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ship_manifestoTITLE: The Future Savior of Mankind and the Baby Robot Girl
AUTHOR: Mari
FANDOM: Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles
PAIRING: John Connor/Cameron Phillips
SPOILERS: Through the series.
DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to people other than myself.
The Characters:
John Connor, the John Connor that we see in the future, is a mystery throughout most of the Terminator franchise. In the first movie, he’s an ambiguous figure from the future who sends Kyle Reese back through time to impregnate Sarah Connor, his own mother, presumably with the knowledge that he’s killing his father in the doing so. In the second movie he’s a child who has never seen a Terminator prior to the opening credits and thinks that Sarah, imprisoned in a mental institution for trying to destroy the computer system called Skynet that will lead to the rise of the machines before it can be born, is insane. And in the series itself (as the series starts before the beginning of the third film and ignores its canon entirely, for the purposes of this essay I will be ignoring the third film also), we have yet another John Connor, this one in his late teens and struggling against the dual goals being offered to him: pretending to be normal long enough to avoid arousing suspicion, and at the same time preparing to become the savior that everyone keeps telling him about and that at the same time no one can nail down with any specifics. The specter of future John Connor hangs over everyone throughout the relevant films and the series: he’s half-messiah, half-general, a man who somehow manages to inspire a small army to follow and even die for him and who at the same time is bloody-minded and calculating (or perhaps merely desperate) enough to send that army to die in the first place. He isolates himself from his own people so that Cameron is by and large his only contact of import in the future; he’s fighting to destroy the machines, but because of his complicated upbringing he’s one of the very few who can see the potential personhood within them. It is under this shadow that the John Connor we see throughout the television series operates, and it informs everything that he does.
John Connor was raised by his mother, Sarah Connor, from birth onward with the knowledge that at some point he’s going to have to save humanity from the machines. While the series itself hints that he might save his species through a more complicated means than violence, and that he might not be able to do it alone, either, John’s training undeniably skews him towards being a warrior. He can creep through jungles, assemble and disassemble complicated weaponry in seconds flat, and can fight for his own life and the lives of others against machines many times over stronger than himself and still win. This is what his mother gave him.
The second half of John Connor’s dual nature arises from the contributions of a Terminator named Uncle Bob and a Terminator named Cameron Phillips, who trails eerily back and forth between sister and, it is hinted, future lover. While his mother’s first contact with the machines was being pursued by one bent upon killing her, John’s first contact was to see one machine trying to kill him and another ultimately sacrificing itself in order to save his life and by extension the world. Flash forward seven years and John is yet again placed in this eerie position: one Terminator infiltrates his high school and tries to kill him and another, Cameron, not only saves his life but says that she has been sent from the future in order to protect him and guide him towards being the leader that he has to become in order to be the paradoxical future self who will send Cameron back in the first place. As a result of this and his own interior character, John is the child of two worlds. He understands the necessity of violence and can carry it out when it is required of him, but he’s not violent by nature. (The series takes it for granted that in any given situation, Cameron, Sarah, and John’s uncle, Derek Reese, will be playing the most violent roles, and John the most nurturing one.) He’s one of a very few people who sees possible personhood in the Terminators, in spite of the fact that the only thing organic about them is the petri-grown skin that allows them to move among humans, and it’s in rejecting the binary that he becomes the hero that he’s going to have to be in order to avert the machine-led apocalypse before it begins.
John at the onset of the series is hardly the future messiah that will save humankind from the machines. Frankly, he’s kind of whiny at best and outright emotionally manipulative at worst. Even though Sarah has been teaching him to fight from an early age, he’s resistant to the entire idea of destiny, and repeatedly asks Sarah to take up the burden of saving the world from him. Sarah acquiesces to this request, but for multiple reasons she is not the person suited to this task, and it’s John’s arc across the course of the series’ two seasons to grow into the heroic role. By the end of the second season, not only is he no longer asking Sarah to take his burdens for him (an arc driven sharply forward by John having to kill a human in order to save Sarah’s own life in the second season opener), he’s deliberately traveling into the future without her in order to save Cameron’s. From the very first episode, however, it’s clear that John has an inescapable drive to help people, even when it’s obvious that doing so would jeopardize his own life and thus the lives of everyone that he’s supposed to save in the future. As much as John resents his destiny and tries to squirm away from it initially by laying it back onto Sarah’s shoulders, he also rejects the idea that a person can be heroic through some innate character rather than through their actions and frequently chafes visibly and loudly when his sense of compassion is being ordered to stand down in the face of pragmatism. In the second season, he becomes bitter as a result of having this calming buffer yanked away--the aforementioned killing of a human being in order to save Sarah’s life--and as a result distances himself from Sarah, Derek, and Cameron as a result of trying to come to terms with his own capacity for violence (unfortunately giving him a few moments of mostly just being a whiny prick until the show chooses to reveal the full circumstances of this shift to us), but the compassion always finds a way to come back through. In one of the last episodes of the series, it is simply taken for granted that John will stay behind to comfort the small girl who, so far as his family knows, is related to an agent of Skynet, while the women go forward to serve as the straightforward soldiers.
