#terminator meta

[commandervisor]

What's your name? Kyle Reese. Grace.

[thebyrchentwigges]

In Terminator: Dark Fate, Grace’s body is…

Terminator: Dark Fate screams with queer tension, fueled by the Augmented supersoldier, Grace.

Grace’s body and its abilities are the reason she’s in the movie. The fraught, intense relationships around her are all given narrative weight because of her body. Grace is a tall, androgynous woman, a supersoldier from 2042, crashing a story set in 2020. She is preternaturally strong thanks to cybernetic augmentation. Her queer body and in-between identity create a tug of war between the filmmakers’ worldbuilding and the actors’ presentation.

For the filmmakers, Grace’s body is a problem. For T:DF’s other protagonists, Dani and Sarah, Grace’s body needs to be rescued, among other complications. Through the lens of robot action, Grace blurs gender, sex, and death. It takes the movie’s double-layered ending – and Terminator’s longer-term worldbuilding – to fully resolve Grace. For Grace’s queer body is perfectly in line with Terminator’s canonical future.

More behind the cut...

For the filmmakers, Grace’s body is a problem

Grace, as a future supersoldier in Terminator canon, was imagined to be the short-term peer of a Terminator. With cyborg components buried in her body as ‘private parts’, she is an exile from the future. Being both female and, depending on your gaze, masculine or degendered, she is queer. She is classically Other – outside the norm and society.

What does Other look like? Grace was meant to be tough, stripped down, a vector to make an action movie’s action happen. Early concept art for Grace shows a character strikingly similar to Mad Max’s Furiosa.

Left: T:DF concept art of Grace. Right: Furiosa from Mad Max.

The filmmakers needed to make their future supersoldier not-Furiosa. The result was a character who tied even more strongly into queerness, which is saying something. The filmmakers parsed their future supersoldier onto a beautiful blonde actor. The result combines two LGBT visual archetypes. Grace blends a 1950s physique magazine bodybuilder (perhaps Jim Stryker) and a butch-of-center power lesbian (Ellen DeGeneres, Suze Orman).

Grace was imagined to be strong, but with a built-in weakness, a need for medication to keep functioning. Again, this combines two LGBT physical archetypes – though they are shadowed ones. Grace’s need for her meds evokes an AIDS patient who needs a drug cocktail to stay healthy. And a scene with Grace being examined by baffled medics evokes the non-standard woman who’s examined, pathologized, medicalized for being ‘wrong’.

To further other Grace, she was also envisioned as being mired in conflict. The T:DF script had lots of banter and negativity between her and the once-groundbreaking action heroine Sarah Connor. This was so extreme that Linda Hamilton, portraying Sarah Connor, put her foot down, insisting on changes and character work.(1)  

Finally, Grace was not intended to be physically attractive. The creative team, especially the director, meant that Grace’s character would not be sexualized and would not have a romance, despite being sent back in time to protect a lovely young woman. This did not hold up outside a straight male gaze, as famously deconstructed in an article on Slate.(2)

The filmmakers themselves were aware that having Grace as a protector was maybe, possibly, kind of lesbian. Terminator’s canon itself encouraged this. In the first Terminator film, a time-traveling future-protector, Kyle Reese, became Sarah Connor’s lover. Kyle’s backstory touches on a trope from other time-travel sci fi, most notably the 1962 film La Jetée: a strong emotional connection helps a human travel back in time.(3)  

So, late in T:DF’s narrative, we get the revelation that there is an emotional connection, but not a sexual one. Grace finally reveals that Dani had rescued and raised a young Grace.  After two hours of Grace and Dani’s physical and emotional intensity, this comes across as tacked on, apologetic. A final proof that the filmmakers see Grace, their creation, as a problem.

For Dani and Sarah, Grace’s body needs rescuing

It takes the film a while to let Dani and Sarah to start relating to Grace’s body. First, Grace must suffer.

Grace is the subject of conflict from the moment she appears, falling naked through a time-gate. First, a very heterosexual couple argue about her. This is followed immediately by a confrontation with multiple police, who Grace defeats – showing that she is a vector for action and violence. This done, Grace turns around and disrupts the heterosexual couple. She responds to “Thanks, lady” by saying “Don’t thank me yet,” and stealing the man’s clothes and their car. The scene is set: Grace is female, powerful, and acting in defiance of multiple laws, including gender.

