Friday, February 29, 2008

Cylons vs. Terminators, reimagined


Fellow fans of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES will enjoy showrunner Josh Friedman’s latest blog post at the TSCC wiki, in which he points out that last Monday's ep “The Demon Hand” was penned by former BATTLESTAR GALACTICA writer Toni Graphia. An interesting fact given that this particular episode touches on so many themes that also run through BSG.

While TSCC fans cross their fingers that the show doesn't “get Foxed” after next Monday’s season finale, Friedman shared some wisdom last weekend at WonderCon and during interviews this week, discussing the meta of Terminators and how they compare with reimagined Cylons:

MovieWeb: In the last episode, with Summer doing ballet, are we heading to a point where the Terminator's are going to be more like Cylons, and are going to have more emotional stuff going on? Because it seemed like there was a hint of that.

Josh Friedman: First of all, I would argue, with all due respect to Ron Moore, that Cylons have wanted to be like Terminator's for many years. Probably all of them wanted to be like Blade Runner. [Cameron is] a more advanced model, and she has more ability to, at least, mimic emotions and do some things.

I think that whenever you have a form of cyborg, android, whatever, there's always a temptation by the writers to start exploring that humanly thing, how far it goes and what our limitations are. It's something that I'm still exploring.

It's interesting because I think there are two groups of people who watch these shows. There are the real sci-fi people who watch these shows, and then there's everybody else. The everybody else, has probably never seen Battlestar Galactica, so they're all fascinated by it…When I was writing this show, I would not watch Battlestar Galactica. Honestly, I had to avoid Battlestar Galactica for a year because I couldn't handle... they do those things so well, and I really wanted to go off on my own and not think about it.

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