“I’ll Be Back” to the Future: Past and Present in the ‘Terminator’ Series (Part 3)

[TMC]

http://www.rebootthepast.net/home/20...-series-part-3

By Vincent Tomasso
Originally published Thursday July 3 2014

Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) had two seasons in 2008 and 2009 and is the deepest exploration of Terminator mythology of all the post-Cameron entries. Bear McCreary, the series’ music maestro, described the series as a direct sequel to T2, and indeed the first shot of the pilot episode is of a highway at night, the same as the closing shot of T2. The series engages with the Terminator mythology in nuanced ways, but also builds on it.

Cameron is an unknown model of terminator sent back from 2027 by future John to protect his younger self. She uses phrases familiar from other good guys in the series like “come with me if you want to live” (figure 1) and “we have to go. Now.”



But in a masterful move the series consistently explores and problematizes Cameron’s ethical character. She may be one of the good guys, but all it takes is for her CPU to be damaged and her original programming, to eliminate John Connor, returns (“Samson and Delilah”, 2.1). The ambiguity of her character is expressed in the opening scene of the episode “The Demon Hand” (1.7). Dressed like a motorcycle cop (figure 3), Cameron looks exactly like Robert Patrick’s liquid metal terminator from T2 (figure 2) and the special features on the DVD confirm that the actress wanted the exact same pair of glasses worn by Patrick. The creators named this terminator “Cameron” in an homage to James Cameron, but the name also indicates this entry’s affinity to the philosophy of T1 and T2. To a knowledgeable audience, then, Cameron is reminiscent of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 from T2 and T3, but at the same time is radically unpredictable.



A side note: I wonder if the title of “The Demon Hand” was inspired by “Demon with a Glass Hand”, a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits by Harlan Ellison. Pre-2001 several media outlets mistakenly claimed that Ellison sued Cameron with the claim that “Demon with a Glass Hand” inspired T1. Ellison has since said that his (successful) suit claimed that T1 plagiarized a different episode of his (“Soldier”), but “Demon with a Glass Hand” has so entered mainstream consciousness that the claim can still be found on The Terminator’s Wikipedia page. Another nod to this is that the FBI Special Agent who becomes embroiled with the Connors and the terminators pursuing them is named (James) Ellison. Through the title of this episode TSCC’s producers are acknowledging this history while also drawing attention to a central conceit of the Terminator series: so that no one will reverse engineer Skynet technology, every part must be destroyed. This episode revolves around the Connors searching for a T-888 arm that had been severed in a previous episode and then lost to police custody (figure 4). “The Demon Hand” refers to a whole history of the series, stretching all the way back to Cyberdyne’s retrieval of one of the first T-800’s arms from the factory that Sarah destroyed it in (a deleted scene from T1 makes this explicit). So the terminators are the demons of the title, and that includes Cameron. Even though she protects John, she too can be a demon, as revealed in the conclusion of this episode, when she allows an innocent woman to be killed. Yet another layer is the Christian symbolism of the series that becomes especially prominent in this episode with the revelation of Ellison’s faith and Dr. Silberman’s belief that Sarah heralds the Apocalypse. Both Silberman and Ellison describe the terminator’s hand as the “hand of God.”

TSCC turns on Sarah and John’s desire to prevent the war and a re-assertion individual will. Sarah’s voiceover in the opening sequence is relevant here:

SARAH: In the future, my son will lead mankind in a war against Skynet, the computer system programmed to destroy the world. Machines have been sent back through time, some to kill him, one to protect him. Today we fight to stop Skynet from ever being created, to change our future--to change his fate. The war to save mankind begins now.

In the pilot episode Cameron saves John and Sarah from another Skynet assassin, and the three of them prepare to cross into Mexico and go into hiding. John, however, convinces his mother to make a stand instead of run because he rejects his future role as the leader of the Resistance.

Sarah agrees with her son, but is unsuccessful in her first attempt to track Skynet. Cameron eventually takes them to a bank vault that contains a time-traveling device, which they use to jump from 1999 to 2007, quite literally skipping the events of T3, which took place in 2004.

Cameron later reveals that Skynet goes on-line in 2011 (which seemingly contradicts T3, unless the timeline has been changed by Cameron’s time-travel), and the series chronicles the trio’s search for early versions of Skynet. In the second-season episode “Earthlings Welcome Here” (2.13), Sarah, following up another clue that she thinks will help her destroy Skynet, imagines a younger version of herself carving “no fate” into the restaurant table (figure 5), an echo of T2 and a reminder to the character and the audience of the guiding philosophy of TSCC.