cyadon
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Post by cyadon on Aug 22, 2008 11:18:02 GMT -5
I find myself referring to what some of what Josh Friedman and BAG referred to in the "What He Beheld" commentary during the scene where Derek threatens the fake Sarkissian.
"How crazy is Derek that Sarah Connor, who is also crazy mind you, is the reasonable one?"
Personally, I think Sarah's just a bit heavy on the paranoia (not that she doesn't have a right to be) and a touch manic (and a bit phobic). Very high functionality and able to be very normal when the object of her fear/paranoia isn't around.
Derek on the other hand is a mess. VA psychs would have problems with him. He's paranoid and a touch sociopathic and violent and deeply depressed and it's all capped off by a heaping helping of PTSD. Deep down he thinks he does what he's doing for a very, very good reason.
He also wouldn't let the little girl see him kill someone. And it's doubtful that would have shot the fake Sarkissian if he wasn't absolutely sure that he would hit his mark. He takes John to meet his father (in a way) and I think he's beginning to come around on John being family and being happy to have him as a relation. He truly loves his little brother (and now his nephew) and wants to save them.
He's willing to sacrifice even his own soul to make sure Judgment Day doesn't come around. Because, according to his beliefs, he's already damned.
So yeah, in a way he cares, but only about those people he has marked as his family or blood. And maybe the concept of 'saving mankind', but anyone that might cause Judgment Day to happen he'll shoot, even if it is one of his best friends.
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rossbondreturns
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Post by rossbondreturns on Aug 22, 2008 13:30:37 GMT -5
I never said that people no longer value human lives. I'm saying that they value the individual far less than the collective. This doesn't mean that the individual soldiers all have that mentality. Different people will have a different reason for fighting but the country they are fighting for will only have one reason or a set of reasons for fighting a particular conflict. Derek is someone who sees beyond his own reasons for fighting the machines. He's looking at the bigger picture, he's looking at why the human race is fighting Skynet. Also, the very fact that desperation has driven the Resistance to using Terminators shows that their value system has changed. They are willing to make greater sacrifices because the consquences of failure is too great. The value of human lives is malleable. During times of war, people always take drastic steps to ensure victory, whether it be convicting alleged spies with almost no evidence or bombing civilian targets in an attempt to damage enemy morale. That's the kind of mentality that Derek has. The fact that even Derek opposed using Terminators shows that the Resistance is willing to take a great deal of risk in fighting the war. The Resistance does infinite resources, it will likely have to ignore the needs of the civilians in order to ensure the effectiveness of its fighting forces even if they could help more civilians than soldiers. Skynet will not make things easy for the Resistance and compassion is something that Skynet will likely exploit at every turn. If an HK has a couple of human shields strapped to it, is the Resistance willing to risk the extra forces needed to rescue them? The lower the human population is in the future, the more they have to take into account the cost/benefit ratio. Are they willing to risk 10 to 20 soldiers, along with all their experience and the gear they're carrying, to save 5 weak and sick civilian human shields or are they going to just blow that HK away? If and that's a big IF Skynet Starts strapping Humans onto H/K's which I think is very very unlikely then humans will make Judgment calls based on what they have to do. If they can bring it down in a way that will not kill these hypothetical survivors they will simply because they NEED more soldiers. If they cannot save them then they cannot save them. This future is bad enough and with Derek and Company taking so many risks in our Present they have already arguably made things worse rather than better.
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Post by vicheron on Aug 22, 2008 20:35:41 GMT -5
That was just an example and you've completely missed the point. There's always a cost/benefit ratio involved in war. It's almost never a matter of what they can or cannot do, it's more of a matter of the potential cost of doing somthing outweighing the potential reward. My example illustrates a possible scenario where the cost of rescuing 5 civilians could be 10 to 20 Resistance soldiers. Just because the Resistance needs more soldiers doesn't mean that they'll be willing to take that risk since the cost of the rescue far outweighs the reward.
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rossbondreturns
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Post by rossbondreturns on Aug 22, 2008 20:42:35 GMT -5
That was just an example and you've completely missed the point. There's always a cost/benefit ratio involved in war. It's almost never a matter of what they can or cannot do, it's more of a matter of the potential cost of doing somthing outweighing the potential reward. My example illustrates a possible scenario where the cost of rescuing 5 civilians could be 10 to 20 Resistance soldiers. Just because the Resistance needs more soldiers doesn't mean that they'll be willing to take that risk since the cost of the rescue far outweighs the reward. Maybe not in that "Situation/example" Vicheron but for the most part the Human Resistance will be attempting to save civilians to build up the Resistance. You think they want to trust "scrubbed units" very doubtful, but because of the state of the war...these Units are one of the few things keeping the hope of the Resistance alive. Sometimes Cost/Benefit becomes a thing of the past...and it's all about how you survive.
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Post by Derek Reese on Aug 22, 2008 21:03:44 GMT -5
I understand that everyone has different opinions and beliefs here, but keep things CIVIL and RESPECTFUL.
Back to discussion.......
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Post by allergygal on Aug 22, 2008 21:25:48 GMT -5
NOTE: Lets also get the topic back to Derek. Discussing the future war or war in general with respect to Derek's mindset and experience is fine, but when the conversation moves strictly into one about war, it's off topic.
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k8ie
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Post by k8ie on Aug 22, 2008 22:11:37 GMT -5
I wonder if it will turn out to be significant that Derek was never in a Skynet camp - Terminator House was similar but not the same and over a much shorter duration (say like being held by the Gestapo versus interned at Buchenwald, to borrow the most obvious analogy) - never stormed the wire, wasn't there when John Connor taught them to smarsh the machines.... if not having had that experience that was so fundamental to Kyle is part of why Derek's so ready to toss out his orders and go haring off on his own hook?