Grace segues quickly into locking in on her mission’s target, Dani, and an extended, savage scene fighting a Terminator. By the time she and Dani get to exchange more than a sentence, and start doing more than surviving, Grace is at the end of her resources. And their queer drama begins.

The middle third of the film is packed with queer-coded physical moments between Grace and Dani, Grace and Sarah. The Slate article (1) shares a lesbian viewer’s gleeful take on the movie, especially this middle third. The action and physical exchanges, with their high drama, really do come across as a sci-fi take on a 1960s lesbian pulp novel.

Dani begins the film passively, a caretaking young woman with ‘a nice, normal life.’ She is baffled by both her peril and Grace’s presence. Her first chosen act around Grace’s body is to step away from being a bystander to defend Grace. This is driven by Grace’s need for medications leading her to hold up a pharmacy. Grace collapses mid-heist. When she does, Dani picks up Grace’s pistol, becoming involved in Grace’s crime, joining Grace in being Other.

Immediately after this, they are reunited with a third Other: Sarah Connor.  

Sarah has the authority of both someone capable of fighting back, like Grace, and of Terminator’s longest-running, oldest character. Once, Sarah herself was the disruptive, strange, and violent woman, albeit tempered by motherhood. She is now mainstream enough to start as the proxy for the filmmakers and their heteronormative bafflement. “I’ve never seen one like you before. Almost human.” She is ambivalent and antagonistic to Grace. Yet she, like Dani, supports Grace’s body.

In her first conversation with Dani and Grace, Sarah, too places herself outside society, with them, in the zone of Terminator survivors unlikely to be believed. But even before that, while Grace is unconscious, Sarah demonstrates what outsiders do: she puts Grace in bed.

With Grace in bed, her Augmentations overheating, Sarah engages in easily-sexualized acts of healing. She drenches Grace in a bucket of ice, penetrates her with a syringe of medication. Questioned, Sarah defends these choices, admitting both her own ignorance and showing Grace a basic respect. “Have you SEEN the bathtub?” Regaining consciousness, Grace turns queer-coded touch back onto Sarah with the trope of pinning her against the wall.

The camera takes Sarah’s point of view for a pivotal scene: watching Grace, who is watching Dani, who is sleeping on Grace’s lap. Grace and Dani have already fallen into physical ease with each other. This gaze-within-a-gaze moment betrays the importance and tenderness of Grace’s regard for Dani. More, this is subtly recognized by Sarah.

Shortly after this, Sarah’s relationship with Dani’s body brings conflict with her and Grace. Sarah, in both bitter identification and claiming, assumes that Dani is the mother of another future savior. At this, Grace erupts into fierce aggression. “If you’re Mother Mary, why do I want to beat the shit out of you?” She storms off to brood, pulp-novel style

They do not reconcile until far later in the film, when Sarah has changed her relationship with Dani. Sarah and Dani are bloodied side by side, with Sarah injured on Dani’s behalf. Seeing this, Grace hurts and heals Sarah in one go, resetting Sarah’s dislocated shoulder.  Grace re-empowers Sarah as a peer of hers, another defender of Dani, both ready to fight again.

Through the lens of robot action, Grace blurs gender, sex, and death

Grace makes it clear she’s out to confuse gender when, from the start of the movie, she repeatedly places herself in men’s clothes. It’s logical enough – they’re the clothes that fit her strength and height. We don’t see Grace wearing clothes that might be a woman’s until she’s at Carl’s cabin. This is both a slight abdication towards Carl and a first step towards Grace’s death. She is not the most powerful cyborg around anymore: the filmmakers give that back to Schwarzenegger’s iconic form.

Carl is a whole other essay. It’s interesting when the script places Carl on the outside-society continuum as asexual. This raises all kinds of questions. About the hollowness of the nuclear family, and how much social performance without substance rewards men. Why the filmmakers stepped away from the Tom of Finland gay-leatherman take of past T-800s.  Carl admits that, despite his flawless heteromasculine performance, he is missing something because of his lack of emotional connection – which Grace has in abundance.

