In Praise of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

So, anyone who knows me even remotely knows that I love sci-fi. I was reared on a steady visual diet of Star Trek (all series) and Star Wars, and, as soon as I was old enough, The Terminator movies.

Terminator has been as influential on the development of my sci-fi mind as The Lord of the Rings (the book, thank you) was on the development of my fantasy mind. I've always loved dystopic or post-apocalyptic films and stories -- maybe because they're tributes to humanity's drive for survival, maybe because they reveal what people can accomplish when stripped of all the luxuries that we tend to call necessities, maybe because they're semi-prophetic in their way, and I like to envision that "end of the world" sense in order to mentally prepare for something like that to happen.

So of course I loved Terminator, and I loved T2 even more (still haven't seen T3, which I'm probably going to have to break down and give in to watching; I just didn't see how anything could come close to topping the achievements of the sequel film). Thinking about the time loops has occupied my mind, when I wasn't imagining what living in James Cameron's 2029 would be like.

When Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was announced to air on FOX, I almost split my skin from excitement. This has been THE story for me, the defining narrative of science fiction, full of, not just nifty twists and interesting futuristic dramas, but so much heart. So I dedicated myself to the weekly watching of the show.

And I'm appalled at all the nasty reviews it's getting. I'm not sure why the critics are so caustic, but something crawled up their backsides and got stuck there -- disappointment, perhaps? But disappointment in what?

Granted, the show isn't perfect. Sarah Connor's voiceovers at the beginnings and ends of the episodes tend to indulge in overly cheesy lines (but let's not forget the Writers' Strike, folks; the best that had committed to the show were a bit on the absent side). But frankly, that's the show's worst fault. What the other critics have been lambasting a.) is something the show can't really help: that it's not the movies; b.) is a misunderstanding of the multiple "time travel" theories that exist in science fiction; and c.) is a result of all the bad television that has become detrimentally popular in our current time.

I. The Show Isn't the Films.

First, the show can't be the movies. Obviously. Plots and writing and even characterization have to change from a film, often dramatically, in order for a TV show to sustain itself over time. Everyone knows that Linda Hamilton absolutely kicked ass as Sarah Connor; but Lena Headey has a different challenge -- how to kick ass without burning out her character. Hamilton had a span of two hours in T2; she should have been, was, and could be the intense, borderline psychotic woman that she played. A Sarah Connor like that would self-destruct in a TV series, the nature of which is much more drawn out.

And let me address one issue that I've seen a lot of viewers and critics complaining about: how Headey's Sarah Connor failed to kill the liability Andy Goode, when Hamilton's Sarah would have blown his head off on the first meeting.

The response is simple. Look at T2. While Hamilton's Sarah did have a few minutes of going terminator herself in the attempt to prevent Miles Dyson from creating Skynet, she didn't actually kill him. That Furlong's John Connor arrived too late to prevent his mother from attacking the Dysons didn't matter; she had discovered that she couldn't kill Dyson, and in fact was a weepy mess at the idea that she nearly did. Three years out of the mental hospital -- the time interval which has passed at the beginning of The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- and no longer being treated constantly as a lunatic would reasonably have stabilized her a lot, and so the character's development into Headey's thoughtful, reluctant-to-murder, yet still tough and determined Sarah Connor makes sense, rendering her willing to immolate Andy Goode's home, but spare his life if possible. (How many wimps commit large-scale arson?)

And I think that's one of the major disappointments that the show's viewers and critics struggle to resolve, which leaves them (mostly the critics) excessively angry -- Headey isn't Hamilton. The show isn't the movies. But how could it be? When a beloved pet dies, and you decide to get another one, you're in for a huge let-down if you expect the new pet to be exactly like the old one, particularly if the new pet is a dog and the old pet was a cat. The animals have different personalities, and, as different species, distinct and variant qualities and needs. So with the challenging transition from film to television, and from what I've seen, the show is doing it well.

II. There are Lots of Time Travel Hypotheses.

The second thing I noticed, from one review that of course now I can't find, was a lot of ranting about the inconsistencies of the time travel. The writer was particularly convinced that should Sarah and John Connor succeed in their offensive to prevent the war with the machines, John Connor would cease to exist, because Kyle Reese wouldn't have come back in time to protect Sarah and thus engendered John.

Well, goodness, how sophisticated.

In fact there are half a dozen or more different theories as to the effects of time travel in science fiction. I spent a while looking them up. My understanding is at this moment only basic (but it's interesting enough to want to do some real research, and not just haunt the archives of Wikipedia, which is the source of all my information; there are more technical sites, but I found them to be, with my nonscience background, practically unreadable; plus they dealt more with psychology and atomic physics than science fiction), but I found enough to satisfy that critic's question, and a few of my own, in regard to the Terminator franchise's time travel.

