Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete Second Season marathon, a review by goodguy
2x17 Ourselves AloneSynopsis:
Riley's mission is in jeopardy when she fears Cameron has discovered her secret. Cameron confesses to John that her glitch has returned.My Rating:
What am I going to do with you? Cameron and the bird go way back to
2x03 The Mousetrap. The maybe-later of then is now, although Cameron's intentions have changed. She no longer wants to kill the bird; she does so by accident, an involuntary movement of her hand, a glitch.
What am I going to do with you? The bird is a fire hazard and Riley is a threat to John. Yet Cameron doesn't know what she's going to do. She has a glitch that causes her hand to twitch. She has a glitch that causes her not to kill Riley.
Sarah on the other hand. Sarah gets her gun, and for a moment she is ready to go out and kill Riley herself. Are Sarah and Cameron switching places? Sarah doesn't trust John anymore, but Cameron puts her life in John's hand.
Riley did cut her wrist to kill herself. Sarah bit into her wrist to become a killer. Cameron cuts her wrist to avoid killing.
Today is the day. Today is the day where they trust each other or not. Back in S1, Charlie and Ellison were at this point. They almost talked with each other, but then they didn't. Now it's John and Riley.
Once upon a time, Derek and his brother Kyle ate fruit from an apple tree. But the garden was lost, burnt away on Judgment Day. Now Derek is here with Jesse, shooting at apples. The sight is off, they say when they miss. A glitch. Do they consider that it might be there view that is off instead?
"I rescued you from hell and I took you to paradise," Jesse says to Riley for the second time. "I gave you a purpose. I made you matter." It sounds like she believes it, it sounds almost like envy. The fight is brutal. Riley, scared Riley, Riley who almost killed herself, now fights as if it matters. And almost wins. But the sight isn't off this time.
Derek sits alone at the roadside as his target passes by. John leaves the shed and finds another dead bird.
It is hard to pick one, but this is probably my favorite episode. It is less high-concept than some others, it is almost deceptively simple. Every scene (with the exception of the CFS woman visit) is a two-person conversation, slowly moving towards the climax.
The dialogue-writing is outstanding and the episode is a key example of what makes TSCC so special. The characters talk in clipped sentences, language reduced to the bare minimum, to the simplest of phrases. The silence in-between is as important as the spoken words. It is essential to the tone, to the atmosphere of the series. There is a lot of repetition with slight variations, creating an almost poetic rhythm. But these style elements also appear on a structural level. Since the core story of Terminator is exactly that, a time loop of repetition and variation, that stylistic choice is quite brilliant.
Considering that the episode is essentially a series of conversations and a big fight, it is once again noteworthy how gorgeous and cinematic it looks. That hallway, where Riley left the bleach box for Sarah. That talk between John and Riley, with Sarah and Cameron on the sidelines (btw, remember that similar sequence of shots in
2x05 Goodbye to All That?), that final low-angle shot as John leaves the shed, etc.
Oh, and a few words about the plot. Upon first viewing, I didn't guess Jesse's endgame until she turned up the heat on Riley and the Connors in this episode. I was never really convinced that her idea of setting John up with a girlfriend would estrange him from Cameron, but it didn't occur to me what the logical consequence was. Looking back, the Riley storyline was really well developed. Great stuff. And more to come in the final Jesse chapters.
(From Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete Second Season marathon on February 24th, 2010)
Users: 0
May 17, 2024, 10:13:00 PM
