This week on Sarah Connor's Chronicles, Sarah lent a hand, Agent Ellis lost his, John watched a tear jerker, and Cameron learned the dance of the cat. There was more philosophy and religious parallels than you can shake a stick at, which always pleases me.

The episode opened with an image of authority subverted and a reference to the Terminator movies. A motorcycle cop turned down an alley and resolved into Cameron dressed as a CHP officer with mirrored glasses. She ripped her way into an electrical facility, which provided the crackling life blood of the city. Rather than turning off the machines, Cameron broke them by placing her hard metal hand into a turbine. Then she watched as the lights of civilization winked out. All so she could break into police lockup and get back that lost 888 Terminator's hand. However, the Demon hand of the episode title was not there. Ellison had moved it from box to box. Everything on this show ends up in a box eventually.

We cut between the boxes where the police store their records to the stone slab boxes of a columbarium. Sarah Connor’s flashlight played a game of light and shadow across the names on the wall as she told us that like the Terminator last week, Andy was cremated in an intense fire leaving only ashes. She equated the machine and the man by telling us that there remained nothing left to tell the story of who or what they were: the nameless 888 and Andy Goode.

She dismissed the idea of the soul as the thing that separates human and machine saying, "gone is gone, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and that she wanted to buried in the Earth. As she found Andy Goode’s box grave, she told us that a part of herself died with Kyle Reese. This is true. Her childhood and dreams of a safe world died when the Terminator came back in time. She then spoke of a very physical idea of immortality, which is that we live on in our children.

What's interesting is that in both the case of the machine and the man, she's missing something. Cameron saved the 888 Terminator's chip, the thing that can make the machine survive physical death. Andy Goode was survived by the Turk, who he described as a precocious child. The Turk’s creation came out of code that had to be expressed like a song. We'll have to see what will come of any of them: the 888 chip, the Turk, and John Connor.

We then shift to Sarah caring for that other remnant of Kyle, his equal, his brother. Derek wanted the nameless machine, Cameron, to find the Turk. His obsession with finding the creation of Andy Goode, his friend, his victim, was interesting.

It occurred to me that the Turk was not the machine-child that Andy created, who became Skynet in that other timeline. Andy described that machine as being built with ten/fifteen other people whose names he never knew. They may as well have had numbers. This is not to say that the Turk could not become Skynet, but I do wonder if it's as predestined as all that.

Speaking of destiny, John wanted to know if Derek would be staying in their home. As he sat in the semi-light and asked the question, I noticed the carton milk on the table next to him, a symbol of home and childhood. Sarah, in the darker end of the kitchen, was focused on the more literal sense of Derek staying. She wasn't sure he would live or if he would become dust and ashes.

While Cameron changed clothes from motorcycle cop to ballerina, Sarah followed up on the lead for the hand. She sat on a swing set wearing Cameron’s motorcycle boots, the motorcycle boots of that naked bleeding cop in an alley. This is an image of Sarah's dead childhood juxtaposed with an authoritarian image. I'm not sure how many of you have worn boots like that, but trust me when I say that when you wear those kind of boots, you really do want to conquer small city states and oppress third world nations. However, they are very hard to dance in.

Clothes enable people to be chameleons. They often present or disguise the truth of who we are. A lamb may wear wolves clothing and a wolf may dress as a lamb.

Some clothes express more than others. I thought about the vulnerability of Sarah’s clothing in the tapes of her time in the asylum. She was an adult, but she could not dress herself. She was trapped in the clothing of sleep.

Ellison watched the tapes of Sarah in her asylum cell, taking her bed apart, the instrument of sleep. She pounded the walls trying to be heard. Finally, she smashed the camera, which was like some unresponsive eye of God or Big Brother who wanted to remove more words from Sarah's mental dictionary.

In the tape, if you didn't know the central truth/mythology of this series, she seemed crazy. She talked about God or the Devil sending messages from the future. I wondered how many drugs the character was supposed to be pumped up on. Sarah was in the asylum for three years and considered a text book case of depression and paranoia. That's a long time. Especially given that the entire time, she knew that machines were coming. She knew that the world would be destroyed by beings sent to do one "perfect" and absolute thing. She knew that they had already killed her mother, and presumably father, and lover. She knew they wanted to kill her and her son, and everything she loved. She knew they wanted to put the lights of the world out and still its humming I-sing-the-body-electric-heart. She knew all this and no one believed her.

