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Terminator
alt title(s): The Terminator; Sky NET
That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
— Kyle Reese

I'll be back.
— T-800

A standard implacable killer, given a Sci Fi justification, The Terminator has become a much imitated part of the pop-cultural pantheon. Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed the titular cyborg for three and a half films in the role that shot him to superstardom.

In the first film, The Terminator, Sarah Connor learns that a serial killer is hunting down everyone with her name. After two people in her home are killed in an effort to find her, she hides in a nightclub. The killer catches up with her there, but she is rescued by a mysterious stranger, who explains the Back Story.

In the near future, men will create SkyNet, an artificial intelligence, which will promptly Turn Against Its Masters, attempting to Kill All Humans in a cataclysmic event called Judgment Day. Mankind will eventually defeat it, but at the last minute SkyNet will send a T-800 Model 101 android assassin back in time to kill Sarah Connor, preventing the birth of her son John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance. In response, Connor will send back the stranger, Kyle Reese, to protect his mother, and the timeline.

After several dramatic battles, and Reese's Heroic Sacrifice, the terminator is eventually killed in a Smoke And Fire Factory, but not before Sarah Connor sleeps with Reese, conceiving John Connor. This means Connor causes his own birth, in a Stable Time Loop.

In the second film, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, SkyNet sends back a more advanced terminator, the Nigh Invulnerable, Shapeshifting T-1000. (The T-1000 is far beyond any other future technology depicted in any of the films, but at the time the CGI was so mindblowing nobody cared.) In response, Connor sends back a reprogrammed T-800 to protect his earlier self.

Both terminators arrive when John is 10 and living with foster parents because his mother was thrown in a loony bin for talking about killer robots from the future. John forces the T-800 to rescue his mother from the mental hospital. Sarah Connor, now an Action Girl after Taking A Level In Bad Ass, learns more details of SkyNet's history and decides to kill the man who will create SkyNet, but falters when she sees his family. They discover from this man that the company Cyberdyne will build SkyNet using components from the destroyed T-800 from the first movie, making SkyNet itself part of the Stable Time Loop. Together, they all infiltrate Cyberdyne, where they destroy all the computers and the T-800 remains. But the T-1000 is not far behind them, and after several running encounters, both terminators are dissolved in a vat of molten steel.

The series then splits off into three canons:

  • The original but deleted ending of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, in which a still-living Sarah Connor watches John Connor, now a United States Senator, and her grand daughter play on a playground similar to the one she saw in her dreams. It is 2029, the year the war that they successfully averted would have been won, and an intact, futuristic Los Angeles can be seen in the background. James Cameron felt that it was too much of a Happy Ending considering the very bleak nature of the film. Sources disagree whether or not he did it also because he had plans himself for a third movie before he lost the rights.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: The third film begins with SkyNet's takeover apparently averted — the date Reese gave has come and gone — but then another terminator appears, this time female. Like before, a reprogrammed T-850 Model 101 (functionally very similar to the T-800, but powered by hydrogen fuel-cells which explode if ruptured unlike the previous T-800s — still a Model 101, so it still looks like Arnold) arrives to protect Connor. Judgment Day was only deferred, not prevented. Sarah Connor is now dead, but John Connor returns to the fight. He and his wife end up in a military bunker, which they falsely believe holds SkyNet's hardware core. In fact, SkyNet is software running on any computer network. As the film ends, SkyNet launches its takeover, decapitating the human governments with a nuclear strike. Fortunately, the bunker is a communications nexus, putting Connor in the perfect place to take charge of the nascent resistance.
    • Terminator Salvation: Taking place during the war with the machines, with no ties to The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Instead of repeating the story of someone going back in time, this is primarily a sci-fi war movie. John Connor is a respected resistance officer but not the leader, with some people questioning his claims of being The Chosen One by Time Travel. Connor sets out to end the war as quickly as possible as well as befriend a young soldier named Kyle Reese. (This film neither refers to nor contradicts T2 or T3, - except some parts, see Mythology Gag and Continuity Nod below - so you could conceivably just watch the first and fourth films without feeling like you missed anything in between.)
  • Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: This television series follows the first two films but ignores the third. It follows the adventures of Sarah Connor, John Connor, a reprogrammed terminator named Cameron, John's uncle Derek (no really) and various other continuing characters. The producers ask viewers to accept that Sarah Connor was a teenager in the first movie in order to present thirtysomething Sarah and teenage John as credible action heroes at the same time. See also the separate article about the TV series.

Here are the character sheets for the Warriors of Steel and Flesh of this saga.

These films provide examples of:

  • Action Girl - Barely. Sarah Connor in T2 and TSCC. Cameron in TSCC.
  • Action Mom - Sarah Connor in T2 and TSCC.
  • Alternate Continuity - Terminator 3 + Salvation together in one continuity with The Sarah Connor Chronicles in the other.
    • There's also the novels by SM Stirling, which did the female terminator/infiltrator idea years before T3 or TSCC.
  • Alternate Timeline: Season 2 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles features multiple divergent timelines as the protagonists change the future. Someone who travels back in time "after" someone else remembers future events differently if the first person changes anything. (Probably they always change something just by being there.)
