Dollhouse Renewed: Fox Spared Whedonites’ Wrath

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

Variety.com and i09.com are reporting that FOX has renewed Whedon’s Dollhouse for a second season (information points at another 13-episode season order, and staying on the Friday timeslot).

This means that Whedon’s declaration about swearing off television in exchange for doing internet-based work will probably wait for a little while longer, though Joss has been known to have more than a few projects at any one time.

Execs apparently enjoyed the last couple of episodes (as I did), and were convinced by strong DVR/TiVo numbers and the unaired “Epitaph One” as proof that the show could run on a smaller budget.

No word on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, its Friday night mate. While Dollhouse can run on a smaller budget, Terminator requires CGI/elaborate makeup cyborgs, and may not fare as well, despite/because of its willingness to break format/formula and experiment with structure.

4-Dimensional Chess

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Michael R. Underwood

Having recently watched the Doctor Who episode called “Blink,” its tight writing and 4-dimensional chess made me think of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and narratives of time-travel where 4-th-dimensional warfare/thinking is integral to the plot. This advanced use of time-travel allows creators to move past the excitement of possibilities like Bruce Campbell vs. The Army of Darkness and craft narratives that push the dramatic potential of time-travel to its extremes.

Spoilers follow for Doctor Who 3×11 “Blink” and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

“Blink”

In the Hugo-award winning Doctor Who episode “Blink,” The Doctor and Martha are stranded in 1969 after investigating a house connected to a number of dissapearances. The episode’s protagonist is not The Doctor or his companion Martha, but a woman by the name of Sally Sparrow. Sally pieces together clues left under wallpaper, letters delivered by hand, messages given in person, and DVD easter eggs to solve the mystery and rescue The Doctor and Martha from being stranded in time. The Doctor speaks to Sally through DVD extras thanks to a transcript of their conversation made by Sally’s roommate’s brother, who was there as the conversation happened, which then allowed a transcript to exist to be given to the Doctor to refer to when (later for him, earlier for Sally), he would have to record the DVD easter eggs.

This non-linear strategizing/correspondence allows for the Doctor’s presence to be felt throughout the episode, but all interpreted and acted upon by another character. Sally must piece together the puzzle pieces left by her time-displaced roommate, a handsome police detective catapaulted back in time to 1969 (to meet up with the Doctor and Martha), and to engage in a two-way discussion with the seemingly-one-sided ramblings of the Doctor on the DVDs. The Doctor and Sally collaborate across time to solve the case of the Weeping Angels, with critical information held by specific individuals allowing the whole picture to be assembled.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Terminator uses 4th-dimensional thinking, but on a larger scale. John Connor of the future, the Connors of the ‘present’ timeline, Skynet of the future, Terminators in the ‘present’, and other independent agents are all fighting a war across time over the fate of the future, the inevitability or prevention of Judgement Day, when a singularity-derived Machine uprising destroys human civilization.

The show’s opening gambits of 4-dimensional chess are Future John sending “Cameron” back in time to be his protector/aide-de-camp, and the attacks of the Terminator known as “Cromartie”

Cameron and the Connors go to a bank and use a time machine built in the past to allow the group to escape Cromartie as well as possibly delay/prevent Sarah’s death by cancer.

During the series, further characters return from a divergent future time-line where the Future John Connor is increasingly reliant on reprogrammed Terminators, which is easily read as being a result of his reliance on and attachment to Cameron in the series. Jesse brings Riley back from that future to use Riley to drive a wedge between John and Cameron (which Jesse presumably thinks will lead to a better version of Post-Judgement day, where John’s use of reprogrammed terminators is not a liability).

4-dimensional chess runs throughout the show, and even in one-off episodes such as “Self Made Man,” where Cameron discovers the history of a Terminator who was sent too far back in time, accidentally disrupts the timeline in a way that would cause its mission to fail, then proceeds to change the timeline in order to ensure that the timeline shifts back in a way so that it can complete its mission.

