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Article by Melissa Voelker
Melissa loves geeky things. Fanfiction, Dr. Who, cosplay, comic book tattoos, skinny guys with a penchant for historical LARPing - these are all a few of her favorite things. She spends her days pretending to work diligently at her writing, when really she plays epic games of Flash Battleship and fake knife fights around the livingroom. When she finally tires of that, she manages to bang out reviews and articles about all of the awesome fangeeky things she's thought about that day. She kinda wishes she could make tons of money at it, but knows she would just spend it all on super hero capes for her cat and a herd of Aldabra tortoises for her yard. 12 Comments
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The sub crew did know the captain was a former terminator. They said something about a "wiped triple 8" or something like that. They knew.
Wow, I didn't hear them say that, and it didn't look like they knew to me, because they didn't treat him at all the way you would expect them too. When they showed Derek in previous episodes reacting to "re-programmed" cyborgs, he wasn't comfortable around them at all. Most of the soldiers they've shown interacting with the wiped cyborgs have acted like they were the last things they wanted to be around. And Jessie is totally against the idea of dealing with re-programmed machines (we've all seen how she feels about Cameron.) I can't see her being so okay with a cyborg captain. But I may have just missed them explaining all of that.
You said >>>I was excited at first to see the back-story flashes that Jessie was experiencing, until I realized she and everyone on her submarine were complete idiots. Their captain is so obviously a cyborg that the show practically slaps you in the face with that fact, and yet none of them seemed to notice.<<<
Point of order: everyone *knows* he's a Terminator. John Connor's resistence has been shown frequently using "Tame" killbots in various roles, and no one in the future is surprised by that. "Captain Queeg" (The name is obviously a joke among the humans in the crew) drives the ship to within a few centimeters of Crush Depth. Jessie all but says "He can do this because he's a machine" during that sequence.
(BTW, I'm pretty sure that manuver wouldn't work)
It was a really good episode, though. I'd really like to see more of the future in this thing, and the "Goodbye, Bird, there was a 51% chance I wouldn't kill you" had me rolling on the floor.
I guess I'm going to have to go back and watch again to try and catch these references to them knowing the captain is a machine, because I missed several of them apparently. And I know that John has been using tame robots for things, but that didn't mean everyone was comfortable with them. When you see the soldier go to pick up John's super secret box, he doesn't look comfortable or happy at all. Even though he is dealing with machines that aren't making any move to kill him, he doesn't look like he wants to be in that situation. I couldn't tell if those were tame robots, or maybe cyborgs from the other side (doing who knows what), but still. I can't see a whole submarine of human soldiers who have been fighting cyborgs for most of their lives being so okay with one in charge of their ship. Why would he even be in charge? Wouldn't he be just another of the crew, and a human would be captain? That doesn't make sense.
You said >>>When they showed Derek in previous episodes reacting to "re-programmed" cyborgs, he wasn't comfortable around them at all. Most of the soldiers they've shown interacting with the wiped cyborgs have acted like they were the last things they wanted to be around. And Jessie is totally against the idea of dealing with re-programmed machines (we've all seen how she feels about Cameron.) I can't see her being so okay with a cyborg captain.<<< I suspect the point of the flashback story is to explain why everyone is so uncomfortable with it now, or at least why Jessie doesn't trust them. Clearly she did up to that time.
The scene where Riley's foster father and John were on the phone with Cameron-pretending-to-be-Riley was just heartbreaking. As was John sneaking into the morgue to say goodbye. As much as I disliked the character of Riley at first, I really felt bad for her toward the end. She never had a choice in the course of her life, and that's tragic. I suppose in that way, she and John had more in common than either of them realized.
Yeah it was! And kind of weird, too, on a whole bunch of different levels.
Hi Melissa…..This is from the official FOX show recap "Inside the sub's control room, we meet Queeg, the reprogrammed Terminator driving the boat."
So now that some of the things in the episode have turned out to be different than you thought they were, does that change your opinion of it any?
I think it actually lowers my opinion. It doesn't make any sense to me for Jessie and her crew aboard the submarine to be okay with not only a re-programmed terminator onboard, but serving as captain. These aren't people who have just started dealing with cyborgs. They've spent most of their lives fighting them. They aren't going to trust them that much, no matter what John Connor says to them. And if they are serving with a wiped machine because they are being forced to by John Connor, I don't think they would be acting so comfortable around it. They would be suspicious and distrusting, just as Derek was when he first met Cameron in Connor's bunker last season. I don't think it would take something extra to make Jessie and the other humans distrust re-programmed machines. They would already distrust them. They would expect them to turn around and go evil again at any moment. And they would be right. Cameron took a severe knock to the circuits when she was blown up in the season finale last year, and it reset her programming to kill John Connor again. Apparently all it would take in any of the cyborgs is a big enough jolt to make them evil again, which means they aren't really "wiped," they are just going on programming put in over the top of their intial programming. I want to believe that the characters in this show could be real people, and so I need them to be written to act in ways that seem real and make sense. This whole business aboard the submarine seems contrived to me, and does not make sense. So an episode that I originally thought was quite a bit better than most of the season has been, has now been downgraded in my opinion.
In an earlier episode in the season, ("Alpine Fields" I think?) during a flashback when we see Derek and Jesse first meet, Derek is at first quite envious to hear that the Australians have an honest-to-dog nuclear submarine, until Jesse tells him they have a wiped Triple-8 driving the thing. When he expresses shocked disbelief that they would let one of those things drive them around the depths of the ocean in, essentially, a tin can, Jesse replies, "Well, show me a sub captain that survived J-Day." I think it's pretty clear in this episode that Jesse's acceptance of Queeg was uneasy to begin with, and after the events that transpired with the package, the trauma pushed her over to full on metal-hate.