I Love Time Travel - Part 5 - The Terminator

Oh no you didn't!

There is confusing time travel, there are loops and single strings and causality… and then there are the Terminator movies.  It is not that the science of time travel that is hard to grasp in these action movies, it just keeps changing.  The rules are switched from movie to movie and sometimes within the same movie.  People don’t watch these movies for the sic-fi, they want to see shit blow up.  As they should.  That’s what I did.  Looking at them through the scope of time travel lore, they are just…off.

For these purposes I’ll only discuss The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  (Truthfully, I never saw the third one all the way through and the fourth one was an unwatchable heap of shit.)  But the first two are the best two and that’s all I need. 

The premise is simple.  The future is a hellscape created by Skynet, an artificial intelligence that humanity created.  Skynet nearly wipes out humanity.  There are few remaining warriors, including the leader, John Connor.  Skynet somehow figures out time travel and sends a Terminator robot back to kill the mother of John Connor, who lives in the eighties and is kind of a whiner in the first film.  Simple.  It was based on an episode of The Outer Limits, written by Harlan Ellison.  It is sci-fi at its purest, although it is enveloped in a high-octane action rampage with Schwarzenegger killing everything.

So, Skynet puts this in motion and future Connor sends a trusted soldier back to protect his young mother.  Fine.  I’m assuming Skynet had access to birth records and knew approximately where Sarah Connor would be.  They are betting on single string time travel, where the future can be changed by altering the past.  But the reality is, the soldier and Sarah Connor get their 80’s grooves on and unknowingly create John Connor.  So Connor’s soldier buddy is his dad.  So it’s not a single string.  It’s a loop.  But if it’s a loop, wouldn’t Skynet know about that, too?  If it’s all preordained, would it not know about the failure of the terminator to kill Sarah Connor, the fact that the date of conception was pretty much the same day or so they sent the terminator back, or that maybe it would have been easier to kill John’s grandma?  I know.  It’s just a movie.  And, and 80’s movie at that.

Judgment Day takes what we’ve learned already about this world of Skynet, time travel, and murder robots and flips it around even more.  John is a young teen now and Sarah is scarred by her knowledge of the inevitable future of catastrophe and lack of humans.  She also is a single mom, and she has told her son that one day he will have to send his own father, a man roughly his age, back to create John and then quickly die.  So John is fucked up.

Here is where sequels screw with time travel.  I realize this was a massive (and really cool) sequel and it was an excuse to get more money and use some sweet new effects.  But, as far as this story goes, the time travel gets twisted again.  Skynet sends a new Terminator after John as a boy.  Future John has now reprogrammed an old Terminator to guard young John and sends him back in time.  Cool premise; the villain from the first movie is now essentially the hero.  Action ensues.  Remember this is a time loop, as established in the first film.  Skynet would know all about this, one would assume, because the second terminator also fails to kill John.

Also, halfway through the movie, Sarah gets the idea that Skynet could be stopped.  Maybe they could keep it from existing at all.  So, they find the lead scientist who gets it off the ground and attempt to kill him in order to change the future.  Okay, so is it now single string again?   Can you alter the future even if you know what it will be?  Also, doesn’t she consider that killing the scientist = killing Skynet = killing time travel = making John never exist? But, we also learn that is the remnants of the original terminator from the first film that that served as the foundation for the technology of Skynet.  So is it a loop again?

  At the end, the old Terminator, after disposing of the newer model, destroys himself to wipe out all remaining future tech, thereby eliminating the impetus for Skynet.  So it was a single string movie after all.  You can change the future.  Except, there are two more sequels.  All that didn’t matter.  Ugh.  I give up. Watch for the explosions, try to ignore the story.  Actually, that is good advice for most action movies.