  • A Man Is Not A Virgin - Averted with Reese, who is a Bad Ass hero and a virgin for much of the film. He does lose his virginity to Sarah Connor, but this is a legitimate plot point — John Connor's conception — rather than just to up Reese's bad-ass credentials.
    • Rendered somewhat confusing in The Sarah Connor Chronicles when it appears that everyone else is getting plenty of nookie in the future.
      • T4 makes it pretty clear that most people are too busy not dying to try and get some...And yet Kate is clearly pregnant through the whole film.
      • The Terminator in T3 tells John that their children will be important later. Knowing this, it's possible he and Kate make it a point to have kids.
  • Apocalypse Of The Week
  • Arc Words - Certain phrases are repeated, usually by different individuals, but all have valuable context from one story to the other.
    • "Come with me if you want to live."
    • "I'll be back." (And he usually returns driving a vehicle into a building.)
    • "There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
  • A Team Firing - Justified in Salvation, where it's revealed The T-600 at the beginning of the film probably wasn't really trying to kill Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese, since he was being used as a pawn by SkyNet to flush out John Connor. Later in the film, when a T-600 is really trying to kill Reese, its poor aim is justified by the fact Reese just stabbed it in the back of the skull a few moments ago.
    • Of course in the first scene, that T-600 had no way of knowing that it was Reese he was shooting at, since he had yet to be identified.
    • In T2, "Human casualties: 0". Despite aiming a minigun and several grenades at their feet. And blowing up several vehicles.
  • The Atoner - In T4 Marcus has a lot of baggage to work out.
  • Awesome McCoolname: Inverted in T4, in which an actress with the Bad Ass name of Moon Bloodgood plays an A-10 Warthog pilot with the boring name of Blair Williams.
  • Back Story
  • Bad Ass - Any of the terminators, but particularly the T-800. Reese was the first human bad ass and Sarah Connor Took A Level In Bad Ass.
    • And John Connor. In fact, very little of the Terminator movies is not badassery. Except...
  • Bad Ass Decay - John Connor in T3, but see Fridge Brilliance below.
  • Bad Ass Longcoat - Marcus's outfit in Salvation.
  • Ballistic Discount - In T1 the T-800 considers this the best way to complete a transaction. Subverted later in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where we get to see how advanced a T-888 is due to its less violent handling of the intricate world of human finances.
  • Big No: Actually a crescendo of them after Sarah Connor sees the T-800 in T2 and has a Heroic BSOD.
    • And when Marcus finds out he's a cyborg. It's sort of obvious if you've been watching the trailers.
  • Bloodless Carnage: Salvation, to get a PG-13 instead of an R. Just◊ compare◊ these◊ images◊.
    • Justified: in order, the first was massive gunshot wounds, at least one car crash, and (if this troper recalls) several stab wounds. The second was a few gunshot wounds and burns. The third was only burns. The fourth was only rather light burns. It's not so much the carnage being less bloody (the second, third and fourth look very similar), as it is the robots being put through less hell.
  • Bluff The Impostor
  • Breast Expansion: In the third film the T-X increases its breast size to distract someone.
  • Broad Strokes - What Salvation does in regards to T3 in order to fix that movie's various flubs with the timeline (see Did Not Do The Research below). Salvation implicitly Broad Strokes T2 just by not mentioning anything in it. Further, in Salvation Sarah Connor (on tape) and John Connor both talk and act as if they believe Connor needs to keep Reese alive and send him back in time to close the loop, even though it's been established in T2 and T3 that time travel doesn't work like that.
  • Canon Dis Continuity - T3 was retconned from the plotline of The Sarah Connor Chronicles first, and then The Sarah Connor Chronicles was completely removed from the story of Salvation.
  • Cant Take Anything With You
  • Car Fu - Every time the Terminator says "I'll be back", he always re-enters in a moving vehicle.
  • Catch Phrase - The original "I'll be back," and to a lesser extent "get out," "fuck you, asshole," and "hasta la vista, baby."
    • "Come with me if you want to live" has taken over as the franchise targets PG-13 and prime-time-TV audiences.
  • The Cavalry Arrives Late - At the end of the first film.
  • Changed My Jumper - Avoided. Time travellers arrive naked, flashforwards show ragged clothes.
  • Chekhovs Gun - The photograph in T1, the T-800 arm/CPU and the ATM hacking machine in T2, and the weak point of T-600's in Salvation.
  • Chrome Champion - The T-1000's true form.
  • Condemned Contestant
  • Contested Sequel - T3 is Dis Continuity, but quite a few people enjoyed Salvation.
  • Continuity Nod - besides the Mythology Gags below, Salvation reminds us of the fuel sources of Terminators (introduced in T3).
  • Cool Shades - Played straight in the first two movies, where Schwarzenegger takes clothes and shades from burly biker-types, subverted in what was perhaps T3's greatest moment, where Schwarzenegger takes the clothes of a male burlesque dancer and puts on his shades, only to find that they are of the tacky pink variety. He quickly takes them off and crushes them Vegeta-style, and acquires his usual shades later on.
    • The shades serve a purpose in the first movie, where they conceal the terminator's robot eye. In the other movies it's about looking cool.
