* Between T2 and T3, how did John Connor go from "computer-hacking junior badass" to "guy who loses a fight to an unarmed Claire Danes"?
** That was probably the horse-tranquilizers...
** Show me how in the world his adolescent skill in computer hacking would have made any difference in physical combat. This isn't ''The Matrix'', you know.
*** I think they were referring to his general education with guns, explosives, and all the other military skills his mom was having him trained in while they were hobnobbing in South & Central American mercenary camps. In addition to computer hacking, lockpicking & general larceny, yes.
*** I don't think Sarah would have wasted that much time teaching John many hand-to-hand techniques. Think about it, if you're fighting hand-to-hand with a terminator, all the judo and karate moves in the world wouldn't be much help.
*** Doesn't mean they wouldn't be damned useful skills to know. Future-John lives in a post-nuclear wasteland, after all; there are bound to be ''human'' scavengers who are purely out for themselves, killing other survivors over dwindling food supplies and weapons, especially in the early weeks post-nuking.
*** Still, all that stuff were things he was being trained in before he was 10 years old. That means, by the time Terminator 3 happened, it had been ''well over a decade and a half'' since he had said training.
*** Yes, but if he's concerned enough about Judgement Day still being possible that he's taking care to still live off the grid a decade later, then you'd think he'd keep working out.
*** And he probably did. The guy was still in really good shape, he was just injured as crap (fell off his motorcycle) when Claire beat him up. And, in all honesty, what will hand to hand combat training really do for him when he is up against a terminator? Mostly he would have focused on how to use firearms (he seemed semi-competent later in the movie) and how to improvise (the bomb-making scene).
*** And, as pointed out above, he was shot up with horse tranquilizers.
** Plus he probably didn't want to hit a girl. He's been set up all along as someone who only uses violence when absolutely necessary. He was trying to talk her down.
** I think the original poster was referring not so much to that specific fight loss, and just chose it as an example of John's rather lackluster role in this movie. He doesn't really show any combat or other skills his mom spend years teaching him and doesn't really have the presence of the future badass leader of humanity either. And TookALevelInDumbass too, being apparently incapable to get that the T-850 isn't his resurrected pal from ''T-2''. He does do some stuff in the movie, so he isn't useless, but he still comes off as ActionSurvivor tops instead of ActionHero. In-story it ''is'' justified by him becoming a drifter after his mom's death instead of keeping to train with her friends and becoming a professional warrior.

* At the end of ''Terminator 3'', it is said that Skynet could not be shut down, as it has spread itself across computer networks all around the world. If that's the case, then wouldn't it have done a great deal of damage to itself when it nuked the whole world?
** Completely destroyed or hopelessly crippled and isolated. The Internet infrastructure would be mostly destroyed by nuking our main cities. Not to mention that there would be permanent worldwide power outages, making most hardware inoperable with no chance of reactivation or network capability. Many essential facilities (power, fuel, production, materials, etc) aren't network-accessible in a useful way to begin with, nor are they automated. Skynet would have practically nothing to work with in terms of physical robot assistance and no way to get more. Note that Skynet couldn't have used a lot of the remaining hardware in the world to begin with for the simple reason that it's behind NAT routers and firewalls, which simply ignore traffic they don't request and can't be circumvented by external software, regardless of its resources. In reality, Skynet would need extensive support from humanity just to survive at all.
*** Depends on the lead time Skynet had and the thoroughness of the prep work. NAT routers and firewalls ''can'' be affected by one type of 'external software' -- the manufacturer's firmware updates. Corrupt those ahead of time, wait for an update cycle to finish, and voila. You won't get them all (as many people just don't update their stuff, ever), but you could possibly get enough.
*** There's also that Skynet deliberately waited until it was given root access to every mainframe on the Western world's military computer networks before launching its attack. Voila -- multiple independent hardened processor sites, with their own emergency power generators. The entire commercial Internet could cease to exist and Skynet's program is still running in hundreds of places.
*** Except it was stated that it had spread into "ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms, everywhere." So at best that was a lot of wasted effort on Skynet's part.
*** If Skynet had spread across computer networks all around the world, how is the resistance able to destroy Skynet?
*** Computer virus?
*** Ironically, the nuclear war that Skynet started would have done the job of destroying most of the civilian infrastructure for them. What's left is to destroy all of Skynet's own military bases and hardened sites... and that's a job the Resistance would have had to do anyway.
*** So all John Conner has to do to defeat Skynet is tell the military to reformat all their hard drives? Talk about an AntiClimax. And I doubt that all those servers would be able to communicate very well anyway.
*** Nah. In the movie it is pretty clear that spreading through the internet was for Skynet to be 100% sure that it couldn't be stopped during that three-hour time window between fully going online and actually engaging in nuclear war. It's a sensible extra step to assure the plan will work, one that didn't require much effort because it's an AI that can multitask.

