Spontaneous Musings

I'm loving my science-fiction tv shows this year, they are all character driven, crunchy, cult fests, with prickly ambiguous characters.

This past week's BSG and Sarah Connor - which selenak did an excellent review of, as did aycheb - regarding Sarah Connor. Luckily for me, my flist mostly likes the same weird ass sci-fi that I do. Of course that's why I wandered online to begin with - to find people who liked this stuff. No one that I know offline can abide it, and those that do love it - have 0 interest in discussing it beyond - yes cool, or nah, horrid bad episode that was way off course. Sort of boring. I can watch any number of tv shows and get those responses. This post is about Sarah Connor because it would be too long to do both.

Sarah Connor Chronicles

Watching this episode reminded me a great deal of the Tony Hillerman novels I read in the 1990s as well as stories my Granny used to tell me. My Granny spent a lot of time with Native Americans in Arizona and the West during the 1970s-1990s. The Navajho and Papago tribes taught her how to do bead work in their own tradition. Then she, upon request, taught their descendants how to do it. My Granny isn't Native American - she's Scotch Irish and German.
But she loved the West. One of the items she learned how to make was a dream catcher.
She gave my parents one, and gave me a pair of dream catcher earrings - studded with turquoise and silver thread, with a sliver feather floating at the end. Complete with a flaw in the bead work. That's how you can tell the difference between Native American work and those who don't know it or haven't learned it from the Native Americans. They deliberately make one mistake - the mistake lets the bad luck out, it makes sure that you don't keep the bad karma in the work. It is also to honor the gods or God or nature - which is also imperfect for the much the same reason. Perfection breeds disaster or so they believed.

A dream catcher has a hole in the center to let in the good dreams, and webs to catch the bad. Usually there are stones - turquoise and others - representing bad dreams that have already been caught. A feather is at the bottom to let the good dreams flow towards us. Or at least that's how I remember the legend.

In this episode - we are in Sarah Connor's head, a woman plagued with insomina, who has not slept. In a sort of psuedo-dream scape. The territory is New Mexico/Southern Cal - the desert, the realm of the Native American tribes and their gods and demons, while Sarah's roam in her future nightmares within glass buildings, and clean hospital corridors.


Sarah three episodes ago, killed a man. Or so she believed. And he, almost, killed her. Since that time, perhaps even, a bit before, she has been in a semi-conscious state or what the natives call dream-walk, in Australia, the aboriginals would call it the dreaming. Wounded, half-crazed with worry and fear, not to mention guilt, she is moving by pure adrenaline.
Until, she gets caught, and when she does she passes "coyote" - a sort of joker character in Native American myth. The fool or the liar, the dream worker. Much as Loki is in Norse Myth.
He takes her inside the dreamscape - where she can no longer tell which is which.

In the dreamscape - she has two captors - one in what is her reality, the guy who captures her, and the other a nurse who is in reality the Terminator. Both are representatives of SKynet. Except the real one is human, with human choices, human motivations, and human desires. He is one of Sarah's kind. And unlike the nurse - he is cruel, torturing Sarah, threatening her son. The nurse is more hidden, less obvious, and is stealing Sarah's dreams, her subconscious, her thought waves, copying them, tracking them, and the info they represent. Both are hunting info. Both are using syringes to get it. But only the nurse in Sarah's dreamscape is succeeding. And the dreamscape is clean, with lousey food, but loved ones to help Sarah, to save her. While the reality is dirty, cold, no food, no drink, and no one to rescue her. She is alone.

In the dreamscape - Sarah encounters Coyote in the form of a janitor, complete with tattoo, and he provides her with a dream-catcher. Her roommate who stands next to the dreamcatcher fears burning to death and burns, literally, and it is unclear if it is her fault - a lit cigarette. Just as Sarah is slowly killing herself with guilt and no sleep. The toll of fighting Skynet...of protecting John is wearing at her. The roommate in a way is a reflection of herself. Her own quilt, her own fears.

The demon woman from Native American mytho, who invades one's dreams to steal their souls, themselves, is a terminator -stealing, copying Sarah's thoughts. The myth is twisted by science. Much as we now fear alien abductions, while the ancients feared demon ones. The fear is the same, the culprit is the only thing that has changed. But Sarah's fear - her demon woman, is we know real - and well, living a few miles north, with the first terminator created - another John Henry and another mother, willing to kill to protect her young.
In the dream, the nurse/demon woman sits on Sarah's chest and tries to take her consciousness, but her captor wakes her and she finds herself tackling him instead. This battle unlike the other - she actually wins. She can take him. And this time, she does end his life - knowing what he is, more than a traitor to humanity, a killer. He's broken, unable to return to his own. Caught by the demon woman in her web. While Sarah escapes into the red laced nightscape, passing the coyote, with barely a glance, going home. Not quite at peace, but not quite as tormented by what she had done.

The episode deals with the murky feelings of killing someone, regardless of why you did it.
The person you killed stays with you, haunting and hunting you inside your dreams. The quilt you feel becomes a type of demon woman eating away at your sleep, burning you up inside.
Sarah resolves the guilt and banishes the demon woman of her nightmares - by confronting head on the man she believed she killed, and ironically, actually being forced to kill him. Confronting the reasons why it happened - in both the dreamscape - where her son shoots the nurse, and she, holds a gun to the nurse's head, but hesitates too long, long enough for the nurse to kill her son. In reality, she does not hesitate, she kills to protect him - just as Catherine Weaver killed a whole warehouse full of people to protect her's.

She's not happy about it. There's a sour taste in her mouth. But she also knows, now, she had no choice. The choices she had are long past. They can't be undone. And the dream is over, resolved. With hope, she can sleep at last, if not truly rest.