Episode Title: Samson and Delilah
Writer: David Nutter
Director: Josh Friedman
Originally Aired: 09/08/2008
Grade: A-
All I could think about through the entire opening music montage was that it sounded like Shirley Manson, and I found it to be gimmicky and annoying rather than tongue-in-cheek cute. It didn't help that the song really didn’t work for me. Part of what made the Johnny Cash song in the finale work so well was the jaunty-music-at-odds-with-the-subject-matter vibe, which this sequence definitely didn’t have. The lyrics of the “Samson and Delilah” song worked incredibly well in setting up the story, though.
Aside from the not-as-cool-as-they-probably-hoped opening sequence, this was a pretty solid season opener. There were definitely some flaws, but I think it set up a lot of promising character arcs and interactions.
First of all, what happened in the attic with Sarkissian? I’m leaning toward John being the one to kill him, for a couple of reasons. When Sarah and Derek talk about what happened later, Derek just assumes that Sarah is the one who did the killing, and Sarah doesn’t correct him. It’s entirely possible that Sarah wanted Derek to keep thinking that because a) she knew John wouldn’t want anyone to know, b) she was ashamed that she couldn’t spare her son the pain of having to murder another human being, and c) she was afraid that revealing the truth to Derek would give he and John something to bond over, especially since John was already beginning to pull away from her at that point.
The second reason I think it was John is right there in the song lyrics: “You all know just how a lion can kill a man with his paws. Well, Samson got his hands up ‘round that lion’s jaws, and he ripped the beast, and he killed him dead.”
However, even if he was the one who killed Sarkissian, I’m not sure that anything can actually justify his behavior toward Sarah in this episode. He pointedly raised his voice to make sure Sarah heard his argument that Cameron “saves his life,” which was incredibly cruel, because that’s exactly what Sarah has spent almost every second of her life doing since he was born. I honestly wanted to slap the kid, and I’m far from a Sarah Connor cheerleader. Part of the problem is that viewers were somewhat cut off from understanding the specifics of what was going on with John by not being allowed to see what happened in the room with Sarah and Sarkissian. When (and it is when, dammit!) the writers choose to revisit this day, I think we will have a better understanding of John’s emotional process throughout this episode. I mean, they did show us the emotional process here, but without being sure what its specific basis is, it’s kind of hard to know what you’re really seeing him go through.
I’m going to assume that lot of the new and strange things we saw from Cameron have something to do with the fact that she was programmed by FutureJohn. I was kind of disappointed when we got the CamCam view and it still said her objective was to terminate John, because I didn’t want a whole season of that kind of cheap tension. I was greatly relieved when it showed her overriding that objective, and very curious as to how much that had to do with Cameron herself versus the tinkering of FutureJohn (or PresentJohn, for that matter). Was that programming or free-willed decision-making? Weaver’s “crossing against the light” monologue, Cameron questioning Sarah about the Resurrection, and her telling Sarah not to let John bring her back if it happens again all seem to strongly push Cameron’s actions into the realm of free will.
As for the Cameron's insistence that she and John love each other, I’m not sure what to make of it yet. On the one hand, I do think she was still “bad” at that point and was trying to stop him from turning her off, but again, was it just programming, or was it a self-defense mechanism motivated by fear, i.e. by emotion?
I think John’s brain pretty much went, "Oh hell no, self, that is fucked up!" about one second after Cameron said the "I love you and you love me" bit. I also can't say that I took him at his word that he put her chip back in because she "saves his life." He obviously cares about her deeply. John’s actions in reviving Cameron also tie in nicely with the scene in “Vick’s Chip” where Derek tells John that one day a machine will kill him, and John says that it won’t be this one, i.e. Cameron. On the one hand, he seemed to be living by his own previous words in reviving Cameron, or on the other hand, perhaps John was thinking that if he had the choice between being killed randomly by a stranger or “bad” Terminator and being killed by Cameron, he’d rather be killed by Cameron.
I have to add that I'm not a big fan of Sarah's statement to John that she "can't let" him try to fix Cameron. I know she's his mother, he's only 16, it was incredibly dangerous, etc. But she had to know that hearing those words would spark some rebellion in her boy! Any teen hearing those words from his mom is going to feel like a big baby, and hate it. Granted I think that's exactly how the writers intended it to play, and that's cool. But as soon as that came out of her mouth, I was like, "Um, you could've tried to find a way to let him do some research, or at least phrased it differently... you're so gonna regret that."
He's not your average 16-year-old boy to begin with, given what he's been through, and according to the opening credits, he's a “future leader of mankind.” She needs to work on her vocab, because the overprotective mom bit is going to grate on him even more than it would on your average teenager. Not saying she's wrong to be overprotective, exactly, but she could try to hide it a little better. Plus she's going to have to let him go his own way sometime, as I'm sure John will point out to her any episode now.
The scene between Derek and Charley in the EMT vehicle was also interesting. What was motivating Derek in that exchange? Maybe Derek was an ass to Charlie for Charlie’s sake, because Derek could see he’s a decent guy who deserves better than getting mixed up in the family business. Or he may have been trying to minimize the damage to John and Sarah (and maybe even Charley, too), because having someone on the team who isn't fully "on the team" because he has a wife to think about is definitely a liability. Or it could just as easily have been territorial aggression of some kind, be it romantic jealousy over Sarah or simply a familial sense of protection that takes Kyle into consideration, too. I did notice that Derek doesn't actually look at Charley once during that entire exchange--he very deliberately looks out the window or straight ahead--which seems like an attempt to avoid making it personal, and was a nice touch by Brian Austin Green. In any case, I think the writers and actors have created a character complicated enough to house all three of those motivations, so yay writers on that front.
Oh yeah, Ellison did stuff in this episode, too. I’m interested, and I’m certainly not rolling my eyes waiting to move on to something else when he’s onscreen, I just don’t feel compelled to speculate about that storyline or talk about his character. Most of his scenes are related the myth-arc, which just isn’t what gets me going when it comes to this show, I suppose.
Overall, this was an exciting episode, but I felt like the quiet, contemplative moments from last season were missing or somehow diminished, so I hope it’s not car stunts and explosions for the entire season. Not that there weren't any emotional moments in the episode, because there were a lot of them, but I felt like a lot of the specific emotions and motivations were getting buried in the tension because they just crammed so much into this one episode.
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