  • Cue Cullen - Terminator Salvation features Christian Bale, a.k.a. Batman, as John Connor.
    • And Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original T-800.
      • To a lesser extent, Helena Bonham Carter in the first ten minutes.
      • ...Why exactly would Terminator fans be excited about that?
      • If you attract both Bale and her, it wouldn't be worthless!
      • Besides, there are Terminator fans who give a damn about the acting quality.
  • Crowning Moment Of Awesome - Several
    • T1: Reese takes on a T-800 with a steel pipe and in his last moments blows said terminator in half.
    • T2: Sarah Connor managing to almost single-handedly defeat the T-1000 while suffering from a gunshot wound and having full use of only one arm.
    • T3: Just as the T-X arrives at Crystal Peak... the T-850 comes, ramming her with a helicopter. "I'm back!"
    • Salvation: After over a decade of failed Resistance attacks, John Connor annihilates SkyNet's main base in a single night. Also, Marcus Wright's Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Darkened Building Shootout: in the Smoke And Fire Factory in the first film. Even darker than most darkened buildings in movies.
  • Dead Ex Machina - The T-800 in the second film.
  • Death By Sex - Sarah Connor's roommate in the first film.
  • Deceptively Human Robots
  • De Terminator - Not only the titular terminators but also many human characters including Reese, Sarah Connor, and John Connor. Kate Connor also counts in terms of emotional trauma.
  • Did Not Do The Research - Terminator 3 flubs the timescale in places. John's opening monologue states T2 occurred when he was 13. Wrong in two basis:
    • The computer hacked by the T-1000 shows he's 10.
    • Considering John was conceived between May 12 and May 13, 1984, and born in 1985, that would set T2 one year after the original Judgment Day...
      • This is closer to Pragmatic Adaptation, because the writers made the decision to change his age based on the age of Edward Furlong at the time T2 was made. It's still annoying though.
  • Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep - It's implied that when freed from Skynet's control, even Terminators are capable of learning to understand humanity.
    Sarah Connor: If a machine- a Terminator- can learn to understand the value of human life, maybe we can too.
  • Does This Remind You Of Anything - T4 makes SkyNet's death camps for humans very eerily reminiscent of the Holocaust, with one prisoner even referring to the HK Transports that take them to the facility as "cattle cars."
    • Don't forget the general telling John to "stay the course!".
  • Everything Is Online
    • Including sentient genocidal software in T3.
  • Draco In Leather Pants - The Terminator himself in the first film may be a merciless mass-murdering monster, but something about his massacre at the police station clicked with the anti-authoritarian youth culture of Reagen Era 1980 America.
    • People who worship Sarah Connor of Terminator 2 Judgement Day as a paragon of feminist virtue tend to be the ones who ignore the fact she is a cruel, violent, emotionally unstable bad-mother who is actually deconstructing militant feminism rather than celebrating it. Point in fact, according to Audio-Commentary of the 3-DVD Definitive Edition Director's Cut, Linda Hamilton (the actress who portrayed her) and James Cameron (Hamilton's then husband and the creator of the Sarah Connor characters) repeatedly stressed on multiple occasions that she is a messed up horror-of-a-human being rather than someone who is meant to be admired.
  • Evil Detecting Dog - Dogs can recognize whether or not someone's a terminator, and are used as an alert system by the resistance once the T-800s start rolling off the line.
  • Eye Scream - Terminator removing his eye in the first movie.
    • The T-1000 stabbing the security guard with his finger in the sequel.
    • Sarah Connor blasting through the T-1000 right eye socket with her shotgun. The T-1000 was not very pleased and threatened to stab her eye next, if she didn't call John.
  • Fake American - All three leads in Salvation.
    • Let's see, Welsh, Marcus Wright's Aussie right?, and Russian...yeah.
      • Though it's worth mentioning that Russian-born Anton Yelchin has lived in the United States since he was six months old.
    • This Troper didn't even realize Marcus wasn't American... except for that one line during his interrogation.
  • Fan Service - Any of the female terminators, and probably the time-traveling dudes, if we're honest.
  • Falling For Someone Never Met - Reese claims to have fallen for a photograph of Sarah.
  • Fantastic Romance
  • Fish Out Of Temporal Water - Reese and the terminators. Marcus, after waking up.
  • Final Girl - Sarah Connor, clearly, in The Terminator.
  • Final First Hug - John Connor and the second T-800's heartbreaking farewell.
  • Fridge Brilliance - The first half hour of T4 made many think that the franchise had been Ruined Forever because it begins in 2018 with John Connor being just an officer in a Resistance, whose headquarters is a submarine. The war was apparently almost over because the Resistance had discovered a signal to shut down the machines. It looked as if Connor would never get to lead like he did in the futures shown in T1 - T3. Then we get to the endgame, where the signal turns out to a Xanatos Gambit by SkyNet, the submarine gets destroyed as a result of it and Connor becomes the new leader with all the others being dead.