Left: first T-800 Terminator. Center: Drawing by iconic gay artist Tom of Finland. Right: Carl in T:DF – again, almost a composite of the other two.

Harrowingly, both Carl and Grace expect to die – the ‘bury your gays’ trope raises its head as they strategize. Carl submits without protest to Sarah’s expressed desire to eventually kill him. At the film’s climax, Grace presents her own death as a solution, offering her power source as a weapon. There is no doubt for any character that removing her power source, buried in her abdomen, will kill her.

Grace’s sacrifice gains weight if we rewind to the future scene where Grace is attacked by a sophisticated Terminator, a Rev-7. Here, defending an injured Dani, Grace endures a curiously protracted attack from a horrific Rev-7, adorned with tentacular extrusions. In the course of the attack, after piercing Grace’s abdomen, the Rev-7 settles on top of her, opening its headpiece to drink in her cries of agony before judging her no longer a threat. In an action-movie context, it’s an intimate attack, nearly a mechanical rape. Grace ends this scene by howling “Make me an Augment!” to the medic attending her.

In T:DF’s crisis scene, Grace volunteers again, this time to be gutted anew, to pull out her Augment’s power source. It echoes her Rev-9 attack, reframing it as a sacrifice through her love for Dani. Dani is the one who accepts Grace’s offer, penetrating Grace, destroying her queer strength and taking it on in the same act. Through this Dani gains Terminator-land’s ultimate reward: the power to kill a Terminator.

At the end, the problem of Grace remains unsolved – until we see the filmmaker’s take: Dani encountering Grace’s younger, de-sexualised self. The innocence of childhood has returned to Grace. She is, for the straight male gaze, safe and acceptable for Dani to love. But with the movie’s recursive structure this is not the real ending.

In Terminator canon, Grace’s body is the future

Throughout T:DF, for all the filmmakers’ fumbles, Grace remains an ambassador of Terminator’s de-gendered future.

Postapocalyptic futures are often a canvas for sexual and gender fantasy. But Terminator’s canon future is oddly low-gender and neutral. George Miller said about his Max Max universe there was no time or resources for recreational sex.(4) There’s something of this in the Terminator future, too.

In the first Terminator, Sarah asks Kyle about the women of the future. Kyle says, curtly, that they are ‘strong fighters’. It is implied that a feminine woman is rare, especially if Kyle is idealizing a glimpse of resilient Sarah from a photograph. In both T:DF and tie-in Terminator media, like its comics, whatever someone’s biological gender, soldiers and scavengers dress and groom alike. In the future, everybody is masculine of center, even Dani.

Sarah Connor herself gives a gender-erasing twist to Grace’s paired revelations that Dani raised her and Dani is the future’s savior. “She’s John!” Sarah declares, linking Dani to her lost son, enforcing that gender roles don’t matter when there’s a world to save. By this point, all the women are dressed alike in dark military gear, grime, and visible wounds, the advance guard of Terminator’s future.

T:DF’s idea of a happy ending has two parts: the vague idea that The Future Will Survive and a tight focus on Grace and Dani. Young Grace and adult Dani are going to survive the next Judgement Day. They will be reunited in a future where Grace has become a ragged tomboy, addressed as a kid, not a girl. Dani will have gained a new toughness that, in any other context, would label her queer. As an adult in this future, Grace will choose, fervently, to become an Augment – to reclaim her life by increasing her strength and strangeness.

Terminator’s past buries its gays, Terminators and Augments alike: its future is going to empower them. 

1 - https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/linda-hamilton-reconnects-with-sarah-connor-after-all-these-years

2 - https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/terminator-dark-fate-lesbian-subtext-mackenzie-davis.html

3 - https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/la-jetee-j-g-ballard/ J.G. Ballard’s essay on La Jetee describes its emotional impact. If La Jetee’s trope sounds familiar, it’s because it was also adapted into another sci-fi film, Twelve Monkeys.