Ellison then went to where all good evidence is kept, the cold box of the freezer. He was trying to unfreeze and unlock the evidence that made no sense, a mechanical hand.

He went to the cold analytical box of the asylum and saw the marks that Sarah left on the walls. However, her Doctor Silverman, another reminder of the movies, had left for the Arrow headed mountains, where one goes for spirit walks and epiphanies come. He went there to put plants in the ground and write words.

While Ellison was in a former home of Sarah's, we see her in his. The camera panned across pictures of family, a marked up Bible, and a neat stack of video tapes. She shuffled through them to take the one that marked her greatest wound.

Meanwhile, Cameron pursued her mission and one more series used Summer Glau's dance experience. However, Cameron cannot dance like a cat, a living creature.

As Maria told Cameron that "Dance is the hidden language of the soul", she's expressing another version of Sarah’s idea of the physical soul. There are other languages of the soul: painting, poetry, writing, etc. Dance is a non-verbal language. It is about perfect synchronicity of rhythm and motion where the mover does not think. The movement is so imbedded in the memory of the muscles that it occurs outside of thought.

However, more than that she tells us that it is a hidden language. Like the dancer who alluded to the movements of a cat, it is something where one thing stands for another. Like Cameron herself, whose mechanical-miss movements are as yet stiff, who pretends to be a "real" girl.

While continuing the trend of characters invading each other’s living spaces, Derek sat on the floor of Sarah's room and loaded guns. John was uncomfortable with the idea of this invasion of space. He wanted this activity moved to the common space of the kitchen. Derek could not even conceive of a space that was not held in common. He lived in a tunnel after all.

It was in this moment as Derek told John that he couldn't believe that John trusted anyone (human-Charlie or machine-Cameron), that I realized in the previous episode John told Derek that Kyle died saving John. There was no mention of just when in time Kyle went back. There was even the implication that John met him. In a way, this transposed the role of the Terminator in T2, who taught John to trust converted Terminators, with that of Kyle. As if in this new version, it was Kyle who helped break Sarah out of prison and was later melted down.

Derek was then caught in a conundrum. He wanted the machine sent out to do their dirty work, but he does not trust it. He laughed at the idea of naming it/her Cameron. She cannot be a pet like a cat. This leaves Cameron one of two potential roles: Tool or Ally.

He also could not allow himself to rest, because they do not rest. In a way, he seeks to become the Terminator, sleepless and strong. He cannot sleep with Cameron around. The gun he held does not help him any more than sleeping on the trunk of them helped Sarah.

While all that is going on, as a self fulfilling prophesy, the tape that Sarah took and brought back to the house is the tape she never wanted John to see. John put his head phones on and he watched it. He listened to it, but tape only catches the outward image of things, which are as true as Cameron’s ballet leotard or CHP uniform. He saw, but he didn't comprehend the truth of the moment. Angst made him not hungry and he fled to the solitude of crowded school.

Sarah saw the tape in the machine, there's always a tape. There is always a machine. She understood what it meant. Her son saw the day she signed away her rights to him as her son. The thing here isn't that she hasn't proved time and again to be a mama-bear where he is concerned. The problem is that in that moment, John saw his mother was breakable and fragile, human. I do wonder if some part of her wanted him to see it. She could have destroyed it, but instead she brought it home where he could see that she was imperfect.

Cameron and Derek discussed dance as the hidden language of the soul that Cameron does not have. The two travelers from the future faced each other across kitchen table, the common space of home. He meditatively stabbed the table with his fork. He was not hungry. Cameron used her fork to eat a bit of pancake, as if to prove how human she can pretend to be. They told each other that they know each other, but I think they don't know each other at all. She doesn't know who he is to the Connors, nor does he. We don't know what Cameron mission really is, nor does Derek.

While Silverman, he doesn't know any of that. It’s an interesting choice that they chose to change his name from the movies Silberman to Silverman – Silver man.

We meet the human-silver-man potting plants, which seemed to ally him with the organic side of our story. Ellison comes to him seeking answers from someone who knew Sarah, but what he gets back is a story of text book delusions and poisoned tea. Beware of false prophets indeed.

Cameron’s mission was also to find some sort of truth. She gets at it by watching Maria Shipkov dance, and by being seen to watch her. In a series with so many lost brothers, the conversation that followed had so many layers of meaning. The two "sisters" who dance and the "brothers" who play chess were both true and false.

