"Sarah Connor" 1.08: A strong blend of elements
"Sarah Connor" 1.08: A strong blend of elements
"Vick's Chip" successfully folds a self-contained mission into the macro-plot.
Season 1 - Episode 8: “Vick’s Chip”
Original Airdate: March 3, 2008
Written By: Daniel T. Thomsen
Directed by: J. Miller Tobin
Plot Summary: Derek reveals that Cameron had kept the chip of T-888 Vick. John manages to scan the chip’s memory, leading the Connors to investigate the Terminator’s past posing as a husband to a developer of a networked traffic system. Cromartie, under the guise of Agent Kester, begins investigating local high schools in his pursuit of John Connor. Sarah attempts to get in touch with Mr. Sarkissian, the apparent current owner of The Turk.
Review:
One thing that becomes evident upon re-watch is that TSCC S1 feels like a different show week in and week out. As in, there is never really a set formula for what a paradigmatic TSCC episode should look like. Partially, this is due to the fact that the series has mostly ignored “Terminator-of-the-week” stories, focusing on its macro-narrative. But even full-blown serials tend to have specific recognizable storytelling rhythms. Game of Thrones, for instance, will follow around a bunch of different storylines week to week that occur more or less concurrently.
Lost primarily focuses on one character in each episode, providing a contained mini-story told over flashbacks. TSCC, meanwhile, has varied up its episodic structures and rhythms considerably from episode to episode to tell its stories in the most interesting way possible, giving its first season a degree of unpredictability and experimentation that seems, to me at least, fairly unorthodox for a network genre series of its time.
“Vick’s Chip” continues the experimental streak by telling a story from the perspective of the titular Terminator. When the episode cuts to Vick’s memories, the camera takes on a first-person POV. Despite the homevid style of presentation, the Vick POV scenes have a somewhat more abstract or dreamier feel to them than the rest of the episode. I would say that these scenes are filmed to intentionally convey a sense of emotional detachment inherent to Vick as a cyborg.*
*One could raise the question of why the memories don’t include the typical red Terminator monochromatic HUD, but it’s best to not nitpick.
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Vick often feels like a Tabula Rasa, onto whom his wife Barbara Chamberlain projects her emotions, with the style allowing for a focus on Barbara herself, rather than her Terminator husband. The episode doesn’t delve too deeply into who Barbara is character-wise, but it does suggest someone whose entire life has revolved around her work, with Vick being a perfect fit seemingly because he literally doesn’t have any purpose outside of ensuring the success of her project.
Everything he does is for her, providing the kind-of slavish devotion that most can only dream of in a partner. It seems a little baffling that Barbara would never realize that her husband isn’t human, but the show commits to the idea without any irony (Cameron’s allusion to her fooling John aside).
What is admirable is how the episode intentionally raises a lot of interesting questions here without definitively resolving them. Like, did T-Vick first meet and then marry Barbara by posing as a human, as the chilling shot of numerous mass-production T-Vick copies suggest? Or was there indeed a human Vick Chamberlain, whose appearance T-Vick duplicated before killing and replacing him? It also becomes evident that a Terminator should be capable of being a sexual partner to a human. But how exactly do Terminators simulate sexual activity? After all, shouldn’t their anatomy be so different as to preclude that?
I do believe the episode wants the viewer to actively ponder these questions, especially as the series begins to play up the sexual tension between John and Cameron. There are clear implications throughout “Vick’s Chip” that Cameron is learning how to better manipulate humans emotionally, and John is catching on to that. Underlining this is the fact that we also see her act more convincingly human in the high school scenes than she did back in “The Turk.” (“Does it make me look fat?” is one of my favorite Cameron lines, and a great callback to 1.03.)
Previously, the series wasn’t at its best when it tried to do a mission-of-the-week story, but “Vick’s Chip” also provides an idea of what a solid “mission-of-the-week” TSCC episode could look like going forward. Although the Barbara Chamberlain plot largely stands apart from the bigger Turk arc and comes to a conclusion by the end of the episode, it also helps build out the world of the series while making ample contributions to the macro-threads.
For one thing, it fills in precisely how Vick first wound up in that room with the dead Resistance fighters, an unresolved mystery that the show could’ve very well forgotten. For another, it certainly leaves open the possibility that a part of Vick had managed to escape onto the Internet. Not to mention that the very notion of Terminators being able to take over other computers or systems in their digital form in and of itself carries a lot of potential for future stories.*
*In fact, it’s kind-of disappointing that the show will not have explored this further in its second season.
