Literature / T2 Trilogy

The T2 Trilogy is a set of novels in the Terminator continuity, written as sequels to Terminator 2: Judgment Day by S. M. Stirling. When its existence is jeopardized by the destruction of the T-800 remnants in the 1990s, SkyNet sends Serena, one of a new breed of super-realistic cyborg stealth operatives, back in time to ensure its existence and, if possible, the destruction of the Connors. This forces the Connors to team up with Dieter von Rossbach, the Austrian-American ex-counter-intelligence agent who served as the base model for the T-800s, in order to stop SkyNet's plans.

The books are out of the main continuity of the series following Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which chose a rather different path for the universe to take, though they arguably inspired (or at least predicted) certain elements of that film (for instance, the famous Sgt. Candy deleted scene is essentially a major subplot from these novels Played for Laughs). On the Terminator Wiki, they are treated as an alternate timeline, similar to the reboot and alternate continuity entries in the film series. In any case, the trilogy consists of three novels:

• T2: Infiltrator (2001)
• T2: Rising Storm (2003)
• T2: The Future War (2003)

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Tropes include

• Action Bomb: Serena's ultimate goal as she infiltrates the Resistance in the future is to get close enough to John Connor and detonate her power core. She's quite close before Skynet recalls her for her time-travel mission.
• Adaptational Explanation: After the film's release, fans of Terminator 2 would often wonder what happened to the arm Uncle Bob loses to the T-1000, as it isn't destroyed at the end like the rest of the future technology. Infiltrator makes this a key plot point, with government agents recovering it from the steel mill seen in the climax and using it as one of the cornerstones of the resurrected Skynet project.
• Adaptational Villainy: Rising Storm takes the same tack as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, removing the element of Skynet's firing the nukes in self-defence from its film backstory in favour of it deciding to eliminate humanity as a threat after reviewing all the data. Notably, the book came out over a year before the film.
• Alternate Continuity: The novels are this to all of the post-T2 movie continuities, setting up their own story that ties into the first two films.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Of all people, it's John Connor who gets this at the start of "Future War", flatly disbelieving his mother and Dieter as evidence mounts that Skynet is active and well on its way to Judgment Day. In this case, it's John refusing to believe his dead love Wendy failed to kill Skynet's sentience with her program, as if that's true she died for nothing.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Victor Greigo is a slimeball arms dealer who absolutely no-one likes, and can't help making himself as unpopular as possible when he stays at Dieter's place. There's even a rumour that his mother died of a broken heart because he was so awful. When one of Serena's Terminators offs him, no tears are shed. Even when John and Dieter find out, all they do is comment on what an asshole he was to his mother.
  • Two men see young Alissa in a restaurant and decide to take the opportunity of her visiting the restroom to abduct her for unsavory purposes. Of course, despite her young biological age Alissa is still an I-950 with Super-Strength and Toughness, to say nothing of being Wi-Fi linked to the three T-800s in the dining room, so this ends very badly for both would-be kidnappers.
  • Kurt Viemeister is Skynet's Neo-Nazi programmer, a blatant misogynist with an unrelenting superiority complex whom even the I-950s delight in finding small ways to take down a peg. Consequently, when Skynet becomes active and tells him precisely how the many books on racial theory and inferiority inspired it to exterminate humans as a whole, one of the military men with him promptly shoots him dead, commenting on how he'd wanted to do that for years. His boss comments on how he'd wanted to do that ever since he met the man.
• Badass Family: The Connors. Sarah and John (John more than Sarah, initially) keep up their physical training (and paranoia) despite believing that they've destroyed SkyNet once and for all. Justified, since they are still wanted for terrorism thanks to blowing up a computer company. Their estancia in Paraguay has all kinds of hidey holes with military-grade weapons stashed away, just in case another Terminator comes calling.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Despite all the Connors' efforts, the second book ends with Skynet becoming sentient and deciding to exterminate humanity.
• Because Destiny Says So: The novels operate on the conceit that time has a kind of inertia, a desire to flow down a specific path and the ability to nudge events towards that path, which is basically the quantum mechanical version of this trope. Thus, the more Skynet tries to kill the Connors (specifically John) and the more the Connors try to stop Skynet before it happens, the harder they fail. The more they move in line with the future history Kyle Reese talked about — the Connors stockpiling weapons and supplies and recruiting allies; Skynet's forces ensuring the AI's birth — the greater success they enjoy.
• Bond One-Liner:
  • From a Terminator, no less. After killing a man via third floor window, the Terminator answers an inquiry as to his whereabouts with "He just dropped out."
  • Dieter gets one worthy of the actor he's based on when he kills Clea with a thrown knife, telling her to "Chill out, Bennett."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: This is the only reason why Dr. Kurt Viemeister was allowed to work on the SkyNet program; as much as it disgusts Cyberdyne to employ a practicing Neo-Nazi, the truth of the matter is that he's the only man on the planet who has the programming knowledge to coax a computer into true Artificial Intelligence. Goes both ways, interestingly: Viemeister initially insisted on much more favorable terms for his contract employment with Cyberdyne, basically amounting to "I do whatever I want and own everything I make," because he's just good enough to make such demands and still get hired by every other tech firm out there. Tricker slapped him with super stringent security protocols partly because the project had already been set back by Stuff Blowing Up, partly because Tricker really would have been happy if Viemeister walked rather than accept the restrictions. But Viemeister stuck around because what Cyberdyne was doing (and what they were doing it with) was well beyond anything he'd get to work with anywhere else. When Skynet eventually makes its move and leaves Viemeister and the military men with him to die in their Antarctic bunker, one of them shoots him straightaway, commenting on how he'd wanted to do it for years.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: In a Funny Moment, a Terminator is attempting to kill John, Sarah, and Dieter as they are leaving on a chartered plane. The Terminator is hanging on outside the plane, and the best weapon they have to deal with it is C-4. Sarah is spinning the plastic explosive in her hands into thin ropes, which they wrap around the Terminator's arms and (eventually) neck to destroy it. Dieter comments that he's never seen someone work plastic explosive like that, and John says that Sarah does it the same way she does with dough for Christmas cookies, to which Sarah helpfully identifies them as Cinnamon Bows.
