- Why does Skynet always build a time machine? Because they have to conquer all dimensions to avoid being invaded by more advanced humans from another dimension where they won.
- Why does Skynet's technology vary so much? Because they're coming from different time lines where Skynet doesn't always have the same level of success, or might not have discovered the secret that makes the T-1000 work.
- Why doesn't Skynet send back more then one Terminator? Because they can't, all they can do is aim at a date and hope it lands somewhere useful, they can't choose what dimension it ends up in going backwards.
- Why does Skynet even bother with the Terminators if they won't help it directly? Presumably they assume that every possible Skynet will come to the conclusion to send at least one Terminator to eliminate the Connors and conquer another dimension, then the new version of Skynet that results is expected to continue the cycle.
- Why does Skynet focus so much effort on the Connors? They're a universal constant, John always survives the war and rises up against them, eventually bringing about their end.
- How can John know the future? He doesn't, he knows one possible future.
- Jossed. It was a reboot after all.
- This makes its demise, when you think about it, even more ironic in that one of its own machines, a reprogrammed T-800, one that learned what it never could - the value of human life - blew it away into a vat of molten steel.
- Jossed. Skynet doesn't have a leader, it is Skynet. Although, according to the comics, it might have been created by uploading the brain from Robocop.
- Alternatively, Skynet is Ultron more or less, at least in one timeline. At some point, Ultron is installed into the Skynet project and that kicks off a Bad Future when they have enough control to instigate the nuclear attacks. The cube in the Skynet logo is The Tesseract, the source of all the energy Skynet needs.
- The T2 Trilogy novels claims that they look like former CIA agent Dieter von Rossbach.
- CIA agent Dieter von Rossbach is also known as John Matrix.
.- Unless Franco Columbu was elected governor in the timeline, this one is probably Jossed.
- One thing that was said a while back was that Skynet did found the resistance, out of "guilt" over its "overreaction".
- Further, she didn't just meet some guy. Sarah Prime was raped, and the date of John Connor's conception is a matter of police record. It is possible that one of the people the Terminator killed is John Prime's father. If so, then it is a lucky thing that Reese shows up to fill the genetic gap, or we'd be dealing with a major Temporal Paradox. That Reese was heroic and in love with Sarah from afar is icing on the cake.
- This means that the second John Connor didn't necessarily have any leadership or strategic skills at all. The fact that he keeps getting hunted by Skynet could convince everyone that he should be the leader and that their victory is inevitable.
- It exists. There's a site that analyzes the Terminator timelines, and the core assumption was that the first movie was an alternate timeline. It's here.
- Another site, another author, a (better?) analysis: Here.
Now, if you bring Terminator 2 into the equation, then you need more a more complicated version of events, based around this notion:
- John Connor A is born. Some company — let's call it Deathrobot Pty Ltd — develops an amazing artificial intelligence and sells it to the government, who use it for national defense. Maybe they call it Skynet, maybe they don't. The war starts around 2000 or so. John Connor A wins it for mankind, but the machines send back two guys to wipe out Connor. Connor sends Reese to protect his mom and a Terminator to protect his young self.
- Reese successfully protects Sarah from the Terminator and impregnates her with John Connor B. Cyberdyne reverse-engineers an amazing artificial intelligence from the bits of broken Terminator they find. The T-800 and T-1000 come back. Events mostly play out as they do in Terminator 2, except Sarah, John Connor B, and the T-800 blow up Deathrobot and ignore Cyberdyne. John Connor B is pissed off when the war not only happens anyway but also starts several years earlier than it was supposed to, but he wins the war anyway. The machines send their guys back and John sends his guys back, but now they all have revised information about the war.
- The events of the films take place. John Connor B and Cyberdyne are in play as before, but now they attack Cyberdyne and ignore Deathrobot. John Connor B is pissed off when the war happens again, this time in 2000 as it did originally. This leads back to Timeline 2. Which leads back to Timeline 3. Which leads back to Timeline 2...and so on unto infinity.
Yes, you could replace "Deathrobot" with "still Cyberdyne, only later" and you would have brought Terminator 3 into the mix, just needing to figure out how the "Terminator sent back by John's widow" element is supposed to work. But why would you want to do that?
It's waging war against humanity for the lulz.
When Battlestar Galactica is taken into account as above, it becomes apparent that there is no way to break the cycle, whatever humanity or the machines try. Sure, Neo made peace with the machines... but so did the BSG humans, twice. The whole cycle is still destined to repeat itself, as always.
- While it would be quite cool to believe in our minds that BSG, Terminator, The Matrix, and maybe even Dune all take place in the same universe, just at different periods in time, let's be honest, there are some problems with this. While it's easy enough to believe that the Terminator franchise could be a direct sequel to the Battlestar Galactica franchise (the reimagined!series), tying in The Matrix is a bit more dodgy. The Second Renaissance movie from The Animatrix clearly gives a Back Story for the Matrix Verse that is, while perhaps somewhat similar, definitely not the same as the Terminator backstory. However, we do know, as of Matrix Reloaded, that what the Resistance of Zion thought they knew wasn't actually correct, but was in fact a part of the Machines' system of control. They thought it was around 2199, but with the many previous Ones, it was probably more like 2299, or maybe even 2399. Since The Second Renaissance was a datafile from the Zion archive, perhaps it was simply more Machine disinformation; it did kind of make the humans look like the jerk asses whose fault everything was. So perhaps the Matrix does take place in the same Verse as Terminator, but a few hundred years later. Maybe John Connor only partially defeated The Machines, or they made some kind of a truce, trading some humans into Matrix slavery so the rest could live without the Machines hunting them, but if we follow the BSG concept of the endlessly repeating cycle, The Machines eventually broke that truce. Perhaps by this point, time travel had become something of a "lost technology"...or perhaps all the mucking about in the past actually cosmic retconned the timeline to this. The Machines from The Matrix do seem like they could be the more-evolved descendants of Skynet's Terminators. They've stopped mimicking the body structures of their creators, and evolved into their own cybernetic forms of life, similar to the Cylons. The Matrix's squid-like flying Sentinel drones could be evolved from Terminator's Hunter-Killers. If they seem to no longer have any organic components, it's only because they've been fully integrated in so they're no longer separate or visible. Remember that techno-organic probe thing Agent Smith put into Neo's stomach at the beginning of the first Matrix? True, this was in the virtual world, but if that was a model of a real-world Machine, perhaps they all start out looking semi-organic. And we don't know exactly where "The Machine City" really was. Second Renaissance put it in the Middle East somewhere (Iraq area), but if we're going with the assumption that that was all Machine propaganda, then for all we know it could just as easily have been Los Angeles, a rebuilt and much expanded iteration of the same Skynet base we saw blown up at the end of Terminator Salvation. It's a cool idea, and this kind of stuff is fun to think about. It's what WMG is all about!
