Terminator Salvation

[Havok]

Unless I am completely off, the 2nd Marcus, the one that talks to Skynet, goes and gets his clothes off the fucked up, damaged, deactivated Marcus that is on some type of analysis table.

And the thing is Skynet does have brains. So to me, what makes sense is that it is simply playing the humans to ensure it's existence.

[Anguirus]

- Double LOL at people that are "OMG Why not just kill Connor and Reese immediately!" Duh. If they did that, Skynet doesn't exist because you have no T1.

FAIL. That makes the decision to send a T-1000 to kill Connor before he could send back Reese suicidal. It is also drama FAIL because if Skynet is actually avoiding killing Connor and Reese then there is no drama. It is also consistency FAIL because Skynet dispatched that 600 and 800 to assault, however incompetently, Connor and Reese.

The only way to make the rest of the movies work is if you accept that T1 is not a stable time loop and a non-Reese-descended Connor is kicking Skynet's ass in the OTL.

Uh, negative. In universe it makes perfect sense, and it explains why Skynet continually makes dumb decisions. Especially now, we know that Skynet is capable of sacrifice, bidding it's time and subterfuge to achieve it's goals and not just Point Terminator at Humans: Set To KILL!!!

When you look at the chain of events it almost has to be this way...

Skynet sends the T-800 back in time to kill Shara Connor. Kyle Reese goes back in time to save her. They destroy the T-800 which then becomes the basis for everything that Skynet is.
Dyson straight up says that the T-800 processor enabled leaps and bounds and took them in a direction they never would have thought of before they got their hands on it.
Now we know that Cyberdyne was purchased by the USAF, but if they hadn't gotten the T-800 processor, that would not have happened because they wouldn't have had the advanced tech the USAF wanted for Skynet.
Skynet knows all of this. This explains the incompetence of the Terminators and Skynet. (Boy it sure is handy having those USB ports that the humans can plug into and reprogram Terminators and all the keyboards that humans use to access Skynet secret files )
It is clear that Skynet is just toying with the humans and bidding it's time in the future until it gets past the events that are in the time loop, all the while taking acceptable loses and making successful key hits on targets that have no involvement in the time travel.

Did it honestly not occur to you that Skynet can put a bullet in Reese and John and then just send a Terminator + chip back in time and have the Terminator mail Cyberdyne the chip? Or just crush itself in a hydraulic press at Cyberdyne?

I think your scenario makes Skynet even dumber than it is in the finished movie. Which is a feat.

You also ignored the fact that it's utter nonsense that a T-800 had to go back in order for Skynet I to be created. It had to happen once, and it's been WELL established that Skynet time travel creates alternate universes.

[Drooling Iguana]

Really, this all could have been avoided by having Sarah not know the date of Judgement Day in T2 until Uncle Bob told her.

OTL: JD happens "a few years from now" (early 21st century.)
Post-T1 timeline: Due to the recovery of the T-800 chip, JD is moved up to 1997.
Post-T2 timeline: Due to Cyberdyne going 'splodey, JD is moved back to somewhere close to its original date.

Really, it's T2 that fucked up the timeline, taking a story that had initially been established as a single-timeline stable loop and making it branch. The rest of the movies/TV shows were just trying to make do with what they were given.

[Havok]

Did it honestly not occur to you that Skynet can put a bullet in Reese and John and then just send a Terminator + chip back in time and have the Terminator mail Cyberdyne the chip? Or just crush itself in a hydraulic press at Cyberdyne?

Then why don't they? And don't give me "oh well the writers are dumb", answer the question in an In Universe context. In fact, why not just send the Terminator back without shooting Connor or Reese and just not have it go after Shara? Then she will never know about the future and will never tell her son she may or may not have about it? Why not send it back in time to kill Shara's parents, or their parents? All it would have to do is get one of them.

I think your scenario makes Skynet even dumber than it is in the finished movie. Which is a feat.

How does mastering the events of multiple time periods to ensure past and future events occur the way you want them to, make Skynet "even dumber"?

You also ignored the fact that it's utter nonsense that a T-800 had to go back in order for Skynet I to be created.

Utter nonsense? So we are just ignoring what is explicitly stated on screen because... you say so?

It had to happen once, and it's been WELL established that Skynet time travel creates alternate universes.

It's called a paradox idiot. You don't get Skynet with out the crushed T-800, but with out Skynet there is no T-800. Is this too complicated for you to grasp?

As for it being well established, no where in the movies is it "well established" that Skynet time travel creates alternate universes.

