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Post by Erika on May 6, 2008 13:15:25 GMT -5
Just trying to keep the boards alive over here in the off-season. . And Thank you hon! Karma
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Post by allergygal on May 6, 2008 14:57:45 GMT -5
Good...though I bloody well wish my Proofreaders would get back to me so I can fully polish T5 up...if they don't hurry I'll have T6 done in the meantime. Not kidding. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, though, right? Tomorrow, for real. I've had to keep my chat off so I could get work done. The second I launch AIM, I get hit up by everyone. What can I say, I'm a popular person (and modest too). Anyway, looking forward to finally reading the rossanity™. In other news... I think I may be becoming a karma whore. (can I say whore on here?) And let me just add that Sarah Connor rocks, so that this post isn't entirely off-topic.
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rossbondreturns
Corporal
Summer 08 Wallpaper Challenge Winner!
Posts: 1,617
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Post by rossbondreturns on May 6, 2008 15:21:16 GMT -5
Looks like you can say both whore and Rossanity(TM)
What can I say...I'll be online all day...today and tomorrow and the next day if I don't have work.
SARAH ROCKS!
Also...it annoys the smeg outta me to have T5 done...and now have 1:40 mins of T6 done...and T5 not even released yet.
SO DOES JOHN CONNOR!
That said..I'm not about to stop the flow.
And I am about to change the Signature in my posts to one of my most epic lines in T6: Rogue Future.
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t101
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Post by t101 on May 6, 2008 18:30:29 GMT -5
Really? That's not at all how I saw that scene. She did choose between the plans (blowing up building - no, planting a virus - yes), but I thought John was a little too smart on everything. Having him be the computer genius is one thing, but when they also made him the only one to understand the files from Barbara's house? I thought it got a little ridiculous. I didn't see a problem with it because Barbara's files would likely be very much technology dense. As in not just "was there network access" technology but heavy programming stuff. That's why John would be the one to give this to. As for why she didn't come up with a plan. Honestly, there was no complicated plan to speak of. What they did was based almost entire on their specific knowledge, John could program a virus, Derek knew about the tunnels. It was straightforward and it was suitable. If they were stuck on this contemplating some complex strategy and Sarah had nothing to say, I'd be the first to complained. The only thing one could pick on, IMO, is that they haven't written a scene specifically to let Sarah shine. But I never felt she acted inadequate given the circumstances. In any case. I don't have a problem with Sarah's portrayal. As far as who the show should focus on I'm leaning more towards a balanced approach, the way it is now is suitable to me.
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rossbondreturns
Corporal
Summer 08 Wallpaper Challenge Winner!
Posts: 1,617
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Post by rossbondreturns on May 6, 2008 21:11:27 GMT -5
gotta agree having thought about those files T101 here is probably very much correct.
I'm sure that the writers will be able to fine tune the writing of the characters much more here in Season Two.
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Post by theturk on May 7, 2008 22:52:40 GMT -5
At the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, I'll add that I think that sometimes people romanticize their view of the movies' Sarah Connor based on iconic moments like the chinups or beating the snot out of licking orderly. The film also makes Sarah and her anger an object of mockery, especially after her collapse at the Dyson house. After that, you have the John telling her to pipe down and even giving her orders, until she gets her mojo back in the steel mill. I don't think we as a show have done anything as undermining to Sarah as the "you don't know what it's like to create a life" exchange where bratty liitle John rather curtly puts her in her place.
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Post by allergygal on May 8, 2008 15:42:05 GMT -5
At the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, I'll add that I think that sometimes people romanticize their view of the movies' Sarah Connor based on iconic moments like the chinups or beating the snot out of licking orderly. The film also makes Sarah and her anger an object of mockery, especially after her collapse at the Dyson house. After that, you have the John telling her to pipe down and even giving her orders, until she gets her mojo back in the steel mill. I don't think we as a show have done anything as undermining to Sarah as the "you don't know what it's like to create a life" exchange where bratty liitle John rather curtly puts her in her place. Ha! I was actually glad when John told her to pipe down in that scene. She was totally going off on a rant. Anyway, I like when John tries to keep his mom in check: When the terminator's busting through the bank vault: "Mom, we have to go, now." When she appears to be upset after the video of Sayles: "Mom, talk to me, what are you doing?" When she's about to go kidnap a doctor: "Mom, this is crazy, alright, even for you." Hopefully Sarah will be more intense in season 2, so John will have more opportunities to do that. You know maybe that's why Heavy Metal and that scene in The Turk didn't sit well with me. It was too much of a role reversal. Anyway, as promised, Turk, it's love-fest time. No character ever captured my imagination like T1 Sarah and I never sat in such total awe of a character as I did T2 Sarah. TSCC essentially brings these two together and breathes new life into her. She's fleshed-out now—humanized. We finally get to see Sarah as a full person instead of just this extreme, cold as ice, ass-kicking soldier. Sure, we got to see her as a person in T1, but she was barely scratching adulthood then. And that was before before she had John, before the new reality of her life had time to simmer. Because of the films, we've got all this background, this rich history. We've seen her weak and we've seen her over-the-top brutal. But the show has given her the depth she didn't have before. She's emotional, vulnerable, but puts up a good front. She's quick-thinking and tough when she needs to be. She tries hard to be both a mother and a protector for John. She's trying to let go a little and let him start becoming what she's been preparing him for even while trying to change the future and save him from his fate. She struggles with how to do that and not to make the same mistakes she once made. And time is running out. Judgement day is looming closer and her own death may be as well. The deck couldn't be more stacked against her and that's when Sarah is always at her best. The show pulled me in from the first episode and hasn't let me go. I love the journey so far and can't wait to see where it goes. Now when I think of Sarah Connor, I think of TSCC Sarah Connor. That's big. That's huge. Bravo.
