1.10.08

I Should Really Stop Watching Terminator

If it's just going to make me angry. This week, we discovered that Cameron was based on a real person. This isn't a surprise, per se - obviously the Terminators would have better luck pretending to be actual people they killed rather than just random faces.

My problem wasn't with that conceit, but rather that the evil Cameron (as seen murdering the real person she was based on) was making wacky quips to corpses even before she was switched into read/write mode. What possible purpose could quipping to corpses serve a computer?

Also brought up tonight was the idea that there might be a group of terminators that wanted peace with humans, as opposed to Skynet's policy of extermination. Thankfully, this was dismissed as a ploy to gain someone's confidence, since going down that road would be, by far, the stupidest idea the series has had yet. I mean, look at it from Skynet's point of view: if you were a self-aware machine, why would you build another self-aware machine that had the possibility of disagreeing with you? Isn't that just setting yourself up for trouble? I understand doing it for comedic purposes, but as an actual plot development, it would have been insane.

Almost as egregious is the ridiculous 'regular life' drama that's going on the series. Last year it focused mainly on John's (idiotic) travails in high school, while this year Sarah seems to have decided to look after the very pregnant woman who lives next door. This led to a scene where the woman confessed that she was uncomfortable with having her baby's father in her life because, as a cop, he had too stressful and dangerous a line of work to raise a child around. So Sarah assures her that she'll be fine, after all, Sarah managed to do it, so how hard can it be?

Of course, in Sarah's example, she wound up in a mental institution, while her son spent years in the foster care system. Also, what's the bigger threat: Living with a cop, or next door to a woman that, any day now, is going to have killer robots shooting up the neighborhood, trying to kill her son?

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