The Luddite Spy

[seekingferret]

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:

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.

Comments

[chaila]

I object to the concession that I am only sometimes right! I am always right, obviously, even if TSCC only sometimes vids itself. :) I didn't even notice that you'd limited this to pilot footage!

Sarah virtually never touches a computer herself. She always lets John do it, because she is scared shitless of machines.

This is actually one thing that bugs me! Not that I think it isn't logical for her character. I think it mostly is, but I also think that she would see that this is utterly irresponsible. Like when she sees Andy Goode's AI and can't understand anything about it or explain any of it to John. It just seems like a bad plan, strategically, to allow herself to remain so ignorant of technology. I can handwave it, because it is born of her fear of machines, and because she just hands that part off to John (which makes for lots of fascinating contrasts between them, of course, given their different, er, comfort levels with machines). But still! It bugs me a bit.