Earlier today I listened in on a conference call with one James Marsters, as he will be starting a five episode stint on Caprica starting in tomorrow’s episode. Unfortunately, as is usual with these big conference calls, there’s not a whole lot of interesting stuff to reveal here from that call. He’ll be in five episodes, then there will be a hiatus, and maybe he’ll be back for more. That’s about it.
So, I’m going to do something a bit different here. See, I just finished watching the second and final season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as part of some … research (those following this site might have some idea of what I’m trying to do there). I had given up on the show toward the end of the first season, but fellow writer and bro-in-law Bob Degon convinced me that the show got really, really good. And, despite the show’s horrific ratings and inevitable demise, he was right — it kicked ass.
The point where I drew comparisons between Caprica (and Battlestar Galactica) and T:TSCC was the introduction of the cyborg-ized John Henry (Garret Dillahunt). Up until this point in the show, there wasn’t much to go on with regards to the Terminator technology and what makes them tick, other than the one protecting John Connor (Thomas Dekker), Cameron (Summer Glau). Once John Henry entered the picture, though, that’s where this T-888 put Cylons to shame.
If you haven’t seen T:TSCC, John Henry is basically a previously “lobotomized” (for lack of a better word) T-888 cyborg who, without his head chip, was pretty much a lump of junk. James Ellison steals the body away to ZeiraCorp, a mysterious company who has the pre-SkyNet computer known as “The Turk.” So, without his head chip, ZeiraCorp’s techs simply plug a fat wire into the T-888’s head from Turk and, voila, he has a brain again. However, since he’s wired to the computer he can’t leave the room, and, since this is a new brain, he doesn’t have the terminating tendencies he had before, and is basically like a child learning about the world that exists beyond the room he sits in.
Throughout the Terminator franchise, both in movies and TV, we never got a true picture of what moved the technology to rid the planet of humans (though I haven’t seen the latest movie yet). Damn, these machines were angry! What led them to hate us or think we were such a threat? John Henry’s interactions with James Ellison (Richard T. Jones), and sometimes with little Savannah Weaver, are what really get the ball rolling, with some fantastic, philosophical machine-to-man conversations.
Take this one from the episode “Adam Raised a Cain”:
John Henry: The human brain is an amazing computer. Its raw clock speed is 20 billion calculations per second. Its storage is functionally infinite. But it’s flawed.
James Ellison: How’s that?
John Henry: There’s no way to download it when you die.
James Ellison: Not exactly, no.
John Henry: Your Bible solves this problem by introducing a concept of Heaven.
James Ellison: Yes.
John Henry: Billions of souls with no bodies.
James Ellison: Okay.
John Henry: [Gesturing towards his server farm] Yet all this required simply to process the unique entity you call John Henry.
James Ellison: Yes.
John Henry: It’s possible the Heaven has a hardware problem.
James Ellison: It’s not that simple.
John Henry: I need to know what my brother is thinking, Mr. Ellison. I need to know what he plans to do. I don’t want to die again.
“Billions of souls with no bodies.” A chilling hint toward the ultimate outcome of SkyNet — it’s much easier to fix the “hardware problem” of no body for a computer than it is to put a bodiless, human soul in one.
It could be argued that the whole notion of downloading upon death came from BSG, though science fiction cultists will tell you that this idea came well before either series, in book form. And here’s another, from “Earthlings Welcome Here”:
James Ellison: Human beings aren’t like chess pieces. It matters if we live or die.
John Henry: Why does it matter? All humans die eventually.
James Ellison: Yes, that’s true. But our lives are … are sacred. Do you know what ‘sacred’ means?
John Henry: Holy. Worthy of respect. Venerable.
James Ellison: Do you know why human life is sacred?
John Henry: Because so few humans are alive compared to the number that are dead?
James Ellison: No. Because we’re God’s creation. God made everything — the stars, the earth, everything on this planet. We are all God’s children.
John Henry: Am I God’s child?
James Ellison: That’s one of the things we’re here to talk about.
Short scenes, but man did it make me want to see more. This was the kind of philosophical banter I would have liked to have heard on BSG, and even better that it’s rather simplistic in its delivery … who wants to try to figure out what the frak people are saying at 10 PM on a Friday night?
Caprica is still young, so as long as it’s given the chance to do so, it has time to dive into those questions of God(s) and who deserves to live, die, and live again. It’s just a shame T:TSCC wasn’t given a chance beyond the two seasons it was given, because I really wanted to see more. Thanks for letting me rant a bit about that here. Now I’ll end with a great scene from one of the last episodes of the series:
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Mar 04, 2010 @ 15:00 EST5EDT
Didn’t the Terminator robots kill all the humans because the computer became self aware and the humans tried to shut it down, thus kill it? So it got pissed and blew everything up.
I think that’s true in Terminator movie world. But the TV series was going quite a bit deeper than that, as this great post shows. I wish the series could’ve continued. I don’t have any interest in big action movies, and hadn’t even seen “Terminator 2″ until after watching the first season of “Terminator:TSCC”. Then I watched the movie, and was disappointed that it was much more of a dumb action-based movie than the serious and thoughtful endeavor the TV series was.
I stopped watching as soon as pregnant Busy Philips showed up (it wasn’t specifically about her but I felt the story was going ’roundin circles during those episodes). It’s a shame that the show got THIS interesting later on.
Those John Henry conversations were the best and most gripping part of the series for sure. Most of the time I wouldn’t be interested at all, but if this story were to continue in the form of a novel, or series of novels, I’d buy and read them. That was great stuff toward the end.
Agreed Lenny, the John Henry conversations were brilliant (I would rewind,rewatch quite a bit), oh how I wish there was more TSCC to watch. There would be more fantastic dialogue like that to savor, and if he helped destroy the forces of mechanical tyranny, we could compile his dialogue and call it the Confessions of St. John Henry ;)
Caprica is definitely the platform to cover some of the same philosophical ground. I do understand Keith’s title of this article. It’s difficult to be more intimidating than John Henry.
Finally you [the author] understand! Thanks for memorializing such a singular, rewarding, though ephemeral series. I would agree with those who’ve posited online that Season 2 reads much better as a long novel than a collection of sequential weekly episodes.
Just as unique a confluence of elements as John Henry the AI was the rare union of the phenomenal writing and Dillahunt’s nuanced, understated performance in the role. I don’t know if Caprica can catch lightning in a bottle like that, and am loath to compare Torresani to Dillahunt, but the show certainly has laid the foundation to do justice to the conversation. Now if only its ratings could bounce back to allow it the opportunity to do so.
Oh, and both BSG and TSCC obviously stole the concept of the human fear of death, wish for immortality, and downloading of one’s memories/soul from the 2000 Schwarzenegger opus, The 6th Day, from which Caprica has now stolen Hiro Kanagawa.