[Havok]

Really, this all could have been avoided by having Sarah not know the date of Judgement Day in T2 until Uncle Bob told her.

OTL: JD happens "a few years from now" (early 21st century.)
Post-T1 timeline: Due to the recovery of the T-800 chip, JD is moved up to 1997.
Post-T2 timeline: Due to Cyberdyne going 'splodey, JD is moved back to somewhere close to its original date.

Really, it's T2 that fucked up the timeline, taking a story that had initially been established as a single-timeline stable loop and making it branch. The rest of the movies/TV shows were just trying to make do with what they were given.

Oh I agree the timeline is jacked, but it is what it is. I'm trying to make sense of what we have and do it in universe, where other people are either trying to make it more convoluted (alternate universes!!) than it needs to be and already is, or are just falling back into "OMG writers are stupid!!"

But even in the first movie you get the paradox. I mean yeah you can say that Shara's baby isn't John Connor or that Reese somehow isn't the dad, but anyone with a brain knows that that is what happened. So you already have John introducing his father to his mother and then his mother telling him about his father before he does that. But of course if we go by Anguirus way of thinking, Shara would have had John anyway once before Reese came back in time, but then she couldn't have possibly have taken that picture that Reese brought back with him because she wouldn't be out in the desert, she would have been at work waitressing. Except then where did Reese get that picture the first time... oops.

[Galvatron]

Really, this all could have been avoided by having Sarah not know the date of Judgement Day in T2 until Uncle Bob told her.

Reese must have told Sarah off-screen in T1 because she told Dr. Silberman the exact date before Uncle Bob even showed up.

Really, it's T2 that fucked up the timeline, taking a story that had initially been established as a single-timeline stable loop and making it branch. The rest of the movies/TV shows were just trying to make do with what they were given.

Agreed. Cameron himself fucked up the timeline with that "no fate" bullshit. I think the whole point of T1's ending is that both Future John and Skynet were wrong and the past couldn't be changed. What happened is what was supposed to happen all along.

Here's another thing that sticks in my craw: are we supposed to believe that Reese's conception and birth were totally unaffected by this constant shifting of Judgment Day's date? Were his parents always FATED to survive the inevitable nuclear war whether it took place in 1997 or 2004? Think about it.

[Peptuck]

You know, I actually almost think I prefer Spoony's particularly insane take on the idea of John Connor.

[Drooling Iguana]

What if Reese didn't tell Sarah the date of Judgement Day? Maybe Sarah came up with the 1997 date on her own as one of her paranoid delusions and Future John programmed Uncle Bob to play along. Maybe Judgement Day was always meant to happen in the early 21st century, and everything that's happened in the movies has been one big time-loop.

[Anguirus]

Then why don't they? And don't give me "oh well the writers are dumb", answer the question in an In Universe context.

That's a bit like asking me to describe why Trekverse artificial singularities can unpredictably increase in mass, or why Trekverse supernovae can unpredictably fry planets across the galaxy. Sufficiently dumb writers may preclude logical explanations.

In this case, the only explanation for Skynet's actions is severe egotism and overconfidence, to an almost ludicrous degree.

It still makes more sense than your explanation. To keep things status quo, all Skynet had to do was nothing. Instead, a computer that, as per your scenario, desperately wishes Kyle Reese and John Connor to stay alive puts Reese in a room with a Terminator firing a minigun and has a T-800 get within two inches of murdering him. So Skynet gambled its own existence on the ability of Kate Connor to do a heart transplant in a tent? From a cyborg that Skynet also tried to murder with that T-800?

In any case, the movie was literally being rewritten on the set, so of course it's dumb. In-universe, this leads to Skynet = second-rate Bond villain. It's not our fault, and we don't have to like it. But your bizarre rationale that Skynet knows all and sees all and any stupid things it does in the movie must be smart things in a really convincing disguise basically amounts to "God told me the movie must make perfect sense, so I will force it to."

In fact, why not just send the Terminator back without shooting Connor or Reese and just not have it go after Shara? Then she will never know about the future and will never tell her son she may or may not have about it? Why not send it back in time to kill Shara's parents, or their parents? All it would have to do is get one of them.

You are absolutely right.

The series has evolved since 1984. Back then, it seemed pretty plausible that there wouldn't be good records on the family of John Connor. This is the only scenario by which sending a Terminator to that particular place and time makes a great deal of sense. As per T3, Skynet = internet, so it should have an enormous amount of info at its fingertips. So yes, it's plausible for the computer to not only know who Kyle Reese is, but to come to an understanding of its significance.