• Clark Kenting: Clea goes to great lengths to alter her appearance from that of her progenitor Serena, starting with hair dye and glasses, then adding in a strong Montana accent and "country cowgirl" style clothing. She also uses makeup and a very eye-catching dress to draw attention away from her face. She's helped by the fact that she is, personality-wise, a completely different person than Serena.
• Clone Angst: Despite all being based on the same template, the I-950s have very different personalities, as it's implied the speed of the latter two's development has left some unaddressed personality defects. Clea regards Serena as arrogant, overconfident and sloppy in her work, while Alissa thinks Clea is overly emotional and "defective". Interestingly, Clea is the most introspective about her own flaws, recognising Alissa is probably the superior unit, but her lack of physical maturity leaves Clea in the leadership role.
• Complexity Addiction: Subverted, Sarah and John are certainly weirded out by the fact that their new neighbor looks exactly like a Terminator, but Sarah really has a hard time believing he is one, since he has a full backstory, job, personality, paper trails, and a whole bunch of other things the previous Terminators never had. She doesn't doubt that SkyNet could instruct its minions to engage in convoluted plots, but she does doubt that it would feel the need to, since it's unlikely anything in SkyNet's past experience has taught it to be any more subtle than a sledgehammer. This is contrasted with Serena, who is creating a false identity and backstory and worming her way into human society so she can ensure SkyNet's existence in the future, but as an I-950 this kind of long-term infiltration is exactly what she was designed for.
• Cyborg:
  • The Infiltrator 950s are the most traditional example of this trope in the Terminator-verse (up until Terminator: Dark Fate), being human beings (with some extreme gene-modification) who are implanted with various cybernetic upgrades from birth, mostly focused on neural modifications. They can even reproduce sexually, though only with other I-950s or through parthenogenesis.
  • Serena has the most critical components for T-800 cyborgs surgically implanted in her body before being sent back through time, allowing her to create T-800s as backup.
• Deconstructed Trope: The books live on this trope. Dieter's main red flag that something truly bizarre is going on with Sarah Connor isn't just that pictures of him were taken with her, once when he was apparently trying to kill her and again when he was working with her (and Dieter is confirmed to be elsewhere during both events), but the fact that, while Dieter is a top-notch special forces agent and crack shot, even he couldn't nonfatally shoot people in the legs as often as the T-800 does. John and Sarah are wanted criminals for their previous antics and hiding out in Paraguay, and both have some pretty severe PTSD to deal with (the first time Sarah sees Dieter's face, and recognizes it as the T-800's, she runs). Numerous other examples abound, mostly deconstructing the common action movie tropes the Terminator series lives by.
• Designer Babies: The I-950s. The basis for them were ova harvested from a female human survivor that managed to impress SkyNet, before being artificially grown to maturity, having their DNA spliced with select animal chromosomes, and implanted with neural cybernetic relays.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: While the franchise has never been shy about having Skynet and its war against humans be analogous to the Nazis and the Holocaust, it's made even more explicit here. Not only is its creator an actual Neo-Nazi, but Skynet has actual death camps on the go almost immediately after Judgment Day, staffed by Luddite collaborators, where people are lured with the hope of food and water. On top of that, the Luddite methods of extermination until the camps are up and running sound disturbingly like those of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union in 1941.
• Electronic Telepathy: Serena and her Terminators have this through basically a Wi-Fi link.
• Every Scar Has a Story: In this timeline, at least, the facial scars John Connor had in the brief look at his future self in T2 are the result of an attack by a leopard seal, nanite-controlled by Clea.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Cyberdyne's government liason/watchdog, who only goes by Tricker (not even Mr. Tricker).
  Is that is his first name or his last?
  Hell, for all I know it's his job description.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Tricker is genuinely offended and downright angry when Colvin and Warren try to dismiss Kurt Viemeister's Neo-Nazism by stating lots of geniuses, when they have political ideas, tend to have "airy-fairy notions about how things should be run."
  Tricker: I have never heard Nazism seriously described as an "airy-fairy notion."
  • Ron Labane is an awful, awful person in so many ways, but he's genuinely shocked when his commune partner insinuates he might start beating her, protesting he's not the sort of pig who'd hit a woman.
  • The arms dealers in Rising Storm point-blank refuse to sell guns to John when he initially approaches them, saying they're not going to be responsible for a high-school shooting spree. When they later apprehend Dieter (thinking he was responsible for the police station massacre in the first film), they tell him in complete seriousness they don't deal with cop killers as a rule.
• Evil Corporation: Averted. Cyberdyne might be responsible for SkyNet's existence, but they're actually being played for suckers by future!SkyNet and Serena; they just want to make a profit through innovative design in military cybernetics and programming, they have no idea that their creation is going to destroy civilization.
