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Terminator 1.6: "Dungeons and Dragons" |
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008 |
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By John Keegan
Visit Critical Myth for an archive of John's TV Review archives, with more than 1100 entries.
| In a slight departure from the action thus far, this episode splits time between the “present” and Derek Reese’s experiences in the future, prior to his arrival in the past. While the story jumps all over the franchise timeline, it maintains a cohesive narrative throughout and sheds light on the future human resistance.
In the “present”, Sarah and John are still reeling from Derek’s presence and the possibility of losing him to his injuries. Charlie Dixon, Sarah’s onetime lovelist gets one hell of an education in the process of saving him. To his credit, he seems to take it rather well. John also shows some of his potential leadership by taking Derek’s life in his own hands. The effort yields immediate dividends Sarah learns that someone has been asking about her, which should put her on guard.
This also leads to one of the more interesting revelations. In "Heavy Metal”, Cameron kept some of the alloy necessary to the construction of terminators, hiding it from the Connors. In this episode, she keeps the CPU Chip extracted from a terminator, against Sarah’s orders. Clearly Cameron has her own agenda, but that agenda is completely unclear. After all, her orders came from the older John Connor, and she has already mentioned more than once that she doesn’t have to comply with Sarah’s wishes.
Derek’s memories of the future are equally intriguing. Derek was forced to endure some kind of unknown experience at the hands of a terminator, seemingly as part of a larger plan that included a jet engine. That the prisoners were eventually released, rather than killed, suggests something sinister. Presumably this will be important in upcoming episodes.
It is also confirmed, following up on the hint in the previous episode, that Derek knew quite a bit about Cameron (or her “model type”) in the future, and that several terminators had been reprogrammed by John Connor and the resistance. Future Cameron notes, during one action sequence, that sometimes the reprogrammed terminators “go bad”, and no one knows why. Taken in context with her decision to deceive Sarah, it would be easy to assume that Cameron is also “going bad”.
Derek’s crusade against the men and women who could have created SkyNet aligns nicely with Sarah’s mission, and as mentioned in previous reviews, his presence could shed light on Cameron and her seeming lack of disclosure. The family dynamic is maintained because Derek is John’s uncle (even if he doesn’t know it yet). Even if Cameron isn’t going bad, Derek will be questioning her every move, and that should make things more contentious. |