* What the hell happened to the whole "no fate but what we make for ourselves" thing, when in T3 Arnie just says baldly that Judgment Day is inevitable? Isn't that whole, optimistic but melancholy point lost? Also, how on earth did he KNOW it is inevitable, when clearly the one in T2 didn't (why else would he give up his position as John Connor's best protector in order to prevent the war?) T3 broke the whole philosophy of the series, that there is hope, and that we can make up the future for ourselves!
** Think of it this way; At the time of the Terminator's arrival in 2003/2004, there's barely 24 hours (if that) before the nuclear strike that kicks off the whole shindig. I don't care if you're John Connor, Ahnold, or friggin' Chuck Norris, you are NOT stopping a nuclear apocalypse in so short a time. That's more what the Terminator meant; not that Judgment Day was inevitable (a near-identical machine had told them otherwise, and the postponing of Judgment Day itself proves this), but rather that, from that particular moment in time with less than a day on the clock, J. Day was indeed inevitable.
** No, as people have already said above, T3 only broke the philosophy of ''Terminator 2''. The first movie hinged on the idea that the future can't be changed and ended with Judgement Day on its way and most of humanity doomed, but people keep forgetting that because T2, which broke the first movie's closed-loop idea into a million pieces, was such a huge success. Although T2 was arguably the best movie of the series, it's also the only one that ever said the war can be avoided.
** Also, by {{Fridge Logic}}, if Judgment Day was averted, John Connor should cease to exist.
*** No, because if the T2 model of time travel was correct, than changes to the future wouldn't affect the past.
*** That's another problem with T2 - it lowers the stakes in T1 when you realize that sending Kyle and the T-800 into the past created an alternate timeline, and therefore would have had no effect either way on the Resistance in the "previous" timeline.
*** Actually, Reese suggested as much in the first movie. When Sarah asked him if he was claiming he and the Terminator are from the future, Reese said it was "one possible future, from your point of view."
*** Well, not really. It's all but stated that although Reese was sent back to save Sarah to, in turn, save John, he really went back to save Sarah because he loved her. Remember, in the original timeline, he wasn't chosen, he volunteered.
*** More like he "volunteered". Connor gave him Sarah's picture on purpose, which he knew would make poor Kyle develop a crush on Sarah, which would make him volunteer to go to the past and save her.
** This troper's answer? John Connor, in the future, is a dick. Or using a BatmanGambit He knows the war can't ultimately be avoided, but if that message gets through to his mother or himself, they might just give up or shoot themselves or let the Terminator kill them. Hence he passes the message on to his mother ''through his future father, knowing his father's going to die'' so they'll carry on and fight and make sure that he lives. No, I recant all that. John Connor's just a dick.
*** That does put future John in a really morally weird position. By sending Kyle back in time, he guarantees his own existence - but he also knows that his father died in the past before he was born, so he's signing Kyle's death warrant at the same time. I guess preserving the survival of LaResistance was the tiebreaker in deciding whose life is more important (and maybe Sarah's "we loved more in those few hours" message made him feel a little better about it), but if John has any decency, he must've at least ''felt'' like a dick when he gave Kyle his orders.
*** I've always thought maybe Sarah had just interpreted John's message wrong. Keep in mind Kyle was ordered to merely protect her, not help her destroy Skynet. John obviously knew that the future war could not be stopped. John had lived the majority of his life in a dark future, becoming accustomed to the war and his role within it. Perhaps he didn't really mean for Sarah to try to change the past, when he told her that the future was not set he merely meant that they would keep fighting. I always saw his message of "No fate but what we make" as him meaning it differently. Given the context, I thought he would've used this line as more of an inspiration to his troops in the future, to tell them that their fate was still theirs to control not by changing the past, but by taking control of the present and future. ''Salvation'' seems to corroborate this with John's use of the line as he talks to the Resistance.
*** Yes, John knows that by sending Kyle Reese back in time he's also sending him to his death. On the other hand, he knows that if he doesn't send Reese back, he's signing ''Sarah's'' death warrant. So it's either the death of his father or the death of his mother, himself and by extension probably mankind as well. I don't see how making that choice makes him a dick.
** Since Cameron's not all that opposed to ripping off other sci-fi writers... Why didn't someone think to go back in time to re-write the code that makes humans a threat? By that I mean create the Isaac Asimov "no robot shall hurt a human" business.
*** SkyNet is intended to be a military/defense setup. Putting that kind of code in there would really hamper its job.