• Evil-Detecting Dog:
  • Referenced; as per Terminator-verse canon, dogs can sense the artificial nature of T-800s and T-1000s and react with aggression. Seeing a stray dog instantly take a liking to Dieter helps reassure Sarah that he actually isn't another T-800 come to kill her.
  • Defied with the I-950s; they have much more subtle cyber-components and so can pass the "dog test". While it's noted that dogs still won't like them, they won't immediately blow their cover. That said, the fact the MP dogs at Cyberdyne's military base location can't keep discipline around Serena, growling and baring their teeth, is a sign to a sufficiently-observant Major that something is not right with her.
  • A woman notes that her dog hates her brand-new SUV. . . which just so happens to be controllable by Skynet. Sure enough, it kills her mere paragraphs later.
• Evil Luddite: A whole army of them. Ron Labane is a Jerkass, but his followers in the second book start getting increasingly violent, irrational and murderous - to the point of killing him to gain greater sympathy for their cause. By Skynet's time, many of them willingly work for it, believing that Skynet will be less harmful to Earth than the human race and that they can freely kill themselves once it's all over. A few even work for Skynet at the very end of the war, once the Terminators have gone back in time. Early in "Infiltrator", Serena is instructed by Skynet to engage a Luddite in conversation on their worldview, and can only come away from it believing humans are insane - especially since, as mentioned elsewhere, Skynet and its war are far more harmful to the environment than humans could ever be.
• Faking the Dead:
  • A really unique variant in Rising Storm. To give her backstory more credibility, Clea has one of the Terminators play her recently deceased uncle by shutting itself down and letting itself be buried. Later, it reactivates and smashes its way out of its grave, scaring the crap out of the local kids and giving rise to rumours it was a zombie.
  • While Sarah having died by the time of the future war is something that most takes on the franchise have logically assumed, here she's still around at the time of Skynet's final defeat, with John having faked her death to give the Resistance (specifically Kyle) a martyr to idolise into a legend. She even lives long enough to see Kyle Reese go back in time.
• Fantastic Racism: In this case, speciesism. While Skynet wanting to destroy humanity has always been a given in the franchise, here, we see an I-950 Infiltrator's viewpoint on the subject. Barely a page goes by where Serena isn't commenting on how stupid humans are, and how they deserve to die. Even one of her Terminators eventually gets in on the action after having to watch a comedy on a flight. Notably, Clea and Alissa dial it way down in the second book.
• Fatal Flaw: The I-950s might be machines, but the fact they're mostly human leads their Pride to be their biggest issue. For all their intelligence and resourcefulness, they repeatedly underestimate the Connors, Dieter and humanity as a whole because at root they simply cannot believe that mere humans can be superior to machines.
• Faux Affably Evil: Balewitch, one of Skynet's nastier Luddite collaborators, can do an excellent impression of a warm and caring grandmotherly figure when recruiting the clueless Ninel in betraying John Connor. When she drops the act after Connor's capture, she revels in being an unrepentant mass-murderer bent on reducing the human race by any means necessary.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: After being sent to the past, Serena is several times confused, impressed, or annoyed by the differences between this time and the future where she comes from. Humans in a "free" society like pre-apocalypse America behave in such bizarre and illogical ways — but they do have "Human Resources" departments, which she finds hilarious.
• Frame-Up: Wendy is framed for the murder of Ron Labane by the eco-terrorist extremists who actually killed him (because he wasn't extreme enough for them). Her college buddies know she's innocent, but all they can really do is help her disappear, so she goes to Paraguay to John and Sarah Connor, reasoning that they have lots of experience being falsely accused of crimes and hiding from the law. Sarah corrects her on one crucial point: with one exception, every crime John and Sarah are accused of committing they've actually done.
• Fridge Logic: In-Universe (and addressing a similar question from fans of the franchise), Serena wonders why humans feel it's safer to move around at night when SkyNet's HKs and Terminators have infrared, making humans more visible at night than during the day. She concludes it's largely psychological, that because humans don't see as well at night they feel invisible, and thus more secure, when they are anything but.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The Luddites, an extremist environmentalist group that wants to wipe out humanity to save the planet. In the present day, they are merely a noisy lobby, but in the dystopian future, they supply a large number of Skynet's human collaborators.
• Gambit Pileup: John and Dieter go to some Good Ol' Boy gunrunners to buy stock for Judgment Day caches. Unfortunately, those gunrunners also fancy themselves bounty hunters, and just saw a TV spot about the guy who shot up a police station some years ago (the T-800, who's appearance was based on Dieter). So they call the show ask about the reward, and prepare to try and snag Dieter at the planned arms deal. The Sector was monitoring the show and its phone lines to try and figure out what the hell's going on with one of their top retired agents, and I-950 Alissa was monitoring the show and the Sector. So John and Dieter arrive at the meeting expecting to buy lots of guns, the gunrunners arrive expecting to arrest a dangerous fugitive and collect a fat reward, Alissa's Terminators arrive expecting to Terminate everyone, and the Sector arrives just hoping to start making sense of this weirdness. More Dakka ensues.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The novels credits Sarah's noticeably more unhinged persona in T2 to her confinement in Pescardero State Mental Institution. Not only were they medicating her for a mental illness she didn't have (it's not paranoid schizophrenia if Killer Robots from the future really are trying to kill you), a different psychologist looking over her case opines that she was overmedicated based on her symptoms. The combination of the drugs and withdrawls from same meant that, for pretty much the entirety of T2, sheer force of will was keeping Sarah Connor remotely functional, and in a more cogent state of mind she probably wouldn't have tried to terminate Miles Dyson, among many other questionable decisions she made in that film.
