Sarah may defend John, the king, from Terminators, but he needs to understand if he is to pass the ultimate test. As Confucius said, “Tell me, I will forget; show me, I may remember; involve me, and I will understand.”

Terminator 1 was a movie about humans against machines. In each of the subsequent movies, and here in the series, it has been humans and machines versus a machine. In this episode, humans surrounded and interacted with the machines in the exposition hall. Humans carried out the moves given them by the machines in the chess match.

This makes me wonder if we will at some point encounter a human working with all these Terminators as they skip toward the apocalypse.

Andy Goode described the Turk II as a precocious child. When Cameron told Sarah that the Turk could become Skynet, Sarah responded that it also could become Pong.

In Pong, two players bounce a ball back and forth. It is adversarial, but it is not a war game. The Turk has the potential, like most infants, to be the ultimate destroyer or to learn to interact.

When Cameron told us that the future-guerilla's mission was to meet up with Sarah and John, I believed her. They were not a Skynet hunting party for all that that is what they did. Future-John, showing a fine understanding of sacrifice, sent his best lieutenants, his best knights, into the past to create and protect himself.  

This brings us to Cromarty on his sleepless mission to find Sarah and John Connor. He hadn't even realized that he had traveled eight years into the future, until he asked a cell phone.

Although given the way Cameron was able to “hear” what the Guidance Counselor was “telling” her about his relationship with Jordon, I do wonder if Cromarty caught Dixon’s tell or if it was only something that his wife would be able to hear.

It was nice that the writers chose to make Mrs. Dixon a reasonable human being. She wasn’t jealous of Sarah Reese, she was afraid because Sarah Connor is a “killer.”

Meanwhile, back at dead girl junction, the students had built a memorial in a corner where two hallways meet. They expressed their grief at Jordan’s suicide by creating cards and leaving notes, which will not be read by Jordan. These notes serve as a physical representation of grief. When Cheryl said that she liked the idea of writing a note even though she didn’t know the person, the idea of written grief could be contrasted with Sarah’s spoken apology to Andy.

Cheryl’s note made up a part of the collage that was the memorial. Sarah’s words were lost and unheard in the dark. When Cameron gave Sarah a pencil to write her grief, Sarah broke it.

Words only mean something when they communicate. Otherwise, it’s just talking to yourself in an empty alley. What I am currently writing will only take on significance when you read it. Reaching back a bit, Plato in “Phaedrus”, wrote about the ways in which writing is lacking, because a writer cannot interact directly with the reader. Unlike John, interceding between the other students in shop class with his “nice accent”, a note is one way communication.

Mind you, even in speech; you can’t know what significance the person is hearing. Morris told John that Cheryl was damaged goods, that crazy things happened at her last school, and that she was under lockdown by her father. John’s smile, his tell, told the audience that to his perception, Morris may as well have been talking about John.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Cameron’s visit to the exhibition hall, which by this point had largely cleared of people. The camera panned from the mechanical fortune teller to the hulking robot to the bobbling plastic faced torso with its wide grin to Cameron. Is she the fortune teller, who predicts the future? Is she the monstrous robot that smashes? Is she a smiling face that waves? Is she the robot dog that barks at her feet? I would guess that at this point, Cameron, like Turk II, is a precocious child and that even she does not know.

I’m also not quite sure what to make of the chess match, all hail the Japanese who the future says won’t end the world. The implication of the scene is that to win, the player must be willing to sacrifice the most powerful piece on the board, Sarah Connor. That when faced with this sort of sacrifice, a player must not choke. This makes me wonder when, or if, John will transition from being the King, a piece on the board, to the player behind the pieces. Bobby Fisher won his Queen sacrificing chess match against Byrne at age 11, so it’s not too early to start.

Alas, Andy the Goode was removed from the board. The question at this point is by whom. Then again, an episode titled “Queen’s Gambit” is more about opening moves. The first four episodes placed the pieces on the board. Now we finally begin to move them about the board.

After episodes of lurking, the resistance fighter with his Skynet work camp tattoo and his dragon tattoo has a name and an identity, Derek Reese.

Derek Reese got three visitors in prison: Agent Ellis, Sarah, and the 888 Terminator on his trail.

Agent Ellis is a part of the system. The guards tighten Reese’s cuffs to create a bond with Agent Ellis visiting him, but they already have a bond.

One of the reasons I find Agent Ellis' story arc so compelling is that of all the characters, he is working the most to understand the shape of what is going on. After placing what he knows in front of Reese, what he asked was, "Tell me something I don't know."

In typical Reese boy fashion, Reese told him that they all were going to die.

Oddly enough, what the 888 left behind was more meaningful to Agent Ellis. Whereas in T2, a found Terminator hand helped lay the foundation for Skynet, here Agent Ellis finds it. It doesn’t tell him something he doesn’t already know. He does after all have the notes about Sarah’s case, but it and the synthetic blood within it may finally tell Agent Ellis what he needs to know.

Sarah, Reese’s second visitor, stole a badge to visit him and slipped on in. Reese described himself and his brother to her as the Reese "boys". It positioned the brothers both as not-adults and as a close and interchangeable unit. They are/were the brothers Reese. In the end, when calling to Derek, Sarah called him Reese, just as she did his brother. This is also the last name that Dixon knew Sarah by.

When she spoke of gaining a family member, Sarah said, “In our grief we are not alone,” which parallels her comment in 1.2, that one of the only things that can be depended on is the love of family. However, Sarah bears her grief in silence with a broken pencil and she spartanly downs her vitamins as a cancer shield.

Future-John learned the lesson of sacrifice very well. That Future-John Connor sent his father back alone and his uncle in a group. While I do realize that this is a retcon of movie to series, it's an interesting one. He separated the brothers, the boys, who were his best knights.

Reese’s third visitor was the unnamed 888-Terminator, who had a bit more subtlety than the Arnold unit. He got himself arrested rather than shooting up a police station. This worked a bit better with the idea of Terminators as infiltrator’s and then killers. However, when 888 broke into room C7, numbered like a square on a chess board, the knight he was looking for had already moved on.

Sarah called her field trip. John called shotgun, powerful and imprecise. Cameron called nine millimeter, which can be precise depending on the hand that wields it.

Future-John knew Kyle and Derek, but Derek didn’t know Cameron. He didn’t know that tin-miss was on their side, which made me wonder if she really is on their side, or just what game Future-John was/is/will be playing.

At this point in the episode, we finally progressed from chess to this episode’s machine on machine battle. This time, the Terminator isn’t locked in a vault. This time, Cameron pulled out her enemy’s chip, her brother’s soul.

As the episode wrapped, Sarah told us that the flaw in chess is that its rules are constant and there are no hearts or minds to be won. As Tin-miss-Cameron wrote a note, probably to that unnamed 888, she used the pencil that Sarah broke. She’s learning.

John was learning too. After Sarah told him that Derek is his uncle, he went to his proxy father for help.

Sarah told us that the goal of chess is total annihilation, like an apocalypse with black and white squares. However the hope of war is that saner minds will stop total destruction and that the rules can be changed. We’ll see.

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Gambit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361