seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2013-05-12 02:38 pm
seekingferret) wrote2013-05-12 02:38 pm
Entry tags:
The Luddite Spy
Title: The Luddite Spy
Recipient: Sanguinity
Vidder: Seekingferret
Music: "The Luddite Spy" by Polski Fiat
Summary: I can't deny I kissed the Luddite Spy
Notes:
password: tscc
I stumbled across the song "Luddite Spy" and saw that it was only about 1:13 in length and had appropriate, ambiguously technophobic lyrics for a TSCC vid. So I set myself the challenge to see if I could assemble a vid in one night, by limiting myself to footage only from the pilot. I really like how it came out.chaila is right, at least sometimes. TSCC sometimes just vids itself.
I think there's probably a Sarah/Cameron read on the vid. I definitely seized on the places where the episode sexualizes Cameron, and cast her as the "Luddite Spy" that the narrator kisses in a skewed attempt at irony. She does confess to being freaked out by technology in a deleted scene from the pilot, in what is from the show an equally bad attempt at irony. But John kept drifting into my shots despite the lyrics not really supporting it, and ultimately I think this is probably best understood as a Sarah-centric story about the creation of their ensemble, which is founded on the three characters' inability to trust each other. When I first watched the Pilot I quit partway, and when I rewatched it again I thought it was weak, but rewatching it from the perspective of someone who knows where the show goes, I think it is stronger than it looks, if you focus on the complex interrelation between Sarah, her son, and her son's pet Terminator. Though I remember telling sanguinity after my first watch that this was my problem with the pilot- it was too interior, too intensely focused on those three characters, and I didn't want to watch a show that was only about them. It wasn't until we got Derek and Jesse and Riley, until we saw Martin Bedell and Alison from Palmdale and Lauren Fields and all of John's future soldiers, that I bought into the show. But watching the pilot from that perspective, knowing where John needs to end up and knowing that all three of them are working from limited information and trying to survive until John can get there, works. Sarah has to be her son's human support, since she can't let him depend only on machines, but she doesn't know how to protect him without Cameron, so she allies with the devil itself, and then spends much of the second season cursing herself for that decision. Oddly, I was flipping through songs about Luddites because I wanted to more directly confront the show's flirtations with actual Luddism. Sarah virtually never touches a computer herself. She always lets John do it, because she is scared shitless of machines. So one might say, though I wasn't really intending this when I made it, that the Luddite spy isn't Cameron but Sarah's terror of technology, which sometimes betrays her and which she sometimes betrays.
Recipient: Sanguinity
Vidder: Seekingferret
Music: "The Luddite Spy" by Polski Fiat
Summary: I can't deny I kissed the Luddite Spy
Notes:
The Luddite Spy from ronarfelq on Vimeo.
password: tscc
I stumbled across the song "Luddite Spy" and saw that it was only about 1:13 in length and had appropriate, ambiguously technophobic lyrics for a TSCC vid. So I set myself the challenge to see if I could assemble a vid in one night, by limiting myself to footage only from the pilot. I really like how it came out.
chaila is right, at least sometimes. TSCC sometimes just vids itself. I think there's probably a Sarah/Cameron read on the vid. I definitely seized on the places where the episode sexualizes Cameron, and cast her as the "Luddite Spy" that the narrator kisses in a skewed attempt at irony. She does confess to being freaked out by technology in a deleted scene from the pilot, in what is from the show an equally bad attempt at irony. But John kept drifting into my shots despite the lyrics not really supporting it, and ultimately I think this is probably best understood as a Sarah-centric story about the creation of their ensemble, which is founded on the three characters' inability to trust each other. When I first watched the Pilot I quit partway, and when I rewatched it again I thought it was weak, but rewatching it from the perspective of someone who knows where the show goes, I think it is stronger than it looks, if you focus on the complex interrelation between Sarah, her son, and her son's pet Terminator. Though I remember telling sanguinity after my first watch that this was my problem with the pilot- it was too interior, too intensely focused on those three characters, and I didn't want to watch a show that was only about them. It wasn't until we got Derek and Jesse and Riley, until we saw Martin Bedell and Alison from Palmdale and Lauren Fields and all of John's future soldiers, that I bought into the show. But watching the pilot from that perspective, knowing where John needs to end up and knowing that all three of them are working from limited information and trying to survive until John can get there, works. Sarah has to be her son's human support, since she can't let him depend only on machines, but she doesn't know how to protect him without Cameron, so she allies with the devil itself, and then spends much of the second season cursing herself for that decision. Oddly, I was flipping through songs about Luddites because I wanted to more directly confront the show's flirtations with actual Luddism. Sarah virtually never touches a computer herself. She always lets John do it, because she is scared shitless of machines. So one might say, though I wasn't really intending this when I made it, that the Luddite spy isn't Cameron but Sarah's terror of technology, which sometimes betrays her and which she sometimes betrays.
no subject
Yeah, I slipped that one in for silly. Obviously it is not evidence in the same way the other points I mentioned are.
Weaver deactivates Cameron?
Fine, Cameron is deactivated by SOMEONE while being in Weaver's secret lab. Is that better?
But I'm given more pause by John Henry haring off to the future
Only if he wasn't sent into the future by Weaver, which we have no evidence for except that Weaver said she didn't send him. The whole final scene in the lab consists of data that can't be easily explained, plus Weaver with an explanation that is just so tailored to make John want to believe it. And as soon as they leap into the future, Weaver disappears on her own plan.
"raise an emotionally secure Skynet that feels an inhibition about murder"
I'm not sure this is clearly her goal at all. It's something she keeps getting pushed toward by Sherman and Ellison, but with Sherman she was pursuing stability, getting John Henry out of a computing glitch in any way she could, and with Ellison she was pursuing controllability, a machine that wouldn't destroy things that were still useful to her like Sherman. It's easy to rationalize John Henry without framing the narrative the way she has led Ellison to believe it.
no subject
Someone who could have been Cameron, from what I can tell.
I'm not bothered by her disappearing once they're in the future: she's in an unknown future, in the middle of a resistance stronghold, and there's a dog. Deciding to be somewhere else for the moment seems reasonable, whatever her political affiliation.
However, I quite agree, we don't know what she's actually doing. NOT ENOUGH DATA, neither pro nor con.
For that matter, I don't even know what John believed himself to be doing, when he jumped into the future. All the data is too scant.