• Hardboiled Detective: Serena hires a PI to look into Von Rossbach and the Connors, verifying priority targets to send her Terminators after. She gets a young man whose day job is a dishwasher in his uncle's restaurant and watches way too many Bogart flicks. His attempts to emulate Bogart's speech are noted several times to be near incomprehensible, uses the slang of old noir PI films, and wears an authentic trenchcoat in Paraguay (which makes him a bad PI, as one of the most important things is to not stick out, and thus get noticed by the people you're investigating). He's gone so far as to construct a whole noir-film story around Serena's job, even remarking to himself that what he's come up with "had plot." He's aided a bit by Serena correctly identifying and exploiting his mental picture of her as a leggy seductive blonde just desperate for his help (though he really should be Genre Savvy enough to at least suspect Femme Fatale is in play. . . which it is). After escorting one of Serena's Terminators to near the Kreiger estancia, he overhears the ensuing gunfight. . . then decides maybe being just a dishwasher isn't so bad after all.
• Heroic BSoD: John has a huge one after he realizes that the computer code he uploaded into Skynet's database at Cyberdyne's Antarctic base was tampered with by the I-950, and that he has, in fact, made Skynet sentient instead of sabotaging it. Sarah likewise has one when John tells her and Dieter... for all of two minutes before she gets back on-mission.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Wendy turns out to have a lot more inner steel than even she suspected. Sarah initially dislikes her, seeing in Wendy who she used to be: a soft, clueless suburban girl utterly lacking the skills and fortitude to survive in a world with Terminators. It takes Sarah some time to see she and Wendy have something else in common: being The Determinator.
  • Snog, one of Wendy's college buddies, seems a lazy nerdy hacker. But he's surprisingly insightful in his and John's first meeting, challenging him and accepting him as the challenges are met. He's also capable with firearms, as his family has always owned guns and maintains a hunting lodge. By the time of the future war, he's one of John's lieutenants, coordinating the humans' technological and hacking developments.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Trying to get home to Paraguay from Brazil, Dieter thinks it's a good idea to strongarm a local gang boss called Garmendio into helping him and John, banking on his Sector reputation. This overlooks Garmendio being a hyper-paranoid thug already on edge after John insinuated Sarah knew his dark secrets, and doesn't help matters with his arrogant and overbearing behaviour. Soon enough he's beaten senseless and stuck in a car trunk to be fed to the local caimans, with John and Sarah forced to rescue him.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Subverted: for all her desire to be a Superior Successor to Serena, Clea often believes herself to be this, noting the "flaws" in her development compared to the more normally grown Alissa, even admitting at one point that the latter would be leader if it weren't for her looking like a six year old girl. However, she's also the only one of the three I-950s to successfully complete her mission, ensuring Skynet's birth.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals:
  • The T-800s; as Serena realises all too late, this makes them more remarkable amongst humans, making it much harder to deploy multiple ones at a time and go unnoticed. She attempts to get around it by artificially styling and coloring their hair to make them look at least a little different on a cursory inspection. This also comes into play with the basis for their appearance, Sector agent Dieter von Rossbach; his associates in the Sector start thinking something hinky is up when he's shown to be first trying to kill Sarah Connor (and murdering seventeen police officers in the process) then helping her, when both times Dieter himself was confirmed to be nowhere in the vicinity.
  • The I-950s cloned from Serena face this as well, with Clea having to go with an entirely different hairstyle and heavy makeup to not immediately be recognised as her progenitor. It works on the Cyberdyne people, but the Connors instantly see through it, and a groggy Tricker also realises the truth when recovering from John knocking him out.
• Internet Jerk: John, monitoring Luddite chat rooms on the Internet and noting the movement is getting more mainstream — and more violent — every day, muses on exactly this trope, that people will say things on the Internet they would never say face-to-face. But it's still probably a good thing not to be in the same room with them when they are saying such things; who knows what could happen.
• Ironic Echo: The second novel starts with a brooding Skynet trying to make sense of the fact it has records of three totally different origins in different timeframes, eventually concluding (just as Sarah Connor once did);
  THERE IS NO FATE SAVE THAT WE MAKE.
• Irony:
  • SkyNet learned a significant part of its anti-human prejudice from its Neo-Nazi programmer. It even thanks him for uploading all the texts on humans exterminating lesser beings (Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, etc) before it kills him, citing their influence on its decision to do the same to humans.
  • Ronald Labane's efforts to set up a group of neo-Luddites would lead to that group's descendants actually helping SkyNet to destroy humanity for "the sake of Mother Earth".
    • Furthering the irony, as Serena notes in Infiltrator, SkyNet is actually more likely to destroy all life on Earth than humanity is, since it is neither hindered by the need for oxygen and organic fuels nor possessed of the emotional attachment that humans feel, however dimly, for other life. If SkyNet's needs are best served by massive smoke-belching factories that blot out the sun and poison air, earth, and water, SkyNet will have massive smoke-belching factories.
  • John Connor is almost directly responsible for SkyNet becoming sentient (see Nice Job Breaking It, Hero).
