On tonight’s Heroes finale, Sylar puts a bunch of the show’s “heroes” together in circumstances planned to bring out the worst in them, to see whether they are capable of killing, of being “monsters” like he is. But in fact, as he confronts Angela trying to get at the truth, he almost begs her to persuade him that she is different from him.
Deep down he’s not seeking proof that everyone is like him. He’s seeking evidence that they aren’t.
Many who have the same attitude probably have the same desire, deep down. And yet Sylar fails to do the one thing that he is hoping others will: He never thinks (at least in this episode) to be the goodness he seeks, to let it begin with him. “Be the change you want to see in the world”, it is sometimes said. We might add (for Sylar’s benefit) “Leave behind the monstrosity that you despise in others, and in yourself. Live the heroism you have come to no longer expect from others, but which nonetheless, deep down, you still hope they’ll manifest”.
On tonight’s season finale of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, we witnessed a person who felt liberated, having once been merely “a cog in a machine”, and another “person in the making” being taught that the value of a human being is more than simply their functional value to someone else. When asked why it matters if humans live or die, Ellison claims that human lives are sacred because we are God’s creation, we’re all God’s children.
The scriptwriters seem unaware of the strangeness of Ellison’s view that God created everything on earth, and yet his ambivalence about whether this being before him is “a child of God”. Perhaps where they are going with this is that the status of “child of God” and “made in the image of God” are ways of talking about our capacity for moral discernment. While we may regularly fail to use it, or ignore it, it may still be the capacity for moral discernment and reflection that sets us apart from other organisms on this planet – and perhaps from our machine creations.
But of course, the top quote from tonight’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is:
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In