"Law and Order", "Celebrity Apprentice" and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles"

"Law and Order: SVU" - This was an interesting episode but was a bit of a headline-grabber. The detectives discover that a 9ish year old boy has been raped, and the boy has been in a sort of tug-of-war between his divorced parents, his Jewish father and his non-Jewish mother. Evidence initially points to someone in his father's Jewish community, but it is eventually discovered that the culprit was a 14 year old boy in his same secular school. The 14 year old boy is being raised by a single father and spends a lot of time by himself, much of it watching very explicit pornographic movies. He says that he watched a prison rape movie and so he was just re-enacting what he saw when he raped the younger boy. It's then discovered that he has also raped several young girls at the same school. His defense lawyer says that he should be found not guilty by reason of mental defect - basically, that he sees how sex is portrayed on TV, in movies and in songs, and he has no idea that what he was doing was wrong. Under questioning, he admits that the girls and the younger boy all said "no" when he raped them, but he says that's how it goes in the movies - isn't that the way it's supposed to be? The jury finds him not guilty, and he is relegated to a mental health/correctional institute as the victims look on. The ADAs discuss that many of the jurors are probably parents who don't necessarily have the time or inclination to supervise their children constantly and could see themselves in the same position and so voted not guilty out of their own sense of guilt. When they first mentioned the media representation defense, I found it to be preposterous. To me, it's a cop-out to blame it on that. At 14, he should know better. But then the question comes up - if that's all he's ever really known and he's been exposed only to violent images and impressions of sex growing up, how is he supposed to know better? Who gets the blame then? Presumably, the parent. But do you imprison the father for the actions of his son or for his own inaction? But then, what happens to the boy and the other son in the family? And what effect does this have on the victims, who have been violated and who have then seen their violator go unpunished?


"Law and Order: CI" - This episode wasn't as interesting to me as others have been. I'm not enamoured of Logan's new sidekick, but she does look a bit like the actress who plays Natalie on "One Life to Live". It was the story of two brothers who were both doctors, one of whom was found murdered. Turns out that back in med school, the other brother was fairly prolific in his donations to a sperm bank, and many of the children produced by his donated sperm formed a network, one of whom actually managed to track him down. He had a brother who was ill and needed bone marrow, but his father refused to donate. He then approached the uncle, but an ensuing argument resulted in a crime of passion and his uncle's death. In return for the murder confession by the son, the father is strong-armed into agreeing to donate his marrow.


"Law and Order" - This week's story involved a Walmart-type company who had an executive that knowingly bought a large order of contaminated toothpaste and then resold it to other places like prisons and retirement homes, where deaths wouldn't be thought to be suspect. This discovery is made by way of the murdered daughter of owners of a dry cleaning business, where the daughter had been working on a case that involved another company employee. It turns out that a previous police captain now works for the company, and at first, he lies on the stand to cover up the redistributed contaminated product, but in the end, he ends up telling the truth. It was an ok episode, but again, no summation at trial. Now that Fred Thompson has dropped out of the presidential race, maybe he'll come back to "Law and Order" and Sam Waterston can go back to doing what he does best.


"Celebrity Apprentice"

Because the women have suffered two devastating defeats, Donald Trump offers Gene Simmons the challenge of being the project manager for Empresario on the next project, which Simmons accepts. Each team will be provided with an air stream trailer, and they need to create an "experience" to sell Kodak's new printer. The presentation of the task actually seemed confusing to me - it took me a while to figure out exactly what it was they were supposed to do. The men come up with an idea but through a serious mishap, they lose much of their data and have to do a makeshift job in completing the project. Simmons on the other hand zeroes in on the product and a tag line. The men's project seems sloppy and haphazard. The women's project seems much more put together and professional. But in the end, the Kodak executives wanted to emphasize the new printer's lower-priced ink as a selling point, so even though the men's presentation was much sloppier, they did focus on that point. Simmons only sent two women to attend the meeting with the Kodak executives, who were put off not only by that but also because they didn't feel that the two women listened to them during that meeting. The women's project emphasized a re-branding of the Kodak product at large instead of the ink that the executives wanted to focus on. In addition, the men ended up selling more because Stephen Baldwin called brother Alec, who apparently bought a few of them for an exhorbitant price. Alec's appearance seemed totally out of place, especially since, unlike with the hot dog challenge, celebrity and contacts really didn't seem to have a place in this challenge.