It seems that in the films, we're dealing with a mutable timeline, identified as "Type 2.1" in this article. This type of time travel assumes a singular timeline in which the past is indeed changeable, but resistant to change, and so requires great efforts and enormous actions to affect more than a few minute details in the immediate future. The films play this hypothesis out rather well: In T1 Kyle Reese's prime objective is not to change but to preserve the future he knows -- the future in which John Connor exists. In protecting and then impregnating Sarah he fulfills his objective, although he didn't know that falling in love with her would finalize his purpose; in T2 the attempt to change the future appears to work -- the Connors blow up Cyberdine and destroy the first Terminator's chip and arm, as well as almost all of the second Terminator -- but in T3 evidently the attempt only postpones the war (after all, in T2 they melt Arnie but forget about the half an arm he left crushed in a gear somewhere, so futuristic technology survives -- see how the timeline resists major change), and so, while they change a little of the immediate future in T2, they still fail to prevent the war itself.

Maybe it's confusing to contemplate the necessity of the time loop in which Reese travels back to father John, then dies, and then is born and grows up and travels back to father John; but this is where the second factor in time travel hypotheses comes in: the Novikov self-consistency principle. According to this idea, there's no paradox in the Reese-Connor time loop; it plays out consistently, since each "time" Reese goes back, he fathers John. This of course presupposes that no one can stop the war against the machines, and the motivation for sending Reese back in time remains the same.

The mutable timeline hypothesis also answers the question of where the "first" John Connor came from. If one refers back to the idea that the timeline resists major change, but allows for differences in the way events are fulfilled, one can hypothesize that the "first" time everything happened, John Connor could have been conceived in the usual way, with some guy from Sarah Connor's present; Reese's involvement in John's parentage only came from John's "first" decision to send back a protector for his mother and therefore himself. This is consistent with the Type 2.1 mutable timeline hypothesis, since in the end, John Connor is indeed born (after Reese became the father, and Sarah Connor bore his son, she obviously assumed that this was the son meant to save the world, named him John, and never had any other children), although the circumstances of his parentage and birth might have differed from the "original" version.

Based on the mutable timeline hypothesis, with the Novikov self-consistency principle incorporated therein, there are at least two possibilities for the future of the TV series that don't relegate John Connor to certain extinction:

1. They fail. After all, the war between mankind and machines is a pretty big event in the world's future history, the timeline resists change, and they've been unable to change it so far. And there's a lot levied against them as far as possibilities for rerouting the circumstances of the future are concerned: the Japanese computer could become Skynet instead of the Turk; with the many machines running around in 2007, the odds of destroying every trace of the future's technology become small; and most important of all, as the Terminator stated in T2, "It is in your nature to destroy yourselves," so something's bound to come up -- in which case Kyle Reese will once again go back in time to protect Sarah and sire John.

2. They succeed. And since Kyle Reese already came back in time in this present's past, and John Connor was already born in this present's past, John continues to live (none of the major time-traveling stories, or hypotheses, say that a character is wiped out in the present if the future is changed; once an event is past, unless you jump back in time again, that past is fixed. The present keeps you safe within itself, if you will). Given that the rate of technology is moving consistently with the future they avert, and given that the timeline resists change without enormous effort, it's highly likely that someone in the "new" future will invent a time displacement machine, and you can bet your boots that John Connor would have a vested interest in tracking down Kyle Reese and finding some reason to send him back in time to ensure his own existence. Or, alternatively, John doesn't send Kyle Reese back, and so the time loop ends and reverts to the "original" version of John's birth, which includes no father from the future; but "our" present John Connor, who has already been fathered by Reese, still exists.

If one doesn't like the idea of the time loop having an origin, one could also consider the idea of block time -- where time is its own dimension, much like space (this idea flows from relativity), and where an observer outside of time (say, God) would view time as an object, with past, present and future existing simultaneously, almost as though all were individually their own coexisting present, although within the system the observers don't know the future, having not yet experienced it. Therefore the time loop causes no difficulty; in this block time, that loop has always been. If one further adopts the concept of block time that accepts mutability in the form of multiverses (many different block times, in which a change in one past/present/future causes the observer within the block to leap into a different block without being aware of the transition -- consistent both with theories of alternate realities and Hinduism's bhakti yoga's concept of karma), one could say that the Reese-Connor time loop never needed an origin, while allowing for the T2 and SCC attempts to change the future.

In fact, multiverses are the easiest answer to all of the questions posed by puzzled viewers, especially since any change in the "past" (or, from our observatory viewpoint, the present, which is the past to the folks from the future) would have no affect whatsoever on the time travelers themselves, or their memories, but rather create a new alternate universe, or block time; the travelers simply could never return to their original "present" (which was, but is no longer, our future). This might explain Reese's statement to Sarah in T1 that he is from "one possible future," and so her subsequent attempts to change the future have created a number of different universes; it might also explain why SCC's Derek Reese, having killed the present Andy Goode, still remembers the Andy Goode who existed in the future (his own subjectively experienced past).

Whichever time travel hypothesis you want to use, the idea remains, regardless, that what's in the present, stays in the present. Leaping back to the past only changes the present from which the traveler leapt (which, from the perspective of the past to which he leaps, is the future). John's not going to disappear if he succeeds in preventing the war; his past is set. He's already been born. Whether the future John Connor, the one fighting the war, disappears altogether, or whether the prevention of the war splits time into a new alternate universe, the present John Connor's existence is safe simply because he's living in the present, and has a set past.