Unfortunately, as I have explained earlier in the thread, putting a bullet into Reese then becomes a win-win situation. Either nothing will happen, or it will revert to a Connor-less OTL where it wins. Or, if it's really afraid of changing things (and who could blame it) it should release him immediately. About the dumbest thing to do would be to stick him in a room and then send a T-600 to kill him once things were at their most chaotic, and about the second dumbest thing to do is tell all your horribly beweaponed drones that he is "Target #1" and that they should shoot big fucking laser beams at a truck that he's in. Either kill him, or don't. If you're going to stage a dramatic escape, then don't do it with a fucking minigun going off in the room.

If you will permit me to go out-of-universe for a second here, the reason why everything in the movie happens the way it does is because when they started shooting the movie, Skynet didn't know who Kyle Reese was. In my opinion they should have kept that and just explained that the nukes did a number on the Internet.

The only possible in-universe explanation we are left with is, again, that Skynet is a colossal egoist. It wanted to gloat at Marcus to make his human side sad, and couldn't even wait until its two terminators had finished killing target #1 and 2. It didn't occur to the computer to wire the factory to blow, or to reactivate all the T-600s and T-1s that it let Marcus deactivate, or to send an H-K over, or to really do anything smart. You don't like that, I suspect, because neither do I. Oh well, if you want smart you should be watching TSCC.

Utter nonsense? So we are just ignoring what is explicitly stated on screen because... you say so?

Explicitly stated only in your mind. Dyson said it, and surprise, he turned out not to be essential to the process anyway, because he blew himself and his lab to smithereens and Skynet still came into existence. So he certainly doesn't know everything. When T2 starts it's already an alternate timeline, where NORAD Skynet is coming online a little faster and better. The Connors invalidate that timeline, but some version of Skynet has already sent the T-X back to create Internet Skynet a few years later.

T1 taken on its own could have been a stable time loop, but the events of T2, let alone the other movies, pretty much kill that. When you go back in time the first time, everything changes from that point forward.

It's called a paradox idiot. You don't get Skynet with out the crushed T-800, but with out Skynet there is no T-800. Is this too complicated for you to grasp?

Yes, it must just be that I'm dumb, and not that if you do consider all of Terminator to be canon, that time travel invariably creates an alternate universe. "This is not the future my mother warned me about." The events of T3 and T:S
create a timeline where is is IMPOSSIBLE for the precise events of T1 to play out, which means that they don't have to happen in any particular way in the "future" of this movie series (though it may not have one).

"Before" any time travel occurred, we had the OTL, in which time travel was not invented and employed until original-Connor had beaten Skynet to within an inch of its life. Sarah still traveled to Mexico, got her picture taken, raised John a fighter...we don't know what caused all this.

Alternatively, I guess if you really like paradoxes, the OTL is the "T1 timeline" where Reese gets the picture, was always the father of John, etc. And the original Terminator was always going to be the father of Skynet. However, something has to be different enough at some point for Skynet to decide to send back the T-1000, which does NOT create a stable time loop...it changes everything and obliterates the original version of Skynet.

Were his parents always FATED to survive the inevitable nuclear war whether it took place in 1997 or 2004? Think about it.

No, but conveniently, once Skynet was foiled in T1 and T2 its development was delayed long enough so that Reese was born pre-Judgment Day. This is true in TSCC as well as T3/TS.

[Mad]

Yes, it must just be that I'm dumb, and not that if you do consider all of Terminator to be canon, that time travel invariably creates an alternate universe. "This is not the future my mother warned me about." The events of T3 and T:S
create a timeline where is is IMPOSSIBLE for the precise events of T1 to play out, which means that they don't have to happen in any particular way in the "future" of this movie series (though it may not have one).

"Before" any time travel occurred, we had the OTL, in which time travel was not invented and employed until original-Connor had beaten Skynet to within an inch of its life. Sarah still traveled to Mexico, got her picture taken, raised John a fighter...we don't know what caused all this.

Alternatively, I guess if you really like paradoxes, the OTL is the "T1 timeline" where Reese gets the picture, was always the father of John, etc. And the original Terminator was always going to be the father of Skynet. However, something has to be different enough at some point for Skynet to decide to send back the T-1000, which does NOT create a stable time loop...it changes everything and obliterates the original version of Skynet.

I figured that T1 was at least the 3rd iteration of the time war.