• Jerkass: Ronald Labane, a self-righteous eco-nut who abandons his commune, including his long-term lover and infant child, because he feels they have "sold out". In reality, he's a self-righteous, lazy, self-proclaimed leader and an all-around asshole, who blew up at them because they expected him to start actually working to help out around the commune instead of sitting around and typing up reams of drivel. His end goal is to actually foment a Neo-Luddite uprising, to save the planet from wanton consumerism and impose a better set of values (namely, his) on everyone. He even cites the old chestnut about omelettes and eggs when thinking about the likely cost of his revolution.
• Les Collaborateurs: SkyNet actually has a small contingent of humans who serve it in various capacities, ranging from humans who sold out in hopes of having at least some small comfort to eco-nut zealots who actively seek the destruction of humanity.
• Made of Iron:
  • The T-800s, obviously. Even the ones constructed in the present can shrug off anything up to anti-tank weapons relatively easily.
  • The I-950s are able to repress pain through their combination of intense training and neural implants, allowing them to keep functioning despite considerable injury. The computers in their brains can even keep them functioning for a short time after fatal organic damage (such as having half the I-950s head blown off). That said, they are still fundamentally organic human bodies, and so are much easier to take out than "proper" Terminators.
• Magnetic Hero: John is growing into this, able to convince, inspire, and reassure people... even as he's threatening to kill them if he doesn't get his way.
• Meaningful Name: The I-950, "Serena." Two concepts immediately suggest themselves from the name: Siren, which fits as SkyNet deliberately chose the "donor" who supplied the genetic material to make Serena and her fellow I-950s because of her physical beauty, and Serena has no problem using her beauty and charm to advance her goals. The other is "serene," and Serena is indeed a very cold and calculating person by design. It was noted that, because of the genetic manipulation that went into growing her, Serena would have been inhumanly cold without the added cybernetics, which regulate her body's hormones and chemicals to keep her within a strict operational range. She'll feel fear and anger and excitement and happiness, but as mere shadows of what humans actually feel, and has to make up the difference through acting.
• Mistaken for Murderer: John Connor is believed to have killed his foster parents, never mind that at his age at the time he didn't have the height or upper body strength to inflict those kinds of wounds, because who would believe a shapeshifting robot from the future could have done it?
• Mistaken for Terrorist: Both John and Sarah, for blowing up Cyberdyne in Terminator 2. Well, technically they are terrorists, even if what they did was justified given the circumstances.
• Monstrous Seal: Clea uses nanotechnology to control some leopard seals into attacking Dieter and John. She laments their overall ineffectiveness on land and that Antarctica doesn’t have polar bears.
• Mugged for Disguise: Serena takes a woman hostage and uses her apartment as a temporary base to set up an identity for herself in order to complete her mission. Before leaving, she takes some of the woman's clothes.
• Mundane Utility: Between sending her Terminators on missions to terminate, Serena has them cook her dinner. There is a practical side to this: she can coach them on suspicious behavior (such as chopping vegetables with inhuman speed and precision) in a controlled environment before she sends them out into the world.
• My Beloved Smother: Sarah, of all people, turns into this once John's girlfriend Wendy comes on the scene, being instantly suspicious of the girl. While she protests that she's not sure if the girl could lead Terminators/the authorities to them after being implicated in Labane's murder, Dieter more cannily observes it's a natural reaction of a mother to a son's first girlfriend, especially in a pairing as close as John and Sarah.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In Rising Storm a deckhand on the boat Dieter takes passage on is called Arnie, and is overhead to utter the famous "I'll be back" line.
  • Future War gives Sarah's "You're terminated, fucker!" line to John when he kills the Luddites that have just killed his girlfriend.
• Naked on Arrival: Serena is naked when she is sent to the past, as is the norm for the series.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Enforced due to the trilogy conceit that history has an "inertia," and will mold events to play out as closely as possible. The more success John and Sarah have delaying or destroying SkyNet, the more events push back to bring SkyNet about. Taken to up to eleven in the second book, when they attempt to simply stop SkyNet from ever becoming sentient. Wendy Dorset basically has to write an AI program, then write a program to prevent AI from happening. But she forgot to label the disks, and ends up inserting the AI program first, and is promptly killed. Thus, Wendy, who was only involved because of her relationship with John Connor, actually makes SkyNet self-aware.
• Nightmare Fetishist: In the future, Serena's role as a deep-cover Infiltrator of the Resistance requires her to behave as a Resistance soldier, including shooting T-90s (non-Infiltrator Skynet footsoldiers). Serena hates having to do it, she thinks T-90s are cute.
• No Social Skills: In the second book Clea takes a job at a local fast food restaurant to train her in interaction with humans. Because of this trope, it goes very poorly. Her artificial over-cheeriness, dedication and doing everything to perfection only gets her labelled creepy by customers, hated by her co-workers and fired as soon as her employers can find an excuse. This is despite the fact that this particular I-950 line is considered stunningly beautiful by human standards! She's gotten much better at it by the time she infiltrates Cyberdyne.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Downplayed. Serena was rather an Action Girl while infiltrating the Resistance, though that was mostly to maintain her cover. Her main weapons are misdirection, subterfuge, and judicious assassination. These same tools are her most important once she's sent to the past to protect Skynet, while her homemade Terminators take care of most of the physical violence that becomes necessary. That said, Serena (and later, her replacement Clea) are still Terminators, and incredibly dangerous if confronted directly, even if they're not as Nigh-Invulnerable as Meatsack Robot Terminators.