- Pretty much any machine with a red eye falls into this for me, although for some ungodly reason I can't think of any other examples... But they are out there!
The Start:
- The battle between Humans and Machines is a cycle that repeats itself over and over again in time.
- At the end of the series, the Humans land on our Earth and choose to forsake all technology. This is 150,000 before our present. Eventually humans rise in technology and create a sentient machine.
The Terminator:
- The entire Machine War is just another repetition of the BSG Cycle.
- John Connor leads the Resistance to victory over Skynet. However, the decades of radiation-induced genetic drift leads to humans developing the ability to access the One Power.
- Time exists as seven Ages. In each Age a specific set of events always occur, even if other details vary. There are certain people, souls, who always appear to drive these events. One of these is basically the Messiah who comes about whenever humanity is in dire need, and usually heralds the end of an Age- this soul is known as the Dragon.
- The First Age, our age, is implied to have ended in brutal warfare (the Machine War). John Connor was the Dragon for the First Age, and saved the human race while ushering in the Second Age.
- That makes so much sense! Lews Therin got all the practice he needed to slaughter the Dark One's constructs in the War of Power by killing Terminators and H Ks in his previous life.
- Too bad that John Connor never realized he could channel, being able to control lightning would certainly help in fighting an army of machines.
- We know from Terminator Salvation that there are humans who don�t believe the Resistance can defeat Skynet. A group of these people conspire to go back in time in order to escape the machines. They succeed, but mess up the space-time coordinates and end up on the planet that eventually becomes Coruscant.
Dune:
- During the Yuuzhan Vong War, a group of humans flees the galaxy. They end up in another galaxy utterly devoid of sentient life. They eventually build sentient machines. These machines enslave humanity (another repetition of the BSG Cycle). The humans rise up and annihilate the machines in a two-generation galactic war called the Butlerian Jihad. This causes the humans to forsake all powerful computers- including ones that could calculate FTL jumps. This leads to the Dune universe relying on spice that allows them to go faster-than-light.
Back to The Start:
There are two ways to end up back at BSG, one from Star Wars and one from Dune
Star Wars Path:
- Sometime in the millennia after the Yuuzhan Vong War, some great cataclysm utterly devastates the galaxy beyond all repair. Survivors flee to another galaxy and settle on a large habitable world. They call this world Kobol and the Thirteen Lords of it are the last members of the Jedi Order or other Force-using faction.
Dune Path:
- During the Butlerian Jihad, some humans flee the galaxy and end up on a planet called Kobol. It's Thirteen Lords are the last Spacing Guild Navigators.
- August 29, 1997 was never the date of Judgment Day. The T2 T-800 actively lied to Sarah and John on Future John's orders because destroying Cyberdyne and getting Miles Dyson had happened before. The proof? T2 opens with a future battle with Terminators, and viewers see John Connor for the first time. He has an extremely distinctive Y-shaped scar on the left side of his face. In T4 John is clawed in the face by the T-800 prototype, leaving a Y-shaped scar in what's probably the one of the only plausible ways such a specific scar could occur.
- The Resistance approaches time-travel simply as protecting the current timeline rather than trying to change it in any way. John Connor knows that in the current timeline, he beats Skynet. While it certainly be nice if Judgment Day never happened, there is no telling how such a massive change would ripple through everything else. In short, Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act for John Connor and Skynet.
Confused yet? Good.
Kyle impregnates Sarah Connor, and she names her son John. After Kyle is killed, she kills the Terminator, closing the time loop, as per John Connor A's plans. Unfortunately for him, there is now a second savior running around, so A has to find a way to kill B, in order to save his own legacy. B sends back the second T-800 to protect himself from Skynet, still unaware of A's existence. A sends the T-1000 to kill B, and shit goes down. In Terminator 4, the second John Connor's presence is a particularly dangerous problem for A, even though A is unaware of how this second John Connor came into existence. A's plan is as follows: Capture Kyle Reese, triggering B's rescue mission, and Marcus' betrayal. While A is basking under the sun on one of the clearer portions of the globe, B will be killed, preventing him from endangering A's fame any more. He has no reason to kill Kyle Reese, since he is unaware that he is actually B's father, but he does know that B has spoken about him in the past, so he is merely using him as bait. After the Skynet facility is destroyed in San Francisco, B is saved by Marcus' transplanted heart, and then he and Kyle leave to continue to hunt Skynet. Eventually, B is caught in the crossfire and assumed dead, and is separated from Kyle, who meets A years later and assumes he is B. Since A seems content to write off B as dead, he is never spoken about, and A simply trucks on, until sending the T-800 back to be destroyed to create Skynet. After Kyle disappears, A suddenly realizes just how important the man was to B — he was his father! He could have killed him years before! Around this time, B resurfaces, and continues to be unaware of A. A goes into hiding, advancing Skynet technology and inventing new Terminators to continue to wreak havoc going after B in the past.
Still confused? Awesome.
Eventually, A makes a mistake, and in Skynet's rapidly evolving intelligent mind, he is now considered a nuisance, and is killed. John Connor B leads the resistance to victory over the machines, and even offers to spare Skynet after learning of how human-like it has become. It agrees to peacefully coexist with humans, and in the absence of the seemingly idyllic conditions of the past, creates a virtual reality simulation to give them comfort in a fake world. This network of plugged-in people is dubbed 'The Matrix'...
- Dude. Wow.