4 - https://thebyrchentwigges.tumblr.com/post/153531979195/george-miller-on-sexuality-in-the-wasteland

[atamascolily]

@soccersquirrel says

I work in manufacturing and non-employees have to wear vests and other gear to signal to employees that they’re guests and have not gotten the safety trainings.  And the empty head is to hold the polymimetic alloy. 

Cool! Did not know that about factories, so thank you for pointing that out. Any ideas about what the dude on the bicycle is doing in the background?

And you’re right, all that polymimetic alloy has to go somewhere on the REV-9’s chassis...

....which raises the new and terrifying question of where the brain--or functional equivalent--is located on the chassis. How exactly is it synchronizing with the polymimetic alloy bits so they can double-team Our Heroes? Is the REV-9 two Terminators in one--fitting from an AI called Legion--or is it one consciousness with multiple bodies? And to what extent is this REV-9 separate from Legion itself??

(thank you, Dark Fate, for offering up even more nightmare fuel for me to contemplate)

[ladytharen]

one last mini-round on tscc - time travel edition!

I’ve been thinking about the fact that when future!john sends people and cyborgs into the past, he’s killing the version of himself that exists to save a new john for the future. sometimes the goal is to change the future (as with the resistance cell) and sometimes the goal is to keep the future (as with sending kyle back in the first place) - but every time, he at least risks destroying the version of himself to save another john for the human resistance. now, pile that on top of our john jumping forward in time twice - first in the pilot and then the finale *rubs temples* our john is rewriting john’s past in a wholly different way, to the point that our john actually disappears himself from the future by joining it.

so now, here’s a new fear unlocked: what if john and cameron are in different timelines after the finale time jump?! cameron jumped first while john was in the past, and could theoretically be tied to a future!john timeline that is then destroyed when john then jumps over his own future. is he even in the same timeline with her?!?!?! will she recognize him in the future?!?! why did my brain come up with this one?!

no deep thoughts, just one fear!!! as someone who is very fond of john connor, it’s wild to think about him destroying himself to save another version of himself, and to think of our john specifically undoing the work of all future!johns.

[ladytharen]

this scene in TSCC 2.17 ‘ourselves alone’ jumped out at me on this rewatch, in contrast to a S1 scene:

cameron: what are you doing? john: I'm looking up a restaurant address. cameron: are you hungry? john: yeah. but this is actually for derek. [scene snip] cameron: I'll make you a sandwich. john: wait. why? cameron: you're hungry. john: why don't we let hungry be my problem? cameron: sometimes it's nice to have help. john: how's the hand? cameron: [flexing her hand] not a problem. john: aren't you supposed to be really good at self-repair? [cameron nods] but sometimes it's nice to have help. well, I'll make my own sandwich.

contrast john’s response here versus two scenes (and particularly the second) in 1.08 ‘vick’s chip’. the episode starts out with a scene at home:

john: mom, food's done. smells done. [sarah voiceover interlude] mom, come on. it's gonna get burned. [sarah voiceover interlude] mom! [sarah rushes out and grabs the roast]

it’s such a teenage boy thing to do and yet I’m like - john - you can get the roast out yourself! and shortly after that, we get this scene while john’s starting work on the titular chip:

john: look, since you obviously have no clue how to read this garbage, would you mind making a 7-11 run or something? pick up some burritos, chocolate milk. [joking tone] it'd mean a lot to me. cameron: [ignores him and sits down] how much power are you giving the chip?

it’s a little thing, but the scene in 2.17 ‘ourselves alone’ genuinely makes me go “character growth! good job, john!” it’s a small thing, but I still dig it. it’s also about john setting boundaries between himself and cameron, but john taking responsibility for himself is also good!

on the other hand, whereas cameron ignored a caretaking role outside of protecting john before the damage to her chip, here she’s trying to be borderline domestic. I recently talked here about how john and riley are both play-acting at the whole girlfriend/boyfriend schtick that neither of them really want or know how to do, but that’s mirrored in cameron’s whole experience as she tries to figure out her role - especially as a glitching cyborg - in this world.