Cameron, meanwhile, though she is not present in any of the movies, nevertheless casts a shadow over the series’ future that is nearly as long and complicated as that of John himself. She is molded in the form of a kidnapped and murdered Resistance fighter and was in turn captured by John as part of an attempt to infiltrate the Resistance, and is subsequently reprogrammed to serve John’s own ends. What those ends might be is a question that the series never fully answers, nor does it fully answer the question of just how deep the programming that John instilled in Cameron goes or whether he in fact programmed her to have free will in the first place. When Cameron and John first meet, she is pretending to be human, and doing it so effectively that even John, who has a fair idea of what to look out for from the enemy by that point, is fooled by her. This will prove to be an ongoing theme in their relationship. When she does choose to reveal to John what she already is, it is so that she can save his life, and deliver a message: she has been sent by his future self in order to protect him so that he can continue the job of trying to halt Judgment Day. That she is being sent back without any supervision in spite of the fact that John as a teenager is presumably much more vulnerable than he will be as a battle-hardened adult man either speaks tremendously highly of John’s faith in his own computer skills, his faith in Cameron qua Cameron, or both. Furthermore, Cameron is less than forthcoming about the exact details of her mission to protect John, whether it’s the only one that she came back through time with, or even how much of it has been detailed to her by the future John and how much is left to her own discretion. Over the course of the series, she admits to John that she sometimes lies to him, and either can’t or won’t say whether she’s doing it in the service of him or purely herself. There are more glimpses of what Cameron is like in the future than there are of John Connor, as she is one of his most trusted companions and is often sent out to be his face when dealing with his lieutenants or, by the second season, the odd machine who might be talked into going rogue and joining the side of the Resistance. That John Connor trusts a piece of metal more than he trusts most--perhaps all--human beings is something remarked upon bitterly by more than one character.
Cameron’s own personhood remains an enigma from the time that she reveals herself to be the metal forward, though the show drops several hints throughout the course of its two year run, both by way of Cameron and the season two character Catherine Weaver, suggesting that machines can be capable of sentience every bit as complex as that of the humans. She is incredibly blunt, and many times she does not see the point in following human mores. (Given how ably she imitated them when it was required of her, it is difficult to argue that she does not at least understand them.) She knows that John does or did have a romantic/sexual interest in her that he’s been suppressing since he discovered what she is, and she is not above manipulating that when it suits either her own ends or the ends of her mission. Whether or not she has an emotional investment in him in return is an open question, but the last episode of the series, wherein Cameron apologized to John for allowing another possibly sentient machine, John Henry, to take her central processing chip--essentially, her mind and soul--when there seemed to be little chance that her apology could work in her own self-interest points towards yes.
Relevant Interactions:
John and Cameron meet in the very first episode of the series, and John expresses an immediate interest in her before either he or the audience knows that she’s a machine. Cameron flirts back with him ably and even gets him to admit that his father is dead, though John does not give her any of the relevant details outside of the fact that Kyle Reese was a soldier. When another Terminator enters John’s classroom, reveals himself, and attempts to kill him, Cameron reveals herself as well and saves John’s life by running over the Terminator with a stolen vehicle and delivering the iconic line of the series, “Come with me if you want to live.” She later saves the life of Sarah, as well, by imitating John’s voice and drawing Terminator fire into her own body (she can handle it much better than a frail human can.) Though he distances himself from his attraction her, right from the beginning John is Cameron’s strongest defender, speaking out for her when Sarah and Derek question her loyalties and asking her repeated questions about why she’s different, explaining human reasoning to her and speaking to her as someone capable of learning them. John, though he tries to suppress his attraction to Cameron once he realizes what she is, betrays himself through his facial expressions when she touches his neck in order to gauge his stress levels, gives her gifts of diamonds that might be sarcastic but also makes one wonder what, precisely, he thinks that a robot needs with a precious gemstone. In the season one finale, Cameron’s help is needed to shut down a city-wide traffic system that looks as though it’s a likely future launching point for Skynet. This involves cutting her processing chip from her head, rendering her helpless for so long as it’s separate from her body, and inserting it into the traffic grid, essentially introducing Cameron as a saboteur. The trust has to run both ways in order for this plan to work: Cameron has to trust that John will come back and place her consciousness into her body again, and John has to trust that Cameron will shut down baby-Skynet rather than giving it a leg up.
