Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- When Kyle is viewing both his own and his Alternate Self's memories of their childhoods in the Time Displacement Field, the direct contrast of the alternate Kyle's happy birthday celebration with his parents and friends against the thirteen-year-old main Kyle tending his parents' graves alone at their home's ruins makes the latter harsher than it already is.
- It's somewhat grim and harrowing to watch Pops struggle through and suffer various malfunctions with his servos over the film due to his old age — his hand inappropriately spazzing and forcing him to knock it back into shape on concrete, his kneecap likewise failing and needing to be jammed back in. It's very much like watching a beloved old person begin struggling to their distress with ailing joints that one knows will not get better with age but will only worsen.
- John's fate in this movie can be seen as one.
- It can be harrowing in the armory scene when Kyle is screaming at John to fight it — as John makes the Call-Back speech, from his vocal tone and the way he's blinking his eyes, it's almost as if whatever's left of the human John's personality is desperately pleading with Kyle to kill him.
- Pops' Disney Death / Heroic Sacrifice. From his acceptance of his fate, telling Kyle to protect Sarah, Sarah's crying and screaming, and the goddamn tragic music, it's easily the most powerful scene in the film - which makes his next appearance so much more badass.
- Additionally, Pops is visible seemingly crying, as his human face flakes in Slow Motion. It looks like a Terminator learnt how to do it after all.
- And then there's Sarah's words after Pops' Heroic Sacrifice. In light of the details of her parents' deaths, the sacrifice of the only family she had for years who promised he would never let anyone hurt her and was always there for her, and additionally the Face–Monster Turn and death of her alternate future son, combined with how Emilia Clarke delivers the line; it comes off as quite meaningful. (Plus it becomes Harsher in Hindsight after Terminator: Dark Fate.)"Everyone who loves me. Everyone. They die."