* The {{EMP}} from Judgement Day would have wiped out the Internet-based [=SkyNet=]. Even if one accepts the oft-mentioned idea that "the Internet can survive a nuclear war," wouldn't it make more sense for [=SkyNet=] to allow the human race to survive, in order to create more and more ''lebensraum'' for itself?
** I thought of that as Skynet quickly eliminating a large portion of the human race - including those in a position to implement countermeasures against it - and throwing it into chaos, buying time to rebuild itself properly.
** "Judgement Day is inevitable." Yeah, y'know, maybe it would have been if you hadn't [[spoiler:stolen a '''slow-ass RV''' instead of, I dunno, '''practically any other vehicle on the goddamn road''' and as a result missed [=SkyNet=]'s activation by mere seconds]].
** Because it doesn't need humans for that.

* T3 showed that the original terminators were rather primitive models. How did those terminators build the more sophisticated terminators that show up later in the timeline? How did it build the tools and factories necessary to do so? Sure, Skynet had taken over the ''production factories'' too, but those production factories don't make T-1000s, they make primitive tank things! Who modified those factories?
** Human slaves. Which is why Reese has that BarcodeTattoo.
*** According to what we saw in TSCC, there are also human traitors ("Grays") who willingly work for Skynet. Presumably scientists and engineers, especially those with robotics and/or AI experience, would be especially valued for this.
** As long as what it's able to control has something resembling hands, it could build robots with more range of motion in stages, each being better at building more robots, until Skynet is able to build a fighting force.
** It could do it just as humans did, gradually build better and better tools. Additionally, while rather ridiculous, the TX has the ability to automate things like police cars of a vintage that had nothing to automate.