The plan works beautifully, by the way. The course of true love does seem as if it will run smooth, albeit in a very creepy way, until Cameron contracts a slight case of blowing up.
Since she’s a Terminator, naturally, this doesn’t seem to have much immediate effect upon her outside of the aesthetic. However, it soon becomes clear that the explosion has damaged a part of her processing chip, eliminating Future John’s programming and returning her to her original mission to terminate John Connor. She nearly succeeds in doing so, until John and his family manage to pin her in place by essentially running her over with a car long enough for John to extract her chip for repairs. (After Derek and Sarah spent large amounts of time trying to convince John that Cameron simply had to be destroyed, and him refusing and sticking with a plan to save her instead.) As John is extracting the chip, Cameron begins crying and pleading with him in a realistically human enough fashion to make clear once again that she is far better at imitating human mores than she simply cares to do in normal situations, and ends by telling John that she loves him. In this instance, she is almost certainly saying whatever she needs to say out of self-interest. John still pauses before he removes the chip, repairs the damage, and returns Cameron back to the ally that she had been before the explosion.
There’s an undeniable change in John and Cameron’s relationship throughout most of the second season, though. John is both grieving his own role in another person’s death and wary of Cameron since she has betrayed him once before, and he tries to cope with this soul-sickness by deliberately distancing himself from both Cameron and Sarah. Cameron is an easy target, so he lashes out at her for her lack of humanity because his own sense of humanity is hurting, and forgets that the entirety of all of her other interactions with her prior to her being blown up and damaged ought to have shown him that she does think and possibly feel, she just doesn’t do it according to human markers. Meanwhile, he becomes first acquainted and then romantically involved with a girl named Riley who, unbeknownst to him, was actually sent from the future by lieutenants of John’s who are wary and fearful of the close tie that he has with Cameron. Riley is the antithesis of Cameron: where Cameron is lithe, warrior-like, and hard, Riley is curvaceous and soft (appearances are misleading: Riley lives in a world ruled by machines bent on the extermination of her race, and the weak are weeded out quickly), where Cameron is difficult to read and keeps her own counsel, Riley is friendly and emotionally open, where Cameron has re-stamped herself as machine in John’s mind, Riley is wholly and undeniably human.
Cameron, meanwhile, is undergoing her own continuing evolution as a result of the events of the second season premiere. While John withdraws from her, she does not pursue, and instead begins asking questions about what happens when she’s gone, if she dies. It should be noted at this point that one of the most basic markers of a complex civilization among archeologists is the practice of burying the dead and evidence of interest in an afterlife. Furthermore, the damage done to Cameron in the explosion does not seem limited to her chip; she also seems to have lingering damage in her motor skills, accidentally killing a bird simply because her titanium-strong hands twitched at the wrong moment outside of her control. And then, on that troubling note, Riley is murdered by Jesse, her companion from the future and Derek’s paramour. The audience knows who the murderer is immediately; as she has been trying to separate Riley from John for weeks, trading upon the sexual fascination that she knows John still has with her form in order to do it, and with her lingering hardware malfunctions, it is Cameron who becomes the most likely suspect among John and his family. Again, Sarah and Derek favor destroying Cameron immediately, and again John refuses, though this time his faith in Cameron is far shakier. She does little to soothe him when, in the process of imitating Riley’s voice over the phone to her foster family in order to make it appear as though she’s still alive and draw attention away from John, Cameron takes the opportunity to say several emotionally provocative things to John, diverting from their plan to simply imply that Riley was still alive and get out. Unlike the season premiere, it’s not clear that Cameron is even lying. She might have some reason to worry for her continued well-being, given that John is essentially her only ally at that point, but she’s not pinned between two cars and on the verge of losing her chip this time. Neither is she doing it to be cruel: Terminators are killers, but they are never cruel.
