If you’re like me (and you really should be), you’re looking forward to the return of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I get made fun of, but I really think it’s one of the best shows on TV right now and one of the better sci fi shows to come along in a while. Unfortunately, we all have to wait over a month, until the middle of February (Friday the 13th to be exact) for the return of the show. Luckily for us, though, the intrepid producer of Terminator, Josh Friedman has started up a weekly video podcast over at the Terminator blog. Luckily for you, I also have it embedded after the jump.
This week’s podcast features Friedman giving a brief tour of his office. Color me jealous. My office doesn’t have a giant cow or a massive Lego tower. I just have a plastic Jabba the Hutt on my monitor. Ah, to live the Hollywood lifestyle.
The podcast also features a sneak peek at the new season. We get a whole scene between Sarah and Kyle Reese. There’s no explanation on why or how they are together, but it’s always fun to get a teaser like this. It doesn’t seem like it’s a dream sequence though, and we saw a whole lot of Kyle in the previews at the end of the last episode. Any theories?
Any thoughts on the sneak peak? Looking forward to more of the podcasts?
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jan 10, 2009 @ 14:00 EST5EDT
Thanks for the podcast!
My curiousity is certainly piqued by the arrival of Kyle Reese. Although, I must say he seems like a boy opposite Sarah. I wonder what timeline he hails from…
And the cow? Hmm.
Ryan, if you are hovering about, I think I read that you thought Cameron was more a wolf than tiger in regards to getting inked. Was there a reason for this?
Gah, Josh Friedman is regrowing his writer’s strike beard. It scares me, and he looks much better when it’s more closely trimmed.
Love the new video podcast. For those fans new to the series, the writers’ blog also features several audio podcasts covering episodes from the first half of the second season, although you’ll have to dig back a few months to find those gems. Also consider purchasing the excellent official T:SCC soundtrack by Bear McCreary, which I highly recommend. It’s lamentable that his BSG music has not received the same fine treatment, as I’d pay eyeteeth to legally own his Celtic-esque score to the death of the Pegasus.
IF this is the real Kyle Reese, and IF he really has returned to 2008, I’m torn. On the one hand, I have no idea how this doesn’t violate how time travel has worked on this show, unless they plan to send him back to the future later so he can turn around and travel back to 1984 to father John. On the other hand, the writers of this show have always earned the trust I’ve given them, so I feel I should just be patient and let events unfold.
(Actually, I don’t feel personally that this violates causality, as John and Sarah are both time travelers now as well, whose pasts won’t change (i.e., they won’t disappear) if Kyle goes back in time early. But I’m sure that none of the characters on the show know that, including future John.)
However, I must disagree with Bob, as this whole scene feels like a dream sequence to me. Since the episode is titled “The Good Wound,” I believe it to be Sarah’s hallucination due to blood loss from her bullet wound. This might also include the scene from the preview where Kyle picks her up and carries her away.
That being said, I hope we don’t end up with a Head Kyle, merely attired in Abercrombie and Fitch rather than Armani, for the next three seasons.
bsgfan2003,
This Kyle is likely from 2027, or no more than a few years earlier, as he seems the same age in Derek’s flashbacks. He practically is a boy, but that makes him well matched to Sarah, who was about 18 when they met and fell in love.
They’ve just had UFOs, so obviously cattle must follow, mach schnell.
No grand reasoning behind the wolf tattoo. It’s just my understanding that tigers are solitary or mated pair hunters, which fit well to Robert Patrick or Cromartie. We hear of lone wolves as well, but they are famous for hunting and communicating effectively as a pack.
My impression of Cameron is that she hunts extremely well solo, yet can effortlessly subsume her ego and methods into a group of warriors. When Sarah or Derek treat her as just a gun, she takes no emotional offense, and can still act perfectly in concert with them. Hence, wolf.
Admittedly, it’s not a perfect analogy, as Cameron is completely outside the Alpha hierarchy, but it works for me.)
Oh, and John? I don’t think he’ll ever be able to treat her as just another gun, no matter how much he might want to at the moment.
Not in favor of this type of podcast. Audio podcasts, that are more casual with a couple of the producers, would be better. Vidcasts tend to be short, awkward, and very formal.
More people need to start looking at what the official Lost podcast does – especially sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction type serial shows. It really enriches the experience 10-fold, and it sucks that nobody else seems to be getting it.
@Ryan: I’m not sure I understand the distinction you are making between the characters’ not having a problem with causality and you personally not having a problem with it. As someone (maybe you) noted here, the infinite universes theory of time travel is completely consistent with the fact that characters who come back at different times have different memories of the past. The characters, and we, have seen enough to know that nothing else is left as an explanation. They’ve seen people travel in time, and they’ve seen them successfully change things once they’ve arrived. I’m not a super-student of time travel theories, but I believe that rules out everything but the infinite universes scenario. Sure, the kind of person who thinks that he can avoid the grandfather paradox by having a “time-quake” or some such nonsense might still be confused, but surely by this time Cameron would have tutored all of the characters enough for them to be smarter than that.
Bob,
I agree that things are quite clear to the viewer, once we’ve stopped to think it through, but I think it’s also apparent that none of the characters we’re watching can be quite as certain as the audience about the laws of time travel.
The only two we know about for sure are Derek and Jesse. In “Complications,” Derek haltingly puts forth the basics of this theory to explain their differing memories. Jesse is completely nonplussed at this, unless she’s feigning ignorance for some reason.
Cameron is the most likely to know exactly how it all works, but she doesn’t seem to have informed anyone in 2008 of the rules. The information we’ve seen her volunteer on other subjects is usually the bare minimum, and sometimes misleading. She answers direct questions, but doesn’t elaborate on the obvious implications of her answers. For example, in the first season when Sarah asked her point blank if she would still die of cancer after their forward time jump, all Cameron would say was that she didn’t know. She didn’t add that the time jump erased the future she had come from so that some of her memories were no longer valid, and she had no pertinent knowledge of the new future.
We don’t know enough about Skynet or Weaver yet to speculate on their understanding, but in this case we’re only talking about Resistance members anyway, so that just leaves Future John. I don’t know whether he knows more or less than Cameron (or if he’s even still alive).
The important thing to remember is this is not Star Trek. Future John doesn’t live in a temporally-shielded command bunker with “realtime” updates on the activities of his time traveling operatives. Each time he chucks a pebble back up the timestream, he has no foreknowledge of what effect it will have, and he may never find out. Each traveler also erases Future John, and the John in the new timeline has no knowledge of what happened in the old timeline.
This is a longwinded way of saying that I don’t think any Future John could afford to take the chance of sending Kyle back in time, as he would not be available after that to send back to save Sarah’s life, father John, and die. We may know that the time-jumped Sarah and John will be fine anyway, and Future John may even believe it to be a certainty in time theory, but he does not have perfect knowledge like we do, and could not take the chance that he was wrong. In that case, he would cease to exist and the human race would be doomed.
On a more practical note, I can’t think of anything Kyle could do in 2008 that an equally experienced, but non-Reese Resistance fighter could not do just as well.
If I’m wrong on all this, though, I expect to be blown away by the writers’ reasoning.