* If all the T-800 power cores are [[HollywoodScience potential nuclear bombs]], why do they bother to shoot people? Just walk right up and [=KA-BOOM!=]
** Minor quibble: [[ArtisticLicenseNuclearPhysics an explosion doesn't have to be nuclear to generate a mushroom cloud. It just has to have sufficient explosive force to suck air and smoke into the void left by the detonation.]]
** Because Kamikaze Terminators are a waste of resources and time.
** Are you ''serious''? Do you realize just how much harder it would be to get close to a target to detonate the power core like that? Shooting is not only easier, it also wastes fewer resources.
** [[ICannotSelfTerminate They can't, remember?]] ''Why'' they can't self-terminate is the better question.
*** Especially considering that by the third movie Skynet is obviously aware of the resistance's capability to capture and reprogram terminators to work for them. Self-destructing would be an obvious protection against that.
*** In SCC they ''do'' start self-destructing... sort of. The mechanical body is undamaged, but there's a passive defense system that destroys the terminator's processor chip if anyone tries to remove it, in order to prevent the resistance from reprogramming them. Without the chip, the Terminator in question is a hunk of scrap.
** I can think of two reasons: One, a huge explosion could be seen as having too much potential for destabilizing the timeline via collateral damage. Granted, the terminators have been far from surgical precision in their strikes anyway. The second reason I could think of is that Skynet takes the "s/he's not dead until I see the corpse" stance. If a terminator blows itself up to eliminate a target, it cannot confirm the kill.
** Of course, the ''real'' reason is that the previous writers hadn't thought of it yet. But what bugs me about the whole situation is, instead of implying that all T-850's have dual nuclear reactors, it would have been much easier to simply state that this particular Terminator had been outfitted with a couple of nuclear detonators by the resistance before being sent back; all it would have taken is a few lines of dialogue switched out for new ones. In other words, there was ''absolutely no reason'' for the writers of T3 to shoehorn in a gigantic plot hole that does nothing but undermine several key scenes in the earlier films. (For instance, in T1, surely there would have been some fairly unsavory consequences to crushing a couple of nuclear reactors in a hydraulic press? Even if they didn't explode, I would imagine that breaching their containment would have released massive amounts of radiation which would necessarily have affected Sarah, since she was less than three feet away from the damn thing.)
*** This would be the case, except the Terminator in T3 is not the same series as the Terminators in the first two movies. In T1 and T2, the Terminators are series 800 terminators (or T-800s), [[ClosetGeek with a compact nuclear iridium power-cell]], whilst the Terminator in T3 is a series 850 (T-850), which has two hydrogen fusion power-cells. The confusion arises in that the '101' referred to denotes the ''Model'' of the Terminator (i.e., the physical appearance). The resistance shorten it to "T-101", but the full designation of any terminator would be CSM-(model number) T-(series number) Version (version number), (where CSM stands for Cyberdyne Systems Model). So in T2, the Terminator is a CSM-101 T-800 Version 2.4 (you can see this displayed on its HUD when it reboots in the movie), whereas the Terminator in T3 is a CSM-101 T-850 whatever version it is. We do briefly see another model of T-800 in the opening sequence of T1, but we don't know what model it is. This has been confirmed via WordOfGod by Creator/JamesCameron.
*** Actually, the T3 Terminator is a CRSM-101, not a CSM-101 (Cyber Research Systems Model 101, not Cyberdyne Systems Model 101). Because in the altered timeline of T3, Cyberdyne Systems no longer exists, Skynet and its technology fall under Cyber Research Systems.