Shortly after diverting Riley’s foster family, John discovers that Jesse is Riley’s murderer, and reveals that he knew that Riley was playing him for longer than he chose to let on. He apologizes to Cameron for doubting her, surprising Cameron as much as he surprises Sarah, who is also present. From this point forward, John’s behavior towards Cameron returns much more to what it was through S1. As a side note, he also forgave Riley for her duplicity almost as soon as he knew of it; by this point in the second season, John is starting to leave his shell-shock behind and become once again the compassionate soul that he needs to be. There is a later, erotically charged scene in which John is ostensibly checking Cameron’s core to make certain that she is not leaking nuclear materials that will lead to Sarah’s death by cancer that involves Cameron taking her shirt off and John lying on top of her. Of course, he’s also making an incision beneath her breast with a scalpel and rooting around where her ribcage ought to me. My show does not flinch from the creepy. After ascertaining that Cameron’s core is working as it should, John and Cameron embark to aid in a mission to confront one Catherine Weaver, who they believe is working on a robot that will lead to the rise of Skynet. That robot is John Henry, also known as Chromartie, who nearly killed the family several times before they believed they had destroyed him, and Catherine Weaver is a Terminator herself who is actually working to avert the future apocalypse, but that is all beside the point. For reasons that are never explained, while left alone with John Henry, Cameron allows him to take her chip and then bolt for the future. She leaves behind an enigmatic message for John: I’m sorry, John flashing over and over again across a series of computer screens. She was lying in the season premiere, her motives were dubious when she was imitating Riley, but here she appears to be telling the truth. The series ends with John bolting for the future himself to save her and discovering instead that he and his family have altered it just enough so that the apocalypse still rolls forward, but the details have changed. He is not the savior of humanity, and Cameron does not exist. The girl whom she murdered is still alive; John’s face lights up initially when he sees Cameron’s form alive and well, only to fall when the girl leans over and pets a dog, confirming her humanity. What he has been avoiding all season becomes clear: John Connor loves the metal, and with her message left behind, Cameron loves him.
The Why:
Bluntly put, the binary of humanity vs. machine adhered to by Sarah and Derek cannot end in anything other than holocaust. They seek to destroy every single machine and technological advance that looks as though it could lead to the rise of sentient machines. This is an impossible task when one of the biggest and most exciting avenues of research in computer science right now is AI. Everyone wants to make smart machines that are capable of thinking on their own. Sarah and Derek’s approach is akin to fighting a hydra.
It has, however, been stated by the series that Skynet comes online and then attacks because it fears for its own safety. The way to avoid the destruction of humanity is then to destroy the binary rather than the machines and stop thinking of it in terms of Us Vs. Them so that Skynet does not attack in the first place. There are three machines in the series which hint at the possibilities of sentient machines capable of moral judgment: Cameron, John Henry, and Catherine Weaver. Catherine Weaver is more human in her affect than Cameron is, but John’s acceptance upon her builds upon his acceptance of Cameron. John Henry’s own John Connor is the small girl, Savannah Weaver. (On a non-shippy note, I would have liked to see who the central leader of the Resistance was in S3 if it was not John. I like to think that it was Savannah.) It is Cameron who pushes John to stop thinking of machines solely as the frightening other, and it is John who teaches Cameron how humans behave and fills in the moral blanks for her that her programming alone does not prepare her for. John Connor is a human that Cameron feels an emotional attachment towards, making her refuse to destroy him even when her own self-interest demands it. It’s a start.
The Resources and the Recs:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
scc_johncameron: Catch-all comm for fic, discussion, fanart, and vids dedicated to John/Connor. Most of the gems that I’ve found came from this comm.
terminatorfic: Dedicated to the franchise as a whole rather than Sarah Connor Chronicles, but they have a ficathon starting up soon, and they’ve explicitly stated that SCC works are welcome.
scc_fic: General SCC fic comm that still features a lot of John/Cameron.
Fifty Moments in a Fractured Time by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deepblueql. Creepy and moving, as John/Cameron should be.
Untitled bymelissa_pbfan. A kiss is just a kiss, until it’s not.
all glory rites, trojan kings byfated_addiction. When Allison leaves, Cameron is born. Does a great job of sex-that’s-not in the same vein as the show.
Delilah byaelysian. She’s poison in every form.