    • Surprisingly, T3 has one of these moments. One of the biggest complaints leveled at the movie is John Connor's Bad Ass Decay which includes such heroic feats as losing to Claire Danes in a fight before managing to utterly fail an "I'll Kill Myself If You Don't Do X" bluff and just generally being rather whiny for the future Messiah. What many people don't remember is that Connor had just ingested animal tranquilizers to dull the pain of a motorcycle crash. T3 takes place over the course of perhaps 18 hours. For the entirety of Terminator 3, for the duration of Judgment Day, Connor is high.
    • In fairness, his portrayal in T3 is better than T2, where is is portrayed as an arrogant brat.
      • Additionally, the film makes it clear how screwed up John has become since his mother's death, which happened the way it did as a result of Judgement Day being postponed. After spending ten years not preparing for Judgement Day, he really can't be expected to become the hero without a lot of pushing from the T-800. It's really the best direction they had to take the character, and Nick Stahl's performance was perfect for it.
    • Also, it seems kind of strange giving the T-850 models from T3 a power core that's prone to exploding if it's damaged at all, since it actually makes them easier to destroy. But on the other side of things, if your enemy doesn't know about it, then they're going to get blown up after thinking they've destroyed their would-be assassin.
    • When you think about what Skynet did to Marcus Wright, it goes from merely mildly unsettling to High Octane Nightmare Fuel. In essence, he was turned into a decoy without his knowledge, and used as an unwitting weapon against the Resistance. Also counts as something of a Shout Out to Zambot 3.
    • Everyone always assumes the series is not a Stable Time Loop because Judgment Day was "postponed" from 29 August 1997 to 24 July 2004. This makes perfect sense...until you realize that the only sources for the "original" date of Judgment Day have been Resistance operatives. The Resistance is actively lying about the date of Judgment Day in order to maintain the timeline. It makes sense- after all, the Resistance knows that in this sequences of events, they win.
    • This Troper just had this pop into his head while reading this article...all the changes in how time travel worked between 1, 2, and 3 can be explained away if we assume this is not a Stable Time Loop, here's how it works; the Judgment day Reese talks about in 1 was the same one from the end of 3, but after the first terminators remains are found it alters history allowing Cyberdine to develop Sky Net faster then it was supposed to be developed, all the destruction of Cyberdine HQ and all the terminator parts did was prevent that earlier Judgment day, while the original time line for Judgment day continues unstopped, and as to Reese being pre-destined to be John's father, there's no evidence that had Reese not gone back in time, Sarah wouldn't have some how gotten pregnant, meaning that the "savior of humanity" Reese knew was never actually born, instead we get the whiney brat from 2 and 3 who instead of being a natural leader, pretty much only does it because it's what he's been told he's supposed to do since the day he was born.
  • Fridge Logic: The EMP from Judgement Day would have wiped out the Internet-based SkyNet in T3. 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? And in T4, where does the Resistance get the infrastructure/fuel needed to fly Ospreys, Hueys and Warthogs...ah, stuff it — I admit I enjoyed seeing something bigger than hand weapons being used for once. More to the point is the annoying habit the Resistance has of openly discussing their plans on the radio. Presumably they're using scrambled communications, but would they really take the chance an artificial intelligence couldn't crack it?
    • The further future of 2029 (shown in the other three film's flashforwards) show cities are even more desolate, so most of what the Resistance uses would be destroyed in the 11 (or more, considering Judgment Day was postponed) following years.
    • Also, the fuel is Handwaved as being from biofuels developed since Judgment Day. It's been canon since T1 that a lot of scientists and engineers survived to fight the war.
    • The moment you realize that all of the Time Travel has actually been one long game of Xanatos Speed Chess between John Connor and Skynet. Connor is trying to keep the timeline the exact same (which includes lying to his own mother in order to keep the date of Judgment Day stable) and Skynet is doing everything it can to change it.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: O.J. Simpson was considered for the title role in the first movie, but he was deemed to be "too nice guy to be considered as a killer".
  • Go Out With A Smile - The second T-800's encouraging final "thumbs up."
  • Grays Sports Almanac - The first terminator remains.
  • Headphones Equal Isolation - Sarah's roommate is so busy rocking out on her headphones that she doesn't hear her lover being beaten to death in the next room.
  • Hell Bent For Leather - Seriously, it's at the point where if you're living in the Terminator world and you meet someone who wears leather and keeps fighting after a punch to the face, you should shoot them immediately because they're a terminator.
  • Heroes Want Red Heads - John Connor does, certainly.
  • Heroic BSOD: Sarah Connor loses it when she sees the T-800 in T2, which looks exactly like the machine that chased her for days and killed her lover in the first film, and has probably haunted her nightmares ever since. Until this point she believes she's in a Stable Time Loop in which no new players would arrive from the future, since that's what Reese told her. After this point she knows things have been changed and she can keep changing them.
  • Heroic Sacrifice - Reese in T1, Miles Dyson and the T-800 in T2, and the T-850 in T3. Marcus Wright in T4. And effing how.
  • Hey Its That Guy - T4 big time. Batman (who is married to Gwen Stacy) is trying to save Chekhov from an army of machines led by Bellatrix Lestrange who are using Macbeth as an unknowing pawn in their grand scheme. And let's not forget the Resistance is being led by Revok! Daryl Revok! See you at the party, Ashdown.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel - The fleshless skeleton of the terminator "rising like Death rendered in metal from the fires" of a burning wreck. James Cameron had a nightmare that inspired the entire franchise.