• First Iteration (original timeline): A John Connor is born and has an unknown father (not Reese). No Terminators sent back in time. John Connor happens to become the influential leader that wins the war, but Skynet sends a Terminator back in time. Kyle Reese is sent after it.
• Second Iteration: Kyle Reese fathers a kid who is named John Connor. Reese dies. The picture in Mexico is taken (now that Sarah has a reason to change her life and create tapes for her son). This picture is given to Kyle Reese after Judgment Day.
• Third Iteration: The events in Terminator can now play out: Kyle Reese talks about the picture. The wreckage of the T-800 is used to create Skynet earlier than it did in the previous iteration. Skynet lasts longer after Judgment Day and a T-1000 is developed in time to send it to kill John Connor.
• Fourth Iteration: The events in Terminator 2 can now play out.

And so forth. Of course, there may be more iterations before Terminator 2 does take place, but it looks like four iterations is the minimum to get to Terminator 2. I find it easier to believe that the wreckage of the T-800 wasn't used to create Skynet in the second iteration than that Sarah Connor would have the exact same picture taken of her in a timeline where she never met Kyle Reese or had to run from a robot from the future.

[Anguirus]

^ Fair enough.

[Stark]

I believe in some of the older comics, that it was suggested that circa Future War #1 (Internment camp edition) Skynet had already developed the T-1000 and sent it back; either elsewhere or Connor's forces got it wrong (or Reese just went to the wrong place). This suggests the T1-T2 events from 1984-1994 take place with the same timeline/timetravel events (since T-Arnie and T-Patrick were sent back at the same time, with Uncle Bob sent back later to T-Patrick's destination). If you accept that silliness then it's possible to make T1 and 2 co-habitate without demanding everything just happens to happen exactly the same but a bit later because of jesus. It's still fucking stupid, because the damn movies are about robots killing people in soulless urban wastelands and not bloody timetravel.

[Shroom Man 777]

I agree. They should've kept the time travel stuff to a minimum in T4 and instead focused on the whole 'RAR future war of survival rage against the machines' stuff.

[MKSheppard]

You can add my voice to that chorus. If the LAPD didn't know the identity of John's father in 1995...

...why would Skynet?

You forgot to add that the dates shown on that computer screen for John's DOB don't match up with T1.

[MKSheppard]

Oh well, if you want smart you should be watching TSCC.

Considering it shits all over T1 in the very pilot and finale:

Dr. Silberman: Well, how are you supposed to get back?

Kyle Reese: I can't. Nobody goes home. Nobody else comes through. It's just him - and me.

[Thanas]

Eh? Shep, your post makes no sense.

[Stark]

He's saying because one guy with no equipment or training can't return to the future, obviously a bunch of guys with detailed files and robots can't either.

[Galvatron]

You forgot to add that the dates shown on that computer screen for John's DOB don't match up with T1.

Refresh my memory.

[MKSheppard]

He's saying because one guy with no equipment or training can't return to the future, obviously a bunch of guys with detailed files and robots can't either.

Yeah, because if it was so easy to build time machines in the past, or ones that can go FORWARD in time; why didn't John just say to Reese:

"Hey man, if you succeed in killing the killer robot, go to this address, one of my operatives will be there; I'll send him back after I send you; and he'll build a time machine to send you back to 2029."

Nevermind the sheer difficulty of building a time machine 40 years in the past; with the precision and technology of 1984-1995 against Skynet's 2029 capabilities. It would be like sending back in time someone who has a vague mental picture of a Jumo 004B axial flow turbojet from 1945 to 1905, and telling him to build a turbojet in 1905. Such problems as metallurgy, precision machining capability, etc etc are trivial apparently in the T:SCC verse.

[Stark]

Oh man. You accuse others of not watching the movie? They had no idea how to build it and destroyed it after Reese went. A terminator could very easily be given the information.

Oh sorry I ignored your irrelevant rant about 1905. How do you know the Skynet time machine needed bizzarotech? Maybe once Skynet worked it out it's easy.

Oh wait 1905 LOL

[TheMuffinKing]

Oh man. You accuse others of not watching the movie? They had no idea how to build it and destroyed it after Reese went. A terminator could very easily be given the information.

Oh sorry I ignored your irrelevant rant about 1905. How do you know the Skynet time machine needed bizzarotech? Maybe once Skynet worked it out it's easy.

Oh wait 1905 LOL

Yes but the terminator will need access to the tooling, materials, and industry necessary to build a time machine. His point is valid, info or not, how is the Terminator supposed to build a time machine without some elaborate set up?

[MKSheppard]

Oh man. You accuse others of not watching the movie? They had no idea how to build it and destroyed it after Reese went.

So how the fuck is it that the resistance somehow can build "EZ-Time Machines" in the past in T:SCC, if they only had control of the time machine long enough to figure how to push the "redial" button to send back two operatives to 1984 and 1994/95?

