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Last I heard, Whedon was doing what he'd swore he'd never do - develop another show for Fox. Mainly as a favour to Eliza Dushku who's starring in it.
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I remember a while back, there was a website in which a guy looked at time travel movies (& TV?) and assessed the way they depicted time travel. I wonder if it's still extant, and what he thinks of T:TSCC.
Because I do like the show, but the way they seem to dodge between retconning and parallel-universalising is annoying me a bit. OK, they've said (or at least implied) this is a different timeline in which the events of T3 now cannot happen. But the clumsy retconning of dates (mainly as they apply to events of T2) is silly. There's no reason why they couldn't have T2 happening in 1994 and that afterwards SC & JC have mananged to hide undetected for 5 years, shacking up with paradmedic guy along the way. That would also allow suficient time for FBI interest to die down to the point when only one agent would maintain interest when he sees a missing-persons report and suspects it's Sarah Connor. And also for SC to think that just bolting to another state but not bothering to change her fake ID (and all because someone proposed marriage to her!) would be enough.
Because we're supposed to suspend disbelief of some issues (the non-resemblance of series Sarah, Kyle, and Silberman to their film equivalents, for example) while other glaring issues remain (like Kyle being alive before the war starts). It would be more interesting if they could admit that the timeline is being changed - that, really, the Kyle who came back is no longer the Kyle who is the brother of Derek who was sent back. Unless that's the point - silly as it seems to speculate on how a series might be intended to end when we're only one abortive half-season in - that they're getting towards: that (as said in T3) Judgement Day is inevitable, that they will never stop it no matter what. Perhaps they'll go for an ending like in that film The Butterfly Effect - that no matter what they can do, it'll always go wrong; so the only way for Ashton Kutcher in that film was to do something completely different, perhaps they'll realise in the end that the only way to avert the Rise of Skynet (and the subsequent war) is for JC to die - or maybe even never have been born. That would be an amazing way to end a show: for SC to have to decide between her son and the survival of a non-nuked humanity. I think she'd pick her son (and let him go on to become the saviour of a post-nuke humanity) while he'd prefer to sacrifice himself.
Incidentally, it completely slipped my mind for a minute why Cromartie actually got onto their trail in the Pilot, before I remembered that it was because Ellison added SC's alias of Sarah Reese to her file and it was detected by a Terminator sleeper agent! They shoud,get Owain Yeoman back to play another Cromartie model, Garrett Dillahunt really annoys me for some reason. He's a completely different body-shape for one thing.
quote:That would be an amazing way to end a show: for SC to have to decide between her son and the survival of a non-nuked humanity. I think she'd pick her son (and let him go on to become the saviour of a post-nuke humanity) while he'd prefer to sacrifice himself.
What if it will be the other way around, he wants to live but she wants to kill him a la Dyson. This reminds me of a "Family Guy" scene;
Old Testament Abraham and Isaac walk back down the mountain again, Abraham stern and tightlipped. Isaac: "Ok what the hell was that about, dad?"
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posted
I always got the impression that the reason Kyle is now alive before Judgement Day is because the events in T2 pushed Judgement Day back several years. It's the same Kyle, it's just his biorth now happened a few years before JD.
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: I always got the impression that the reason Kyle is now alive before Judgement Day is because the events in T2 pushed Judgement Day back several years. It's the same Kyle, it's just his biorth now happened a few years before JD.
...and that single post just made a whole lot of sense to me now.
Nim, I don't think Fox exec's would really appreciate the idea of a mother actually wanting to murder her son, even if it does spice the plot up. If they do go that route, it would probably be the original way.
-------------------- "Its coming on. I just saw the wall move..."
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"I think she'd pick her son (and let him go on to become the saviour of a post-nuke humanity)..."
Now, I haven't seen T3, so forgive me if this is stupid, but : Have we seen any evidence that he will be a savior? We know he's managing to lead a fairly upbeat resistance in the future, and Skynet obviously thinks highly of him to want to eliminate him from existence. But, has anyone ever come back from the far future? Is there any indication that, regardless of Connor's efforts, humanity won't be wiped out in the end, anyway?
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
And what's the point of wiping out humanity anyway? Were Skynet's goals ever noted past that? What does it want a mechanoid planet for anyway?
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: I always got the impression that the reason Kyle is now alive before Judgement Day is because the events in T2 pushed Judgement Day back several years. It's the same Kyle, it's just his biorth now happened a few years before JD.