“Vick’s Chip” also has the benefit of folding together the disparate central threads the series has sown in the previous episodes. John has to approach a classmate about getting the necessary tech he needs to analyze the chip, while Cameron uses their new friend to throw Cromartie off the scent when FBI Agent Kessler comes looking for John at school. This helps make the high school scenes considerably more interesting and relevant now that it’s crossing over with the Connors’ other life. Much like with the mission-of-the-week stuff, this suggests the series could’ve continued to better integrate the high school material into the macro-plot in the future.
On rewatch, however, the most interesting element of “Vick’s Chip” may very well be the Derek subplot. His desire to get rid of the Connor family Terminator seems to border on the irrational, and it is notable that he doesn’t come around to recognize Cameron’s worth, even after it is revealed that he was wrong to point fingers at her for what had happened to his men. Derek claims that he didn’t know that his men were checking on Barbara Chamberlain, which is possible though not probable. Sarah is correct to suspect that he’s lying, especially as he still attempts to goad Sarah into getting rid of Cameron when they upload her chip to the traffic system.
Reading through the lens that Derek realized that Cameron was his interrogator during the basement incident suggests that he knew all too well that Cameron wasn’t responsible for what happened to his team, but seized the opportunity to try to oust her anyway, as he fears that she will one day expose his betrayal to John. So, what motivates him throughout the episode is likely a combination of guilt, shame, and a desire for self-preservation. None of this is ever explicitly communicated to the audience, but it is certainly there.
By contrast, I am not certain, as to what’s going on with Sarah in this episode. It appears that the Barbara situation is getting to her personally, as she is tired of being unable to save people, much as she lost Andy, but the connection here feels hard to grasp. Because of that, the scene at the end, where Sarah confronts Derek about his having murdered Andy Goode, and then lied about it, which should be the emotional culmination of her arc, comes off as confusing rather than cathartic.
It seems the idea was that the Barbara/Vick story helped Sarah recognize that Derek is a capable liar and that he had indeed murdered Andy. But this is not something that has been communicated clearly to the viewer. After all, the question of who killed him didn’t even come up in “The Demon Hand,” and it appears that Sarah was unconcerned with whether or not Dimitri was the culprit, as she never tasked Cameron with questioning him about it.
Plus, the confrontation is further obfuscated by the fact that it comes on the heels of her conversation with Sarkissian, so… did Sarkissian tell her something that convinced her there was nobody other than Derek who could’ve killed Andy? In any case, it definitely feels like there is some missing connective tissue here.
Coming on the heels of such a masterful entry like “The Demon Hand,” the Vick episode can’t but help feel somewhat less than great. But while the Sarah stuff doesn’t work too well, pretty much everything else does. It’s a real shame that the show’s first season never did get more episodes, because “Vick’s Chip” was a good model of how the show could balance serialized and procedural storytelling.
Grade: B+Notes and Annotations:
There are clearly a lot of setups here that unfortunately would not come to fruition, especially with the high school. Cherri Westin’s reaction to the Wichita comments were originally part of a longer subplot, wherein apparently she was being blackmailed about an undisclosed incident that took place there before she moved to L.A. John would’ve apparently “run afoul” of this blackmailer sometime during the final episodes of the season, according to what Josh Friedman has said of the dropped subplot.
Barbara at one point alludes to Vick having a motorcycle incident. Might this have been the moment when T-Vick replaced real Vick, assuming the latter existed? Or might the incident be a reference to the time Sarah literally hit T-Vick with a motorcycle back in Episode 2, which happened a few weeks ago in the season’s timeline, I believe? How much time has passed since the Connors arrived there anyway? Barbara was clearly alive at the time Episode 2 took place.
One of the best illustrations of how the show has become much better at humor is the opening scene with Cromartie. Everything he says and does here is a riot, in part because he’s being very blunt and direct. “I have never smoked a little marijuana.” “Thank you for your cooperation.”
Shouldn’t Vick have gone into stasis after Barbara had completed her project, as he fulfilled his mission? Continuity error? Or did he have other missions we are not privy to?
I love the bit of Cromartie analyzing the snow globe at the beginning. It’s not really plot relevant or anything but it continues to show how Cromartie is still discovering the world and is a machine-out-of-time.
The fact that Vick, even reduced to just a chip, continues to pursue John attests to how scary Terminators are. Like, they really don’t give up.
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