[ladytharen]

sarah and john’s conflict over cameron in tscc

there are two cases in S2 where john gets angry at sarah, by which I mean he actually has an angry outburst. john - as a rule - is very emotionally controlled. even when he’s feeling intense emotions, including anger, he is studiously controlled and uses his emotions to achieve a systematic goal. but there are two cases where his anger actually gets away from him with sarah, even if for just a brief moment: in 2.01 ‘samson and delilah’ and in 2.18 ‘today is the day - part 1′. both scenes involve john and sarah facing each other across a table, and both scenes involve the subject of cameron being a “problem”

first, in 2.01 ‘samson and delilah’, john and sarah are dealing with the facts of cameron-as-terminator:

sarah: then we need to talk about her. whatever happened with the explosion, it's flipped a switch. she's reverted or something. john: she knows everything. sarah: I know. john: bank accounts. contingency plans. weapons stash. sarah: I know. john: how we run, where we'll go. who we've been, who we'll be. she's stronger and faster. sarah: we have to kill her, john. john: [stabs the table with his knife] I know! [calmer - working to control himself] I know.

that episode later features cameron telling john she loves him, which sarah immediately tries to address and john flatly acknowledges:

sarah: what she said back there, everything she said, it was a trick. you know that, right? they don't feel anything. they don't have feelings. they don't know love. john: [dully] I know that, mom.

then the subject of cameron’s declaration goes into hiding for 17 episodes. it’s not until sarah is facing the belief that cameron killed riley, in 2.18 ‘today is the day - part 1′ that she brings it up again:

sarah: how can you say that? how can you be so sure? john: because I'm sure. and I know her. and she told me. sarah: she told you? just like she told you she destroyed every part we ever captured? just like she tells us what she does every night when we go to sleep? when she comes back in the morning, she's covered in cuts and bruises. hey, just like she told you she loved you? john: [suddenly vibrating with anger] you don't know anything.

this is the second (and last) time sarah brings up that cameron told john she loved him, and these are the only times sarah and john every talk about it. this time john reacts with anger. he practically snarls his response. he’s john, so he doesn’t get violent, but his anger is no longer carefully contained and managed. it’s out there, a living thing, and it’s because of this live wire of cameron. when someone tries to take cameron away from him, john’s core emotion is defensive anger.

john tried to put a lot of distance between himself and cameron this season, because for all that he dated riley in part to create that distance and play at normalcy, john is struggling with the facts of cameron - how much she feels and how much is programming - and what he’s willing to do to keep her. john is no fool; he knows he crossed a line by handing cameron a gun and (essentially) asking for her oath that she’s not here to kill him. he pointed a gun at sarah, derek, and charley to get her back. but if john thinks too much about cameron actually having emotions, or even being able feel things, his attempts at compartmentalization are going to fall right apart.

he’s faced with the blunt reality of cameron’s emotional ability twice in S2. first, in 2.09 ‘complications’, john is confused by cameron sticking her foot out the window:

john: what are you doing? cameron: feeling what it's like to get away. john: I don't think you are. cameron: what do you mean? john: if by feelings you mean emotions, I'm pretty sure you still don't have any of those. and if by feeling you mean what it feels like to have the wind blow through your toes or your hair I'm pretty sure you can't feel that either. cameron: I don't think you understand how we work. I have sensation. I feel. I wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't feel.

note john’s use of “you still don’t have any of those”. if emotions comes from thoughts, there is no reason why cameron - who is made up of thoughts - couldn’t feel things. neither john nor viewers are under the misconception that cameron doesn’t have thoughts, but if john accepts the through line of cameron also having feelings, then he has to accept that she could feel just as much as - and with as much meaning as - humans do.

it seems safe to believe that when cameron makes her big declaration (“I love you john and you love me”), it’s the terminator speaking - lying - because when john gets her chip out, he works on the physical damage. after the repair, cameron chooses to force override the termination order, which contributes to later glitching, but all of that happens after john works on the chip.

and yet, despite this being a lie, it’s also likely that the terminator program chose this lie because of something in cameron, and something they recognized about cameron and john. the terminator program could have chosen any lie; they chose this lie. and that’s why sarah is so concerned, over half a season later, about john believing it - because she believes it. 2.18 ‘today is the day - part 1′ is also the episode where cameron once again ~says she loves him - in riley’s voice, during the cover-up with riley’s foster dad. in neither case is cameron telling john she loves him as herself - but in neither case does john buy that it means absolutely nothing. neither does sarah.