And a vid. Encapsulates everything about John and Cameron and their whole twisted, glorious...thing.
AUTHOR: Mari
FANDOM: Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles
PAIRING: John Connor/Cameron Phillips
SPOILERS: Through the series.
DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to people other than myself.
The Characters:
John Connor, the John Connor that we see in the future, is a mystery throughout most of the Terminator franchise. In the first movie, he’s an ambiguous figure from the future who sends Kyle Reese back through time to impregnate Sarah Connor, his own mother, presumably with the knowledge that he’s killing his father in the doing so. In the second movie he’s a child who has never seen a Terminator prior to the opening credits and thinks that Sarah, imprisoned in a mental institution for trying to destroy the computer system called Skynet that will lead to the rise of the machines before it can be born, is insane. And in the series itself (as the series starts before the beginning of the third film and ignores its canon entirely, for the purposes of this essay I will be ignoring the third film also), we have yet another John Connor, this one in his late teens and struggling against the dual goals being offered to him: pretending to be normal long enough to avoid arousing suspicion, and at the same time preparing to become the savior that everyone keeps telling him about and that at the same time no one can nail down with any specifics. The specter of future John Connor hangs over everyone throughout the relevant films and the series: he’s half-messiah, half-general, a man who somehow manages to inspire a small army to follow and even die for him and who at the same time is bloody-minded and calculating (or perhaps merely desperate) enough to send that army to die in the first place. He isolates himself from his own people so that Cameron is by and large his only contact of import in the future; he’s fighting to destroy the machines, but because of his complicated upbringing he’s one of the very few who can see the potential personhood within them. It is under this shadow that the John Connor we see throughout the television series operates, and it informs everything that he does.
John Connor was raised by his mother, Sarah Connor, from birth onward with the knowledge that at some point he’s going to have to save humanity from the machines. While the series itself hints that he might save his species through a more complicated means than violence, and that he might not be able to do it alone, either, John’s training undeniably skews him towards being a warrior. He can creep through jungles, assemble and disassemble complicated weaponry in seconds flat, and can fight for his own life and the lives of others against machines many times over stronger than himself and still win. This is what his mother gave him.
The second half of John Connor’s dual nature arises from the contributions of a Terminator named Uncle Bob and a Terminator named Cameron Phillips, who trails eerily back and forth between sister and, it is hinted, future lover. While his mother’s first contact with the machines was being pursued by one bent upon killing her, John’s first contact was to see one machine trying to kill him and another ultimately sacrificing itself in order to save his life and by extension the world. Flash forward seven years and John is yet again placed in this eerie position: one Terminator infiltrates his high school and tries to kill him and another, Cameron, not only saves his life but says that she has been sent from the future in order to protect him and guide him towards being the leader that he has to become in order to be the paradoxical future self who will send Cameron back in the first place. As a result of this and his own interior character, John is the child of two worlds. He understands the necessity of violence and can carry it out when it is required of him, but he’s not violent by nature. (The series takes it for granted that in any given situation, Cameron, Sarah, and John’s uncle, Derek Reese, will be playing the most violent roles, and John the most nurturing one.) He’s one of a very few people who sees possible personhood in the Terminators, in spite of the fact that the only thing organic about them is the petri-grown skin that allows them to move among humans, and it’s in rejecting the binary that he becomes the hero that he’s going to have to be in order to avert the machine-led apocalypse before it begins.
John at the onset of the series is hardly the future messiah that will save humankind from the machines. Frankly, he’s kind of whiny at best and outright emotionally manipulative at worst. Even though Sarah has been teaching him to fight from an early age, he’s resistant to the entire idea of destiny, and repeatedly asks Sarah to take up the burden of saving the world from him. Sarah acquiesces to this request, but for multiple reasons she is not the person suited to this task, and it’s John’s arc across the course of the series’ two seasons to grow into the heroic role. By the end of the second season, not only is he no longer asking Sarah to take his burdens for him (an arc driven sharply forward by John having to kill a human in order to save Sarah’s own life in the second season opener), he’s deliberately traveling into the future without her in order to save Cameron’s. From the very first episode, however, it’s clear that John has an inescapable drive to help people, even when it’s obvious that doing so would jeopardize his own life and thus the lives of everyone that he’s supposed to save in the future. As much as John resents his destiny and tries to squirm away from it initially by laying it back onto Sarah’s shoulders, he also rejects the idea that a person can be heroic through some innate character rather than through their actions and frequently chafes visibly and loudly when his sense of compassion is being ordered to stand down in the face of pragmatism. In the second season, he becomes bitter as a result of having this calming buffer yanked away--the aforementioned killing of a human being in order to save Sarah’s life--and as a result distances himself from Sarah, Derek, and Cameron as a result of trying to come to terms with his own capacity for violence (unfortunately giving him a few moments of mostly just being a whiny prick until the show chooses to reveal the full circumstances of this shift to us), but the compassion always finds a way to come back through. In one of the last episodes of the series, it is simply taken for granted that John will stay behind to comfort the small girl who, so far as his family knows, is related to an agent of Skynet, while the women go forward to serve as the straightforward soldiers.