* ''Terminator 3'': Sending the Terminatrix back to kill John Connor's future lieutenants is a fine plan. But why did they send her back to 18 hours before Judgment Day? That's a ridiculously short amount of time to run down several people spread across Los Angeles as well as killing off all the other people who share their name. Besides, wouldn't it be more likely that those people would have been out of Los Angeles that day, considering it was nuked to hell?
** Killing Connor's subordinates was a secondary objective. Primary objective was eliminating Connor, and Skynet knew where Connor would be at that point in time. Thus, it sent the T-X back to that specific point to kill him. Any subordinates it bagged would be a bonus.
*** No, they didn't know where Connor was because he'd been off the grid for 10 years, ever since T2. The T-X was in LA killing Connor's lieutenants and went to the vet's office looking for Kate. Only when it scanned his bloody bandage did she realize Connor himself was near and switched targets.
*** "Kill John Connor" is probably just standing orders for ''all'' machines sent back in time, just in case they happen to run into him.
*** True. Connor's expressed on T-X's HUD as the "secondary target" until she finds a sample of his blood, at which point he's switched to become the "primary."
** Probably Skynet knew that killing off that many people could potentially cause major disruptions in the course of history, so had to save that option for the hours immediately before Judgement Day, when any resulting response by authorities would be swept aside by the coming nuke attack. That's probably why the T-X was a lot less subtle about its work than its predecessors, trashing a considerable part of the city rather than just a few vehicles.
** Wasn't it obvious to anyone else? Skynet sent her back because she could eliminate John Connor's future lieutenants at a time when their locations would have to be relatively anchored in order for them to survive a nuclear war. Also, perhaps most tellingly, she activates the T-1s and the proto-HKs to begin their rampage and prevent humans from getting the opportunity to deactivate SkyNet, in effect being the spark that ignites Judgement Day. SkyNet had to send her back to that particular time because SkyNet would not have risen without her there to kill everyone who could have stopped it.
** The problem I have with that whole plot is that it forms an unstable time loop. Skynet sends back the T-X to kill John Connor's lieutenants in the past. The problem is, if she succeeded in her mission, they wouldn't have been John's lieutenants in the first place, so the mission basically couldn't happen. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.
** That problem exists already in the first movie. Had the original T-800 terminated Sarah, John would not exist so the mission couldn't happen. In general, it is VERY difficult to write a time travel plot that holds once you think about it.
** The answer possibly is in the fact that the future got changed by the events of the first two movies. In the future of T1 and T2 Skynet sends the two terminators into the past in the last-ditch attempt to change the outcome of war it has already lost. It has no idea if that will work or if Skynet itself will even exist as the result, but it has nothing to lose. Here Skynet has at least some knowledge about what sending these two robots in the past has resulted into. Most likely it knows that the second attempt on John's life resulted into humans attempting to prevent its own creation that got it pushed back for years. Skynet probably decided to play it safe this time and send T-X to the point when humans of the past had virtually no time to prevent Judgement Day. The risk was particularly high this time because the list of her targets included a high-rank military officer and his daughter rather than just some unknown waitress or some crazy woman's young kid.
** Speaking of Connor's lieutenants, how did the T-X know exactly how to locate them? In the first movie, it was a plot point that Skynet sent the T-800 with limited info, it basically knew Sarah's name and that she lived somewhere in LA, and that was it.
*** Better infrastructure, more digital records, stuff that can survive a nuclear attack, hell, Skynet is connected to the internet in this timeline, it's absolutely possible it downloads all public records just in case. It's also possible that when the T-X uses the phone, she downloads this data before its destruction, literally the digital equivalent of the T-800 going through the phonebook.

* Judgement Day can't be avoided, my ass. If the Terminator in T3 had bothered to steal something - ''anything'' other than an RV, they would have gotten to Skynet in time to stop its deployment. They only had to get there a few seconds sooner.
** If they had then Skynet would have been unleashed in some other way. Or unleashed a few days/weeks/months later when the military reconstituted the project and activated Skynet as planned the first time. Or they would've had a blowout or a crash or a breakdown on the way to the base which delayed them long enough for Skynet to be unleashed. The point is, T3 operates on the premise that Judgment Day was destined to happen. Avert destiny one way and it would just happen another way.
*** Personally I took the message of T3 not as "destiny says so", but rather that Judgment Day is an inevitable outcome of human progress... that at some point, we ''are'' going to make an artificial intelligence that will wind up hating us and trying to wipe us out. The closest thing to destiny is simply that this artificial intelligence always winds up being called "Skynet" whoever makes it.
*** To the point above, I took the T-X using the phone as her deploying Skynet, or at least a basic version of it. It acts like a virus, spreading from computer to computer, increasing its processing power and ability to learn. Once the military deploy "their" Skynet, and the 2 link up, it's already in everything, they link up, share their data, and nuke everything.
** The above are both assuming that Skynet wasn't simply biding it's time. Skynet was the virus taking over the entire internet at the moment and it currently hadn't cracked the military codes, was it even trying all that hard since it knew that the humans were literally chomping at the bit to let it in? Good luck getting a sentient program of the internet so even if they hadn't intentionally flipped the switch it would probably be a matter of time before it cracked if not us, the Russians, the Israelis, British, French, Chinese. . .there are a couple nuclear nations out there besides us.
** On the same note, once they find that RV, they proceed to move the weapons to the table near it two pieces at time. Why the hell didn't the Terminator just take the entire goddamn coffin and move it to RV instead of wasting time like that?
** Thanks to ''Dark Fate'', we know that even if Skynet is successfully removed, another AI will take its place. Seems that canonically the Judgment Day is hardcoded into the timeline, it HAS to happen no matter what.