the second time john runs up against the question of cameron’s emotions is in 2.22 ‘born to run’. he’d called her a machine earlier, in reference to concerns about her generator leaking radiation, but cameron then uses that against him after their conversation with ellison, to deflect attention away from her obvious bad reaction to ellison’s question. in other words, she’s trying to deflect attention from the fact that ellison upset her:

cameron: he upset you. john: me? I think he upset you. cameron: you know that's impossible. john: is it? cameron: you said it yourself, john. I'm just a machine.

there is one other case where john and sarah face each other from across a table, in a final reckoning. it’s the end of 2.22 ‘born to run’, when john leaves sarah - to go after cameron - and ends up in the future. someone did take cameron away - john henry or cameron herself - and john is no longer angry. he’s just desperate - and jumps across time to get her back.

[ladytharen]

I always find it disconcerting when I’m watching riley and john on tscc because there is a major disconnect between what the text says they are and what the delivery looks like. the text says that riley is john’s girlfriend and that riley is on a mission - but just like the mission isn’t what it said on the tin, I get very weird vibes off of riley and john versus what the text is telling me they are. jesse wants riley to be one thing, john thinks riley is another, but none of that aligns with what riley wants for herself - how she sees herself - or her actual role in the text.

riley’s relationships with john and jesse

I’ve written about this a few other times but: it really doesn’t seem like john and riley are together-together for a long time! a stark example of this is that their first onscreen kiss doesn’t happen until 2.11 ‘self made man’ after john picks riley up from the party, but this is well after the trip to mexico where they share the honeymoon suite (2.08 ‘mr. ferguson is ill today’) and long long after they first start hanging out (2.02 ‘automatic for the people’). it’s also their only onscreen kiss. 2.11 was directed by a woman (holly dale) and I half-wonder if in true carrie fisher-style she was like “this is really weird, I’m going to confirm these two kids are dating onscreen” but then every director after her just didn’t do anything with it. it’s always been straight-up bizarre to me that john and riley are sharing the honeymoon suite in 2.08 but they barely touch each other. this actually makes perfect sense for the characters - neither john nor riley are what you might call well-adapted to trust or physical contact from new people - but the setting really throws their physical awkwardness around each other into stark relief. neither of them are acting like teenagers who really dig each other and want to sneak off together, and though - obviously - there’s nothing wrong with that, it clashes with the text - and what jesse wants riley to be doing for the mission.

looking closer, the very first scene we get with riley and jesse features riley trying to get out of dating john:

riley: there's a lot of mirrors in this world. did you notice that? I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm sorry. jesse: it's not easy, I understand. maybe you even have some real feelings for him. who wouldn't? he's john connor. there's a reason people follow him all over hell. riley: well, what if I want out? jesse: how would you do that? where would you go? there is no out. you can do this. you have to do this.

I don’t think riley ever declares that she loves john the way jesse describes it. she’s loyal to him - both in 2.03 ‘the mousetrap’ and then in 2.08 ‘mr. ferguson is ill today’ - and brave as hell to boot, but she doesn’t seem like a girl with a crush. and when you think about it, there are a lot of reasons why that could be. to riley, john connor was a guy in his 30s-40s while she was a teenager in the tunnels, the leader who was running the human resistance and about as far from accessibly human as possible. I think it’s possible that riley in-text could actually be older than john and see him less as a romantic partner than jesse expects, especially when she’s also trying to also “do the mission”. and then there’s the elephant in the room, which is that - despite that I don’t think riley is generally written as a queer woman - she canonically tells jesse she loves her and suggests they live together instead. in 2.13 ‘earthlings welcome here’ she makes this speech:

“I need someone to talk to. I need you. I was thinking, instead of just getting another foster home, that maybe we could find someplace close together. like an apartment or something. I'll just tell john that I quit school, and we can be together.”