Cameron, meanwhile, though she is not present in any of the movies, nevertheless casts a shadow over the series’ future that is nearly as long and complicated as that of John himself. She is molded in the form of a kidnapped and murdered Resistance fighter and was in turn captured by John as part of an attempt to infiltrate the Resistance, and is subsequently reprogrammed to serve John’s own ends. What those ends might be is a question that the series never fully answers, nor does it fully answer the question of just how deep the programming that John instilled in Cameron goes or whether he in fact programmed her to have free will in the first place. When Cameron and John first meet, she is pretending to be human, and doing it so effectively that even John, who has a fair idea of what to look out for from the enemy by that point, is fooled by her. This will prove to be an ongoing theme in their relationship. When she does choose to reveal to John what she already is, it is so that she can save his life, and deliver a message: she has been sent by his future self in order to protect him so that he can continue the job of trying to halt Judgment Day. That she is being sent back without any supervision in spite of the fact that John as a teenager is presumably much more vulnerable than he will be as a battle-hardened adult man either speaks tremendously highly of John’s faith in his own computer skills, his faith in Cameron qua Cameron, or both. Furthermore, Cameron is less than forthcoming about the exact details of her mission to protect John, whether it’s the only one that she came back through time with, or even how much of it has been detailed to her by the future John and how much is left to her own discretion. Over the course of the series, she admits to John that she sometimes lies to him, and either can’t or won’t say whether she’s doing it in the service of him or purely herself. There are more glimpses of what Cameron is like in the future than there are of John Connor, as she is one of his most trusted companions and is often sent out to be his face when dealing with his lieutenants or, by the second season, the odd machine who might be talked into going rogue and joining the side of the Resistance. That John Connor trusts a piece of metal more than he trusts most--perhaps all--human beings is something remarked upon bitterly by more than one character.
Cameron’s own personhood remains an enigma from the time that she reveals herself to be the metal forward, though the show drops several hints throughout the course of its two year run, both by way of Cameron and the season two character Catherine Weaver, suggesting that machines can be capable of sentience every bit as complex as that of the humans. She is incredibly blunt, and many times she does not see the point in following human mores. (Given how ably she imitated them when it was required of her, it is difficult to argue that she does not at least understand them.) She knows that John does or did have a romantic/sexual interest in her that he’s been suppressing since he discovered what she is, and she is not above manipulating that when it suits either her own ends or the ends of her mission. Whether or not she has an emotional investment in him in return is an open question, but the last episode of the series, wherein Cameron apologized to John for allowing another possibly sentient machine, John Henry, to take her central processing chip--essentially, her mind and soul--when there seemed to be little chance that her apology could work in her own self-interest points towards yes.
Relevant Interactions:
John and Cameron meet in the very first episode of the series, and John expresses an immediate interest in her before either he or the audience knows that she’s a machine. Cameron flirts back with him ably and even gets him to admit that his father is dead, though John does not give her any of the relevant details outside of the fact that Kyle Reese was a soldier. When another Terminator enters John’s classroom, reveals himself, and attempts to kill him, Cameron reveals herself as well and saves John’s life by running over the Terminator with a stolen vehicle and delivering the iconic line of the series, “Come with me if you want to live.” She later saves the life of Sarah, as well, by imitating John’s voice and drawing Terminator fire into her own body (she can handle it much better than a frail human can.) Though he distances himself from his attraction her, right from the beginning John is Cameron’s strongest defender, speaking out for her when Sarah and Derek question her loyalties and asking her repeated questions about why she’s different, explaining human reasoning to her and speaking to her as someone capable of learning them. John, though he tries to suppress his attraction to Cameron once he realizes what she is, betrays himself through his facial expressions when she touches his neck in order to gauge his stress levels, gives her gifts of diamonds that might be sarcastic but also makes one wonder what, precisely, he thinks that a robot needs with a precious gemstone. In the season one finale, Cameron’s help is needed to shut down a city-wide traffic system that looks as though it’s a likely future launching point for Skynet. This involves cutting her processing chip from her head, rendering her helpless for so long as it’s separate from her body, and inserting it into the traffic grid, essentially introducing Cameron as a saboteur. The trust has to run both ways in order for this plan to work: Cameron has to trust that John will come back and place her consciousness into her body again, and John has to trust that Cameron will shut down baby-Skynet rather than giving it a leg up.