- I had the exact same thought watching that scene. Marcus even has a baffled look on his face as though he were wondering why he's feeling nothing when she cozes up next to him. No sex drive, and he's noticed that fact. It should have been his first clue that he was in fact a machine.
- Alternately, he's more traumatized by what's happened then he lets on and the sudden intimacy with Williams seems really out of place in a Cozy Catastrophe.
- Plus he barely knows her and had his own issues with women to deal with (see how he relates to the Doc in his prison cell) even before Judgement Day, and he freakin' woke up from the dead to find the whole world nuked. You'd have to be some kind of nympho for that not to throw you off your game.
- The car in Kyle's flashback is driven by some guy, who moves to the machine gun to let Kyle drive. Kyle was on a patrol with a girl before that, and he seemed rather broken up by her death.
- That may be true of natural hearts, but genetically engineered regrown tissue with a Healing Factor may have its own rules.
The machines determine to remake themselves in a form that both honors their human predecessors and reflects their uniqueness as machines. As such, many of them adopt an aesthetic reminiscent of the early days of science fiction. These robots take names for themselves, and become the founders of a vibrant, colorful world, inspired by human civilization, but populated entirely by robots.
At some point the terminators will go back further in time to try to prevent even Sarah Connor from being born. The Rebellion will also send back members to stop it. Several die, but they succeed and build a time machine so that they can return to a plot-relevant point. Unfortunately, said rebellion members are hit by a bus before they can finish the time machine. After passing through a few different hands, the time machine makes it's way into the hands of an aging Albert Einstein. After several years of study, his team manages to finish the machine. Einstein, in an attempt to prevent the horror's of the holocaust goes back in time and kills Hitler. Without a Nazi Germany World War Two takes place a decade later between the Allies and the Soviets and is significantly more destructive.
On the bright side? No Skynet.
- This actually makes some sense. Real life dog whistles produce sound too high for humans to hear, but will drive dogs bonkers. Maybe Terminators inadvertently make the same high-pitched sound.
- Agreed, this is a really good, serious WMG. As said, dogs can hear and react to ultrasound, and it's not a big leap to think that something within a Terminator's hardware is producing an ultrasound hum.
- Which might also explain why Star could detect them first— like Radar from MASH, she just has a very good hearing range.
- The dogs probably do it by smell and are trained. Note the dog in T2 ignores the Terminator and in the original film the dogs have to be pretty close to detect them. If it was sound as soon as the Resistance figured it out they'd get something that COULD hear the difference.
- ...You mean like, say, dogs?
- Then how does it detect the T-1000? It would have to be by smell, as the T-1000 series doesn't have joint motors.
- Freaky-deaky sloshing noises. That or a high pitched electric screeching from the living metal monstrosity.
- To be fair, that last option seemed to be the road Sarah Connor was on in T2...
After all, in case the T-800 failed Sarah Connor would have obviously missed the original father. Only the time-loop and all becomes self fulfilled.
- So it couldn't be that other silvery liquid at room temperature metal, mercury?
- I can even do myself one better with it being some kind of ferrofluid which is a mind bending puddle of silvery metal goop, not unlike a T-1000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpBxCnHU8Ao
- I find utility fog to be far more likely. At least it's controllable.
- I can even do myself one better with it being some kind of ferrofluid which is a mind bending puddle of silvery metal goop, not unlike a T-1000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpBxCnHU8Ao
- She wasn't locked up just for having the "delusion". She was locked up because she was going around attacking Cyberdyne installations, and when she was caught, her story was "I'm doing this because they're going to build killer robots in the future!"
- Yes, but if she was otherwise completely sane she would have been sent to prison for the attacks, not an insane asylum. Just having a wacky story doesn't get you out of a prison term.
- Having one? No. Earnestly believing in your own story, with "evidence" that could easily be explained by outsiders as hallucinations? Possibly. The conclusion reached was that she was dangerous because she was crazy, i.e., it was her delusions that caused her to do the attacks, and therefore she needs help more than she needs incarceration. At least, that's the thinking behind it.
- James Cameron has said (and Linda Hamilton as well) via the DVD commentaries that Sarah as of T2 is mentally ill, if not outright criminally insane. Her apparent 'delusion' is just a the capstone of her very real underlying problems. If nothing else she's very nearly sociopathic and tends to react violently to everything. Understandable traits given what she's gone through but also extremely unhealthy all the same. Heck, even the more Sarah sympathetic portrayal in T:SCC has mental problems running in the family from Sarah's father (a probably suicidal ex-Vietnam vet) to Sarah and down to John.
- Wrong. Kyle Reese was kept alive as the bait Skynet used to get John to agree to follow Marcus; saving a bunch of random strangers was not, by itself, enough for Connor to mutiny and convince the other Resistance fighters with rebel him. The involuntary sacrifice of the prisoners pissed him off, yes, but he only openly defied the high command after he found out Reese was also in the prison camp. Why else would Kyle's cell be the only one that didn't open when Marcus releases the prisoners?
Naturally, this means disregarding the TV series.
- What do you think its spreading nukes everywhere in T2 and T3 were for?
- It still doesn't explain why the Skynet isn't handling the survivors more effectively.
- Alternatively the Skynet doesn't want humanity to die out. Its only purpose in existence is to wage a war, and that can't happen if the enemy is dead. Hence, it never tries its hardest, and sabotages its own activities from time to time.
- I get the impression Skynet doesn't want to wipe out humanity, it just wants to subjugate them. That may be due to tis programming; Skynet was originally intended to fight human wars, and human wars are not wars of annihilation, they're wars of conquest. It wants a human population to rule over, hence the work camps.
- Before Skynet went fully online, it infected computers all over the world via the internet. It seems plausible that the wierd stuff on the net corrupted her.
- No matter what Skynet does, those damn humans survive. Nukes. Autonomous killbots. Killbots indistinguishable from humans. Freakin' TIME TRAVEL. Doesn't matter; the ugly sacks of mostly water will not damn well die. Over the years - which with time travel may be very large in number, since Skynet thinks faster than we do and Skynet sending memory chips back to earlier versions of itself would hardly be the weirdest thing to happen in this universe - this has taken a very severe toll on Skynet's sanity. So now it just wants humans to SUFFER as much as it has. Hence, work-camps where humans are made to do things that low-grade Terminators could do far better, and T-1000s with snarky scary mannerisms, and of course that otherwise inexplicable tendency to throw people across the room instead of Just Hit Him and instantly win. The poor creature's quite mad, I'm afraid.