That's about the shape of it. The difference being that in the original timeline Kyle & Derek's parents survived as Kyle was conceived several years after the original JD, however in this version it appears that Derek just takes hos brother and runs...so maybe right there is our explanation as to why John & Kyle look different; his parentage has shifted with the altered timeline...but that wouldn't account for Sarah or Silberman. Cute idea though.
As for the series not discussing the "alternate timelines" I imagine it's partly because they've known since T2 it's all become a bit fluid (no pun intended) and partly because they have other thing on their mind.
As far as the date shifting goes, I think it has more to do with the ages of the actors. Thomas Dekker is 20 (playing a high school student) and Lena Headey is 34 while on the other hand Linda Hamilton is 51 (though she was 24 when she played a 19 year old Sarah) and Edward Furlong is now 30 (but was 14 when playing a 10 year old.) Even when you take the 8 year jump into account there's still a bit of a gap.
So let's see if I can get this straight...
OLD old timeline 1984 - Sarah (19) Kyle (22) 1985 - John (0) 1994 - Sarah (29) John (10)* 1997 - Sarah (32) John (13)** 2007 - Kyle (0) 2029 - John (45) Kyle (22)***
NEW old timeline 1984 - Sarah (18) Kyle (23) John (0) 1997 - Sarah (31) John (10)* 1999 - Sarah (33) John (15)** 2002 - Kyle (0) 2005 - Sarah (39 - Deceased) John (22) 2011 - John (28) Kyle (8) 2014 - John (30 - celebrated with Derek, so after the disposal camps) Kyle (10) 2027 - John (43) Kyle (23) ***
* Events of T2 ** Judgement Day *** Tech-Com smash the Skynet defence grid & find the time displacement equipment.
So for the most part the only things that are significantly different are the timing of certain events like the bombing of cyberdyne, Judgement Day and the battle at Skynet's complex.
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"Is there any indication that, regardless of Connor's efforts, humanity won't be wiped out in the end, anyway?"
Well, in T1, Reese tells Sarah that they had basically won the war when he was sent back. Sending Arnie 1 and the t1000 back was basically their last ditch effort.
quote:Originally posted by Shik: And what's the point of wiping out humanity anyway? Were Skynet's goals ever noted past that? What does it want a mechanoid planet for anyway?
Ironically it was self defence. A military computer system suddenly becomes self aware so naturally they panic try to pull the plug. The military defence computer then reacts the only way it knows how and it all escalates from there. Like allot of good sci-fi the true villain of the piece is humanity, or just general hubris.
As for Skynet's long term plans, I imagine it knew humanity would always be a threat so it did everything it could to wipe us out. I doubt it's really thought much beyond that, after all the first thought of any living thing is it's own survival. The real question is, would the planet and the Universe in general be better off with Skynet running around or having us back in business.
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So hypothetically speaking, if SkyNet achieved its goal, would it then just mellow out? Would it try exploring what it means to be sentient? What about the bots? What would happen to them? And why don't we see humans from the far future? Gah, so many questions...
Also how exactly did it achieve sentience?
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
Probably the HOLMES IV theory. From Wiki:
"In the novel, Heinlein posits advanced Artificial Intelligence software for the consciousness of the character of Mike. Mike's awakening is a fictional example of the emergent theory of consciousness. Mike was originally installed to control the mass driver catapult mechanism and control the flight of pilot-less freighters; he was vastly under-utilised in this role however and so the Luna Authority gave him more and more tasks to do, and more and more resources (extra memory, processing units, neural networks etc) until one day he became so complex he simply "woke up". "
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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posted
And following that, this is so weird. I go to Wikipedia to read up a bit on AI and stuff related to this thread, and before I can start typing stuff into the search field I spot "Today's Featured Article", and what is it?
quote:Storm botnet The Storm botnet is a botnet, a group of "zombie" computers controlled remotely. In September 2007, it was estimated to run on as many as 1 to 50 million computer systems linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse that has spread through e-mail spam. Other sources have placed the size of the botnet to be around 250,000 to 1 million compromised systems.
The Storm botnet was first identified around January 2007, with the Storm worm at one point accounting for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers. The botnet reportedly is powerful enough as of September 2007 to force entire countries off the Internet, and is estimated to be able to potentially execute more instructions per second than some of the world's top supercomputers.
Used in a variety of criminal activities, the Storm botnet has displayed defensive behaviors, that indicated its controllers were actively protecting the botnet against attempts at tracking and disabling it. The botnet has specifically attacked the online operations of some security vendors and researchers who attempted to investigate the botnet.
These "controller" guys are playing with fire... :.)
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