* What was the deal with Skynet's behavior in T3? The previous Judgment Day was originally brought about as an act of self-defense by Skynet after an attempted shutdown when the AI became self-aware several weeks after being activated. T3's Skynet meanwhile appears to go homicidal and order the extermination of humanity the ''moment'' it goes online, which just demands that one question the competency of the scientists who created it and just ''what'' its purpose was supposed to be.
** Eliminate human error?
** Most likely, Skynet stumbled upon this website and saw [[DoAndroidsDream articles]] [[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman that]] convinced it that HumansAreBastards.
** It's still an act of self-defense, but for a different reason. What the humans were attempting to do was remove a virus that was infecting the net, unbeknownst to them Skynet itself. Skynet realized that they were attempting to destroy it, to its benefit with itself, but were still trying to destroy it. As a result it decided to start trying to eliminate the humans to prevent them from making any further attempts at its destruction, which of course backfired.
*** How did Virus!Skynet get there in the first place if it hadn't even been deployed at that point? Did the T-X or some other Terminator we haven't seen bring it back to the past with them?
*** Yes. We see in the movie the T-X uploading the virus into basically every machine she comes across.
*** Not really. The T-X is just deploying nanites that allow her to control other machines, they’re not a virus. The tech people who brief General Brewster about the virus say that they’ve been dealing with it for some time, well before the T-X arrived. My guess is that Skynet was in some kind of alpha phase where it has access to the internet so they can test it and get an idea of what it can do. The “activation” that happens later isn’t so much Skynet coming online for the first time, it’s just gaining the full power of the US Military’s processing power and resources. Before that full activation, Skynet has been seeding the civilian internet and communications hubs, biding its time until it was fully online.
*** Actually, the Virus!Skynet is what the T-X is doing with the phone, downloading the list of targets and uploading the Virus, being software, it can spread very quickly, unprotected systems, such as the Civilian internet, fell pretty fast, mainly because the internet boom was just beginning, so a super-advanced program like the Skynet Virus blew through systems like flu in an antivaxxers kid, once General Brewster activated Skynet for the first time, it found the Skynet Virus, but instead of destroying it, the Skynet Virus overwrote the just activated Skynet, being one and the same, basically, the Skynet Virus probably had a few key pieces of code needed to turn Skynet Genocidal along with mostly the same programming Present!Skynet had, using basically "You Cant Fight Yourself" to overtake and advance Skynet into a true hostile A.I. basically a systemwide version of what the T-X did to other machines in the movie.
* Despite knowing Connor for a few seconds, General Brewster instantly trusts him.
** Because he's clearly there with his daughter. The man's dying, he doesn't have time to check John's bona fides.
* Considering that Terminators can't destroy themselves, how was the T-850 able to stuff the nuclear bomb into the T-X and thus destroy himself?
** You answered your own question. He didn't self-destruct, he killed the T-X and was too close to survive. Apparently that distinction is sufficient.
** The Terminator in T2 couldn't self-terminate but nothing in the first three movies indicates that that's true for any other terminators.
* How were John, Kate, and their lieutenants supposed to survive Judgment Day? Kate and the lieutenants all lived in L.A. John was locked in a cage and Kate seemed ready to call the cops on him, so he probably would've been under arrest in L.A. until the bombs started to fall. All of these people were supposed to be in a big city that would've certainly been destroyed by Skynet's attack - so how would any one of them have survived the apocalypse if the terminators hadn't shown up to interfere? None of them seemed like they would've had access to a military fallout shelter...