and then - with grief as the open wound in 2.17 ‘ourselves alone’, riley bursts out with “I trusted you! I loved you!” I think jesse reads all of this as riley wanting a mom (in 2.13 she replied with “I am not your friend. I am not your mother. and you are here to keep john connor away from her. go finish your job. go.”), but I don’t get the sense that riley wants a mom at all. she wants a partner, someone who she can talk to and who understands her, and that very much is not john - because as soon as john knows who she is, she becomes a pawn in jesse and john’s chess game. she and john have that incredible, iconic, grievous final exchange in 2.17 where neither of them decide to tell the other what they know, which is less a break-up than a showdown. after all, jesse brought her back as a pawn to be sacrificed - a soldier, but a pawn all the same. that said - riley begins to question her role as soon as she’s inhabiting it!

riley: why did you pick me? I always wanted to ask. jesse: but you never have. riley: I thought you would tell me when the time was right. I think the time is right. jesse: no, sweetie. the time's past.

but even as a pawn, riley challenges the rules of the game that both jesse and john are playing, right up to the end.

riley as infiltrator, soldier, agent

by the time riley dies, cameron’s behavior is definitely in the “unreliable” category: she’s tried to kill john, she’s glitched badly as allison from palmdale, her hardware is breaking down after all her fights with terminators, and she’s really lost her grip on playing the role of john’s sister and behaves more like someone in a romantic relationship. cameron’s relationship with john is romantic at this point, albeit in their own way, but cameron is supposed to be very good at pretending. after all, she enters john’s life as an infiltrator twice: first as the terminator impersonating allison from palmdale, and second in the pilot episode where she pretends to be a girl at john’s school who likes him. weirdly - very weirdly - this is the exact entry point that jesse chooses for riley. both cameron and riley enter john’s teenage life as the girl from school who likes the weird kid. john himself says this to cameron in the pilot:

“you needed to get close to me. it's just the way you're programmed. like some hot girl is really gonna try and make friends with the new weird kid. if I'd have thought about it, I would've known something was messed up, you know?”

all this to say, it almost looks like jesse could have gotten away with her plan, and that cameron might finally have glitched enough to kill riley - but it’s interesting because of how much cameron and riley mirror each other along the way. the mirroring between cameron and riley comes full circle with cameron impersonating riley over the phone, first to riley’s foster dad and then to john himself. the second part is the really weird part, the part that pisses john off, and the part that prompts him to go check riley’s body at the morgue. but as much as cameron looks like she’s trying to take riley’s place in the narrative as “john’s girlfriend” (#notagirl), riley mirrored cameron’s place in the narrative, the place ~she might have had~ if cromartie hadn’t shown up. it’s a lot of mirroring! but it’s not a role that riley wants to inhabit. she’s not really a soldier - but she is a survivor. she had to be, by herself in those tunnels. who was she before jesse scooped her up and ~brought her to paradise?

these narrative tricks and tools are leading to one place: riley’s death. there is no shine or veneer to it; jesse wants to fridge riley. she wants cameron to kill riley and for john to be so reshaped by his grief that he swears off trusting or working with reprogrammed terminators for good. but - but! - the narrative rejects that approach! riley rejects her place in the narrative! john doesn’t accept his role either! more importantly, the narrative gives riley agency in her own death, in understanding (realizing) the story she’s in, and even with her death, she becomes more than just another fridged woman for john’s manpain. in the end, it’s human relationships, not terminators, in where the real danger lies. that’s where it always lies. for whatever riley was before, it was the human relationships she had - with jesse and with john - that got her killed, and not the scary robot living in the house. and whatever else we know or don’t know about the timeline of when john found out that jesse and riley were working together, we know that as soon as riley figures out what jesse had planned, she acted on it - just like john would. just like jesse would. just like sarah would. just like we would.

[ladytharen]

I started thinking about gender identity in the sarah connor chronicles, not for the first time. the show questions gender and its role at its core because one of the main characters is an agender cybernetic organism who - in the series finale - moves from a female to a male chassey. I tend to think about gender in this show in an abstract way and then move on almost unconsciously because it feels like a case of “still waters run deep”. the questioning is always there, it always matters, but because it’s so constant, it rarely pushes itself to the forefront in a way that forces your conscious attention. the main exception to this rule is 2.13 ‘earthlings welcome here’ with the introduction of a trans (or at least gender fluid) woman, eileen/alan park/abraham.

but tscc knows that it is challenging notions of gender from the start in S1, and it does so explicitly.