Maria, her name a form of Mary, was incredulous that Cameron had thrown the generic thug across the room because she was just a girl. Clearly, Maria hadn’t read the script into the next scene and didn't realize that Cameron was a wolf in lamb’s clothing. I

While Ellison got that lesson all too clearly. The psychiatrist, who planted green things, had drugged and tied up authority. Silverman quoted the Bible, Mathew 7:15 – “Beware false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Silverman converted rather forcefully by his metallic vision all those years ago had become rather like those witch finders of old who would drop suspected witches in water to see if they would float. To determine if Ellison is from the future, Silverman stabbed Ellison in the leg.

As we shifted from Silverman twisting the knife in Ellison’s wound to grass, we came to what for me was the heart of the episode. Derek stood barefoot in the grass with feet so pale I wondered if they had ever seen the sky. He touched the grass tenderly with his foot as if to absorb the green with his toe-roots. He looked up at the sky like he was a plant soaking in the sun.

As he stood there, this solider in a war he hadn't asked for, Sarah, another tired warrior in that battle came out. In that moment, I thought of the motorcycle boots that she wore earlier on that self same grass. It was not that she took the green for granted; it was that she could not afford to see it. The present beautiful world for her was tainted by all her knowledge of what is to come. That is the part of her that died with Kyle Reese.

Her every moment since has been defined by her need to protect both her son, and by extension the world and everyone in it. However, like the people who wouldn't listen to her in the asylum, John will not take her messages. As she started for Arrowhead, Ellison and Silverman, Derek attempted to make some sort of conversation with her. He told her that John was a strong boy. That’s quite a shift in perspective. Someone who he had known as a leader of men, someone older than himself, was now a strong boy. 

However, as with all of Derek's conversations, it turned back to Kyle. John had told Derek an abstract story about his brother, in an episode with so many references to hidden brothers. Derek asked Sarah where his brother was now. She gave him the only answer that mattered, that Kyle was in the grass. While Andy Good's ashes lay suspended in cement and air, Kyle’s body was somewhere in the ground nourishing the Earth. She promised to take Derek there someday and I wondered if it would be as a visitor or as the last place he exist.

This conversation of connection and guidance, shifted once more back to Silverman as he put a tourniquet on Ellison's leg

Silverman pretended to be a potential ally. A true convert to Sarah's religion, he wondered if the apocalypse in Revelation and Sarah's predictions were "one and the same." This phasing struck me as being very monotheistic and absolute.

Then Silverman told Ellison about his road to Damascus conversion. How he saw an emotionless man throw a guard like a rag doll, a thing. He also went on to add dualism to this conversionary moment, because there was another man, a beautiful, perfect changeling with a face of mercury. These are both references to not only the inhuman, but the beyond human. Mercury was a god, while changelings are fairy children left as cuckoos in human cribs.

Silverman had been converted to Sarah's overall ideas, but hadn't grasped the basic concept beneath them. He equated the lack of emotion and perfection of these machines with God. However, as Sarah later told us, it is the perfection of machines, which prevented them from grasping the hidden language of the soul. Silverman paralleled his memory of the emotionless man reaching out to Sarah to God reaching to humanity in the Sistine chapel. That image is a painting made by a human lying on his back for years to create something that touches on the divine. The Sistine Chapel is floor to ceiling beautiful, imperfect/perfect art. It is a room that so speaks the hidden language of the soul that it is literally dizzying to stand in.

There's a psychological syndrome called Stendhal’s syndrome where a person sees something, generally art, so beautiful and overwhelming that you literally feel attacked by it. In Silverman’s experience, the beautiful and ineffable art attacked.

I was also struck by the significance of the catch phrase, "Come with me if you want to live." It's been in the series so long, it never really hit me how messianic, in a series already chock full of messianic imagery, that phrase is.

At this point, Ellison attempted to break through to Silverman by offering him proof that none of them are crazy and that they don't have to take this apocalyptic fear on faith. This I suppose makes Ellison Doubting Thomas who wanted to touch the wounds on Christ’s. Ellison has the hand of God in his car in his trunk in a box, like a Russian doll.

Here again, Silverman showed the audience that although he saw the machines, he didn't understand their significance. He understood that the hand shouldn't fall into the wrong hands, but his reaction is that of the machines, destruction.

