Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

* We know that Jesse wants to provide John Connor with a girlfriend to keep him from getting too attached to Cameron. So she picks a young attractive woman out of the refugees and sends her back to pose as a high school girl and hook up with John. But Jesse herself is reasonably attractive and not much older than the woman she picks. So wouldn't it be simpler to just do the fake girlfriend bit herself?

** ...Jesse isn't a teenager. And Cameron knows her.

** I think it is called "FOX Just Cancelled Us" and the production team decided to throw out the biggest cliff hanger possible, regardless of logic or real-world space/time problems.

** Different model of time travel in TSCC.

** The time travel used in this (and arguably, throughout the Terminator movie series) is iterative time travel, wherein paradoxes can seemingly occur, but really don't. Because even if you erased a future or past event, it still DID exist at one time. Think of a streambed that changes course... the old streambed is still there, the river just isn't flowing in it at the moment.

*** I believe that in the series, everyone is possibly [[Wrong Genre Savvy]] about how the timeline works. they think that time travel follows a predestination model, but in reality it is all iterative. For example, Kyle Reese doesn't matter to the past; in fact, his act of impregnating Sarah eliminates the John Connor who sent him back and replaces him with a new one. Of course, it turns a big part of T3 into a [[Shaggy Dog Story]], but that's a bit of bitter, delicious irony.

** No. They were deliberately keeping future!John as [[The Faceless]]; he's been a background character throughout the first, second, and third movies, and even in the fourth he was just a byproduct of that ''other'' John Connor who started the whole thing. Hell, even in the second movie, we only got one short glimpse of him. Giving him a face and a personality would have ruined the [[Shrouded in Myth]] nature of the mysteious future messiah character.

** In the movies he is this mysterious future messiah and indeed a background character, in TSCC he is much more involved, with scenes where Derek and Jesse wonder what he is thinking, a history with Allison and the man behind whatever convoluted scheme Cameron is involved in that causes her to join John Henry and probably the only one that completely knows why what happened. He was [[The Faceless]] but it was very much played with and Cameron refused to let people see him for what I presume to be in-story reasons. From what I thought, they were building up to something.

* In 'Today is the Day', when John is confronting Jesse in her hotel room (And yes, I do feel bad about nitpicking what is possibly the series' biggest [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]]), he tells her about Skynet sending a Terminator after him "When I was twelve". If he were supposedly born in November of '83 now, would that not make him thirteen in July of '97? Now it's true that John may be simply misremembering things, but it still smells of continuity error to me.

** John's dominant emotion at the moment is tightly controlled ''fury'', and he's off-handedly recalling a chaotic and tumultous point in his history, which is largely ''irrelevant'' to the point at hand. John doesn't give a flying fuck about remembering precisely how old he was when that happened, especially when time is such a hilariously mutable thing in this series.

* Just watched the episode where Ellison and a SWAT team tries to take down Cromartie and all get killed except Ellison. The fight concludes with Ellison the only one left standing, held at gunpoint by Cromartie... Who just walks off. What reason did he have to let Ellison live?

** Its explained in the second season. The short version is that by letting Ellison live, Cromartie can watch him in the belief that he will lead Cromartie to the Connors.

** Its strongly implied in the finale that there was an ulterior motive to sending Cameron back that extended beyond simply sending a bodyguard. Note that future-John was using Cameron as his own personal advisor and laison, and it is worth noting that future-John Connor was strongly implied to at least know Allison Young personally. But the problem here is that we ''don't know'' what his motivations were or what he was planning, because the series got canceled. All we have is speculation. Maybe future-John cared about Cameron enough that he wanted to preserve her by sending her back. Maybe Cameron is the only Terminator he trusts enough to carry out what appeared to be a cross-time [[Batman Gambit]]. We don't know.

**** John Connor got close to the terminator that killed Allison and impersonated her to get into the camp, after reprogramming it. Perhaps it was his connection to Allison that he couldn't seem to let go of. Cameron could also become a predestination object, like Kyle, or the photograph (inserting itself in the past and eventually becoming self-sustaining).

** Cameron doesn't have Allison's memories. She has memories of Allison talking ''about'' her memories when she was interrogating Allison so she could mimic her. Note that when the counselor is asking Cameron about her past, she begins reciting, word-for-word, what Allison said in the interrogation room. The episode in question strongly implies that Allison was either a close friend or intimate of John Connor, so Cameron had to mimic her very closely in order to fool John. Also, Cameron's CPU apparently has the ability to at least fake emotions to the point that Cameron herself can be overcome by them (i.e. she panics, she breaks down crying, etc.) which suggests she was designed to be a very ''deep'' cover agent. From this, we can conclude that Cameron was going to impersonate Allison to the point that she could be her in every aspect. Cameron basically took all of the information Allison gave her, built up a personality around that, and used it to infiltrate John's base.

* A slight case of [[Did Not Do the Research]]: the episode ''Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today'' takes place mostly in Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated November 2nd. This episode takes place a few episodes after we've been told, through the Connors' old phone code, that the date is November 18th (note that John also makes a joke about the Mexican restaurant they're in having a great Thanksgiving special, which fits more with the later date than the fact that we're told that the Day of the Dead festival is celebrated that very evening a few minutes earlier). Maybe they just happened to be in a Mexican village that celebrates the Day of the Dead a few weeks late, but that's a stretch.

*** John and Riley did go in 2007, but not on Nov1 or Nov2 (when Dia De Los Muertos traditionally is celebrated). The celebrations were postponed because of the great floods in Mexico that happened around that time in 2007. Tropical Storm Noel devastated the area at that time. (~by Xyberfaust)

 

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