Simmons is defiant in the boardroom and absolutely refuses to admit that he did anything wrong, instead insisting that the Kodak executives were wrong in not knowing how to market their own product. Trump points out a few of the women that he thinks might have contributed to the loss, but Simmons refuses to pass along any blame and instead holds fast to his position and in the end, brings back with him the two women least responsible for the outcome of the challenge. Trump has no choice but to fire Simmons.

Simmons' move to bring back two women that Trump couldn't possibly fire seemed like a suicide move. Some have speculated that he was done with the show and just wanted out. To me, it seemed like he was just grandstanding, that he was absolutely not going to admit he was wrong in any way. He might have come up with the better campaign, but he didn't come up with what the clients asked for. It was funny to listen to his bravado during the challenge, but his refusal to come off that in the boardroom cemented his ouster. I'm also wondering how much of it was that he wanted to be kicked off the show on his own terms. Sure, he was technically "fired", but you could say that he didn't completely deserve to be fired, even though he was the one who had come up with the overall plan. But absent his bringing back two people Trump could absolutely not fire, who knows how long Simmons would have been in the game, not to mention if or when he might make a big enough mistake that would actually warrant his firing. I heard him on a radio show this morning, and he was maintaining the same position, that he was right and the Kodak executives were wrong, and he was taking total responsibility for the outcome and wasn't going to lay the blame on any of the women.


"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles"

At the beginning, Sarah talks about the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, whether they knew what they were building, how they could rationalize the completely devasting device they were creating and if given the opportunity, whether anyone would have killed them before they could complete their project. This is clearly a comparison to those who developed Skynet.

Sarah and Cameron revisit the slain resistant fighters and discover that they were a Cyberdyne hunting team, looking to stop the creation of Skynet in the same way that Sarah and Cameron were now doing. Sarah goes to see Miles Dyson's wife again, and she ends up reluctantly identifying a picture of a man who used to be an intern at Cyberdyne - Andy. Sarah tracks him down and eventually gets to know him, even agreeing to go on a date with him to find out whether he might be responsible for Skynet. Andy eventually reveals to her that he has been building a chess-playing computer, but Andy sees it as much more than a machine, and the machine has in fact been displaying more than normal machine behaviour, being "moody" as Andy describes it. Cameron tells Sarah that Andy needs to be killed, and Sarah wrestles with the issue. In the end, instead of killing Andy, Sarah ends up destroying his computer with a house fire.

In the meantime, Cameron and John are trying to get acclimated in their new school. There's a lot of awkwardness as Cameron tries to fit in (reminiscent of the Terminator's adjustment to society and young John's instructions in T2), but when John first met Cameron, she seemed like a normal girl, enough that he never suspected her of being a terminator, but now, all of a sudden, she doesn't know how to fit into a school? There's also another mystery that arises when painted doors with words and images show up around the school, greatly upsetting one particular female student that Cameron ends up befriending. However, the girl commits suicide by jumping off a roof, which upsets John who had wanted to try to stop her, but Cameron prevented him so as not to draw attention to himself. I have no idea if I missed something and was supposed to figure out what all that was about or if we're going to be told more later.

Meanwhile, the terminator who was teleported into 2007 along with Cameron, John and Sarah has almost succeeded in completely rebuilding himself. The terminator is able to enlist the services of a scientist by providing him with the formula for making synthetic skin. As we had all already figured out but which apparently escaped the scientist completely, as soon as the terminator is able to re-skin himself, he kills the scientist, stealing his eyes in the process.

There was also a segment where the FBI agent who has been tracking Sarah pays a visit to the nephew who made new identification papers for Sarah et al. The scene really didn't go anywhere, but then the FBI agent is roped into trying to figure out why one of the group of men killed (the resistance fighters) showed up displaying the fingerprints of a young child in another state.

This was an ok episode compared to the first two. It was much more of an intellectual questioning - would you be able to kill a person if you knew that killing that person was going to save many other lives in the future?