jmtorres | (no subject)

echan and I are watching Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles and I was pondering what makes John Connor so important (because as a teenager he is himself starting to ask what the fuck does he do in the future that's so important) and I had the thought, what if because of the absurd circumstances of his origin, he can hold multiple timelines in his head, and that's what's so important, future!John and Skynet are locked in this chess match of strategic time travel moves.

The show is getting pretty heavily into "you're not the person I knew, you're not from the future I was from," alternate timelines stuff, and both sides keep sending people back trying to change things. I was reminded of Miles Vorkosigan learning about the Xanatos gambit from Cavilo in Vor Game; "not a path to victory but all paths," and like what if that was how time travel warfare worked, you had to fight it out until all possible timelines were satisfactory to whoever survived or they'd send someone back in time and fuck shit up some more--which COULD mean fighting to the complete annihilation of one side, ala Skynet's opening move of "I will kill your mother before you were even born!!!", but the more complex the temporal interferences get, the more it has to mean, both/all sides in this war come to agreement/equilibrium, such that they can all choose not to send someone back to fuck shit up some more. It also seems like some sort of compromise is very much what future!John is trying to do with Cameron and other metal.

And there's one bit we just watched that it makes super interesting for me--when John is confronting Jessie about her plot to get Cameron to kill and/or frame Cameron for killing Riley, to make John stop trusting her (Cameron), Jessie asks, would it have worked? If she'd killed her, or if I'd made you think I had, would you have stopped trusting her? and John says, No. And I'm just pondering, why did she ask that, what if that the what if was the most important thing, like, how many possible outcomes of this play are there? And can John really know that, what he would have done? or, could an ordinary person not be able to know that, but John the-time-travel-predestination-paradox-loop Connor could, and that's his important power, the power to see possible timelines and also make decisions across timelines, delimiting what the possible outcomes are? (And maybe Skynet can do that just because it can crunch data like no one's business and just, like, predict the possible forks in a way that it's probably maddening to them that there's even one human who can accomplish similar intuitively?)

I mean, as far as I recall the show never really gives us future!John because that would be,,,, ehhh? for the kind of storytelling they were trying to do? but i like time travel stories a LOT and I am liking the idea that time travel turns conflict into this all-or-nothing propostion.