FOX has cancelled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There just wasn’t an audience for a show where machines had the upper hand — and foot and eyes and brains and skulls and about any other body part you can name — and were crushing humans.
I figure people just didn’t buy the concept. There’s been so much scary stuff written about how computers are going to take over the world that no one’s paid attention to the fact that computers have taken over the world; they’ve just been sneaky about it. Computers, and just about all electronic conveniences, have become our pets, welcomed into our homes and lives. We can’t leave home without some version or versions of a computer; we feed them with electricity and battery snacks; we store them in safe dry places. And for that we get what? Crashes. Bugs. Data losses. And still we love them.
They might just as well be cats. I can imagine this same thing happening to the first Egyptians to adopt little bundles of fur. First the felines hung around outside the pyramids, chomping down on some leftover body parts from the latest mummification. Then they got a little bolder, purring and rubbing up against the high priests in exchange for the unneeded chunk of kidney or a piece of brain that dropped on the floor after being pulled through the nose.
Eventually the priests took them home where their wives were, no doubt, stunned at what seemed like useless creatures; kinda like wives and husbands — we’re more liberal today — were bemused by those first computer devices we brought home from the office. The cats eventually showed their worth by eating the mice that lived in the grain and warming feet and legs on cold nights when a nasty breeze blew in off the Nile. It got to the point where everybody had to have a cat; they weren’t just for the embalming rooms anymore, they were part of the household.
Doesn’t that sound like our computer-controlled electronics? Most of the time we start out with them at work. Oh, they started slowly, for sure, laying out spreadsheets and processing words. Then they got a little more sophisticated and offered up some rudimentary games. Then came Web browsing and the Internet and tweeting and interactivity and now the damned things are in our phones and our TVs and our cars and our houses.
Face it people, we invited them in, just as those Egyptians brought in the cats. Computers are even better than cats because more often than not they do what we want. They certainly have cat personalities, affectionate one moment, biting us the next. And we love it. We take care of them; we buy them software treats and pedestals on which to sit and wireless attachments.
And when they just don’t work out, but aren’t dead, we even take them to second hand stores where someone else can adopt them as their own pets or hand them down to our children.
That’s why Sarah Connor and her cohorts failed to hold an audience. They were trying to beat the machines. That’s silly. The machines are there for us. So what if they get a little cantankerous? Who hasn’t had a bad day with a cat? After all, they’re living things; they’re not pet rocks — at least until the hard drives crash.
