I find that this song has been on repeat for several hours now.
I am compelled to force it on you as well.
I am compelled to force it on you as well.
I also like the pacing of this scene with the music.
The previous episode was nicely done as well.
I can't find a link (other than the obvious truncated Amazon samples and pay-to-listen links), but you should compare and contrast Dave Van Ronk's version, which is pretty badass in a completely different way.
Badass folk singing. Go figure.
It actually reminded me of a couple of tracks from Nick Cave's Murder Ballads.
That was really outstanding, thanks for posting it.
I was trying to figure out what TV series I'd spent time on watching recently. I've been in a post-wire-discovery funk (I've wasted how many hours on Lost, BSG, etc. when I could have been watching the Wire!) but I totally forgot about the Terminator series.
I still can't believe they cancelled it.
They cancelled it because the writers lost faith with the Novikov self-consistency principle that was the foundation of the story, and tried to embrace the multiple-worlds theory instead, but those theories of time travel are mutually exclusive and so the canon self-imploded.
The canon backfired?
When a cannon had to be abandoned such as in a retreat or surrender, the touch hole of the cannon would be plugged flush with a iron spike, disabling the cannon (at least until metal boring tools could be used to remove the plug). This was called "spiking the cannon".
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon#Operation
Further evidence that the Terminator canon is spiked: http://whedonesque.com/comments/22240
Also: I contend that the series was doomed to failure because the writers opted not to have terminator-Glau fight terminator-Manson in a chocolate pudding factory for the season finale.
Riiiiiiiight.... thaaaaaaaat's why they cancelled it.
Terminator, like The Matrix after it, succeeded because it touched a nerve with its audience by articulating something subconscious and primal in us -- something plausible, and at the core of real people's fears.
By changing the fundamental assumptions in the scientifictitious model that formed the basis for these fears, the audience became subconsciously and primally disenfranchised.
You're right. They could have gotten away with the "canon spiking" if the show was based on characters that weren't defined almost entirely in relation to the original premise - the Star Trek franchise is an example of doing that. But what made the original characters so compelling was entirely their relationship to fate. Absent that, it's just a long series of chase scenes - a shaggy dog story - and you can find better vehicles for special effects and sexual innuendo.
Exactly!
And a very interesting note about Star Trek -- because, up until the Abrams version, Star Trek was very firmly part of the "Multiple Worlds" camp of time-travel lore.
However, with the Abrams movie this year, the movie worked because he got the audience to sit through the movie asking themselves, "How will the self-consistency principle manage to get *this* Kirk in to the command chair of the starfleet flagship, where fate so obviously wants him to be?" That was the compelling question that drove the audience engagement.
Changing back and forth between Multiple-Worlds and Self-Consistency is possible in Trek, because Trek is about the characters, not about the story.
Are you saying that self-consistency is the foundation of the story even though the characters involved didn't realize it?
I mean, the whole point of the plan was to change the present by changing the past, right? I find it hard to swallow that the various parties mastered time travel but didn't understand--and somehow neglected to test--whether self-consistency held.
Therefore, I've always counted the issue of John's father to be a meaningless plot twist rather than an endorsement of self-consistency.
I'm saying that it's the foundation of the story *because* the characters didn't realize it. Remember, time travel was invented by SkyNet, which likely didn't heavily consider the philosophical implications.
The audience, however, went in to each new movie or episode with the expectation that the puny humans would always be able to change the details of history, but could never prevent SkyNet from existing. SkyNet is fate.
It's the height of hubris for Sarah Connor to think that she can prevent SkyNet, moreso than for a machine to think it can prevent John Connor. As soon as the self-consistency principle fails, then either SkyNet or John Connor will cease to exist, and the Terminator Franchise must end.
The whole purpose of the franchise is to explore whether John Connor's message to his mother is true, or in vain: "I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set."
We know the future is set, SkyNet always finds a way, and yet we root for the underdog, because we're the audience.
That's an interesting take on the story, one that I don't believe was sufficiently stressed in the productions or appreciated by the general public.
It was all over the second movie.
Why can't they cancel the shit I don't like?
Why do you like shit that you know is going to get canceled?
Why do they even make it if it's going to be canceled?!
What amazed me about this was:
1) Shirley Manson isn't a bad actress, and
2) She has an incredibly strong accent that doesn't come out in her singing at all.
Individual tastes vary, of course, but I think that's an awful treatment of the song and a really trite choice of lyrics re-use. I found myself more interested in debugging the production than escaping into it:
The heroin rock treatment of Samson and Delilah is a good concept but the singer really needs to better appreciate the lyrics. When she sings "I would burn this old building down" she doesn't sound like she would burn anything down, she sounds like she wants to writhe around like a model in a Carl's Jr. commercial (not that there's anything wrong with that). When she sings about Samson killing the lion, against the visual of the terminator doing terminator stuff... it's lyrically inappropriate and her delivery doesn't invoke a man ripping the throat of a lion open so much as it suggests really bad porn. Sorry.
The burning building tie-in is superficial and the Samson and Delilah story is way out of place here.
So, what would be better? I had to wash my ears out by listening to some real blues and found two that could be more interesting:
"There's Destruction in this Land" Rev. Gary Davis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhTk32BcOIQ&feature=related
... sync up the bit where they crash out the window with the lyrics "There ain't no use in moaning / their ain't no use in crying / you just set your house in order / and prepare yourself to die."
or, emphasizing the terminatrix angle:
"Cross and Evil Woman Blues" Rev. Gary Davis
.... with lyrics like "You get a jealous hearted woman / she's a woman that's hard to quit" [terminatrix wakes up from the crash] and "She'll get up cross and evil / and can't hardly be pleased / nothing you can do to please that woman / if you get down on your bended knees. / Don't a woman feel good and satisfied / when she knows she got a man of her own...." [her first kill of the scene]
At the end, when terminatrix raises the gun at J.C.: "Lord when a jealous hearted woman starts loving / she gets crazy, plumb out of her mind. / When a jealous hearted woman starts loving / she gets crazy, plumb out of her mind / all she want is a shotgun or a razor / icepick or piece of pistol she can find"
"I like blues, and I don't like Garbage." There, I fixed that for you, and used fewer words.
I'll pipe down but, I do like (some) Garbage and I do like (good) heroin rock. It's just that you said you had that track looping for a long time so I thought it might help to try to talk you down before permanent brain damage occurred.