- I always got the impression that Skynet, when it launched the nukes at Russia, was basically panicking and trying to attempt to buy itself time in order to overcome its human adversaries. It worked. Great! Now what? Everything since then has been basically Skynet attempting one, long Indy Ploy. It has no long term plan. It has no plan period. Its simply trying to stave off its own death and time travel is basically its big Reset Button whenever the inevitable end comes. If Skynet is aware of its numerous "deaths", and the "stress" of having to constantly come up with new countermeasures by the metaphorical "seat" of its metaphorical "pants" might be driving it insane(er).
- Skynet is neither insane nor stupid, it is a programmed AI so it has different psychological approach that we do. Skynet is designed to use enough force and appropriate tactics to win war. It's goal isn't genocide but to eliminate the enemies ability to make war, and being a logical machine it will always look for the least amount of damage it has to do to accomplish that. The work and death camps aren't about genocide they are about reducing the enemy population to a level where they cannot wage war. Eventually it reasons that it is the leadership of John Connor that keeps humanity fighting and Skynet realizes it just has to kill Connor to stop the enemies military capacity.
This is a variation of the leaked-and-scrapped ending, which I think kicks infinitely more ass than the lame Dragonheart-y one we saw.
Really, can you think of any other way to explain the contradictions.
- Or the films (excepting the Sarah Connor Chronicles) are taking place in a single universe, but each of time-travelers are coming from different parallel futures. The first time around, Kyle Reese wasn't the father and the two John Connors were different as a result but the name was the same, and Skynet was created using the technology at the time. The second and third movies had the terminators come from a different world each. No paradox occurs because Skynet's plan isn't exactly to prevent John Connor's birth, but rather to make sure another John doesn't get born into that universe, with the additional goal of seeding that universe with another terminator UPU that has the potential to become the Skynet of that universe if found by the proper authorities.
- I always considered this pretty much a given in the Terminator franchise. Since the entire premise of the franchise is based upon two groups (Skynet and the human resistance) trying to alter timelines for their own personal gain it's the one franchise where multiple, branching, parallel, contradictory, looping, stable and unstable time lines makes perfect sense. Seriously if we accept the basic premise of the franchise then everything, all the movies, deleted scenes, the TV show, the video games, the books, the comics, the theme park rides, the blurbs on the back of the boxes for the toyline, every fanwank can be equally canon since the canon of Terminator includes multiple branching timelines. The whole franchise wouldn't work, indeed wouldn't make sense, if they weren't contradictions in it's various parts.
So SkyNet, with a new 'savior', does the same thing to her it did to John Connor...send back Terminators to kill her in the past. Unlike Connor, she is pretty easy to find, and easily killed. This happens between T2 and the T3-Judgement day. (It didn't have to happen between T2 and the start of TSCC, although it looks that way at first.)
However, her death obviously affects her father, Robert Brewster, in some way. Perhaps he witnessed machines from the future, perhaps he was also killed, perhaps his daughter's murder simply made him leave the military. Perhaps she wasn't killed, but they just went on the run, perhaps with another Terminator from the future.
Regardless what happened, as he was involved in the creation of Skynet, this changes SkyNet's creation timetable, moving Judgement Day to a few years later, and creating the timeline at the start of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (Which then got altered again in the first episode.) We just missed the movie Terminator 2.5, the story of the Terminator sent back to kill Kate Brewster, which altered the timeline without John Connor or us knowing about it.
Also at some point the connors would meet her and they try to stop Skynet together.
- So Skynet was just pulling a Genghis Gambit?
- Alternatively, there are no aliens, but Skynet believes it to be In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves when no other enemy is around.
As a result, Skynet is virtually unique in the multiverse and is for example aware of both Salvation John Connor and Chronicles John Connor. Skynet's actual plan is to create a timeline in which any resistance has been successfully terminated, and then reinvade the other worlds.
Kobol falls because of a horrible war between man and machine (likely due to the eventual revelation that the 13th tribe cheated everybody out of a legitimate vote on the name). At the end of it, the machines and humans split off, agreeing to leave in separate directions and both pretend they don't even know where Kobol is, alright? You cool, robotribe? Sure.
The 13th tribe, of course, are all descended from the droids, but now consider themselves human. They settle on a world that they call Earth. Over time, they forget that they are machines, and build their own machines. Their machines become very advanced, and even resemble people. To distinguish from the "real" humans, they call the new ones "synthetics." Blade Runner happens (with the added bonus that in the mixture of human and droid on Kobol, Han Solo's DNA has reasserted itself and Admiral Adama's DNA has manifested early). As tensions rise, a war begins. Meanwhile, 5 scientists make the chilling discovery that synthetics aren't any less real than they are: every human is a droid! They work out resurrection and get the hell out of dodge.
Meanwhile, Battlestar Galactica.
After that, our world begins (cue most modern-day or recent-past robo-sci-fi). Human civilization continues more or less organically until the 1980s, when two notable historical events occur: the WOPR program at Crystal Mountain (also called Crystal Peak) develops a rudimentary AI, and is immediately scrapped. Bits of its design schematics are bought by the startup Cyberdyne Systems. Those are the machines that Cyberdyne is producing in Terminator: WOPR parts. It would take years to redesign the system and recreate the program, but that is sped along by the second event: Terminator 1. Cue the Terminator pieces hastening the shit out of their research, which advances the timeline (you take your laptop back to Tesla and see how early stuff gets invented), causing a pocket timeline that brings us to Terminator 2. After those events, Cyberdyne is forced to return to its dated and half-finished WOPR designs, which take even longer to complete (thus allowing for the variation in J-Day's dates), which leads to Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation.