    • The nuclear holocaust scene of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, holds the dubious honor of being praised by scientists as the most horrifyingly realistic portryal of a nuclear attack committed on film, to date.
    • The Hydrobots Every single robot in T4 is terrifying. And the terminator factory with racks and racks of T-800 parts that may or may not go homicidally active at any second. Sweet dreams.
  • Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act
    John Connor: "We stopped Judgment Day."
    Terminator: "You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable."
  • Homage The Humongous Mecha scooping up humans and dropping them in cages, as in The War Of The Worlds. And Transformers too, given the same robots' shapeshifting abilities.
    • The Harverster's mounted gun fires, sounds and operates like the Predator shoulder Cannon. Same as the other Plasma guns the Machines use, although the Harvester makes the best resemblance.
    • John Connor's Tracker sounds simmilar to the motion trackers U.S.C.M. used in Aliens.
  • Honor Before Reason - John Connor of Terminator 2 is an admirable example this trope: He stops Sarah Connor from killing Dyson even believing it would prevent Judgment Day, and his idealism allowed a war for humanity's future to be waged and won without murdering a single innocent human being.
    • John Connor takes this even further in Salvation, where he makes the choice to risk (what seems to be at the time) humanity's best chance of winning the war in order to rescue a group of prisoners that happen to include Reese and may or may not already be dead.
    • The game's entire plot is driven by this, as Connor goes deep behind enemy lines to rescue three Resistance soldiers, going against orders. He also manages to take out a substantial Skynet base, and the small victory there starts to give hope to the Resistance.
  • Humongous Mecha / Transforming Mecha: Is a 60-foot-tall Harvester with a huge Frikken Laser Cannon for a head (plus mototerminators coming out of its legs) enough for you? It also forms part of (or changes into — I'm not sure which) an even bigger prisoner transport aircraft armed with its own Hunter Killer parasite escort.
  • I Cannot Self Terminate - The Trope Namer
  • Immune To Bullets - It takes something with explosive power or a hell of a lot of kinetic force to damage a terminator.
    • Chronicles and Salvation both show that modern, military hardware tends to work. You still need a whole lot of it though.
  • Impersonating An Officer - T-1000.
  • Implacable Man - The terminators. Oh, and Marcus Wright.
  • Improbable Age - Sarah Connor ends up as the "Mother of the Future" at 19 — though her age isn't mentioned in the film and Linda Hamilton was obviously much older. Averted in Salvation, as it is implied that the reason John Connor isn't in command of the Resistance for ¾ of the movie is because when Judgment Day happened he was a 19-year-old kid hiding in a bunker while General Ashdown was, you know, a general.
  • Internet Backdraft - The fan outcry over the leaked ending of T4 prompted the studio to completely change the movie's third act. It was originally going to have John Connor die, with the Resistance putting his skin on Marcus's frame so that humanity wouldn't lose hope due to the loss of him. Thank you, God, that they did not go with the original idea.
    • Your Mileage May Vary - many people found Marcus to be a much more likeable character than Connor.
    • Considering the elements of the story that they didn't change, the original ending they had planned actually fit better with the rest of the film. Watching the movie you really do spot skeletons of the overall idea that John Connor the man wasn't important, but more of John Connor as an idea.
    • Which is Hilarious in Hindsight (sorta) since John Conner is Batman... who, in his own movie, has stated that as a man, he's only mortal. But as a symbol, he can be more.
    • Well, at least This Troper now knows why the film lurches awkwardly into an unnecessary sacrifice ending that feels contrived and tacked on—-it was. Damn you, Internet Meddling.
  • Invisible Darrin - Through the magic of CGI combined with a mold from the Eighties, Arnold appears in Salvation, and he hasn't aged a day in 25 years.
  • The Juggernaut - Terminators are unstoppable. (Unless you get their weakpoints.)
  • Kid With The Leash - John Connor in T2.
  • Kill All Humans - SkyNet wishes to do this, seeing harmanz as a threat to its existence.
  • Kill It With Ice - The oft-copied (and parodied) liquid helium scene in T2.
  • KillerRobots - They absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
  • Large Ham - John Connor in Salvation.
    "If we stay the course, we ARE DEAD. WE ARE ALL. DEAD!!!!!!
  • Laser Guided Tykebomb - John Connor
  • Leaning On The Fourth Wall - All the talk about salvation and second chances in Salvation after some very famous Dis Continuity in Terminator 3? Totally about the series itself.
  • Lowered Monster Difficulty - the first terminator and T-X are damaged until they become only endoskeletons, and after that even lose their legs.
  • Made Of Iron - Sure, John Connor is the Bad Ass human of the Future War, there's only so many times a guy can get up from being thrown INTO steel walls like nothing has happened before it becomes hilariously funny.
    • Potentially subverted with Marcus, who spends the first 1/3rd of the film taking increasingly over-the-top blows from various terminators (including falling 50 feet and being slammed across a lake hard enough to make him skip across it like a stone). Of course, it turns out he's actually a terminator.