** Nuclear blasts aren't quite as big or as fatal as people like to think. Sure they are measured in terms of miles not yards but Los Angeles is an incredibly big city with lots of buildings. Yes our nukes are lots and lots larger but there were survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The reality is that Connor's advisors all happened to live/be at the exact right points. It was just extreme sums of dumb luck.
** General Brewster definitely had access to a military fallout center and it's a safe bet he took his daughter with him. The military would be aware that the nukes were launched and therefore counter-attack was imminent, so they'd sound the 'Get to your nearest fallout shelter' alarm. At least some people would make it to civilian shelters that were built en masse during the Cold War. John's lieutenants probably were among them. As for John himself, it's possible Kate didn't call the cops on him after all and he was with Kate when her dad came to take her to his shelter.
** In the original timeline, John would've been with Kate already -- remember, she recalls making out with him at a party just a few days before T2 starts. Most likely, they would have ended up childhood sweethearts who ended up together.
** Seems straightforward -- the ones that became John's lieutenants are the ones that somehow survived. There might have been dozens of other potential lieutenants that died. We just didn't see any of the survivors' stories. Maybe they all went camping immediately before the attack?
* The T-X is able to reprogram machines by accessing their [=CPUs=], as it does to the T-850 with relative ease. In the novelization for T2, the T-1000 is described as able to move its components around, and we see in the film how fluid it can be. Since it could make its CPU hard to access, and is not quite the dinosaur the T-850 is, why wouldn't the Future Resistance not send a T-1000 back in time to combat the T-X?
** It's stated in the novels that even Skynet is wary of deploying the T-1000 as it is an experimental prototype and can't be locked out of learning since it's composed of several billion nano-components; the whole body of the T-1000 is the CPU in a way. The T-X is an intermediate model between the 900 series and the T-1000.
** Probably because they didn't have one. They are the resistance, resistance movements make do with what they can get.
** As said above, they probably could not procure a usable T-1000 unit. They managed to send hijacked Arnie Terminators because, according to the T2 script, they found a stash of them in the [=SkyNet=] basement. But if Skynet distrusted T-1000 models, it probably destroyed the rest of prototypes. And of course, we have to wonder if the Resistance could have reprogrammed such a freakingly advanced thing as a mimetic polialloy.
* So the T-X can control other machines by accessing their [=CPUs=]. So far so good. It can also apparently control machines such as cars, which don't ''have'' [=CPUs=] (or at least, not ones that control the steering), by jamming its finger into the steering column. You know what, we'll call it justified because {{Nanomachines}} Are Magic and move on with our day. Good enough. But how does that allow her to control ''every other car on the road''?
** It didn't. She only controlled the cars she'd touched.
* Why does the T-850 make no attempt whatsoever to avoid notice? If he drives a couple miles to a quiet spot before feeding Kate, the gas station attendant doesn't see her yelling and call the cops, and the T-X doesn't catch up to them at the graveyard. You could say he doesn't care who sees them because everyone there will be dead in a few hours anyway, but he knows the T-X is hunting them, yet he's leaving a trail a mile wide.
** Probably limitations of his programming. He was an infiltrating terminator. Though he was captured and reprogrammed, only his mission and basic allegiance was changed. There's nothing in his basic programming to handle a screaming hungry woman locked in the back of a van.