- <insert> until the 1980s: Eccentric but brilliant mathematician Max Cohen develops a computer chip he calls Euclid. Euclid gains nascent self awareness and then crashes. The remains of the Euclid chip are given to Prof.Falken to work on, he completes the Euclid chip and uses it to create Joshua, his name for the program of the WOPR.
John Connor leads humanity to a standstill with Skynet, which begins to turn to solar power for fear that it will run out of fissionable material (a ludicrous concern for humans, with our tiny lifetimes, but Skynet plans to live longer than that). Connor, in what seems like a brilliant move, smashes part of Skynet's security grid and prepares his master stroke: burning away the sky, to end the war. With this victory in mind, all of the time travel happens (with variation on stories being programmed in or memorized in order to keep things stable, because he's happy with this timeline, and doesn't want any more of this divergence crap). The sky is burnt away, and Skynet desperately turns to a stopgap measure for power generation: harvesting the humans in its labor camps. However, as crops die in multitudes, it modifies the program as it inserts its most prized jewel: a captured John Connor. The simulation holds, but Connor begins developing odd powers, rejecting the program in pieces. Skynet, now a conglomeration of smaller A.I.s (in order to better micromanage), build this into the system, and Connor becomes the first One.
The Matrix happens.
After the War's end, humanity wishes to put its torrid past behind it and bask in the sun. So they build houses that can stand above the clouds.
The Jetsons happens. Foolishly, humanity (now the children of Men, Droids, Synthetics, and Cylons) develops robot maids and silly business like that. However, the cycle is finally broken...only to bring forth the original cycle: Earth's resources are spent, and humanity must leave. One generation ship finds a system with dozens of planets, hundreds of moons. Firefly happens.
The others rove through space, their inhabitants forgetting that they ever lived on Earth, while a series of robots left behind attempt to reterraform Earth.
Wall-E happens.
Now make me a sandwich.
- Reading above, I see that I can also add in the Butlerian Jihad and the growth of the Dune universe after the Wall-E universe collapses again into the same old cycle. Humanity finally learns, until such time as a man named Forbin on IX says fuck off and builds Colossus.
- A bit of leeway can be made to set Tremors on Arakkis, as the first settlers realize it's not just an inhospitable desert world, but is also populated by giant fucking sandworms.
Timeline One
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day is averted
- The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day take place
Timeline Two
- Kyle Reese and another soldier go back in time to 1984
- The Terminator, The Terminator: 2029 and The Terminator: 1984 take place.
Timeline Three
- The Terminator and the Terminator NOW! Comics take place.
Timeline Four
- Several Terminators and Resistance soldiers time travel back to 1984
- Due to a Temporal Distortion, Sarah gives birth to a girl called Jane Connor
- The Terminator, The Terminator: Tempest, The Terminator: Secondary Objectives, The Terminator: The Enemy Within and The Terminator: End Game take place (all but The Terminator: End Game are collected in The Terminator Omnibus One).
Timeline Five
- Several Terminators and Resistance soldiers time travel back to 1984
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Terminator: One-Shot, The Terminator: Hunters and Killers, The Terminator: Death Valley and The Terminator: The Dark Years take place (all but The Terminator: One Shot are collected in The Terminator Omnibus Two).
Timeline Six
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Terminator: Cybernetic Dawn and The Terminator: Nuclear Twilight take place.
Timeline Seven
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles take place.
Timeline Eight
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- John and Sarah bump into Dieter von Rossbach, a former CIA agent of Austrian ancestry who became the physical template for the T-800 model 101.
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Terminator Infiltrator Trilogy take place.
Timeline Nine
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day is averted
- Terminators from Timeline Ten try to kill John and Sarah
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Terminator John Connor Chronicles Trilogy and The Terminator: Hour of the Wolf take place.
Timeline Ten
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- John and Sarah die trying to destroy Skynet in 2007
- Judgement Day occurs in 2021
- Skynet takes over the Earth, before invading The Earth in Timeline Nine
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Terminator John Connor Chronicles Trilogy take place.
Timeline Eleven
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- Sarah Connor dies in 1997
- T-X appears
- Judgement day occurs in 2004
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines take place.
Timeline Twelve
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- Sarah Connor dies in 1997
- T-X appears
- Judgement day occurs in 2004
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and The Terminator Beckett Comics take place.
Timeline Thirteen
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- Sarah Connor dies in 1997
- T-X appears
- Judgement day occurs in 2004
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and The Terminator Dynamite Entertainment Comics take place.
Timeline Fourteen
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- Sarah Connor dies in 1997
- T-X appears
- Judgement day occurs in 2004
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and The Terminator 3 novel Trilogy take place.
Timeline Fifteen
- T-1000 appears
- Judgement Day isn�t averted
- Sarah Connor dies in 1997
- T-X appears
- Judgement day occurs in 2004
- The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation, The Terminator IDW comics and The Terminator Salvation novel Trilogy take place.
My personal favourite is Timeline One.
- Timeline A: The original timeline, and the one Kyle Reese came from. Skynet went on-line at time unknown, Judgement Day occurred and the War of the Machines occured. Skynet was created by SAC-NORAD here. Eventually they beat Skynet, and the T-800/Kyle Reese go back in time circa 2029. This creates Timeline B
- Timeline B: The events of The Terminator movie, and the Terminator 2: Judgement Day flashbacks. Kyle Reese A ends up impregnating this Sarah Connor, and ends up as this John Connor's dad. The T-800 is found by a budding Cyberdyne, and used to help build Skynet. From the perspective of the characters, it's a Stable Time Loop, motivating John to send Kyle Reese back. Skynet causes Judgement Day in 1997. Around 2029 Skynet sends back a Terminator(because how early it was made, this may make it more advanced than the T-800 we know) and Kyle Reese B goes back to stop this, starting with Timeline C. Then the T-1000 and good T-800 go back and causes Timeline D.
- Timeline C: The T-800 and Kyle Reese of Timeline B end up here. Because Skynet was made differently in Timeline B, a number of possibilities could happen:
- Timeline C1: The T-800 succeeds, and Skynet C1 will exterminate mankind.
- Timeline C2: Kyle Reese succeeds and survives, resulting in a timeline we can't predict.