  • Lights Off Their Eyes
  • Manly Tears - "I know now why you cry, but it's something I could never do."
  • Memetic Mutation: HASTA LA VISTA BABY!
    • I'll be back...
    • And the above mentioned Christian Bale rant.
  • Mythology Gag - T4 has this in spades. When Marcus first meets Reese, Reese tells him "Come with me if you want to live." When Kate asks John Connor what she should tell his troops when he decides to launch an AWOL solo attack on SkyNet, his response is "I'll be back." In the endgame battle, Connor gets attacked by a Schwarzenegger terminator.
    • Here's a cute little one for T4: When Connor hijacks the motorcycle-terminator, he baits the trap with a boombox blasting Guns N Roses 'You Could Be Mine', the same song he was playing while working on his bike in T2.
    • Marcus teaches Reese the tying-the-sawn-off-shotgun-to-your-arm trick in T4, which he uses in the first film. Chekhovs Gun in reverse?
    • This troper was waiting for Connor to pick up the badass scar that he'd sported in the intro to T2.
    • Also an extremely obvious one : guess who does the very first complete T-800 look like ?
      • Considering the mould is "Model 101"...
    • A Connor being pursued by a one-armed torso Terminator. Both first and fourth.
  • Made Of Explodium - Subverted in T4 in one scene where Marcus tries to take out a giant terminator by ramming a tank of gas into it and having Reese shoot the tank as they drove away. The tank of gasoline refused to explode until they finally tossed a lit flare at the leaking gas.
  • Misaimed Fandom - See Sarah Conor, in the Draco In Leather Pants entry above.
  • Mordor - The entire world post-Judgment Day, and SkyNet's main base even more so.
  • My Own Grampa - The very first Terminator sent back in time ended up "fathering" is own creator and master Skynet in death.
  • Nice Job Breaking It Herod - This is SkyNet's basic goal in every film. Even Salvation, where the only person higher than John Connor on Skynet's hit list is Kyle Reese, Connor's eventual father.
  • Nigh Invulnerability - T-800 is Made Of Diamond, while T-1000 is a regenerating Made Of Air.
  • No Flow In CGI - Averted.
  • No OSHA Compliance - The Smoke And Fire Factory in T1, the steel mill in T2, the SkyNet terminator factory in T4.
    • Averted in T3, the USAF facility may not have as many dangers compared to the above, but they did bother with such excesses as handrails.
  • Now I Know What To Name Him — Trope Namer
  • The Nudifier - Time travel requires that you travel naked.
  • Ominous Walk - In the second movie the T-1000 does this multiple times, which ended up screwing him over in the end.
  • Ooh Me Accents Slipping - Sam Worthington in Salvation. Ironically, not Christian Bale.
  • Our Skeletons Are Different - Their skeletons are robots.
  • Out Of The Inferno - This trope actually founded the Terminator franchise. James Cameron wanted to make a movie where a robotic skeleton emerged from a fire at some point. Since such advanced robots weren't around yet, and a movie set in the future would cost too much, he decided on having a robot travel back in time to the present.
  • Password Slot Machine - T2
  • Plot Hole -T2 and T3 ignore how Time Travel works in the first movie. T4 ignores how it works in T2 and T3.
  • Pre Mortem One Liner - By Sarah Connor in T1, and the terminator in the next two.
  • Prisons Are Gymnasiums - Sarah in the second film.
  • Railing Kill - T-1000 in T2
  • Rapunzel Hair: For some reason the female fighters in T4 all have long wild hair, despite its impracticality. If they can't have a crew-cut for fanservice reasons, would a Lara Croft-style ponytail be all that terrible?
  • Recurring Character - Dr. Silberman, who shows up in all of the movies (even Salvation?) and The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  • Redemption Equals Death - In Terminator Salvation Marcus Wright is a convict, on death row for some sort of crime that resulted in a dead relative and two dead cops. There are lots of criminal Anti Heroes in fiction, but in American movies dead cops cross the Moral Event Horizon, so even after Marcus is executed, and even after Judgment Day overshadows everything else, Marcus can only atone for his terrible pre-apocalyptic transgressions by giving away his heart. And dying.
  • Redshirt Army - any member of the L.A. police.
    • Or various Resistance members in Salvation.
  • Rescue Romance - The basis for Sarah Connor and Reese's relationship, John Connor's birth, and the franchise's on-again, off-again Stable Time Loop.
    • Also Marcus and Resistance pilot Blair in T4.
  • Ridiculously Human Robots - Two examples go even further: the T-800 in T2 starts understanding feelings, and the T-850 from T3 has psychology in his programming)
    • Taken even further in T4 where SkyNet creates a human-machine hybrid named Marcus Wright who is actually a terminator with his original heart and brain with a SkyNet control chip in it.
    • Taken further still in on novel based on the franchises that depicts a very special kind of terminator. Sky Net basically grows a human in a vat to about 1 year of age, implants it with cybernetics, control chips, and what have you, and puts the baby through Training From Hell until it's biologically an adult. The result being an almost entirely organic terminator undetectable by dogs that's far more capable of being human then even the best T-model... because it is one. Though, on the other hand, it's also still very much organic too so it's less Nigh Invulnerable than the wholly mechanical Terminators so Sky Net uses it more as background infiltrators rather than outright hunter-killers.
