Where Does Sarah Connor Go When She Comes Undone?
It’s not easy to be Sarah Connor. Not only is she a “post-modern Virgin Mary,” but her future-savior son is going through a punky phase in season two of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. The Terminator TV show will put its bad-ass heroine through a pretty hellish time in its second season. But the good news is, it sounds as though new co-star Shirley Manson will rock even harder than you expected. We were on a conference call with star Lena Headey and producer Josh Friedman, and here’s what they had to say. With a few spoilers.
Sarah Connor’s helplessness:
As you may have heard, season two will show John Connor stepping up more to become the hero we all know he’s going to be. And that means Sarah Connor will be taking more of a “backseat,” said Friedman and Headey. “I think this season for Sarah is her losing slight control over everything, pretty much,” said Headey. “I think there’s a slow madness sort of happening in her, she feels that everyone’s kind of out of reach right now.” Side note: Color me a bit concerned. I’m not sure I’m on board for watching another show about a strong woman character unraveling.
Sarah Connor’s rage:
I asked Headey about the anger that drives Sarah Connor. Is she partly mad at John, because he’s the reason she can’t have a normal life? Said Headey: “I think there’s some truth in that. I think Sarah’s pretty complex.” She was a normal girl who suddenly gave birth to the savior of the world. Plus, she was truly in love with Kyle Reese, and then he died and left her with this legacy. “I absolutely think her anger is partly at her son and at her situation. Her frustration is being that, she can’t slow down with her son. I think her rooted anger is with everybody who comes to advise her, and say she can’t do this or that. And she would like to tell them all to fuck themselves and go away”
The mysterious death:
People asked Friedman a lot about the announcement he made at Comic-Con: that one of the show’s main cast members will die. He wouldn’t elaborate very much, except to say that Summer Glau’s pseudo-death in the season opener doesn’t count. And when it happens, you’ll know. And it’s for story reasons, not just for shock value or to save money on actors.
Shirley Manson’s character:
She’s not evil, just… focused. She has a plan to grow the Turk (that chess-playing computer that eventually becomes Skynet) and she’s not going to let anyone stop her. She’s the CEO of a big tech company, but it’s not Cyberdine.
Rock’n'Roll High School:
We have pretty much seen the last of John’s high school days. Sarah will be home-schooling him (in pain.) No more scenes of John sitting in a classroom doodling IEDs. But we will see him interacting with kids from high school. 
Sarah Connor’s cancer:
Her cancer, which was dealt with in one or two episodes of season one, will come up again at some point. Something happens that brings it up again, and it’s investigated “in a bleak way” in some early episodes. But we won’t be seeing her in bed with chemotherapy any time soon.
Religion in the Terminator verse:
Religion has always been a big part of the franchise, with Sarah as a sort of postmodern Virgin Mary, and John as a rocket-shooting turbo-Jesus. It became a part of the TV show because Richard T. Jones, who plays FBI agent Ellison, is very religious, and that became part of his character. In season two, we’ll be exploring how his discovery that Terminators are real impacts his faith. You might think Skynet proves God doesn’t exist, but that’s not necessarily true, says Friedman. (Any more, I’m guessing, than the atomic bomb or the Holocaust did.)
Brian Austin Green’s role on the show:
He’s the “human face” of the future war, and he shows what it’ll do to people if it’s not stopped. He’s a “damaged war vet,” says Friedman. Incidentally, we’ll see more flashes of the future war this season, but it’ll always be there to inform the emotional context of what’s happening on the show now. And Derek will not be getting together with Sarah — they’re more like bickering exes.
A big surprise in the season premiere:
Friedman alluded to a huge surprise in the season opener, in which we meet a new antagonist for Sarah and John, who’s more than “a basic corporate type.” (Presumably having to do with Shirley Manson’s character.) And it sounds as though there’s a surprising twist involved.
