Writers: Ashley Miller and Josh Stentz
Director: Bryan Spicer
Originally Aired: 10/06/2008
Grade: A
I know a lot of folks loved this episode, and I can see why, but for some reason, it just… didn’t appeal to me that much. Of course, I still have plenty to say.
I did appreciate Derek trying to hammer home the point that people will, someday, die for John. And John met one of those people today. Derek’s not blind, he saw the way John was behaving at the beginning of the season, and he needed to get through to John somehow, to make sure he was going to “snap out of it.” John’s tears seem to indicate that he succeeded. Derek loves John, and I think he truly wishes that things were different, that John could just be a normal kid. But he also has firsthand experience of a horrible dystopian future in which John Connor is pretty much holding the remainder of the human race together with paper clips and old chewing gum. I didn’t see the “they all die for you” comment as being about guilt and blame, exactly, but pointing out to John that if people are going to die for him someday, maybe he doesn’t have the luxury of worrying about getting to hang out with girls and rebel against his destiny.* It’s true that Derek hammered on the “people die so you can live” part, but I think he was just really trying to make sure that John had absorbed everything that happened and that he was remembering how high the stakes are.
*For the record, I believe that John needs to actually form emotional connections with people besides his family and robot protector in order to be a good leader. However, in the first three episodes this season, he seemed to have lost sight of the end goal a bit.
We also saw John express his own frustration that everyone but John Connor is controlling John Connor’s life, which has always bothered me and is a point that needed to be made. And in most ways, I completely empathize with John’s PoV here. It is completely and utterly fucked up that almost every time he makes a decision, someone throws his destiny in his face and second-guesses him. (Actually, most of the time, they just make the decisions for him without including him in the process, which is definitely not any better.) Granted, I don’t think he’s earned the right to have his decisions go unquestioned, and given the events of the flash-forward, he probably never will. But still, how on earth is this guy going to become a leader when no one is willing to follow? And who has the authority to tell him whether he’s on the right path or not? How do they know? Was there ever a scenario in which John Connor came to be the leader of mankind completely by accident?
Another thing that really hit me after watching this episode is that the Connors have no way of knowing whether or not they’ve succeeded. They thought they’d succeeded before, when the show began, and they were still living in fear, running away every few months, etc. They can never, ever be sure that it won’t happen unless it does. Even if they succeed, they will never know because there is no possible way they could be absolutely sure. They will always be waiting for the hammer to fall. The words on the wall behind Sarah’s couch--“Enjoy Relax Dream”--are particularly poignant in light of this.
I also thought it was hysterical that Cameron seemed to have no interest in protecting Marty and his family, aside from the fact that Sarah ordered her to do so, yet she bothered to pass on his no-crust preference to Sarah.
It also occurred to me that Cameron may be studying John Connor because SkyNet wants to build their own version of him. I don’t know how that would work, exactly, it just occurred to me that she would be able to do that, given what we’ve seen of her origins.
I have to admit that I still wonder if she really was programmed by John, just because I'm operating on "if we haven't seen it, maybe it didn't happen." But Cameron knows things that she just wouldn't know unless she was someone that John talked to intimately, like the story of Sarah reading him The Wizard of Oz in Spanish.
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