I often think of this exchange between charlie and cameron in 1.06 ‘dungeons and dragons’ when charlie finds cameron in the garage destroying the vick terminator.

CHARLIE: you know, little girl? you freak me the hell out. on the outside, you're just as pretty as a picture. but on the inside, - you're a - CAMERON: hyper-alloy combat chassey. CHARLIE: is that a complicated way of saying "robot"? CAMERON: cybernetic organism. living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. CHARLIE: okay. scary robot. and here you are, carving up this guy - into chum. CAMERON: he's not a guy. he's a scary robot. CHARLIE: okay, he's a scary robot? you, you're a very scary robot.

cameron seems to have no problem with using she/her pronouns, and seems interested in exploring what it means to play at being a girl, including using makeup, physically mimicking she whom I call estrellita, and roleplaying as john’s “sister”. but josh friedman’s commentary in 2.22 ‘born to run’ puts it bluntly:

“it’s both sort of a way of completing the circle so that they’re together so he will follow her if she goes somewhere, and sort of locks them together, but it’s also a way to remind him “I’m not a girl.” it sort of does both. at least that’s how I always thought of it, both as saying “I’m not a girl but you do love me. but know that what you love is a machine.”

having a robot be an agender character is not new, and veers toward some negative stereotypes about agender people, some of which also end up being used with asexual people, namely that being agender or asexual is something not human. I think that on balance, tscc explores it carefully, but it is a tightrope.

and then we come to the eileen/alan park character, who is, as far as I can tell from the text, a canonical trans woman. I’ve used both names here because she claims both names, but although she initially tells sarah she went into hiding as a woman because she was scared for her life, she later says that this is the life she wanted to lead. but - let’s start at the beginning, with the reveal that eileen was behind the abraham blogs.

SARAH: abraham. where is he? if you know, tell me now. EILEEN: I'm abraham. I'm the one you're looking for. my real name is alan park. SARAH: what else is real? EILEEN: all of it. SARAH: all of it? EILEEN: the research, the blogs. It's all true. SARAH: except the woman part. EILEEN: my life was in danger. I needed to hide.

eileen deliberately puts distance between her identity now and the abraham behind the blogs at the start, which is a distance that sarah struggles to accept after the reveal. so much of the world is black-and-white for sarah - something is or it isn’t - because that’s how she’s needed to survive. someone is a terminator or they aren’t, someone is with john or they’re against him, etc etc etc. this is, I think, part of why she struggles so much both with the terminator in T2 and cameron, whereas john is much more comfortable living in the gray.

at the same time, it’s not entirely clear at this point in the script how eileen sees herself - as a woman, as alan park hiding as a woman, or something else:

EILEEN: oh, really? I'm a man who lives as a woman, and you're a woman who lives as a - SARAH: [pushing eileen against the wall with her gun] stop. EILEEN: what made you so hard?

but then we get the heart-to-heart outside the trailer, where eileen and sarah swap war stories.

SARAH: they tried to kill you. twice. EILEEN: they did kill me. they killed alan park. and I thank them for it. they gave me a gift. the life I was scared to lead. before this happened, I was a cog in the machine. ordinary, repressed. how many people dare to live the life they dream of? face their real fears about who they really are? not their houses, or their jobs, or their habits, but their deepest, truest selves. do you have any idea what I'm talking about? SARAH: I used to be a waitress. killed her too.

and that, to me, sounds like eileen is a trans woman, not a man “hiding” as a woman (although, of course, hiding as your truest self is a hell of a commentary on gender). it could be that eileen/alan park identifies as both, as nonbinary, or some other term the writers just didn’t have on hand. eileen is played by a woman, dinah lenney, and while the commentary is all wrapped up in science fiction with military tech and aliens and robots, the show does end up questioning gender in a way that - frankly - was still novel during the show’s run from 2007 - 2009. I’m not sure if there is commentary on 2.13, but if someone knows of it, please do share!