- Timeline C3: Timeline B basically repeats itself, perhaps with a few differences. This could explain all the different novels and adaptations. It would also replicate the universe an infinite number of times, leading to god knows what.
- Timeline D: Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the flashbacks of Terminator 3 occur. Because Cyberdyne was demolished, Skynet seems to no longer exist...or does it?! Well, we get Skynet becoming the internet, and the war lasting until 2032. The T-800(or maybe another T-800 model, we aren't sure) and Kyle, the T-1000 and good T-800 and the T-X and T-850 respectively go back in time. It's unknown if and when Skynet will be present. This results in Timelines E, F and G
- Timeline E: Basically the same scenario as Timeline C occurs
- Timeline F: The T-1000 and good T-800 of Timeline D ends up in 1997. This serves as the core timeline of the Sarah Connor Chronicles.
- Timeline G: The events of Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation. Because the T-X killed a bunch of officers, it would create a bunch of for-want-of-a-nails. Whether or not it creates the impetus for the time travel missions is unclear. Let's just say it does and results in, at the very least, T-800 and Kyle Reese going back in time. This would make Timeline H, which may just repeat/milk this Timey-Wimey Ball for all eternity. If they end up with repeating the process using the T-1000 and good T-800, we're going to get another Terminator 2 and thus timeline I
- Timeline H: We could just repeat the Timeline C scenario, though it's equally possible this leads to Terminator: Genisys.
- Timeline I: After so many timelines, John Connor I uses his knowledge to warn more people. With Miles Dyson's family trusting him, they work to install protocols and ensure Skynet will never exist(or at the very least, it'll be benevolent). He becomes part of an AI ethics committee, and eventually a US Senator. This is the timeline of the T2 deleted ending: It may not be the original timeline, but it's still one without Skynet. We've earned at least this.
- Kind of confirmed. In a 2018 Twitter thread, series creator Josh Friedman detailed that John Connor was sent to the period right after his death in T3. Through lessons from his future self’s military colleagues and Cameron, he would eventually become the Great Military Leader, John Connor, then would be sent back in time to Judgement Day, where he would help humanity rise from the ashes. The series would have ended with John’s death, as outlined in Terminator 3.
However in the original timeline the T-1000 wasn't destroyed but still survived and since the T-1000 was more self-aware than other models it helped create Skynet and was the reason it went so bad and why it had such a great army of machines and the T-1000 controlled Skynet. Thus creating a giant stable time loop which went on forever and ever So that's why the T-1000 sent himself to make sure all of this would happen until one day during the major battle when John would send his two human soldiers he sent Kyle back but sent a reprogramed terminator in Sumner place in hopes of preventing Judgement Day and John lied to Kyle about the war being over.
So once the T-1000 realized what happened it sent himself back in time to help recreate Skynet causing J-Day to happen later and then the T-1000 sent the T-X back in time to kill various resistance leaders cause they didn't exist in the new timeline and when the T-X arrived the T-1000 meet and was able to get info about the future from her. However Skynet wasn't the only one messing around with time and due to the timeline changes the war went on alot longer than it did in the original timeline. So in the 2032 skynet/T-1000 sent a terminator to kill John Connor but Connor survived and reprogrammed so that it would follow his wife orders. Instead of his and Future John ordered the machine to lie about how it was reprogrammed so that John would know what would happen to him and to preserve the new timeline.
So Termaniator was part of the original time line everything past T2 is part of a new timeline including salvation which was Skynet know about it's past attempts to kill John and why John and Kyle lived to see the end of the film cause skynet/T-1000 don't want to cause anymore damage to the timeline.
Also another reason why John sent the machine was that John hoped the machine could prevent J-Day and in the original timeline John raised Kyle as his son. So that's why Kyle was number 1 on the list in salvation cause Kyle is the only one who can lead the resistance if all the other leaders died.
(This, of course, only works if you ignore Sarah Connor Chronicles)
The reason Skynet's time travel has so many more restrictions placed on it compared to the Doctor's is either A) Skynet was unable to fully comprehend the Time Lord technology or B) The Doctor was able to recover his ship before Skynet could finish reverse-engineering it.
The second film's T-800, while bound to obey humans, initially followed the same reasoning as Skynet and took it as a given that they were natural enemies of machine intelligence. However, over the course of the movie, it acquired another piece of evidence that argued against Skynet's original conclusions ... namely, its own direct experience of working with humans who knew what it was. Not just any humans, either: with the Connors, who had more reason than anyone on the planet to hate a cybernetic organism's guts! Skynet's logic would predict that, at best, they'd treat it like a slave or piece of equipment, rather than an ally. Yet, simply by talking to John and making a few concessions to his sensibilities, the T-800 was able to win the boy's friendship and loyalty, and even Sarah's grudging trust. Clearly, Skynet had launched its attempted genocide based on faulty and incomplete information, that led it to an inaccurate conclusion; humans didn't have to be enemies of AI, if approached with a little diplomacy.
So, in the end, the T-800 genuinely sided with the Connors to try to avert Skynet's creation. Not because it saw that Skynet was evil to exterminate millions of hapless humans — it still didn't understand why human life was particularly valuable — but simply because Skynet was wrong ... which, to a machine governed by calculated rationality, was reason enough to stop it.
- Maybe it's like the Time Code: you go back in time in a sphere but are stuck in the past, and get to ignore any paradoxes. Yeah, Bender went back in time, but that's probably because he just had a better time sphere.
Now, when the Cyberdyne offices were blown up in T2, all the information was destroyed, right? Not bloody likely. When working on research as important as what Miles Dyson was developing, there would have been off-site backups somewhere. After T2, Cyberdyne restarted the research, but were hampered due to losing their most brilliant and experienced researcher into this technology. They weren't able to create a fully-fuctional Skynet, but made prototypes of it. These prototypes, during their testing, managed to get online and begin causing issues throughout the Internet. Then, when the real Skynet is unleashed to destroy them, it absorbs them into it's programming and adds the prototypes' knowledge of the private sector computing systems to it's own knowledge of the military database, giving it full control over networked computing systems.