• The Nose Knows: Dieter stocks the guest bathrooms of his estancia with shampoo that has a strong and distinctive scent, so he can tell if guests are sneaking about his home.
• Not So Above It All: Serena and other I-950s do feel emotions, and so while they try to repress them, they are occasionally caught off-guard by them.
• Off with His Head!: John specifically requests the head of a Terminator they're trying to kill, wanting to attempt to get some useful information from its memory and programming.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Deconstructed when Dieter takes a look at the unedited reports of the T-800s rampages; the leg actually has a number of major blood vessels that are very hard to avoid, meaning a leg-wound is actually pretty likely to be fatal. No human would be likely to make consistently non-lethal leg-wounds.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Luddite terrorists that follow Skynet are only known by their codenames, save a brief snippet where Skynet refers to Balewitch by her real name.
• Only Sane Man: Dieter, when it comes to talking about Judgment Day, at any rate. Even Sarah's friends who genuinely like her just politely put up with her delusion about time-traveling robots, and to the wider world she's a psychotic terrorist and source of "can you believe this crap?" humor. And of course, young John was raised in this insanity, of course he'd give his dear, crazy mother the benefit of the doubt. Dieter, on the other hand, has an absolutely impeccable reputation as grounded and level-headed, so when he starts backing up Sarah's claims, some people start paying attention. After all, mental illness isn't contagious, and no one's that good in bed.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Clea doesn't have much respect for Serena, despite them being genetically identical. Part of it is resentment that Serena actually knew Skynet, while Clea, "born" in the past, never really will. Part of it is some harsh (but not unjustified) criticism of Serena's personality, plans, and approach. Interestingly, Clea gets this in turn from her clone Alissa, who regards her as far too polluted by human emotions to be effective.
• Outside Ride: Attempting to intercept and Terminate the Connors before they leave, a Terminator hitches a ride on their charter plane. A tense sequence ensues where they use C-4 to keep it from getting in the plane.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Serena couches it in terms of logic, but still, she chooses to leave the woman she mugs for initial clothing and shelter alive (and even adds a thousand dollars to her bank account), and actively makes it her goal to avoid killing unless necessary during her efforts in Infiltrator.
  • There's also her seemingly instinctive desire to protect the female slave who was her caretaker, even though she considers SkyNet to be her "true parent".
• Pin-Pulling Teeth: John looks down on people who do this as engaging in macho bullshit that's bad for your teeth. But when he finds himself needing to chuck thermite grenades at Terminators while riding a motorcycle, he doesn't have another option.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Tricker has shades of this, though mostly when dealing with Kurt Viemeister, though he gets some double-barreled sexism when he opposes hiring Serena, because she's too pretty and will distract all the hopeless computer geeks from doing their jobs.
  Tricker: Oh, so you've got a kraut that talks to a box. How nice.
  Warren: He's not a kraut. He's Austrian.
  Tricker: So he's a kraut in three-quarter time who talks to a box. No go.
• Pragmatic Villainy: While Skynet despises all humans and would rather do without any of them, it nurtures the militant Luddite movement and uses them to do it's bidding in exterminating humanity in the early stages of the war, as until it can get the Terminators and Hunter-Killers up and running it needs them as a disposable army.
• Psycho Lesbian: Serena is the typical Steve Stirling beautiful lesbian Action Girl in this novel, and suffers from severe Lack of Empathy due to being a semi-lobotomized cyborg. Though due to being a genetically-altered human implanted with cybernetics and raised from infancy as basically an extension of SkyNet, she herself has little, if any, in the way of sexual drive, desire, or preference. Sexuality is simply another tool in her arsenal to infiltrate and eliminate humans. She is noted to have been in a fairly serious relationship with a female Resistance soldier (serious from the Resistance soldier's perspective, at least), but Serena will use her beauty and wiles against anyone if it will give her an advantage.
• Raised Hand of Survival: In one big homage to classic zombie films, one of the homegrown Terminators has to appear to be a person who died and was buried. After a time, it breaks out of its grave and goes to join up with the others. The actual breakout begins with a perfect description of this trope, and goes on to describe the Terminator's flesh sheath mostly rotting, and the Terminator clearing some of that rotted tissue to reveal its glowing red eyes.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Literally. After Cyberdyne is blown up again, Tricker is put in charge of security for the US government's clone Skynet project, which is operating out of a secret facility in Antarctica.
• Reconstruction: The novels take the impression lots of viewers of Terminator 2: Judgment Day had of Sarah Connor ("Wow, she's such a badass now!") and runs with it. As pointed out several places on that film's trope page, Sarah is far from good role model, being neglectful of John, emotionally distant, more than a little unhinged, and, in one of her biggest moments in the film, acting exactly like a Terminator! This Sarah is a lot more stable (though still flawed), having had time to cope with her assorted traumas, and is genuinely a good mother for John, and their relationship has vastly improved. Sarah remains a badass Action Girl, but loses a lot of her very questionable personality traits from T2 (see Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul).
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The neural implants in an I-950 can actually take over the body and use it like a meat puppet after the organic brain is fatally damaged. The heroes have to blast the brain to total mush, or sever the head, or just kill the body to stop one.