The plan works beautifully, by the way. The course of true love does seem as if it will run smooth, albeit in a very creepy way, until Cameron contracts a slight case of blowing up.
Since she’s a Terminator, naturally, this doesn’t seem to have much immediate effect upon her outside of the aesthetic. However, it soon becomes clear that the explosion has damaged a part of her processing chip, eliminating Future John’s programming and returning her to her original mission to terminate John Connor. She nearly succeeds in doing so, until John and his family manage to pin her in place by essentially running her over with a car long enough for John to extract her chip for repairs. (After Derek and Sarah spent large amounts of time trying to convince John that Cameron simply had to be destroyed, and him refusing and sticking with a plan to save her instead.) As John is extracting the chip, Cameron begins crying and pleading with him in a realistically human enough fashion to make clear once again that she is far better at imitating human mores than she simply cares to do in normal situations, and ends by telling John that she loves him. In this instance, she is almost certainly saying whatever she needs to say out of self-interest. John still pauses before he removes the chip, repairs the damage, and returns Cameron back to the ally that she had been before the explosion.
There’s an undeniable change in John and Cameron’s relationship throughout most of the second season, though. John is both grieving his own role in another person’s death and wary of Cameron since she has betrayed him once before, and he tries to cope with this soul-sickness by deliberately distancing himself from both Cameron and Sarah. Cameron is an easy target, so he lashes out at her for her lack of humanity because his own sense of humanity is hurting, and forgets that the entirety of all of her other interactions with her prior to her being blown up and damaged ought to have shown him that she does think and possibly feel, she just doesn’t do it according to human markers. Meanwhile, he becomes first acquainted and then romantically involved with a girl named Riley who, unbeknownst to him, was actually sent from the future by lieutenants of John’s who are wary and fearful of the close tie that he has with Cameron. Riley is the antithesis of Cameron: where Cameron is lithe, warrior-like, and hard, Riley is curvaceous and soft (appearances are misleading: Riley lives in a world ruled by machines bent on the extermination of her race, and the weak are weeded out quickly), where Cameron is difficult to read and keeps her own counsel, Riley is friendly and emotionally open, where Cameron has re-stamped herself as machine in John’s mind, Riley is wholly and undeniably human.
Cameron, meanwhile, is undergoing her own continuing evolution as a result of the events of the second season premiere. While John withdraws from her, she does not pursue, and instead begins asking questions about what happens when she’s gone, if she dies. It should be noted at this point that one of the most basic markers of a complex civilization among archeologists is the practice of burying the dead and evidence of interest in an afterlife. Furthermore, the damage done to Cameron in the explosion does not seem limited to her chip; she also seems to have lingering damage in her motor skills, accidentally killing a bird simply because her titanium-strong hands twitched at the wrong moment outside of her control. And then, on that troubling note, Riley is murdered by Jesse, her companion from the future and Derek’s paramour. The audience knows who the murderer is immediately; as she has been trying to separate Riley from John for weeks, trading upon the sexual fascination that she knows John still has with her form in order to do it, and with her lingering hardware malfunctions, it is Cameron who becomes the most likely suspect among John and his family. Again, Sarah and Derek favor destroying Cameron immediately, and again John refuses, though this time his faith in Cameron is far shakier. She does little to soothe him when, in the process of imitating Riley’s voice over the phone to her foster family in order to make it appear as though she’s still alive and draw attention away from John, Cameron takes the opportunity to say several emotionally provocative things to John, diverting from their plan to simply imply that Riley was still alive and get out. Unlike the season premiere, it’s not clear that Cameron is even lying. She might have some reason to worry for her continued well-being, given that John is essentially her only ally at that point, but she’s not pinned between two cars and on the verge of losing her chip this time. Neither is she doing it to be cruel: Terminators are killers, but they are never cruel.