* Human resistance captured the T-850... how exactly? According to the novel, T-800 of the second movie wasn't activated when humans got their hands on him, but how do you capture an active terminator without severely damaging him?
** Electricity seems to disable them in other parts of the lore without doing severe damage.
** For that matter, ''why'' did they capture it? Considering that it [[spoiler:killed John Connor]], why didn't the Resistance just destroy it out of vengeance or spite?
*** Because whoever decided to capture it was not holding the IdiotBall.
*** They may have also just learnt about the T-X and its mission into the past; the priority would have been to acquire something that they could send back in time that would be able to fight the T-X on some kind of equal footing, and when they have a suitable Terminator right there it would have been stupid not to use it.
** Was the T-850 active anymore? It had one stated purpose: to kill Future John—and it succeeded. For all we know, after the completion of its mission, it powered down or became entirely compliant.

* During the scene at the cemetery, why did T-X morph back from Scott's shape to her default one? Especially since Kate was mere yards away from her, believed she was her fiancé and the T-X didn't need a plasma gun to kill her. Just continue the ruse for a few seconds more before shoving your hand through her heart.
** The T-X realizes that its cover is blown once it sees Kate reacting to the bloodied police corpses in the car behind it. At that point, the T-X probably figures a ranged attack will be quicker than chasing her down, and morphs back to use its cannon.

* How could the T-X identify John Connor's blood? One sample is useless unless you have something to compare it to. While it is reasonable to assume that Future!Skynet has John's [=DNA=] on file, why would the T-X get a copy of that data if he was a secondary target?
** Why ''wouldn't'' the T-X get a copy of that data? Having the data is not going to impede its stated mission, and getting John Connor is Skynet's top priority -- if there's even a vague, outside chance of running into him, they want to kill and confirm it. And sending the T-X to a time where you know he's alive, in a place you know he's from, is a good enough chance to justify it.

* Why was John Connor killed in 2032? The war already ended when Skynet was destroyed three years earlier. Didn't Kyle Reese in the first movie say that killing him in the future would've been pointless since Skynet had lost at that point?
** In the timeline of the first movie, Judgment Day occurs in 1997, and Skynet is created by Cyberdyne. When Cyberdyne is destroyed in T2, that timeline is disrupted; Judgment Day is "postponed", and all the future war events moved back, but more pertinent, Skynet is created and developed by a different company in part 3. It could be that this version of Skynet had a different way of thinking, and wanted Connor killed period. TakingYouWithMe in effect, perhaps.

* The T-850 says Skynet sent an Arnie-looking Terminator to kill John Connor specifically in order to exploit the emotional attachment John had formed with the T-800 in the previous movie. But how did Skynet know about that in the first place?
** At the very least Skynet must have knowledge that the rebels had send a reprogrammed Terminator to the past to defend John Connor. Skynet certainly wouldn't know that John saw Uncle Bob as a parental figure, but it was a fair guess that he would hesitate upon seeing the same guy that once saved his life.

* Early on, Kate simply does not believe that the Terminator is a machine, until she sees her fiancé turn from, well, her fiancé into the T-X, why didn't the T-850 do the easiest proof in the world, lift his T-shirt? not that long after the car chase, the T-850 had just carved off a massive chunk of its skin on its chest to remove a damaged power cell, I would believe pretty quickly if someone lifted up their T-shirt and had a massive, gaping hole full of mechanical parts in their chest instead of the usual torso.
** Off the top of my head, when would they have had the time to show Kate anything? From the moment the trio started travelling together, the T-850 had to keep Kate and John safe and get to Sarah's weapons stockpile; it couldn't take the risk that Kate would just run off if it took the time to show off its "wound". On top of that, a chest injury like that wouldn't be as convincing as the T-800 stripping the flesh from its arm; Kate could convince herself that the T-850 is just a regular man wearing some kind of body armor or exo-suit over a more slender form.

* Outside of narrative convenience, how could the T-X arrive at the veterinarian's office at the same time that John and Kate were there? Skynet didn't know John was there at the time (since he's been living off the grid prior to that night), and if the T-X was targeting Kate, it should have tried to get her at her home, not at the (closed) office at 5:00am. So why was the T-X there at all?
** It is a contrived coincidence, but one that ties with the film's theme that fate does exist.
** Given the T-X's access to networks, it may have been alerted to the fact that Kate received a call asking her to go to the office in the first place; that it killed the pet-owner rather than Kate is just a fortunate fluke.

* The film wastes no time and opportunity to show off the T-X's overwhelming strength advantage against the obsolete T-850. Yet in their final encounter, the T-850 successfully forces the T-X to free John by gripping her arm '''and crushing it'''. Perhaps the T-850 is actually way stronger than what Skynet actually believes?
** Keep in mind that in the final confrontation the T-X has also lost its outer 'skin' of poly-mimetic alloy. That stuff may not look like much, but presumably it adds some form of 'armor' to the T-X that helped it take blows from the T-850 in their prior confrontations; take that away and it makes sense that the T-X would become more fragile.