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- Review: Sarah Connor 1.10, "Strange Things Happen at the One, Two Point"
Review: Sarah Connor 1.10, "Strange Things Happen at the One, Two Point"
- By Crystal Carroll
- Published 12/1/2008
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles
- Unrated
Crystal Carroll
Crystal is a 30-something writer living in Northern California. She divides her time between writing technical documentation (techy, tech, tech requirements docs), analytical essays on television shows that hold her brain for ransom, and the occasional bout of fiction (like plague, only with characters). She enjoys Pinot Noir, but not during robot apocalypses, and feels all movies could be made better if they had a Sleestack in the background.
View all articles by Crystal Carroll
This week on Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, 2.10, "Strange Things Happen at the One, Two Point", Sarah went just a bit dot crazy, Ellison was asked to be a daddy, and there were shenanigans with the love interests. (spoilers)
The title of the episode, as is explained halfway through, comes from a concept in the game of Go, "Strange things happen at the one, two point" that means that in some cases the rules do not apply. This is an episode about rules and behavior.
We begin the episode with digging. Ellison dreamed of digging up Cromartie. When he woke up, he found Cameron stabbing his lawn with a metal stake as she searched for Cromartie's body. Both the dream and Cameron's search are wonderfully literal and visceral. However, Cromartie is far deeper in the ground than that.
As we join Ellison at the company where they are building Skynet, the police take a body from the earth. In this case, Dr. Boyd Sherman was trapped in a sealed room when following a power outage the AI, formerly known as Turk, took all the power to keep itself cool. Dr. Sherman slowly cooked in the dark. The rules did not apply to the Turk, as Catherine is creating a machine that will break rules. Ellison first is led through the cold basement and encounters the physical form of the AI. He is then challenged by Catherine to ask the AI, John Henry, what happened.
Dr. Sherman named the AI John Henry after the mythic giant black steel-driver. John Henry was about to be displaced in his job by a machine. He challenged the steam-powered drill to contest. He won the contest, but died of a heart attack and was replaced by the machine anyway. The choice of name is interesting in several ways. The AI here is associated with not just a human, but a giant and yet marginalized laborer about to be displaced. The work John Henry engaged in was the building of railroads, which in their hey-day interconnected a far flung young nation in literal lines of steel and wood. These lines were both connective and destructive. They allowed mass migrations of people. They helped destroy the buffalo.
Ellison goes down into the earth once again to ask John Henry what happened. John Henry both spoke in images and one for yes and zero for no, which is an contrast to Sarah’s mad-trinary search.
John Henry understood alive, but the concept and dead or feelings was beyond it. When the power came up, it called the paramedics with no understanding that Dr. Sherman could not be fixed. According to Ellison, it should not have been irrelevant if John Henry felt as long as it had a moral code. I, of course, went to Asimov's three laws of robotics. While Ellison told Catherine and the engineer that they are to blame for Dr. Sherman's death for not providing John Henry with rules and suggested that they try the first Ten Commandments. Given the nature of the first three commandments, that would be an interesting task.
Catherine essentially asked Ellison to become a father, or guiding figure, to John Henry. They return to the room where Dr. Sherman, the last man to make that attempt, died. The dream that opened the episode comes full circle, as Ellison finds Cromarartie-no-more plugged into the AI, who smiled and introduced himself as John Henry.
Between these two bookends of dead-Cromartie and living-John Henry, the other characters circle each other trying to prevent the future birth of Skynet.
In Sarah's case, she goes off on a tangent as she seeks to understand the writing on the wall. As I've commented before, there's a wonderful synchronicity between having Sarah et al pursue clues based on that writing and Catherine naming her pet project Babylon. After all, as Ellison tells the engineer when he hears the project's name, Babylon was a marvel, which God destroyed. That destruction was foretold by a message written on the palace wall by God's hand.
