‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’ blogging: “Vick’s Chip”/“What He Beheld”

Well, put me down as someone who will be more than disappointed if this show isn't renewed.

I agree that it seems rather a cheat to call it a "two-hour season finale", but both episodes were really good. We've got plenty of cliffhanger material to jumpstart a second season.

As far as the Terminators becoming more and more human: Could this be a result of timeline contamination? Each time a Terminator comes back in time, inevitably some part of it ends up on the scrap heap, or incorporated into some piece of technology that ends up getting used in Skynet. This means that Skynet "starts out" more and more sophisticated each time the timeline recalculates; the Terminators start out more sophisticated, and the process of "machine evolution" gets further and further along before Skynet and John Connor start sending things back through time. It seems like eventually, through the process of sending back progressively more advanced technology, that we might end up with organic (or bioengineered) Terminators that have more than just living flesh over a metal endoskeleton; we might start seeing Terminators that are truly human, the only real difference being that they are programmed to serve Skynet.

And if that ever happens, then what? Does humanity become obsolete, to be replaced by its new organic artificial life? Would these new organic Terminators be any different from the replicants in Blade Runner?

"when there are things to celebrate they should be celebrated" that was a good quote.

See, I don't think it's a question of the Terminators wanting to become human. It's about Skynet doing what it can to fight the humans who are not under its control. If making Terminators more and more humanlike until they are indistinguishable from the free humans helps Skynet achieve that goal, then Skynet will do that. Skynet's goal is control: Whether it can accomplish that with crude, rubber-skinned robots or replicants who are subservient to Skynet is irrelevant, at least as far as Skynet is concerned. (Of course, one problem for Skynet is that the more advanced and humanlike the Terminators become, the more likely they will start sympathizing with the humans. It's a vicious cycle.)

Each time a more advanced piece of tech or software gets sent back to the past, the natural development of that tech or software becomes more and more accelerated in the new timeline. Enough time travel, and both Skynet and the resistance start having better and better toys to play with.

But one theme that this all reminds me of is this: Who will come after us? There are several SF novels I've read (esp. Stephen Baxter's Evolution) which posit that humanity's final major accomplishment will be the creation of a new, intelligent species of machines which are better suited than we to life in a cruel Universe filled mostly with empty space. If we can build machines which are capable of reproducing themselves and which are capable of independent thought, and if they continue the course of their own evolution by improving their mechanical bodies and by reprogramming their minds to allow more and more advanced forms of thought, then perhaps that's as far as we go.

Biological life is wondrous, to be sure, but technological life is perhaps ultimately better suited to long-term projects like space exploration. Maybe we get to stay here and fade into nothingness while the machines, Our creation, get to inherit the rest of the Universe.