He decided that he must destroy Ellison by fire as one might have burned a witch in Renaissance Europe while that Sistine chapel he liked was being painted. Silverman made that cognitive leap between stories of Sarah's death and that of Jesus, without really comprehending what she'd want under the circumstances.

While Silverman set fire to his home, John attempted to discover if he was going to gain another person in his. While there's a certain horrible teenage self-centeredness to John's angsting over the time he slept on couches to the survivor of a nuclear-robot-holocaust, there was a sliver of truth to it. There were once two people who wanted to become his parents, and they died because of it. While his mother, who always seemed so indomitable, in that baren moment in the video tape, seemed to let go.

That tape was the image of God no longer reaching for Adam, but rather being in the act of pulling away. John still had a teenager’s belief in absolutes and that there are some people who cannot be broken. However, even machines can be reprogrammed, and as Derek told John, "four walls"/a box/a prison, they distort how you see things. As with Plato’s Cave, when a prisoner exists without sunlight, shadows take on their own reality.

Derek, having come from a broken future, told John that there were fewer people who always fight than you might think.

Only the machines never stop, no matter their programming. We shift to Cameron on her relentless mission to find the Turk. She offered Dimitri a diamond, a girl’s best friend. Once she got the information, she left. When I first watched, as the Russian's came up the stairs, I cheered because I thought she'd toss the thugs around. I thought that she would save them like the hero always does. I was shocked when I heard screams and gunfire. Both Dimitri and his sister, Maria, died. Then I was surprised at my own surprise. Cameron's actions were completely consistent with her character.

It did seem rather predestined that as Silverman burned his house, he met Sarah outside. He asked her forgiveness, which she gave with a punch in the face, a closed right hand. As with Cameron in the previous scene, Sarah heard cries for help.

Her response was implicit in the next scene. Silverman sprawled pale in the falling rain with two rainbows arching across the camera lens, while Ellison kicked him awake. In the Bible, having destroyed the earth's population in a flood, God's promise of Genesis was that he wouldn’t destroy the world in a flood again. The promise of the book of Revelation that Silverman and Ellison were talking about was that the world would end in fire, but the believers would survive However, tha ending fire will not come the Demon/God’s hand that Ellison found. Sarah took it. As the double rainbows reappeared, Silverman laughed in his puddle in the rain.

As Silverman laughed, Sarah approached what looked like a pile of clothes on a bed, her brooding son. On this show, dates and the order things happen in are always important. She broke out of the asylum on June 8, 1997. Tapes, being only recordings of the outside rather than feelings, lie through lack of context. They can leave things out. She broke out on the day that she signed away her rights to John after three years of being drugged and locked up in a mental institution.

As John was coming to save her, she was coming to save him. Their truths were one and the same. She reached out and touched the same spot on John's leg where Silverman stabbed Ellison, and said that she would always find John. He told her that he would always find her. Rather than a perfect paternal God, we are here offered imperfect humans, who will always reach out to one another.

As she began her closing monologue, Sarah told us that John now understood that she couldn't walk on water. She told the audience that we all have weak moments where we lose faith. We are not immaculate mercury: we are human beings. Silverman didn't understand that, so he ended up in the same cell where Sarah was once kept, ranting what she once ranted. While Ellison leaned against the wall casting a long shadow.

We opened with the idea that having children is a form of immortality and in the middle we learned that Kyle Reese was in the grass. It made sense then that Ellison, a man of the book, in his circular equal Bible group, read aloud from Luke 3:9 "Every Tree that does not produce good fruit, shall be hewn down and cast into fire." That was John the Baptist’s way of urging people to be good to one another. He was that sort of a preacher.

Then Sarah set fire to the fruitless Terminator’s hand, which was no hand of God, but a Demon's hand, which produced a dead dust world. Then we switched to Cameron as she removed her shoes. Sarah told us that machines could not appreciate beauty. Cameron, who left Dimiti to die, danced. Sarah told us that if a machine could understand beauty, they wouldn't have to destroy us, they would become us. Derek, who grew up in a world destroyed by metal, who seeks to become cold inside, watched her light and shadow movements, in horrified fascination.

While I was ever more curious about what will become of all of them.


Sources
While I’m very tempted to link to my own essay on Stendahl’s Syndrome, I won’t as that would be tacky. Instead,
http://www.google.com/search?q=stendahl%27s+syndrome&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a