However in this case, what Sarah is seeing is more aligned with Pink Floyd's "The Wall", which as a concept album/movie shows the protagonist Pink's increasing self-isolation and paranoia.
Last week's illness turned this week into full blown obsession with understanding the dots. She first burglarized Dakara, a technology company with the three dot logo like the bloody finger prints on the wall. As Derek tried to tell her that she's off track and that they are just blood, she responded that the entire wall was written in blood. For Sarah, there must significance in everything because it's written in a human life. Where John Henry had no concept of human worth, Sarah was overwhelmed by it. She pushed out her conception of the significance onto the others until even disbelieving Derek saw significance in random dots. The difference was that he was already at one remove from Sarah.
This continued his pulling back from Sarah and damaged his belief in her leadership at a significant moment. He found Jessie's surveillance photos. She explained that she was there because in the future, a different future than Derek's as we learned last week, John had become increasingly dependent on Cameron. Fearing the affect of her influence if around for twenty years, Jessie had returned to "save" him.
Meanwhile, John goes to see Riley at her foster-home. On her walls are a number of posters: blue sky, cactus, waterfall, Yosemite, and a bear. Given the significance of images, each poster has a hidden meaning. John was attracted to the picture of Yosemite, but he thinks Riley was a bear sort of person. She then told him that the poster was not a picture of a bear, but of a fish caught by the bear at random. The other fish don't even know what has happened.
That is our first hint that there's more than normal to Riley. She urged John to tell her his secrets, but he cannot.
The situation became more complicated with the reveal that Riley was also from the future and her mission was to get close to John. As she and Jessie sat together in a changing room, they faced mirrors and Riley marveled at how many mirrors "this" world held. Considering Riley's age, unlike Derek and Jessie, she had no memories of the world destroyed. She would have been born to that dead and mangled steel world. She was the child of a post-John Henry world.
While Sarah cycled back to a familiar madness. I'd like to write that here that she becomes increasingly obsessed with stopping Skynet, but her actions in this episode, while more sophisticated, hark back to her behavior in T2. Sarah herself referenced her old predilection for blowing up technology buildings. Sarah, who does not understand her son's technology references, was a modern day luddite, or at least an 80s/90s one. As with the ending of Pink Floyd's the Wall, where the last line connects with the first line, which indicates a cyclic pattern of behavior, Sarah's actions are part of a pattern. It's useful to think that just because in T2 there was an action against an antecedent of Skynet that many of her luddite actions were probably against companies that were just as peripheral as Dakara.
Here, she pretended to be an investor, and seemingly bonds with the owner, Alex, both over being a parent and a child of the 80s. While his son, Xander, which is a derivation of his father's name, spoke only the language of technology. There were a series of twists in which Alex told Sarah that he was going to license a Japanese chip for his son's AI. For a moment, I thought of the chess competition from the previous season, but Xander wasn't interested in chess. He played Go instead, which has an infinite number of variations. Sarah was so convinced of the significance of the dots that she gathered up all their resources to pay for the chip and follow the lead. But the chip, like the Dakara AI is vaporware. First Alex led Sarah to believe that his contacts were Yakuza, at the same time he told the story of his grandfather being robbed of his store during the American internment of Asians during WWII. It's a cliché on a cliché, but in a parallel of last season's episode where Sarah pursued the Turk to a mobster's home, they raid the home of the man who gave them the chip, only to find that he was an actor. Sarah et al return and confront Alex, who told them it was a trick. While he believed in his son's dream, he cannot understand his son. More importantly, he doesn't believe that his son understood him. This paralleled both Sarah and John's relationship and the John Henry child/parent story. What's interesting is that in both Alex and Sarah's case, it is the parent who struggled to understand the technical child. What this implies for John Henry remains to be seen.
However where last season, Derek was Sarah's loyal right hand, here was farther from her than ever. When he met again with Jessie, he told her one of the central secrets of the series, that he is John's uncle. In a line reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, he asks her tell him all her secrets so that there can be complete honesty between them. She responded with a joke. It's funny and yet, we then see Riley come to see John, as she continued her mission.
