Transformer Sarah

While ranting about the lack of character development in Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles elsewhere I was directed to this guide. I suppose it was meant to nullify my points. Lets see what this guide has eaten.

The point of the guide is that during the three episodes centered around Sarah her character went through a transformation. It starts as a defense for episode Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep but it’s about all three episodes.

The voice-over at the beginning of Earthlings Welcome Here is presented as a first proof. The writer claims it to mean that Sarah will undergo a transformation just like the Spanish explorer. That’s one way of seeing it. Another logical interpretation is that it’s referring to the events of the very episode – transformation from Alan Park to Abraham.

In addition to this voice-over the writer has collected pieces of dialogue from various episodes to support the theory. I believe that most of the voice-overs are vague enough to be interpreted in many ways and same applies even more to handpicked dialogue. Even if one would agree with all these proofs they would be pointless if the hinted development doesn’t occur.

The writer says that Sarah dying in her dream was the defining moment of the transformation. A change that would in the writer’s own words turn her “more like Cameron — more like a machine” or as some say a bad-ass warrior. The completion of the change is visualized to us with a pull of the trigger when she kills Winston. That doesn’t sound too far fetched, right?

Well, why did her dream have such a drastic effect? She had already nearly got John killed in real life (the events starting in Brothers of Nablus) but that didn’t teach her a thing. She’s been doing these same mistakes all the way from T2 and now we’re supposed to accept that one lousy dream suddenly fixed her. Either it’s bad writing or something’s amiss (or both).

The biggest flaw of the article is its timing – it tries to justify three episodes with something that hadn’t happened at the time of its writing. One can write all kinds of beautiful theories about how something was hinted and built terrifically but they all become worthless if that something never occurs. An article about Sarah’s transformation before we’ve had a chance to verify that change is not very useful.

Now that there’s been two episodes after that it’s quite safe to say that the transformation theory presented in the guide has no value. In Today Is the Say (Pt. 1) Sarah is back to her old self. Last week she was quite convinced that Riley is a security risk and told John to prepare himself because she assumed that Cameron is going to kill Riley. This week after learning about Riley’s death she instantly went back to her old bitching ways and was practically ready to kill Cameron for presumably doing the logical choice – the choice new Sarah should have embraced herself.

So I’m still going to uphold my opinion that TSCC has some serious flaws in its writing and that the three Sarah centric episodes at the beginning of back 9 were three hours wasted on nothing. I wish that the series can survive the creative talent that is Josh Friedman.

Tags: Josh Friedman, Sarah Connor, science fiction, Scifi, SF, terminator, TSCC, TV