[NCC-73515]

"The ball is blooey" - Uhura.

[chator]

Originally Posted by kevin

I follow that. But Cameron still emphasized the positive outcome.

This is why I get headaches out of time travel.

Either John Connor is stuck in a loop he will never escape from (he sends his father back, but that causes the creation of the very device that destroys mankind, thus the suggestion is they will just go round and round until the cycle is broken) -

Or would he cease to exist once he stopped the creation of Skynet? But would have saved mankind.

Or would he continue to live anyway, even if he was never able to send his 'father' back to create him, as since he already existed, it's simply this loop that has been broken, allowing him to continue.

Like the cause and effect cycle of the TNG episode.

The scene Cameron cut from the end of T2 showed Sarah and John alive in a peaceful future, so Cameron may have been thinking along those lines.

What 'Terminator' needs is a movie that answers all these questions, that ties up all the loose ends, not some Bang-for-your-Buck flick that shows how cool it is to blow up robots.

[kevin]

Originally Posted by chator

What 'Terminator' needs is a movie that answers all these questions, that ties up all the loose ends, not some Bang-for-your-Buck flick that shows how cool it is to blow up robots.

Agreed, and on the initial evidence, T4 and any continuation seem likely to focus on the blow-up part.

Though I don't wonder if the easiest solution is for John Connor to not send Kyle Reese back in time.

Again, this may not make sense and perhaps someone with a better understanding of time travel could weigh in but...

If Kyle Reese never gets sent back, the future will have been altered. Within those alterations could that not create an alternate where, because the events of Terminator could not happen, as they did, the wreckage of the T800 would never be found, because it would never have been sent back in the first place?

Without that piece of arm left behind - Skynet can't be developed.

Because it was the events of T1 that helped create Skynet.

Again - headache time!

[Saquist]

Originally Posted by chator

I just had a thought, most of all the Terminator films take place in the present, even the television show. Remember that famous quote, "The Battle for the future takes place in the present," well, the T4 doesn't. Mostly all of the 'Terminator' films deal with future beings battling it out in the past, that is, our present, when humans have not yet been enslaved by the Terminators, and deal with the attempt by these future beings to kill/protect John Connor. New film doesn't do this, so it really is a major departure. I'm not saying this doesn't make it "authentic" Terminator, i just noticed how it was different. What does this mean?

You're right.
But Terminator started off a horror film anyway. It was never meant to be a full view of the future.

[Pauln6]

The future already is different. If you look at the horrific, grubby view of the future in the original and compare it to the sanitised vision in T4, the world is a much nicer place now. The women even have access to make up, hair stylists, and have the whitest teeth one could hope for in a post-apocolyptic future.

Much the same as in the sequels to the Matrix where the real world women suddenly became as glossy as their computer-enhanced counterparts.

At least Children of Men stayed reasonably grotty.

[Cyberbeagle]

John Connor in T4 doesn't seem to think that anything *has* changed due to his and his mother's actions in T2, when in reality *everything* should have changed. The Skynet in T3 and T4 isn't the same as T1 and T2, so why has it developed Terminators like the original Skynet?

They could have retconned that by explaining that the TX in T3 was in fact a sleeper agent from the original timeline who was sent to ensure that Skynet survives - it downloaded Skynet's consciousness into the new defence system and thus creates a new version of the original Skynet. That's why the T-800 is developed sooner - that's why events pan out as before.

While it's wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey in true Doctor Who fashion, it works... otherwise we're all left scratching our heads how to reconcile all the continuity!!

[Zardoz]

T4, while having some good SFX, is missing what made T1 and T2 work, a good hard driving script, with charters we could relate, to and sympathize with. T1 we had Sarah and Reese, and even by the end of the film we felt for the Terminator, even though it was a villian. T2, we had Sarah, John, and a "Good Terminator," while not as strong script-wise as 1, still was 100 times better than T3 and T4.