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roseredscare
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Post by roseredscare on Aug 23, 2008 13:57:42 GMT -5
So watching The Demon Hand featurette on the DVDs they were discussing the last scene of Cameron dancing. That moment was always puzzling to me because I had really no clue why Derek had tears in his eyes but according to the featurette that those tears were mostly ones of rage and anger. BAG says that Derek has "experienced" Cameron before and not just another model of her but her. So was it Cameron in that basement room? What did she do to him? Does future John know about it? Geez, I hope we get answers soon.
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Post by Derek Reese on Aug 23, 2008 14:01:39 GMT -5
With you, Rose. That's one of those moments that stood out especially with the music coming into play during its first appearence in "Dungeons and Dragons."
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t101
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Post by t101 on Aug 23, 2008 16:39:32 GMT -5
Whatever she did to him it seems more elaborate than straight torture. The way Derek was in such a hurry to get back to the bunker, IMO, he gave away the location. That's why he is so determined to "fix all the mistakes" by any means necessary.
As for Cameron, she might have been infiltrating Skynet's forces for the resistance. Either that or the entire thing is some elaborate setup by John, to possibly test or manipulate the others to do something.
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roseredscare
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Post by roseredscare on Aug 23, 2008 17:44:42 GMT -5
Or Cameron is just another captured terminator to have the memories of the atrocities she committed whipped out and reprogrammed to help the resistance. By the end of the season Derek had just settled on her being a powerful tool to prevent Skynet but he doesn't have to like her even if she may not know what she did to him.
If she was the one to torture him in D&D then it gives his attitude toward her in Vick's Chip a whole new context.
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k8ie
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Post by k8ie on Aug 24, 2008 21:28:44 GMT -5
I don't think it can be Cam in the basement room of the T-house since she's with John Connor at the resistance headquarters when Perry brings in Reese after he escapes and she seems very familiar as well as a familiar sight around the base.
I think a clue might be in "Vick's Chip" when Derek asks Sarah if she thinks she'd know the difference between a terminator and a person, and the 'yeah, sure, what-ever' look he gives her when she says "of course".
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Post by justforeverme on Aug 26, 2008 8:55:18 GMT -5
I was musing on this the other day, just random thoughts - I don't know if any of it makes sense, but I thought I'd post it here anyway...
He was just a kid when it happened. Eight years old, I was fifteen.
So, here's how I see it. Derek was substantially older than Kyle. The bombs fell, their parent's died. They were together somewhere and Derek took him underground. Nuclear fallout, there was nowhere else to go. The initial threat wasn't the machines - the initial threat was the fallout. They lived in a major city, it would have been hit, they were lucky to not be killed. Lots of people would have done.
How do you tell an eight-year-old machines have taken over the world? You don't.
He didn't - he did whatever it took to keep his brother save. And that was more than physically safe, that was mentally safe as well. In the early days, that would have been the basics - food (hard to come by), Shelter (again, hard). Dealing with a little kid who didn't know his world had just ended. Derek grew up <i>fast</i>.
I think their first 'live' threat was probably other people. People competing for food, for shelter. Chaos sets in early, life is hard, brutal. Society breaks down in an instant. The machines are already on the surface, killing, so everyone's underground - but the human race isn't designed for that. Everything we need is on the surface. Who can he trust - not just with his life, but with the life of his brother.
Kyle becomes Derek's world early on. Everything Derek does, he does for Kyle, keeping him safe, protected, sheltered. Derek sacrificed a lot for Kyle. A lot of his illusions were shattered early on. I think he killed to protect his brother within weeks - human or machine. It needed to be done. He was the adult. Kyle was the child.
Because of Derek, Kyle was able to grow up with a semblance of normality. He's not as jaded as Derek is. He has a hope, a purpose. He laughs where Derek is old before his time and jaded.
In my head, Kyle joined the resistance first - probably as not much more than a kid. 14 possibly? Something like that. I think Derek would have kept him out of it as much as possible - Derek's mission, in my head, is to keep his brother alive. And you don't keep someone alive by letting them go wielding guns against robots. So Derek tries to keep him away from all that, tries to dissuade him. But Kyle's maintained that innocence because of what Derek's done for him. He joins up, he's passionate about it - he wants to help, he believes that we can win the war. He's really, really passionate about the fact that we can win.
So, Kyle joins up. And Derek follows him - if he can't keep him out of it, then he'll be in there with him, protecting his baby brother every step of the way. And so it goes, until Kyle gets captures, sent to a work camp. Then... actually I'm still trying to figure out what that did to Derek... That's where this little musing ends...
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Post by vicheron on Aug 26, 2008 9:17:18 GMT -5
I'm sure that Derek tried to shelter Kyle but Kyle was in a Skynet death camp loading bodies into the incinerators non stop. I don't know why some people have the idea that Derek is so different from Kyle. As far as I can tell, the only real difference between them is that Derek has experienced and remembers much more of the pre-Judgment Day world than Kyle.
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roseredscare
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Post by roseredscare on Aug 26, 2008 9:30:22 GMT -5
Well, by my estimations Kyle was only 12 when he was captured by the machines and he didn't reunite with Derek until 6 years later when he was 18. So Derek may have protected Kyle early on and had killed so both of them could survive but it was only four years worth of protecting and it wasn't enough because Kyle was taken none the less.
I suspect that Kyle didn't really join the resistance until he met Connor in the camps while Derek probably independently joined sometime in the 6 years Kyle was missing and, when Connor returned to the resistance, was reunited with his little brother.
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