  • Ripped From The Phone Book - The terminator doesn't just rip out the page, he begins to kill everbody on it.
  • Robo Cam - Which shows 6502 assembly language code in ''T1,'' and Macintosh commands in ''T3''
  • Robot Girl - Cameron in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  • Robot War
  • Rousseau Was Right - Terminator 2, surprisingly enough. This Troper was amazed to watch an action movie in which the entire goal of the protagonist was to save the world without killing a soul. The Heroic Sacrifice of SkyNet's creator really hit the point home.
  • Rule Of Three - In the first film, we think the terminator is dead once, then twice, then finally it sticks when Sarah Connor remembers to deliver a Pre Mortem One Liner.
  • Sand In My Eyes - John says that Sarah does this when she cries about her lost love Kyle Reese.
  • Scannable Man - Reese and his concentration-camp tattoo.
  • Scenery Gorn (Shots in Terminator 2 of the city being nuked, and the future Robot War scenes.)
  • Screw Destiny - Terminator 2 contradicts Reese's original report about the future — the part about nobody else coming through. T3 and TSCC also contradict his clear calendar date for the apocalypse. There may be some sort of spiritual destiny, but it is not embedded in the clockwork of spacetime, which is squishy and malleable. Unless T4 is a direct sequel to T1 and nothing else is canon any more.
    • In T4 John Connor can't get his story straight about whether destiny can be averted or must be fulfilled.
  • Self Fulfilling Prophecy
  • Sequel Hook - During the first film Reese explains the history of SkyNet and Cyberdyne. The Smoke And Fire Factory at the end of the climax is revealed as a Cyberdyne building.
  • Serial Killer - The first film starts as a variation of this genre of film.
  • Shapeshifter Default Form
  • Shape Shifter Swan Song - The T-1000
  • Sheep In Wolfs Clothing - Markus.
  • Shoot The Shaggy Dog - Originally, Terminator Salvation would have ended with Captain John Connor's death from his stab wound through the chest, with Kate creating the legendary figure of "General John Connor" that we all know by grafting Connor's skin to Marcus Wright's endoskeleton and having him act as a Replacement Goldfish. Fortunately, a leak of the early script resulted in massive fan outcry, and the ending was changed to Marcus giving Connor his heart to save Connor's life.
  • Silent Partner - Star, the little girl in Salvation, never so much as makes a sound.
  • Slasher Movies - The first Terminator film was a textbook example of this genre. It is fundamentally the story of a (literally) Made Of Iron serial killer who stalks his young female victims by picking their addresses out of a phone book.
  • Slow Doors - T3.
  • Someone To Remember Him By - John, who was born after Reese's death.
  • Spock Speak - All of the terminators played by Schwarzenegger, and the Terminatrix. The T-1000 falls somewhere between this and normal speech. Averted by Marcus and SkyNet.
  • Stable Time Loop - Broken in T2. Even if Connor sends Reese back in time again, it won't be the same Reese who said Judgment Day was in the '90s. Or not, maybe we'll discover that all the details of T2 and T3 have been Broad Stroked out.
  • Stan Winston - The man responsible for the metal skeleton of the title role. Amazingly enough, ten of the fifteen minutes that the T-1000 transformed onscreen in Terminator 2 Judgement Day were also his amazingly-articulate puppets rather than lazy CGI.
    • As noted above, at the time, CGI was the novel expensive option, saved to be used with the T-1000's morphing effects.
  • Star Making Role - Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Stat O Vision - Standard for terminator RoboCams.
  • Straw Feminist - Sarah Connor in T2 for about a minute or so during a Freak Out:
    Sarah: How are you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death...
    John: Mom.
    Sarah: ...and destruction.
    John: Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, okay?
  • Super Prototype : in Salvation, the first T-800 in history can survive damages that would have destroyed the Terminators seen in the previous movies, such as being dipped in molten iron.
  • Tear Jerker - When Reese dies in the first film, and when the T-800 wipes John Connor's tears away in the second.
    • The "burning playground" opening of Terminator 2, juxtaposed to Brad Fidel's gentle and heartfelt rendition of the "Terminator Theme" strikes just the right emotional nerves, reminding us of how important it is to save this world for the next generation.
    • And the bit at the end, y'know, with his.. the thumb, and... the molten, y'know, is there someone else?
    • As Sarah Connor was about to murder Dyson in cold-blood in front of his family, she realizes that she has become exactly like what she hates the most, and collapses weeping in guilt.
    • "I know now why you cry, but it's something I could never do." Grown Men Cried.
      • Terminator Salvation. "Take mine. You said every man gets a second chance. This is mine."
      • John's monologue during the final moments of T3. If the music doesn't get to you the image of the skull of his T-800 underwater, where its red eye flickers then disappears completely might.
  • Technology Porn - All over the place. The T2 teaser trailer qualifies for this trope alone.
  • Terminator Twosome - Trope Namer. Seen in all three movies, and the first episode of the TV series (apparently).