A terminator could very easily be given the information.

Why would they be given the information? In the original T1 novelization, if the Terminator completed it's mission, it's standby orders were to go into some deep hiding place such as an unused mine and go into hibernate mode until 2029.

Oh sorry I ignored your irrelevant rant about 1905. How do you know the Skynet time machine needed bizzarotech? Maybe once Skynet worked it out it's easy.

Oh wait 1905 LOL

2029 - 1984 = 45 years

1945 - 1905 = 40 years

Hypothetically, as an exercise, let's send Stark's computer back 45 years to 1964.

It would certainly cause a lot of head scratching; especially when they took out the DVD drive in his computer:

"Hey guys, look; a semi-conductor laser capable of operating at higher than room temperature!

"Didn't that guy named Hall have to use liquid nitrogen to cool his semi-conductor laser to like 300 degrees below zero farenheit in order to get it working two years ago?"

"Amazing."

(The invention of the room temperature solid state laser is six years in the future BTW)

That's just one thing off the top of my head. Another good example is the precision machining needed to actually make the time machine parts themselves -- you wouldn't be able to make a R-4360 in 1905 among other things; due to metallurgy being lacking along with the machining needed to make the cylinder heads.

Oh wait, I forgot that Stark's instant rebuttal to any argument is "LOL".

[Revy]

The point is though that we don't know how the time machines are built. For all we know it could be McGyvered together using tech from an earlier age, just provided you have the know how. It may not need super advanced metal working or electronics - it might just be made from conventional parts, but with a complex design.

Anyway, in Kyles case Connor is *hardly* going to tell him about an address with a spare time machine he can use - John knows Reese is doomed to die (because his mother tells him). He knew he was sending him on a suicide mission.

And further, it only seems to be around TSCC, when he is sending entire squads of resistance fighters back, that he actually has the ability to send someone back to construct a time machine. As has been pointed out, in T1 Reese said they only had Skynets machine, didn't know how it worked, used it once or twice and then destroyed it. TSCC paints a very different future, with the Resistance having their own time machines to the point where rogue AWOL soldiers like Jessie were able to sneak in and use them.

Also, is it not possible that John sent a reprogrammed terminator back (perhaps with a human engineer as well) and had the engineer use actual parts from that terminator to build said machine? I mean if you really cant build such a piece of advanced tech decades ago, perhaps you can build one by scavenging the components from a T-800? They have an advanced CPU chip, power source and materials. If it didn't object too much, it could allow the human engineer to simply dismantle it and build a time machine from its own body.

By TSCC there is certainly so much 'metal' walking around the Resistence camps that they can't be that scarce a resource, and even if they were from all we've seen they only built the one time machine in the past.

[tezunegari]

If I remember correctly we have only seen a time machine three times and did was only shown on TSCC.

• The first was the bank-o-time in the pilot. Either the time machine was small enough to fit into the safe or the whole building was the time machine with the safe acting as the focal point for the time bubble.
• The second was the resistance time machine that was shown to Derek. The room with the time bubble was huge and had airplane turbines or some other type of big cylinders in it.
• The last was the Zaira Corp version using John Henrys room as focal point for the time bubble.

And as TSCC was considered to be a different timeline/canon/continuity the ability to create time machines in the past might not be present in the movie-verse of Terminator.

Or either Connor simply lied to Reese to get him into a certain mindset, knowing that it is quite likely that Reese will die again (he knew that Reese died to protect her but with No-Fate mindset it might be different) or at the time they send Reese and T2-Ahhnuld they simply weren't able to recreate the time machine yet.

• T1 - The Time machine was a last resort from Skynet and they did destroy it right after sending Reese
• T2 - Skynet either had more time to develop the T-McGoo... T-1k or Reese stating there were only two beings send back was wrong in T1 (if so it's even possible that Connor found learnt about the T-1k after sending Reese back)
• T3 - The time machine seems to be more involved in the war than before and apparently even the Resistance has one now or they did capture a second one to send the T-850 back
• TSCC - Both the Resistance and Skynet have time machines. And both sides use them to fight a hidden war in the past.
• T4 - Haven't seen it yet but I doubt that they had any hints at the time machine in this one (at least not in the trailers)

[Thanas]

And as TSCC was considered to be a different timeline/canon/continuity the ability to create time machines in the past might not be present in the movie-verse of Terminator.

Well, it only is a different timeline after T2.

That said, for the reasons stated by you and others, it does not seem that building a time machine is that huge a challenge.