One last kicker: Multiverses can still work with a mutable timeline, since the change itself is what creates new universes. You can go with the mutable timeline alone if you don't like the multiverse theory.

So after examining the various time travel hypotheses out there, one becomes clear on the consistencies maintained by both the Terminator films and the Sarah Connor Chronicles. SCC is more complex, sure, with people and machines displacing themselves en masse in time, and going backward and forward; but it still works.

III. People Should Watch Better Television.

The last issue that seems to be especially troubling to skeptics and critics is a flaw in their own viewing experience. The most popular TV shows airing right now, which have been airing for a decade or so, are all serials. Each story arc lasts no longer than one episode, in the span of an hour all the major conflicts come to resolution, and all questions are answered as quickly as they come up. Of course, there are always a few longer story arcs that last throughout a season, but in general each episode has some sort of tidy resolution. I'm thinking specifically of CSI and all of its offspring here, along with Law & Order and House and NCIS and Numbers and even my very favorite, Bones, which does the serial crime drama more brilliantly than anything else out there. A few shows have been daring enough to run their seasons more like twenty-hour films shown piece by piece (Angel Season 4, for example, or possibly even Lost and 24); but they tend to wane in popularity, which is a terribly sad statement on the modern viewer's attention span and discipline toward patience and independent thought.

So mostly these critics' yapping about the irresolution in SCC is a result of their own steady diet of episodic TV and their often-pandered-to desire for immediate gratification. What I like about SCC is how it raises all kinds of questions, and opens all kinds of possibilities, without answering or resolving them immediately; it's a show that's running on the assumption that it's going to be around at least four seasons, and thus it develops the conflicts and the themes with appropriate gradualness. Plus there's an enormous amount of story to cover -- this show has taken on something huge in wrestling all the mythology of the franchise into one series.

The slow development of the central issues is actually poetic in its execution. Friedman's not afraid of subtlety; in fact, you have to pay close attention to the dialogue at every point in an episode to comprehend the more intricate points (which makes up for the moments when he comes out and hammers you over the head with something obvious -- in fact, the constant shift between subtle and obvious balances out the show).

One moment in particular that I loved occurs at the end of "Dungeons & Dragons," where Cameron inexplicably picks up a pencil and a piece of paper and starts writing. The allusion of course is to the "grief notes" written by her classmates at school in reaction to another classmate's suicide, and to her own interpretation of the "grief notes": "you should write a note when you can't cry" (and, being a machine, she can't cry); but the question is what she's trying to grieve. She clearly doesn't give a damn about Derek Reese dying on the table (she's still a machine), so one must assume that she's writing it in regard to the Terminator she just "killed," at whose CPU she stared for a long moment when she pulled it out of his head. The implication is that she's somehow "related" to him, but the question isn't answered in that episode, nor in the next; so the viewer just has to sit tight and have a little patience waiting for the answer to unfold itself somewhere, with the knowledge that these little questions will probably have enormous implications when they're answered, and the wait will be completely worth it. (Of course, this is the girl whose ultimate television writing hero is Joss Whedon, for whom every single intricate detail, no matter how irrelevant it seems, ties in to this huge interconnected web of story. I know Friedman isn't Whedon, but when I see a question placed so deliberately without an immediate answer, I know it's gonna be good when it comes.)

You'd think this little-bit-at-a-time storytelling would be even more incentive to keep watching the show, and for wanting its continuance into a second season, because if the show doesn't survive, the answers will never come. And come on, people, this is a great show! The actors perform superbly in their extremely multifaceted roles, and the show is more than up to the challenge it took on in adding to the Terminator legacy. John Connor's character receives a nice fleshing out (and no, I'm not talking about the way the camera loves Thomas Dekker) as a broody, sometimes self-absorbed teenager struggling to forge his own identity apart from his destiny, who at the same time can't help being a hero from time to time -- after all, it's what he was raised to be -- and who furthermore hasn't completely accommodated the difficult years he spent in foster care apart from the mother he was told was insane. Sarah Connor has undergone a little more evolution from the frantic helpless damsel in T1 (who shows seeds of the determination she exhibits later) to the barely sane warrior-woman in T2 (who yet shows seeds of the humanity that she exhibits later) to the internally stable, quieter, but still powerful and terrified woman she becomes in SCC. And of course there's Cameron, the unique and compelling "unknown cyborg" who at times seems incredibly human, and at others seems completely alien, and who seems to be seeking, if her ballet performance at the end of "The Demon Hand" is any indicator, not so much humanity (like Pinocchio or Data) as a soul (vis a vis the original Little Mermaid).

Altogether I love the show. Its minor flaws in writing quality will, I think, be resolved with the end of the Writers' Strike, and grow smoother with time (har). Each episode is markedly better than the last, which is saying a lot because each episode is quite good, even as "beginner" eps. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has set the perfect pace for itself, which, while "slow" to the perception of the mind trained on House, gives itself enough time to address the franchise's themes with the same heart and painful beauty that made the first two films not only good action, but gorgeous.