Source: io9.com
In Recent Scifi, Intelligent Design Is Truth
A new crop of science fiction novels focus on what it would mean if Intelligent Design turned out to be the truth. Jay Lake’s Escapement is a perfect example, as is Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces — both are novels about people in clockwork worlds designed by some kind of higher power associated with spiritual realms. Other recent tales, such as Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children and Iain M. Banks’ Matter, flirt with the idea of an Intelligent Designer by suggesting that under some circumstances it is the most logical explanation for reality: For instance, if you are a creature who lives in a synthetic world (or body) designed by sophisticated engineers, your existence has been literally created for you rather than randomly evolved. Are these scifi authors carving out a pro-science version of Intelligent Design theory?
In some ways, no. Consider Jay Lake’s novels Mainspring and Escapement, which are about a kind of alternate Earth where it’s obvious somebody (whom they call “God”) has created their universe. After all, the sky is filled with gears and their world is run literally by a massive clockwork mechanism. When I talked to Lake about his novels recently, he said that they were explicitly a response to Intelligent Design. He thinks of them as a critique of the belief that our world was built rather than evolved. “By making ID into something that was clearly fiction, I wanted to show that the idea itself was fictional,” Lake said.
When you try to create a world that is believably the product of ID, Lake seems to be saying, you get something that looks nothing like our Earth. That it’s designed is completely obvious, and is not difficult to prove. So this is a thought experiment in ID that in some sense proves that our Earth was not created by a Designer.
Interestingly, however, Lake’s critique of ID has not freaked out religious people nearly as much as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. (Sure, it’s true that more people have probably been exposed to Pullman’s work, but let’s assume that isn’t the only reason why it’s gotten more negative attention from religious groups.) In Pullman’s universe, which is also a parallel Earth, there is a God and there are angels. But it turns out that God is just a senile old white dude, and his angels are fighting to seize his throne and control the Kingdom of Heaven.
Pullman’s critique, like Lake’s, works by saying, “OK let’s assume that Christianity is real — what would that mean, logically?” For Pullman, that means God and His henchmen are a bunch of power-hungry politicians. And for Lake, that means that the universe is a giant clock. Both series, in a way, argue with Christianity on its own terms. They don’t attempt to say, “Well hey, look at the world from the perspective of science — see how that’s better?” Instead they say, “When you really think about what Christianity implies, this is what you get.” And that’s a powerful critique, though Pullman’s is ultimately much darker. I believe Pullman has irked Christians for saying that their beliefs are in some ways downright evil, whereas Lake simply calls them the fantasy backdrops for rollicking adventure tales. This alone may account for the novels’ different receptions among Christians.
As I said earlier, however, there is another way that this ID scenario is being tweaked by scifi authors. In Stross’ Saturn’s Children, there’s a great subplot about robot religions. The robots, who have taken over our solar system after the extinction of humans, have to believe in a Designer — they were, after all, literally designed by humans. So a belief in ID, for robots, is the equivalent of believing in evolution for humans: It is the scientific truth. And yet there are certain religious zealots among the robots who insist on believing that they have evolved, and go through bizarre rhetorical gymnastics to prove it.
What Stross is saying is that as our planetary and bodily infrastructures become more synthetic, more “designed,” we approach a state where ID begins to verge on scientific truth. This idea is echoed in novels like Iain M. Banks’ Matter and Karl Schroeder’s Pirate Sun, where our characters live inside massive synthetic worlds — a huge nested sphere in the former, and a giant blob of atmosphere floating in space in the latter.
What these authors are doing is even more tricky, if you look at their work as a sneaky critique of ID theory. Essentially they’re saying, “Let’s invent a universe where ID is truth. Oh, that would be the universe that science will build for us.” And ultimately, in these novels, the Designer is not a God or even gods, but instead a whole bunch of sentient creatures harnessing the power of science and technology to design worlds and bodies intelligently.
This is the truly proscience version of ID theory: The notion that humans will eventually live in an ID universe, where our bodies and everything around us is designed. Only it will have been designed by us, in the service (hopefully) of bettering humanity. We won’t be the playthings of some third party entity whose motivations are unclear. In the end, we will become our own intelligent designers.
Top image by Jasper Morello.
Source: io9.com