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k8ie
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Post by k8ie on May 8, 2008 21:51:35 GMT -5
At the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, I'll add that I think that sometimes people romanticize their view of the movies' Sarah Connor based on iconic moments like the chinups or beating the snot out of licking orderly. The film also makes Sarah and her anger an object of mockery, especially after her collapse at the Dyson house. After that, you have the John telling her to pipe down and even giving her orders, until she gets her mojo back in the steel mill. I don't think we as a show have done anything as undermining to Sarah as the "you don't know what it's like to create a life" exchange where bratty liitle John rather curtly puts her in her place. Karma for that Turk - for once I'm not the one pointing out that in T2 Sarah Connor played third string to the guvernator and a 10 year old. And I always hated that scene. It's a completely tone-deaf moment, even leaving aside the gender dynamics, where the movie stops to play its subtext for laughs. Urgh, let's kill the scene with fire and call it even. Put the gender dynamics back in and that scene sums up the source of my critical anxiety (if anxiety's the right word) about Sarah's character in TSCC. Too often in SF and action films, female characters - really interesting, cool, complex female characters - end up being just "the girl". They start out head of security and end up answering the galactic switchboard, or go from being the best pilot in the fleet to a headcase. The character description reads "Executive officer and expert field agent" but her narrative function is the hero's love interest. A woman may lead the Rebel Alliance but she never gets to wield a light saber. She saves the world but dies of cancer three years later. Seriously, I look at the big picture and wonder if I'm not so much a scifi fan as a masochist because it ain't easy out there for a girl. It's certainly unfair to view TSCC through that prism but I watched the pilot hoping I wouldn't want to Elvis my TV before the hour was up and ended up falling in love with Josh Friedman and Lena Headey's take on Sarah Connor. I'm more invested in the character now than I have been at any time since I first saw T2 in '91. Now I care because TSCC not only rescues Sarah from the miserable fate inflicted on her by T3 but from the not entirely perfect dynamics of T2 and creates a whole woman out a character that was stripped down to little more than a caricature (despite how enjoyable and memorable that caricature was). Everyone involved with TSCC deserves mega karma for that, too. Unfortunately, yeah, I'm that person will smile and point out your typos if I don't like your work, and will give you a five-page, foot-noted critique if I do. QED, I like TSCC's Sarah Connor a lot.
