Gift Vid: The Monkey's Paw - for seekingferret

[chaila]

Title: The Monkey's Paw
Recipient: seekingferret
Vidder: Sanguinity
Music: Laurie Anderson, "Monkey's Paw"
Summary: Life is just a roll of the die, and a terminator can roll any number it wants.
Notes: canon-typical gore, no violence, spoiler-lite

Link: Link to signed vid post.

Comments

[no_detective]

What a fantastic mix of funny and poignant! I always felt that in some ways, Cameron had more in common with the Blade Runner replicants than the Terminators, and this vid does a beautiful job of portraying how she crosses that line. Great vid.

[sanguinity]

YES YES YES. I have this theory that the older a Terminator gets, the more crufty its programming gets -- the more kipple it accumulates! -- and that starts looking a whole lot like personality. Cameron has been around forever in Terminator terms, and quite a lot of that hanging around with humans and their bizarrenesses, not to mention the reprogramming and chip damage that she has sustained: it has gotten interesting in her head, in a crufty kippley sort of way.

And Cromartie, from what I could tell, was making a decent start on that same phenomenon. (It cracks me up the way he snarks about Cameron to Sarah: that is not a cold streamlined killing machine, but Cromartie engaging in watercooler gossip, haha.) Cromartie was already picking up some odd quirks; it would have been interesting to see how peculiar he would have become, had his chip survived.

You've seen kiki_miserychic's Does Cameron Dream of Electric Sheep, yes? (vid rec!)

[seekingferret]

Have we talked about how odd it is that Cromartie is always called Cromartie, never Laszlo? I fucked around a bit with some of the human identity porn in my vids, particularly in the Qui Son? section of Cold Metal Hands, but Cromartie is always Cromartie and Cameron, even when she gets fake names, is still always Cameron, and... why, exactly? Isn't Cameron an infiltrator terminator, specialized for assuming new identities? I think this may have a lot to do with the way these terminators seem to pick up personality.

[sanguinity]

We have not!

I always presumed that the name-constancy was a glitch in the humans around them, amplified by the show wanting to keep things simple: the human wetware desperately wanting a "true name", and creating one where none exists. Cromartie is the name the Connors use, but don't Charlie and Ellison call him Kester? At least until the Connors' name infects them? (I am not surprised Ellison doesn't call him Laszlo, at least not after the S1 finale: it is disrespectful to overwrite an actual person's identity with the machine that killed him. At least Kester was a wholly fictional identity.)

I presumed Cameron was always Cameron because it is difficult for people to reliably switch names -- even difficult for people like the Connors -- and they needed to not be caught making a mistake. (I forget, does she give the archive-guy a name for herself? Because you'd think it would be extremely foolish to give him a name that can be traced to the Connors.)

But there's a lot of stuff about the Terminators in this show that is ridiculously anthrocentric: Grrlpup and I refuse to believe that Terminators see the world through a heads-up display that's got English status notifications all over it. All those status reports should be something closer to proprioception, no? Grrlpup and I handwave it with an inference that the early terminator design was pioneered by a human anglophone military -- a remote infiltrator-drone sort of thing -- and that Skynet just snagged and repurposed the existing design.