Shipping Confessions: Serek (TSCC)

Back to the lovely Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles! Oh how I've missed you. And I wish you could've lived a long life. Spanning many seasons and letting my obsession boil to new heights.

Oh, right, supposed to be writing a blog post here. Not a love letter to TSCC (aka, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). That can wait for later.

Anyways, we're back to talking about TSCC. And we are again going to talk about Sarah Connor. But instead of pairing her up with the enigmatic Cameron, we're going to look at the ship of Serek. Serek is the ship pairing Sarah Connor and Derek Reese together. And Serek is my OTP (One True Pairing) for TSCC. This is the pairing I watched the whole show wishing it would become canon. Before that glorious moment, a Terminator killed Derek with a head shot.

I believe Brian Austin Green (actor who played Derek Reese) said he didn't want his character to have a relationship with Sarah Connor.

Let's look at the fierce warrior queen Sarah Connor first. In the first Terminator film Sarah falls in love with a soldier from the future sent back to protect her. We also find out later that this soldier, Kyle Reese, was also sent back to impregnate her (you can't tell me John Connor didn't plan for it to happen, at least in the timeline that The Terminator deals with).

I am probably the only one who doesn't buy the love story in The Terminator and how deep it becomes by Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I find Kyle and Sarah to be lusting after each other. If Kyle's dialogue in The Terminator is to be believed, he saved himself for a woman he didn't know he would ever be able to meet. And Sarah? She didn't have enough time to really get to know Kyle.

But her relationship with Derek had longer to form. Did she think about Kyle? Probably. Though she ended up thinking of Derek as his own person.

Derek Reese is the older brother of Kyle Reese. He's also the darker one of the two, though he is still very much a 'good guy'. What's interesting, at least from a behind the scenes stand point, is that he was only supposed to appear for an episode or two and then die (or leave). On the DVD extras for Season 1 they have an audition tape for all the actors except for BAG (aka Brian Austin Green).

Derek, over the short two seasons, matches up good with Sarah. They have many little verbal sparring matches that seem to be done more out of love than hate. Yes, Sarah's last real conversation with Derek was that she didn't trust him/hated him (long story short: she blamed him for Riley Dawson's death and the chaos that had ensued before and after). But after he had died, and she's explaining it to James Ellison, Sarah mentions Derek's name first. Plus she might have been wearing his jacket (or at least a similar one to it, let's just say I stared at a picture for a long time over a series of days).

Now I know a lot of you will bring up Jesse Flores and say that was his love interest for the series. To me, and others, there was no real chemistry between the two. Both of them had their own interests of being a couple:

Jesse Flores wanted to use Derek after she had John kill Cameron (long story short: plan didn't work), so that Jesse could influence how John looked at Terminators and therefore ran the Resistance. I think Jesse liked Derek, but it wasn't the love that she once felt. Though she wished that it was.

Derek Reese wanted to be with Jesse to pretend that things were like they had been. It wasn't good when he was from, but something familiar always brings comfort in an ever changing world. It's also why I don't blame him for not looking too hard at Jesse's real motives.

Why did I bring that up? Because while it's canon, it didn't really have that much emotion behind it. Derek and Sarah, while not being a canon ship, had a lot more power and nuance to it.

You could tell that Sarah loved Derek. Their first meeting (well, the first meeting where they knew the other and weren't trying to beat the other up) at the prison hinted at what was to come. Subtle things were thrown in the conversation (and not so subtle things) to show that both were attracted to the other.

Jesse even comments at one point how easy it is for Sarah to get him to do things.

Finally, the shower scene. When Sarah found out that Derek killed Andy Goode, she confronted him in the shower about it. She also tells him that they will meet with a man the following day.

So why confront him while he's in the shower, with hot water running down him, and he's completely naked? While Sarah did want to intimidate him, she also wanted to see how that hot bod looked without clothing.

This is one of those times where a third season would not help this ship evolve. It could have Sarah admit her feelings for Derek, but that's about it. As the Derek we saw through the majority of Seasons 1 and 2 is dead.

Let me end this by saying to those who ship Jesse and Derek: I don't believe in the ship myself. But you have it being canon to back you up. Damn you lucky bastards!

So what is up for the next Shipping Confessions? We will stick with TSCC and talk about a very popular canon shipping. The reason this isn't breaking the rules I set forth in the introduction to this series, is that I don't think a lot of people really believe I ship it. At least I don't talk about it often.