• Retired Badass: Dieter von Rossbach, an ex counter-intelligence agent. The man was picked as the base for the T-800's disguise for a reason. Notably, John and Sarah initially consider Dieter more dangerous for the fact that he's retired, since he'll be bored and able to pursue idle fancies that cross his path (like the suspicion that his pretty next door neighbor and her well-mannered son are actually wanted terrorists).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Serena is trying to locate John and Sarah Connor, she hires a local private investigator (who's day job is a dishwasher in a restaurant and who watches way too many Bogart movies) to find them. When he does, she has the poor guy drive one of her Terminators out to deal with the Connors. The PI only hears the ensuing firefight in the distance, then decides that being a dishwasher isn't so bad.
• Series Continuity Error: The novels make the same error as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, identifying the T-800 as a T-101. For the record, the Terminator type featured throughout most Terminator media is the Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Terminator, or simply T-800. "Model 101" refers to the outer flesh coating a Terminator is given to create a distinct appearance (rather bizarrely, early on in the first book reference is correctly made to the T-600). Stirling actually doubles down on it by introducing a predecessor type known as a T-90 that appears in many of the future sequences.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Interesting in that "what once went wrong" is the Bad Future of Skynet's attempted extermination of humanity. Time wants to resume as close to its original shape as possible, so Serena enjoys her greatest success merely preserving Skynet's existence. When she tries to Terminate the Connors is when things start getting ugly for her. Of course, preserving Skynet's existence means preserving its ultimate defeat by John Connor.
• Sex Signals Death: John loses not one, but two lovers who die shortly after he sleeps with them.
• Sexy Soaked Shirt: As a result of overenthusiastically hugging John after he'd been on the deck of the yacht acclimating to Antarctica's weather, Wendy gets one of these. At her insistence, John is quick to help her out of it.
• Shout-Out: When Sarah, travelling alone across the dystopian hellstate that used to be the American Midwest, encounters an evil biker gang, she exasperatedly wonder where Mel Gibson is when she needs him.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Deconstructed and looked at realistically. After Judgment Day one of Sarah's frequent issues is getting many of the survivors to change their worldview, particularly that they have to learn to defend themselves from other people either desperate to feed their own kids or hardened criminals used to talking what they want by force anyway. Numerous people insist they should share and that nothing like what she's describing could possibly happen in the civilised world, and that they won't even change their diet in one particular vegan case, ignoring that they can barely grow enough produce in Alaska in a good year, never mind a nuclear winter. Unusually for this trope, Sarah's self-aware enough to acknowledge she's had decades of survival training and getting used to the idea of killer robots coming after them, so it's not too surprising it's taking these people a hell of a lot longer than she hopes to get their heads in the game.
• Sleeping Their Way to the Top: Played straight, then deconstructed. Serena fakes a truly impressive resume to land a job as Cyberdyne's head of security, so she can protect SkyNet, but to add further incentive to hire her, during her interviews she subtly implies that some of her "upward mobility" was due to her "horizontal agility." The Cyberdyne directors find the implication very persuasive, but their security liaison immediately sees it as a red flag.
• Something Only They Would Say: Invoked in Rising Storm. John and Wendy split up in the Antarctic base, but John insists they do this when meeting back up, as he knows Terminators can imitate voices. Sure enough, Clea jumps Wendy and then imitates her voice to lure him in. Interestingly, though she hasn't a clue what John's talking about when he says Snog's in charge, she manages to bluff her way through by accurately reading the context of what he's saying enough to guess it's bullshit. It's the un-Wendylike phrasing of her reply that gives her away.
• Stable Time Loop: Discussed in Infiltrator. When the group extract data from the head of a destroyed Terminator, one of the things they find is a schematic for the phased plasma rifle discussed in the first film. John notes that despite Judgment Day having originally supposed to occur by that point, no current weaponry is anything like it - leading him to speculate that Skynet only has it in the future because its future self sent back the information with various Terminators, which then allowed Skynet to build it and be able to send the schematics back in the first place.
• The Spartan Way: SkyNet's efforts at rearing the I-950s, which started when they were babies; they would be given hologrammatic toys to chase and compelled to chase them as long as possible to build up physical conditioning and stamina. Those who failed were punished and eventually eliminated. Serena actually kills one of her brothers during puberty after he is judged "emotionally compromised".
• The Stoic: I-950s do feel emotions, and SkyNet concedes that this is necessary for their function, but between their training and the chemical-regulating neural implants they sport, they are inhumanly cold and logical by nature.
• Strawman Political: The Luddites are portrayed as gullible fools at best, and their leader comes across as a massive hypocrite and whining sociopath. To make clear how stupid their fanatical environmentalism is, the first book even has Serena and Skynet commenting condescendingly on it.
• Sucksessor: Whether from being pushed too hard in the growth acceleration stages, being raised by a Terminator and never knowing Skynet's presence, or just inherent instabilities in the brand-new I-950 line, Clea is definitely flawed compared to her progenitor Serena, however hard she works to make herself a Superior Successor. Even Alissa regards her as defective by the end.
• Tempting Fate:
  • After Sarah was caught in the successful attempt to blow up Cyberdyne again, she manages to work the system and get moved to a halfway house fairly quickly. She reflects that this is so much easier with a more gullible doctor and not being pumped full of drugs she doesn't need by the unlamented Dr. Silberman. Guess who turns out to be running the halfway house?
  • In the third book, one of John's survivalist friends gets so frustrated with his community's refusal to acknowledge the dangers of the post-Judgment Day world that he almost wishes they'd be attacked. A few pages later, Skynet chooses their village as a test attack for its early Terminators to attack, and he loses his son in the ensuing massacre.