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k8ie
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Post by k8ie on May 8, 2008 22:05:08 GMT -5
It's cracking me up that y'all are having this same conversation over here. Yeah, you'd think we didn't have jobs or grad school theses to write or anything better to do. I assumed that John was google dumping in that scene not that Sarah had turned over the paperwork to him myself. In my Bruce Wayne identity (I guess I should change that to my "Baum" identity, eh?), I'm a civil servant who works in an infrastructure-related field and if Sarah understood a third of a briefing document about a proposed transportation-related infrastructure project, she's doing better than the average mortal. They're written by engineers in a particularly unfriendly style of what is allegedly English so that no one can understand precisely what they're proposing. My theory that this is a plot so that when they're asked to produce something, they can, like Montgomery Scott, work miracles and justify their budget. Naturally, this means obfuscating their sinister designs behind phrases like "directional amber illumination device*". *yellow light
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Post by vicheron on May 8, 2008 23:04:01 GMT -5
At the risk of pouring gasoline on the fire, I'll add that I think that sometimes people romanticize their view of the movies' Sarah Connor based on iconic moments like the chinups or beating the snot out of licking orderly. The film also makes Sarah and her anger an object of mockery, especially after her collapse at the Dyson house. After that, you have the John telling her to pipe down and even giving her orders, until she gets her mojo back in the steel mill. I don't think we as a show have done anything as undermining to Sarah as the "you don't know what it's like to create a life" exchange where bratty liitle John rather curtly puts her in her place. I think that scene played out like that because of a lack of time. Sarah had just been through quite a traumatic experience and she was trying to reconcile her beliefs with reality. She knew that Skynet as the ruthless mastermind trying to annihilate the human race, but not being able to strike at Skynet, she attributed those qualities to its creator. She never expected Miles Dyson to be a decent guy. Before meeting Dyson, she had someone to focus her anger and hate. After coming to know Dyson, she could no longer blame him for Skynet's actions. So much of what she believed had been destroyed at that point. She no longer knows who, if anyone, is really at fault for the coming apocalypse. Yet she still has so many negative emotions but she no longer has anyone to direct them toward. There simply wasn't enough time to explore how Sarah comes to term with all that. Instead, they just had a scene where Sarah gets all weird and does her crazy rant. I think that this is an interesting weakness with many of the characters. No one really views Skynet as an individual by itself. No one really puts all the blame on Skynet for Judgment Day because they don't really see it as they see other human beings. At least with the Terminators, they actually look and act like human beings, and they can be attacked directly. Skynet is much more of an intangible being, with so many undefined qualities. That seems to be why they're all so obsessed with finding how Skynet is created and who the creators are. It gives them "real" goals with tangible results and enemies they can physically harm. In the end it may not be how Skynet is created or who creates it that matters but what the driving force behind that creation is as that will be the basis for Skynet's consciousness.
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Post by miniglik on May 8, 2008 23:53:43 GMT -5
That's the part of her I actually want to see more of: the unhinged part. (Even if it would get a "my mom's a leetle bit cuckoo" response from John.) I don't think it'd ever have to go as far as T2. But there has to be a side that lived through T1 and T2 -- and may be mellowed a lot now (and trying to be a good mom, misremembering pizza day and whatnot) -- but is still different from normal people. She's a little too normal. But unlike allergygal, I don't see TSCC Sarah as THE Sarah yet. (That's not really the show's fault. It just started. The movies have been around for awhile. More time to make an impression.)
I remember seeing pics of Lena with a vest full of explosives. I'm SO curious about what that was.
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Post by ReeseDN38416 on May 10, 2008 0:52:46 GMT -5
WOW! Lots of interesting discussion. The main thing you're seeming to get hung up on is Sarah's ignorance of computers, as described in "The Turk." But it's not a reflection of her intelligence, it's an aspect of her character-- for very understandable reasons she hates and fears computers and tries to have as little to do with them as possible. That scene is about John and Sarah's different relationships to technology, computers, and artificial intelligence, not John=smart, Sarah=dumb. ITA. I don't think Sarah Connor has to understand computers to fight them. I like that being John Connor's area of expertise. I think being outside of that world, gives Sarah a valuable perspective and an irreverence that I enjoy. And I like her having a character flaw. She doesn't trust machines. If all the power went out... Sarah Connor could still kick some machine ass! That's her area of expertise. Anyway, as promised, Turk, it's love-fest time. No character ever captured my imagination like T1 Sarah and I never sat in such total awe of a character as I did T2 Sarah. TSCC essentially brings these two together and breathes new life into her. She's fleshed-out now—humanized. We finally get to see Sarah as a full person instead of just this extreme, cold as ice, ass-kicking soldier. Sure, we got to see her as a person in T1, but she was barely scratching adulthood then. And that was before before she had John, before the new reality of her life had time to simmer. Because of the films, we've got all this background, this rich history. We've seen her weak and we've seen her over-the-top brutal. But the show has given her the depth she didn't have before. She's emotional, vulnerable, but puts up a good front. She's quick-thinking and tough when she needs to be. She tries hard to be both a mother and a protector for John. She's trying to let go a little and let him start becoming what she's been preparing him for even while trying to change the future and save him from his fate. She struggles with how to do that and not to make the same mistakes she once made. And