While Sarah is left to face herself in the mirror. There are blood dots on her face in the pattern of the three dots of the wall. She smashed the mirror, but this only increased the number of reflections. We’ll see what other shattering these events will create.
Sources
John Henry wikipedia
3 Laws of Robotics wikipedia
The Wall wikipedia
The title of the episode, as is explained halfway through, comes from a concept in the game of Go, "Strange things happen at the one, two point" that means that in some cases the rules do not apply. This is an episode about rules and behavior.
We begin the episode with digging. Ellison dreamed of digging up Cromartie. When he woke up, he found Cameron stabbing his lawn with a metal stake as she searched for Cromartie's body. Both the dream and Cameron's search are wonderfully literal and visceral. However, Cromartie is far deeper in the ground than that.
As we join Ellison at the company where they are building Skynet, the police take a body from the earth. In this case, Dr. Boyd Sherman was trapped in a sealed room when following a power outage the AI, formerly known as Turk, took all the power to keep itself cool. Dr. Sherman slowly cooked in the dark. The rules did not apply to the Turk, as Catherine is creating a machine that will break rules. Ellison first is led through the cold basement and encounters the physical form of the AI. He is then challenged by Catherine to ask the AI, John Henry, what happened.
Dr. Sherman named the AI John Henry after the mythic giant black steel-driver. John Henry was about to be displaced in his job by a machine. He challenged the steam-powered drill to contest. He won the contest, but died of a heart attack and was replaced by the machine anyway. The choice of name is interesting in several ways. The AI here is associated with not just a human, but a giant and yet marginalized laborer about to be displaced. The work John Henry engaged in was the building of railroads, which in their hey-day interconnected a far flung young nation in literal lines of steel and wood. These lines were both connective and destructive. They allowed mass migrations of people. They helped destroy the buffalo.
Ellison goes down into the earth once again to ask John Henry what happened. John Henry both spoke in images and one for yes and zero for no, which is an contrast to Sarah’s mad-trinary search.
John Henry understood alive, but the concept and dead or feelings was beyond it. When the power came up, it called the paramedics with no understanding that Dr. Sherman could not be fixed. According to Ellison, it should not have been irrelevant if John Henry felt as long as it had a moral code. I, of course, went to Asimov's three laws of robotics. While Ellison told Catherine and the engineer that they are to blame for Dr. Sherman's death for not providing John Henry with rules and suggested that they try the first Ten Commandments. Given the nature of the first three commandments, that would be an interesting task.
Catherine essentially asked Ellison to become a father, or guiding figure, to John Henry. They return to the room where Dr. Sherman, the last man to make that attempt, died. The dream that opened the episode comes full circle, as Ellison finds Cromarartie-no-more plugged into the AI, who smiled and introduced himself as John Henry.
Between these two bookends of dead-Cromartie and living-John Henry, the other characters circle each other trying to prevent the future birth of Skynet.
In Sarah's case, she goes off on a tangent as she seeks to understand the writing on the wall. As I've commented before, there's a wonderful synchronicity between having Sarah et al pursue clues based on that writing and Catherine naming her pet project Babylon. After all, as Ellison tells the engineer when he hears the project's name, Babylon was a marvel, which God destroyed. That destruction was foretold by a message written on the palace wall by God's hand.
However in this case, what Sarah is seeing is more aligned with Pink Floyd's "The Wall", which as a concept album/movie shows the protagonist Pink's increasing self-isolation and paranoia.
Last week's illness turned this week into full blown obsession with understanding the dots. She first burglarized Dakara, a technology company with the three dot logo like the bloody finger prints on the wall. As Derek tried to tell her that she's off track and that they are just blood, she responded that the entire wall was written in blood. For Sarah, there must significance in everything because it's written in a human life. Where John Henry had no concept of human worth, Sarah was overwhelmed by it. She pushed out her conception of the significance onto the others until even disbelieving Derek saw significance in random dots. The difference was that he was already at one remove from Sarah.