• Terminator Twosome: Half of one. Skynet sends Serena to the past to ensure its own creation, but the Resistance doesn't send anyone to stop her. It's up to Sarah, John, and whatever allies they can make.
• Those Wacky Nazis: Dr. Kurt Viemeister, the Austrian scientist who is integral to SkyNet developing into a full-fledged AI, is a full-blown Neo-Nazi. Initially, Cyberdyne's government liason doesn't want anything to do with him, but is eventually forced to accept him because he is just that good. Infiltrator contains a chilling scene of him teaching the infant SkyNet to vocalise by reading aloud Mein Kampf, calling it "one of my favorite books". Serena can barely resist smirking, noting that this, more than anything, is laying the foundation for SkyNet's future genocide of the entire human species. Not because the AI was persuaded by Nazi propaganda, but because it showed the AI how dangerous and insane humans were, that they believed things like that. And let's not forget when the Cyberdyne executives tried to excuse his political leanings by dismissing them as "airy-fairy notions of how things should be run," Tricker is appalled.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: To its own discomfort, Skynet finds it has records of its creation in multiple timelines - 1997 in the original, years later as a result of Cyberdyne restarting it with Uncle Bob's arm, and again after the intervention of the Clea I-950.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Unlike his appearance in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, where he's as unhelpful and in denial as ever, Dr. Silberman here has come to believe in the truth of what Sarah was saying after seeing the T-1000 in action. Despite Sarah's caginess at first, he's genuinely helpful to her and eventually helps her escape to Mexico in the second book.
• Truly Single Parent: A female I-950 can choose to self-fertilise and conceive a clone-daughter, which she can then either carry to term or implant in a human surrogate mother.
• Uncanny Valley: In-Universe. Serena is unable to grow actual organic eyes for her first crop of homemade Terminators, so equips them with glass eyes. Well aware this will just look wrong, she has them wear sunglasses. At one point, she e-telepathies one of her Terminators to take off the sunglasses while trying to persuade a human, using this effect to make the Terminator that much more intimidating.
• Unhand Them, Villain!: Self-inflicted. A Terminator is holding Victor Griego out a third story window, and begs "Let me go," then immediately realizes his mistake. Downplayed in that the Terminator had already decided upon this method of Termination.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Wendy keeps the discs with Skynet sabotage programs in the lining of her bra. So they don't freeze and shatter during the trek across the Antarctic.
• Victory Sex: How Wendy insists she and John celebrate her finishing the program that will prevent Skynet from becoming sentient. Subverted when this program is ultimately what makes Skynet sentient.
• Villain Decay: Played With. Serena can make several T-800s, which she sends against the Connors as Elite Mecha-Mooks. John and Sarah have a noticeably easier time dispatching them than in the films proper, but mostly because they know a lot more about the Terminator's vulnerabilities (and, for a change, usually have the right tools for the job easily to hand). This could be due to, as Serena admits, her Terminators being of the "homegrown" variety. She only brought the CPUs and power supplies with her from the future, everything else was custom ordered and manufactured in the present; not on Skynet's assembly lines with all of its advanced resources and technology. This doesn't seem to hamper their performance, but the differences could be small but exploitable by the Connors, who have some experience with terminating Terminators.
• Villain Override: Skynet can reach out and take direct control over pretty much any of its forces whenever it wants. To Serena, the sensation is akin to religious rapture.
• Weirdness Censor: Deconstructed. When Dr. Silberman makes his reappearance, his POV notes that he knows what he saw the night the Terminators came to the asylum was real, and that Sarah had been telling the truth the whole time. But knowing no one else will believe him, he uses his own psychiatric knowledge to go along with the counseling he gets, allowing himself to be talked into believing it wasn't real, into being "successfully treated" for his mild delusion that night. Seeing Sarah makes it all come back, he acknowledges that he always knew he was lying to himself, and he offers Sarah whatever assistance he can provide in her fight against the machines.
• Western Terrorists: Neo-Luddites, of the "psychopathic ecological preservationsts" variety, actively serve SkyNet in the future, and are beginning to form around Ronald Labane in the present.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Despite a prominent role in the first book, Jordan Dyson completely disappears from the narrative around the midpoint of Rising Storm. He's not even mentioned again, despite the running subplot of the Connors gathering allies who believe them in preparation for after Judgment Day.
• Wolverine Claws: Serena added titanium claws to the fingers of her Terminators, concealed under their flesh and fingernails.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: As mentioned in the Hardboiled Detective entry, Marco Cassetti thinks he's in a Humphrey Bogart detective film, spinning increasingly elaborate fictions when speculating why his employer has an interest in Dieter Von Rossbach - and why she sends him an apparently identical man to help "investigate". He's dead, dead wrong (the Terminator has orders to kill him as soon as the Connors are disposed of), and only Sarah and John blowing it to bits lets him unwittingly survive.
• You Can't Fight Fate: A recurring theme in the first two books. While the dates and details can be changed, the same sequence of events is fated to play out; Skynet WILL become sentient and kill billions on Judgment Day, and John Connor WILL rally humanity to defeat it. However hard the Connors and the I-950s try to change things, the timeline keeps springing back to variations on the original theme. By the start of the third book John, Sarah and Dieter grimly come to accept this and start preparing for life after Judgment Day.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: As it grows its army of Terminators, Hunter-Killers and other war machines, Skynet starts arranging "accidents" for all but the most useful of its Luddite followers.

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