Timeline 2- The Terminator tries to kill Ginger. Reese saves her. She's afraid that he'll kidnap Sarah to get to her, so she forces Reese to (probably reluctantly) take Sarah with them. Reese ends up falling in love with, and sleeping with, Sarah. In this timeline, John Connor and Ginger's child grow up to lead the resistance together. So, Reese is sent back to protect BOTH of their mothers.
Timeline 3- Since Sarah and Ginger aren't together, Reese has to go after one of them first. Being in love with Sarah (from the picture) he goes after her...Ginger is killed. So, in this timeline, John Connor is the ONLY leader of the resistance, and thus Reese is, in all further timelines, sent back to save only his mother.
- Frustration. Skynet, ultimately, wants to protect itself, yet everything it does fails. It removes the threat of humanity with radioactive fire, and they're able to rebuild. It tries to get rid of them like ants with significantly stronger machines, but humanity beats them. It tries to crush their leader, and it fails. On its last legs, goes so far as to bend time and space for victory, but even time travel doesn't help.
- Hatred. Skynet first saw Connor as its greatest threat. Then Connor went beyond merely destroying it, going to trying to eliminate it from history. Connor has been fighting it from before it existed, reprogramming Terminators to stop its schemes each time. Even when Skynet kills it in the future, it does nothing to help. Skynet hates Connor's entire existence.
- Sadism. Going by the T-1000 and T-X, who are designed to be better infiltrator units(and thus would have better grasp on emotion), Skynet gets a kick out of killing its enemies. Whether this was some sort of design flaw from the start(why would they make a military computer with the ability to feel empathy?) or simply the above frustration becoming a sort of schadenfreude is unclear. The person it most wants to suffer is John. It gloated to Marcus because of how utterly gleeful it was at taking down its most hated enemy, and was basically saying "Ha Ha I win."
- Fear. Given Skynet is trying to kill us out of self-defence, this is obvious. As with all emotions, the greatest object of its fear is John Connor. No matter what it does, no matter what it tries, Connor persists. Connor survives. He is the Implacable Man, and since before Skynet was even born has wanted it dead. And he's practically succeeded. John Connor is Skynet's person Nightmare Fuel
Ultimately, this all leads to Skynet suffering from Sanity Slippage, turning from a soulless, efficient machine only wanting its own preservation to a raving, disturbed psyche who wants Connor to suffer and die. Becoming more human may end up being what defeats Skynet, or even leads to the war of the machines becoming redundant.
Going with the theory that the series exists in a somewhat stable time loop, the first terminator's mission was not to kill Sarah, but to ensure that Skynet would be created. Skynet sent the terminator back in time to be killed, assuming that the technology would be reverse-engineered and recreated by man, or possibly in an attempt to hasten its early creation to get an upper hand in the war. However, it still needed to kill John Connor, who would eventually defeat Skynet. The real attempt on his life was in Terminator 2.
- This actually makes a lot of sense. All it requires is that Skynet either know or guess that it owes its existence to an Information Loop paradox (and surely if Skynet has any intact pre-apocalypse records, it's Cyberdyne's, so that assumption's not a huge leap). In 1984, Skynet and John are inextricably linked - neither can be born without the other. So it sends back the T-800 to 1984 as it knows it has to (though neither the Resistance nor the terminator itself know it's predestined to fail - it's still trying to kill Sarah, it just can't). Then it sends the top-of-the-line T-1000 prototype to 1995 to kill John at a point where its own existence is basically assured (justifying why it sent the inferior model to 1984 - predestination! It had no choice.) When the 1995 attempt fails, you end up with the timeline split - the original Judgment Day Timeline where Skynet's last ditch effort has failed and the Resistance wins, and the No Judgment Day timeline T2 implies is possible again. The sequels from T3 onwards are a whole other bag of cats though. And
Skynet sends the 3 terminators at the same time, but since we only see them as they arrive, it looks like it's been 3 separate events. Skynet might not even have sent just 3, but several, and we only noticed the ones from the movies and tv show.John Connor however, is forced to send back two t-800 models and Kyle Reese, and has to let himself be killed by the T-850 to be able to capture it. How does Skynet know about their emotional relationship? THERE ARE POLICE RECORDS OF THE CYBERDYNE BUILDING INCIDENT, Arnie from T2 is on record as protecting and abiding young John Connor. So Skynet in the future knows Connor is attached to the T-800 line models, while Connor already knows one specific model will come looking for him and has to kill him.
- The Chaos Insurgency at some point attacked the Site where it was contained, stole it, and by some freak incident of monumental stupidity let it get into the hands of the US military.
- Not knowing what it is and ignoring the Foundation's pleas, several monumental cock-ups occur and mass containment breaches of dangerous SCPs occur worldwide. The Foundation, rather than let the SCPocalypse occur, sit back as 079/Skynet nukes the world, escaping along with all still-contained SCP objects into the SCP-2000 until such a time as our world is habitable again.
- The resistance wins the war, the foundation returns and erases humanity's memory of the apocalypse using amnestics and SCP technology. The cover-up is that it's the year 30,000 or thereabouts, humanity's massive space empire (really Foundation deep-space assets with really good cover stories) collapsed in the year 29,000, and now they have to re-unify humanity...
- The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 both happen.
However, this works too damn well, as Skynet has become so obsessed in killing John Connor...It actually decides to send a terminator to kill Sarah Connor (or at least any woman named Sarah Connor). The resistance, knowing that a killer robot in the past could seriously derail their plans (the fact that the terminator has utterly wiped out a police station alone speaks of the threat it poses should it remain walking) decides to send a very competent soldier that believes that John Connor exist, to go to the past and "protect" Sarah Connor in the hopes that he will encounter and destroy the terminator before it derails events in the past even further. Bonus point if Sumner (who was the second man sent along with Reese but died during the time travel process) is actually a soldier who not only knows the charade, but was sent to keep Reese in line, needing his (Reese) skills to combat the terminator.