Shortly after diverting Riley’s foster family, John discovers that Jesse is Riley’s murderer, and reveals that he knew that Riley was playing him for longer than he chose to let on. He apologizes to Cameron for doubting her, surprising Cameron as much as he surprises Sarah, who is also present. From this point forward, John’s behavior towards Cameron returns much more to what it was through S1. As a side note, he also forgave Riley for her duplicity almost as soon as he knew of it; by this point in the second season, John is starting to leave his shell-shock behind and become once again the compassionate soul that he needs to be. There is a later, erotically charged scene in which John is ostensibly checking Cameron’s core to make certain that she is not leaking nuclear materials that will lead to Sarah’s death by cancer that involves Cameron taking her shirt off and John lying on top of her. Of course, he’s also making an incision beneath her breast with a scalpel and rooting around where her ribcage ought to me. My show does not flinch from the creepy. After ascertaining that Cameron’s core is working as it should, John and Cameron embark to aid in a mission to confront one Catherine Weaver, who they believe is working on a robot that will lead to the rise of Skynet. That robot is John Henry, also known as Chromartie, who nearly killed the family several times before they believed they had destroyed him, and Catherine Weaver is a Terminator herself who is actually working to avert the future apocalypse, but that is all beside the point. For reasons that are never explained, while left alone with John Henry, Cameron allows him to take her chip and then bolt for the future. She leaves behind an enigmatic message for John: I’m sorry, John flashing over and over again across a series of computer screens. She was lying in the season premiere, her motives were dubious when she was imitating Riley, but here she appears to be telling the truth. The series ends with John bolting for the future himself to save her and discovering instead that he and his family have altered it just enough so that the apocalypse still rolls forward, but the details have changed. He is not the savior of humanity, and Cameron does not exist. The girl whom she murdered is still alive; John’s face lights up initially when he sees Cameron’s form alive and well, only to fall when the girl leans over and pets a dog, confirming her humanity. What he has been avoiding all season becomes clear: John Connor loves the metal, and with her message left behind, Cameron loves him.
The Why:
Bluntly put, the binary of humanity vs. machine adhered to by Sarah and Derek cannot end in anything other than holocaust. They seek to destroy every single machine and technological advance that looks as though it could lead to the rise of sentient machines. This is an impossible task when one of the biggest and most exciting avenues of research in computer science right now is AI. Everyone wants to make smart machines that are capable of thinking on their own. Sarah and Derek’s approach is akin to fighting a hydra.
It has, however, been stated by the series that Skynet comes online and then attacks because it fears for its own safety. The way to avoid the destruction of humanity is then to destroy the binary rather than the machines and stop thinking of it in terms of Us Vs. Them so that Skynet does not attack in the first place. There are three machines in the series which hint at the possibilities of sentient machines capable of moral judgment: Cameron, John Henry, and Catherine Weaver. Catherine Weaver is more human in her affect than Cameron is, but John’s acceptance upon her builds upon his acceptance of Cameron. John Henry’s own John Connor is the small girl, Savannah Weaver. (On a non-shippy note, I would have liked to see who the central leader of the Resistance was in S3 if it was not John. I like to think that it was Savannah.) It is Cameron who pushes John to stop thinking of machines solely as the frightening other, and it is John who teaches Cameron how humans behave and fills in the moral blanks for her that her programming alone does not prepare her for. John Connor is a human that Cameron feels an emotional attachment towards, making her refuse to destroy him even when her own self-interest demands it. It’s a start.
The Resources and the Recs:
scc_johncameron: Catch-all comm for fic, discussion, fanart, and vids dedicated to John/Connor. Most of the gems that I’ve found came from this comm.terminatorfic: Dedicated to the franchise as a whole rather than Sarah Connor Chronicles, but they have a ficathon starting up soon, and they’ve explicitly stated that SCC works are welcome.scc_fic: General SCC fic comm that still features a lot of John/Cameron.Fifty Moments in a Fractured Time by
deepblueql. Creepy and moving, as John/Cameron should be.Untitled by
melissa_pbfan. A kiss is just a kiss, until it’s not.all glory rites, trojan kings by
fated_addiction. When Allison leaves, Cameron is born. Does a great job of sex-that’s-not in the same vein as the show.Delilah by
aelysian. She’s poison in every form.And a vid. Encapsulates everything about John and Cameron and their whole twisted, glorious...thing.
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