#tscc lb

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!

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.

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.