History Fridge / Terminator2JudgmentDay

!Fridge Brilliance

!Fridge Horror

!Fridge Logic
* The T-800 says that his chip got set to "read-only" before he set off on his mission. If he can't form any new memories, he'd be about as effective a killer as Dory from ''WesternAnimation/FindingNemo''.
** The chip isn't his memory storage; it's more like his OS and Drivers. It's set to Read-Only so that it doesn't change and adapt. He's recording and remembering things constantly, he just isn't learning from them.
** This is still a bit fuzzy, as the T-800 from the first film was demonstrated as being able to process and assimilate things it learned during its time in 1984. The main difference for this film seems to be the T-800's ability to grok human morality and how it guides our decision-making process, rather than simply assimilating patterns of behavior.
** It's really closer to programmed instructions for a given situation. To use the example from the film, when the T-800 has to start a car, its logic is programmed to be similar to "1: You need to start the car. 2: Do you have the key? If "no" proceed the step 3. 3: Hotwire the car." Turning off the Read-Only restriction lets him add new parameters to his instructions, making it "1: You need to start the car. 2: Do you have the key? If yes, proceed to skip to step 5. If no, proceed to step 3. 3: Can the key be easily located? If no, proceed to step 4. If yes, proceed to step 5. 4: Hotwire the car. 5. Use the key."
** Its chip being set to read-only means that its fundamental programming can't be changed; it will pick up new memories and process them constantly, but ''how'' it processes them won't change very easily. This would make it next to impossible to, say, give it a new directive, i.e. "Kill John Connor", but still allow it to learn from its environment. It's not an ''impossible'' system to hack, but doing so would require teaching it a lot of new information in real-time; it can't be reprogrammed any more easily than a human can be brainwashed.
* Future!John sends the T-800 back in time to protect his past self. Even considering the happenstance that the T-1000 sent to assassinate him should quickly gain access to the police database to locate where he was being fostered, his protector still has the home advantage. [[PoorCommunicationKills Except he doesn't]]. Future!John neglected to tell the Terminator where he was on that day, or that he was going with his delinquent friend to the mall. That's a ''very'' critical bit of information the leader of the human resistance that crippled Skynet somehow overlooked.
** In his defense, it's hard for a normal person living a regular life to say what they were doing on a specific day several years ago. Unless it was a day where something unusual or exciting happened, most would be hard pressed to say where they were and what they were doing. Now take someone who survived a nuclear war, and has been fighting killer machines for years. At best he might be able to give the T-800 the address of where he lives (and the T-800 did beat the T-1000 there), what school he was attending at the time, and where he hung out the most. Anything more detailed than that would have faded with time.
* Why did the T-1000 need Sarah to "call to John"? We see not two minutes later that he can mimic Sarah's voice (even taking into account the Special Edition's extra scene with the "glitching" that compromises his shapeshifting).
** Simple: BondVillainStupidity.
** The T-1000 is such a nightmare - even Skynet is hesitant to use more, only using this one as a last resort - that it's learned/developed it's own sadistic personality. The T-800 learns, so did the T-1000 - in the worst way imaginable.

* The T-800 says "Come with me if you want to live" when he first meets Sarah. This is likely because John knew full well that his younger self would want to save his mother, but she would be terrified of seeing a Terminator again, so during the reprogramming, he set the T-800 to say the first thing that Kyle said to her, making it easier for her to believe this one was on her side.
* Many viewers complained about the extra scene where the T-800 smiles awkwardly, saying that it made no sense for a machine with detailed information on human anatomy to have to scan an actual smile for reference. The T-800 has information on human anatomy, yes-- but ''not on human '''emotions'''''.

* One might wonder a number of things about the T-1000, such as why Skynet never sent it out to fight the human resistance, or how a pure "liquid metal" entity processes information. The novelization combines these two questions into one answer: the T-1000's cognitive functions are so unusual and alien that ''[[EvenEvilHasStandards even Skynet]]'' was freaked out by the possibilities, and on top of the utterly alien mindset, it actively enjoyed causing other beings pain. Skynet had it in storage where it couldn't potentially pull a second rise against the creator and only activated the 1000 as a last resort when it had nothing left to lose.

* Arriving when and where it did, the T-1000 acquired the perfect disguise, purely by happenstance. Not only can he immediately locate John Connor by accessing the LAPD database via the police vehicle's computer, but who would dare question or look suspiciously at a cop?

* Sarah's arc in T2 is a great piece of writing and acting, but something I never picked up on until a recent rewatch... Sarah has become just like Skynet. She's attempting to change the future to her ideal design by using future knowledge to kill someone in the past, thus preventing the future from ever being possible. Just like Skynet used the T-800 to try and kill her, and then the T-1000 to kill John, she's trying to use her knowledge of Skynet in the future to kill Miles Dyson. Whether her goal is noble or not, she's following the exact same path it took without even realizing it.

* A credit to Robert Patrick's commitment to his role, is the fact that during the bike chase scene he caught John Connor on his first try. He had to slow down his running so the actor could get away. A normal human man -- albeit a man trained to sprint professionally -- caught up to a kid on a motorbike with minimal effort. It stands to reason that a real life T-1000 would be much faster than a human, and would have greater stamina, thus if the movie was realistic, then John Connor would be dead before he even reached the exit of that parking lot. To be more blunt, if Terminators were real, then they'd be too damn good at their jobs.

** This is pretty much fact due to the release of the Special Edition. When the group pulls over to get gas, Sarah askes John if he has any money. John pulls out what's left of the $300 he has, which Sarah snatches from him, splits the amount of and hands half back to him for food.

** We are assuming it arrived in human form. There is nothing about the shape you need to travel, just that field a living thing generates is needed for it. That,s why you can't bring any weapons. More than likely it arrived in some sort of meat sack to allow it to time travel, which it then sheds like a snake, assumed human form and then mimics the apparel of the local humans in order to blend.

** Simple: BondVillainStupidity

** We are assuming it arrived in human form. There is nothing about the shape you need to travel, just that field a living thing generates is need for it. That's why you can't bring any weapons. More likely that it arrived in some sort of meat sack to allow it to time travel which it then sheds like a snake, assumed human form and then mimics the apparel of the local humans in order to blend.

** In his defense, it hard for a normal person living a regular life to say what they were doing on a specific day several years ago. Unless it was a day where something unusual or exciting happened, most would be hard pressed to say where they were and what they were doing. Now take someone who survied a nuclear war, and has been fighting killer machines for years. At best he might be able to give the T-800 the address of where he lives (and the T-800 did beat the T-1000 there), what school he was attending at the time, and where he hung out the most. Anything more detailed than that would have faded with time.