  • The End Of The World As We Know It
  • The Olivet (Dr. Silberman)
  • The Other Darrin - John Connor has been portrayed by many people; T4 also has a new Kate Brewster and Kyle Reese; understandable and necessary in the latter case, since he's several years younger than in the original film.
  • This Is For Emphasis, Bitch! "You're terminated, fucker!"
  • Time Travel
  • Timey Wimey Ball - The past and future have both been changed so often, and with so many loops and paradoxes, that there's no point even trying to figure out the rules of how it all works.
    • And yet, people try.
    • The end of season 2 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles really gets into this, and does a good job. In TSCC you can change the future and it stays changed. Paradoxes will not rip the universe apart or erase important characters from the present. In T4 how any of this works is not clear at all.
  • Took A Level In Bad Ass - Sarah Connor in T2
    • John Connor since Salvation uses T3 as canon
  • Took A Level In Jerkass - Sarah Connor in T2, oh so very, very much.
  • Trust Password - "Come with me if you want to live" is what Reese says to Sarah Connor when they first meet. In T2 and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, it's how terminators identify themselves as good guys.
  • Truth In Television - The British Ministry of Defence actually operates a satellite network used to coordinate unmanned vehicles - including "Hunter Killer drones" - called SkyNet.
    • This link further cements that the previous troper did not, in fact, make that up.
    • The US Air Force has a unit readiness tracking system called, I shit you not, SkyNet. During exercises, announcements come over the loudspeakers for group commanders to "update numbers in SkyNet".
    • This troper has learned of a company called Cyberdyne that is working on endoskeletons. Based in Japan. The version it's getting the most attention for is called the HAL 5. Anyone else see the three problems with this?
    • If parts of T4 gave you nightmares then just skip this link. At least there's no... teeth
  • Turned Against Their Masters
  • Two Keyed Lock
  • Uncanny Valley - In T4, the T-800 at the end has a digital rendering of young Arnold Schwarzenegger's head. Justified, because the real Arnold has aged noticeably since 1984 just like everyone else, and the CG effect is actually pretty appropriate for a robot.
  • Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny - The Terminator vs. Robocop
  • Villain Ball - T4: SkyNet successfully lures a completely unsuspecting John Connor into a well-planned trap of its own design, and instead of greeting him with a bomb, nerve gas, or even an army of robots, it sends one terminator to kill him (and doesn't even bother to give it a gun!). SkyNet also doesn't send the T-800 any backup even after it becomes obvious the plan isn't going quite as intended. Granted, the terminator does remarkably well, but you'd think SkyNet would take absolutely no chances given the amount of effort it spends on killing Connor later on (multiple time travel attempts, etc.)
  • Viral Marketing
  • Visual Effects Of Awesome - The T-1000 completely blew the audience mind when Terminator 2 came out. It, and Jurassic Park, are credited for the CGI revolution.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting
  • What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic - In Terminator Salvation Marcus is deliberately tied up in a cruficified position while receiving his lethal injection in the film's opening foreshadowing him as a sacrificial savior by the story's conclusion.
    • While that could be, lethal injection tables are positioned like that. Given the writers behind Salvation, it could just be coincidental.
  • Waif Fu - Cameron in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, though it does not fight like a waif.
  • Weaksauce Weakness - Marcus is every bit as tough and unstoppable as you would expect from a terminator... except for his glaring exposed weakpoint in the form of his organic human heart (which isn't even covered with any sort of armor; it just hangs there in a big gaping hole in his chest, leaving it completely exposed to any stray pistol shot or well-aimed punch).
  • What Could Have Been: WASP singer Blackie Lawless was considered for the role of T-1000.
  • Why Dont Ya Just Shoot Him - In T4, the T800 tasked with ambushing John Connor gets hold of Connor's loaded grenade launcher, only to inexplicably throw it away and carry on fighting hand-to-hand. Granted he was doing well enough without it, but that has never been enough of a reason to prevent every other T800 from using guns.
  • Xanatos Gambit - SkyNet's plan in T4 to destroy the Resistance by giving it a false shut-down signal for its machines.
    • Its concurrent plan to trap and kill John Connor was pretty much a Xanatos Roulette, considering the sheer number of coincidences required for Marcus to run into Reese, let alone make his way to Connor without being killed or exposed at some point. In fact, Marcus is exposed as an infiltrator, but then manages to fulfill his mission anyway.
  • You Cant Fight Fate: Dialogue notwithstanding, the actual events in The Terminator imply a simple time-travel physics where there's one future and one past and you can't really change anything. Terminator 3 substitutes a soft determinism of disaster, with institutional and technological forces constantly trying to create something like SkyNet, and although our heroes have to power to stop it, they ultimately fail. See Screw Destiny.
    • The Sarah Connor Chronicles subverted You Cant Fight Fate — the creation of SkyNet may be unavoidable, but how and why it happens, and what happens afterwards, is not set in stone.
      • And its possible that its creation isn't inevitable because of fate, but because three people are attempting to hold back technological progress, which is not a realistic goal. Several similar systems to Sky Net appear, implying that computer technology may have advanced to the point that a sentient supercomputer is the natural next step of research.
    • The final line of T4 has John Connor, in spite of what he says in T3, declaring that there is no fate but what we make.
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