This continued his pulling back from Sarah and damaged his belief in her leadership at a significant moment. He found Jessie's surveillance photos. She explained that she was there because in the future, a different future than Derek's as we learned last week, John had become increasingly dependent on Cameron. Fearing the affect of her influence if around for twenty years, Jessie had returned to "save" him.
Meanwhile, John goes to see Riley at her foster-home. On her walls are a number of posters: blue sky, cactus, waterfall, Yosemite, and a bear. Given the significance of images, each poster has a hidden meaning. John was attracted to the picture of Yosemite, but he thinks Riley was a bear sort of person. She then told him that the poster was not a picture of a bear, but of a fish caught by the bear at random. The other fish don't even know what has happened.
That is our first hint that there's more than normal to Riley. She urged John to tell her his secrets, but he cannot.
The situation became more complicated with the reveal that Riley was also from the future and her mission was to get close to John. As she and Jessie sat together in a changing room, they faced mirrors and Riley marveled at how many mirrors "this" world held. Considering Riley's age, unlike Derek and Jessie, she had no memories of the world destroyed. She would have been born to that dead and mangled steel world. She was the child of a post-John Henry world.
While Sarah cycled back to a familiar madness. I'd like to write that here that she becomes increasingly obsessed with stopping Skynet, but her actions in this episode, while more sophisticated, hark back to her behavior in T2. Sarah herself referenced her old predilection for blowing up technology buildings. Sarah, who does not understand her son's technology references, was a modern day luddite, or at least an 80s/90s one. As with the ending of Pink Floyd's the Wall, where the last line connects with the first line, which indicates a cyclic pattern of behavior, Sarah's actions are part of a pattern. It's useful to think that just because in T2 there was an action against an antecedent of Skynet that many of her luddite actions were probably against companies that were just as peripheral as Dakara.
Here, she pretended to be an investor, and seemingly bonds with the owner, Alex, both over being a parent and a child of the 80s. While his son, Xander, which is a derivation of his father's name, spoke only the language of technology. There were a series of twists in which Alex told Sarah that he was going to license a Japanese chip for his son's AI. For a moment, I thought of the chess competition from the previous season, but Xander wasn't interested in chess. He played Go instead, which has an infinite number of variations. Sarah was so convinced of the significance of the dots that she gathered up all their resources to pay for the chip and follow the lead. But the chip, like the Dakara AI is vaporware. First Alex led Sarah to believe that his contacts were Yakuza, at the same time he told the story of his grandfather being robbed of his store during the American internment of Asians during WWII. It's a cliché on a cliché, but in a parallel of last season's episode where Sarah pursued the Turk to a mobster's home, they raid the home of the man who gave them the chip, only to find that he was an actor. Sarah et al return and confront Alex, who told them it was a trick. While he believed in his son's dream, he cannot understand his son. More importantly, he doesn't believe that his son understood him. This paralleled both Sarah and John's relationship and the John Henry child/parent story. What's interesting is that in both Alex and Sarah's case, it is the parent who struggled to understand the technical child. What this implies for John Henry remains to be seen.
However where last season, Derek was Sarah's loyal right hand, here was farther from her than ever. When he met again with Jessie, he told her one of the central secrets of the series, that he is John's uncle. In a line reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, he asks her tell him all her secrets so that there can be complete honesty between them. She responded with a joke. It's funny and yet, we then see Riley come to see John, as she continued her mission.
While Sarah is left to face herself in the mirror. There are blood dots on her face in the pattern of the three dots of the wall. She smashed the mirror, but this only increased the number of reflections. We’ll see what other shattering these events will create.
Sources
John Henry wikipedia
3 Laws of Robotics wikipedia
The Wall wikipedia
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