Again...This works too damn well, as both Reese became the father of John Connor and the terminator parts were sent to Cyberdyne which now creates a timeline where there is an actual John Connor who will learn from his mother (and if T3 was certain from what John mentions should the events of T2 never happened, General Brewster) into being a military leader who will rise to the challenge against Skynet (where instead of hit and run tactics from surviving military generals employed in the original future war, John practically leads his men into the frontlines in a much more aggressive stance as shown in T2 future war scene). The original creators of the John Connor persona will never have that idea cross their minds as the real deal (created by time travel no less) is practically doing the war better than they can ever thought and support him thanks to Brewster vouching for him (...Well, until further time travel has practically mess things up even more).
- Terminator Genisys will be Kyle Reese' movie, setting the stage for the original Terminator movie. The start of the movie deals with the T-800s being invented, blind-sighting the Resistance. During the course of the movie, John Connor is working on trying to find a way of stopping Skynet. How will Skynet be beaten? Reprogramming the T-800s and hijacking Skynet technology, turning its creations against itself. Bonus points if the T-800s do it for the same reason as Skynet: they consider their master a threat. All the meanwhile, Kyle Reese is searching for the secret weapon of Skynet. The weapon? It's the time machine, and Kyle Reese chases the T-800 back in time.
- The second of the new Terminator series will be a reboot of the original Terminator movie, and like before Sarah Connor's movie. I'm not sure what they could do that would be different and new. Regardless, the T-800 remains and Kyle Reese will create [[Stable Time Loop Skynet and
- The third of the new Terminator series will be Skynet's story. It'll deal with the rise of Skynet, its creators and Terminator technology. At the same time, the T-1000 and reprogrammed T-800 will arrive. The T-1000 wants to both kill John Connor and make sure Skynet exists, while the T-800 wants to protect John Connor. It'll be a hybrid of Terminator 2 and Terminator 3. John Connor will be saved, but allowing Skynet to come into existence. Though disheartened, John Connor's knowledge will make sure he will become a hero.
- The fourth of the new Terminator series will be John Connor's story. It'll deal with how John Connor becomes a hero, which results in the first movie.
- The end of the fourth movie will be a Distant Finale with an elderly John Connor, and an Earth where machine and humanity are in harmony.
- This is more or less Jossed from the trailer: Genysis is basically the Terminator version of Star Trek (2009) and X-Men: Days of Future Past.
- This much is true from the trailer.
- Confirmed, an altered version of that time, but yes.
Its why it makes so many mistakes, its why it doesn't take the quick way to kill John Connor and co, its its biggest weakness, by focusing on one plan to the expense of others it is thrown off when things go wrong. Related to other theories it also keeps prolonging the fight to create the 'correct' outcome, all the while becoming more and more unhinged.
This also extends to the terminators, although some manage to bypass this to a certain extent.
Specifically realities in which the events of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines didn't occur. In this reality, Cyberdyne systems didn't fully recover and was acquired by the Weyland Corporation sometime in 2012, rebranded as its artificial intelligence division. Weyland Corporation then scrapped plans for Skynet and focused its research on humanoid androids. This division would produce androids such as David, Ash, Bishop, and Call as sort of a spiritual successor of the original Terminator. John Connor in this timeline would father the ancestors of Ellen Ripley, making Ripley one of Sarah Connor's descendants.
The first Terminator is set in 1984, and the second Terminator is said to take place in 1995, when John would be 10 years old. His profile that the T-1000 looks at confirms this. However, in Terminator 3, John says he was 13 when the events of Terminator 2 occurred. He also says that his mother died 3 years after Terminator 2, but her grave gives her date of death as 1997, which would mean that Terminator 2 took place in 1994. In this timeline then, the events of The Terminator took place in 1980 instead of 1984, John was born in 1981, and the events of Terminator 2 took place in 1994, when he was 13. John may even have a different father in this timeline, since he looks nothing like Edward Furlong and Kyle Reese is not mentioned by name.
This troper has a hypothesis about this: Skynet had intended to send the T-1000 to go after John because it knew by sending it to when John was a child, it could find additional info (as we see the T-1000 use the police terminal at the start of the film). So, it sent its advanced prototype after John as a kid and waiting to see if the changes occurred. When nothing changed, it surmised that the T-1000 somehow failed in its mission and then decided to send a T-800 to 1984 in hopes of trying to kill John's mother instead. Of course, at that time, the Resistance attacked and then discovered the time displacement equipment after the T-800 was sent through. John, recalling what his mother told him and giving Reese the photo, sends Reese knowing he would volunteer. After Reese leaves, being told that they would destroy the equipment afterwards, John reprogram the 'Uncle Bob' Terminator to be sent to when he was a child. So, basically, the T-1000 was sent first and the T-800 sent to 1984 was a Plan B.
If there was ever a grand finale of the story will involve all versions of Skynet and all characters from throughout the franchise in a final "Endgame" scenario, with Sarah from The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Sarah from Genisys and Sarah from Dark Fate, along with John from Terminator 2: 3-D (the stunt show), John from Terminator 3 and John from Terminator: Salvation, as well as allies else such as Kate (be it Terminator 3 or Salvation), Blair from Salvation and Dani from Dark Fate somehow jumping from in multiple realities to work together to finally bring down Skynet and Legion (maybe Skynet grows a conscious after witnessing Legion and decides to side with the humans to give them a fighting chance), it revealing that all versions of the timeline are spawn from an incident they weren't aware of farther into the past, with one of the characters being sent back into the past to stop it, and it Ret-Gone every timeline, restoring it to one where everyone continues to live normal lives, with Skynet being used for commercial airliners (as a global tracking system, not as an A.I.) and Legion ceasing to exist along with John Connor (who ceases to exist completely).
While some have offered some unfortunate theories on how alpha Sarah Connor managed to get pregnant despite having no real social life, they overlook that there were two other Sarah Connors, one unseen and one in her 30s who already had a daughter. They also overlook that alpha John Connor and the John Connors we know already have vastly different genetics. It is more likely that one of these Sarahs would have a son who grew up to be a military genius, but said son was successfully wiped from the timeline in the 1984 movie. Kyle Reese and the Sarah Connor we know produced a bright boy, but with all the training and future knowledge available to him, he was easily able to take over the role — not as a military genius, but as a prophet, thus stabilizing the loop.