Characters such as Catherine Weaver are unknown quantities in the 4-dimensional war, as she acts with an agenda, but has not clearly been revealed as being on either the Connor’s or Skynet’s side.

Concluding Thoughts

Stories that play with time-travel as not just a plot device, but use the non-linearity of time as a multi-use narrative tool gain the advantage of being able to layer decisions, put together characters who know one another but from different timelines or parts of their individual time-lives which would normally be impossible (Sally meeting Billy the detective on his deathbed as an elderly man, having just earlier that day met him for the first time as a young detective). These tools allow for writers and creators to utilize the nostalgic mode of storytelling in compelling ways, and to provoke thought about choices, causality, opportunities past and those that yet remain.

T:SCC Samson and Delilah — A Vid By Any Other Name

Posted on September 11, 2008 by Michael R. Underwood

The opening sequence of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles‘ season 2 premiere “Samson and Delilah” is tightly-edited, and seems like it was structured beat-by-beat off of the soundtrack used for the scene, “Samson and Delilah,” as sung by Shirley Manson, former lead singer of the rock group “Garbage” who also happens to be playing a new recurring character in the series.

Watch here:

As I watched the opening, I couldn’t help but read the sequence as if it were a fan-vid, as in ‘vidding.’ My friend/colleague Alexis Lothian, author and maintainer of Queer Geek Theory (http://queergeektheory.wordpress.com/) has been working on/with vidding of late, which almost certainly helped inform my viewing. Vidding has a great deal of transformative potential, in that juxtaposing specifically-edited scenes from one or more show/film to a soundtrack can easily and affectively change the original scenes and create/unlock new or underprivilidged readings. Vidding is an argument, constructed and polished as any other, an argument using audio-visual elemets edited together in the proud tradition of a Henry Jenkins-style Textual Poaching.

More than just in that opening sequence, the whole episode seems to be a riff on the title/content of the song, casting John Connor as Samson and Cameron as Delilah. It’s not terribly surprising to have this tightly-coded opening, considering the potent use of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” at the end of last season to support the inexorable menace of the Terminators.

Most of the time, a TV/film score is a supplement, a way of re-inforcing or undercutting the tone of a scene. It’s more rare to have a scene where the music takes the foreground, and it seems as if the visual and diegetic-audio component is supplemental to the score. But sometimes the music tells the story, sets the tone. It remins me of the sequential art form, where the narrative relies at different times more on the text or more on the art. Using the song “Samson and Delilah” allowed for the show to immediately set the stakes for the second season and ride the driving emotion of the song to open the episode and the season with a great deal of momentum, which then is carried forward by the relentless pace of the chase-and-hide-and-chase episode. “Samson and Delilah” felt more like a Terminator film than most any of the other episodes thusfar, emphasizing the lack of fatigue or remorse on the part of the Terminators.

The Samson/Delilah dynamic is the latest layer of what is a growing theme in the show, a meditation on faith and the role of a messiah. John Connor is the Promised Hero who is destined to save humanity, with his own personal angel he himself sent back to ensure that he could fulfil his destiny. Agent Ellison (named for Harlan Ellison, whose story “Demon With a Glass Hand” was an inspiration for the original Terminator) is a man of faith, who comes to view the Terminators as agents of the Adversary, falling into Dr. Silberman’s paradigm, viewing the coming Judgement Day as being that of Revelation (the title of that episode “The Demon Hand” was another nod to the Ellison story. The Terminator series has always had those strands running through it, but the series has the advantage of being able to develop these themes over time, subtly and incrementally. In addition, with Cameron inquiring about the ressurection, we see another thread in the tapestry of that theme, as her character develops both along the Delilah angle, a continuing possible threat, but since she was just ressurected, her sins washed away, she is re-christened as a savior figure herself as John’s guardian angel.

The show has clearly found its stride, and if the rest of the season to follow the cues of the premiere, I think we’ll be in for a good year for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.