time is running out. Judgement day is looming closer and her own death may be as well. The deck couldn't be more stacked against her and that's when Sarah is always at her best. The show pulled me in from the first episode and hasn't let me go. I love the journey so far and can't wait to see where it goes. Now when I think of Sarah Connor, I think of TSCC Sarah Connor. That's big. That's huge. Bravo. Oh wonderful love fest! ;D TSCC's Sarah really brings all parts of Sarah from both films into a wonderful whole character. I loved Sarah Connor in both films. I don't think TSCC Sarah would be who she is without going through the polar character she was in T2. I also enjoyed her speech to Dyson in T2. She's been isolated for so long and motherhood is so primal. I hear echoes of that speech in episodes like "The Turk" and "Queen's Gambit" where Sarah is really digging into the minds of these men whose creations destroy. Yeah she's a mess and her rant didn't really come off very well. And I think Sarah... after being pent up for so long, was ready to unload on Dyson... she was face to face with the potential destroyer of mankind and I love that she brought up motherhood. That's deep. And then the power of the end scene where she holds John as he cries. I can just see Lena Headley. I mean by the end of T2 that's where Sarah is. There's a huge journey in that film that she takes. Anyway, I love Sarah. She's right up there with Ellen Ripley from the Alien films for me. I love that... there's nothing particularly special about her from the outside. She's a young waitress in LA like countless others. But when push comes to shove she digs deep and fights hard and never never never gives up. There's something so wonderful about mother and cub. And there's something sexy about a man being fascinated by that dynamic (James Cameron - T2/Aliens). The ferocity of it is incredibly enjoyable. I was afraid and wary and ready for TSCC to be REALLY BAD. I mean... don't mess with my SARAH CONNOR! But it's just been so beautiful and fearless in exploring the world and the character and the themes. I'm so happy to see this character, Sarah Connor after surviving the events of T2. She's lucid and she's caring and she's ferocious. I hope to see more of her ferocity without losing the tenderness. Also her sense of humor! I could kiss whoever is responsible for making Sarah so cheeky! It's perfection. I hope... in all the excitement about Cameron, and yeah, Cameron is badass, that the show remembers who the title character is... and keeps the focus on Sarah and John. ;D
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Post by allergygal on May 10, 2008 14:31:58 GMT -5
hen push comes to shove she digs deep and fights hard and never never never gives up... The ferocity of it is incredibly enjoyable. I was afraid and wary and ready for TSCC to be REALLY BAD. I mean... don't mess with my SARAH CONNOR! But it's just been so beautiful and fearless in exploring the world and the character and the themes. I'm so happy to see this character, Sarah Connor after surviving the events of T2. She's lucid and she's caring and she's ferocious. I hope to see more of her ferocity without losing the tenderness. Also her sense of humor! I could kiss whoever is responsible for making Sarah so cheeky! It's perfection. I hope... in all the excitement about Cameron, and yeah, Cameron is badass, that the show remembers who the title character is... and keeps the focus on Sarah and John. Karma for that, reese. Oh and I'm glad you pointed our her sense of humor. I love that too and it goes right along with T2 John having been such a little smart-ass. Sarah must have had a sense of humor at some point, so it's nice to see a little of it now. So much love in here right now.
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Post by allergygal on May 10, 2008 14:32:13 GMT -5
Too often in SF and action films, female characters - really interesting, cool, complex female characters - end up being just "the girl". They start out head of security and end up answering the galactic switchboard, or go from being the best pilot in the fleet to a headcase. I don't detect any BSG bitterness at all. So say we all. I assumed that John was google dumping in that scene not that Sarah had turned over the paperwork to him myself. In my Bruce Wayne identity (I guess I should change that to my "Baum" identity, eh?), I'm a civil servant who works in an infrastructure-related field and if Sarah understood a third of a briefing document about a proposed transportation-related infrastructure project, she's doing better than the average mortal. I don't have a problem with Sarah only understanding some of it except that John apparently has no trouble with those same documents about a proposed transportation-related project. And since John is explaining everything and even hands Derek a file while talking about what ARTIE is, he'd obviously read and understood them. He wasn't merely talking about the technological stuff. I didn't even mention the blocking of that scene before because I thought it might be too nit-picky, but... There's a clear hierarchy: John, then Cameron, then Derek, then Sarah. John is standing at the head, Cameron is standing further back in the room, Derek is sitting up high on the arm of the sofa, Sarah is sitting down low on the sofa. That visual reinforces the action. For homework tonight, I want everyone to rewatch the living room meeting in Vick's Chip. ;D
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Post by allergygal on May 10, 2008 14:46:18 GMT -5
That's the part of her I actually want to see more of: the unhinged part. (Even if it would get a "my mom's a leetle bit cuckoo" response from John.) I don't think it'd ever have to go as far as T2. But there has to be a side that lived through T1 and T2 -- and may be mellowed a lot now (and trying to be a good mom, misremembering pizza day and whatnot) -- but is still different from normal people. She's a little too normal. But unlike allergygal, I don't see TSCC Sarah as THE Sarah yet. (That's not really the show's fault. It just started. The movies have been around for awhile. More time to make an impression.) I remember seeing pics of Lena with a vest full of explosives. I'm SO curious about what that was. Yeah, I'd like a little more unhinged as well, not T2 level of unhinged, but more desperation perhaps. She's a tad too reserved right now. I read a Lena Headey interview at some point where she talked about wanting Sarah to be that way early on so she'd have somewhere to go with the character. Oh and I so want to know about that suicide vest pic too!
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