History NightmareFuel / TerminatorDarkFate

* Terminators like Carl are machines with human components added. "Augments" like Grace are humans with terminator components added. They aren't really all that different. Carl recongizes this immediately when he asks "what" she is. The nightmare is that the Resistance is (for all practical purposes) building terminators to fight terminators.

* Terminators like Carl are machines with human components added. "Augments" like Grace are humans with terminator components added. They aren't really all that different. The nightmare is that the Resistance is (for all practical purposes) building terminators to fight terminators.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/future_war.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:''[[CallBack "The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire..."]]'']]

-->'''Sarah:''' ''[as her past self sobs and desperately tries to resuscitate John]'' Once, I saved three billion lives. [[AdultFear But I couldn't save my son]]. A machine... took him from me. And I... am '''[[DespairEventHorizon terminated]]'''.
** It's so much worse from Sarah's viewpoint. You've just defeated a megalomaniacal artificial intelligence and saved the world from certain destruction. You're relaxing on a beach with your son, proud that you protected him and that he can safely grow up to become the hero of the future. Right behind you comes an eerily familiar man with sunglasses...''[[AdultFear who then draws a gun on your child]]''...

* The simple fact that history repeats itself is nightmarish, but it gets even worse when we think about it. Whatever happens, even if Legion is defeated, will not matter. As long as humanity (especially its warmongering stupidity) exist, humans will build an A.I for war which will go rogue, rinse, repeat. It feels like the Terminator universe can never have a good end.

** Legion establishes itself as a more refined foe than Skynet with one simple yet chilling detail: It dropped the Rev-9 right on top of Dani's home address.

* The glimpses we get of [[BadFuture the future that Grace came from]] are horrifying. Grace had to experience the end of her world before she'd even hit puberty and her father was killed by a hungry mob for a tin of peaches. When Grace joins the Resistance, we see a series of Rev-7s in action and they manage to be even more horrifying than the T-800s, using their liquid metal components to form tentacles and other alien shapes to utterly ''rip through'' Resistance soldiers, and they shrug off all but the heaviest form of munitions effortlessly. Grace's chilling words about the Rev-9 ("You don't fight it. You run from it.") makes a lot of sense.

->'''Grace:''' We? There is no we. Dani’s with me, it’s my mission to protect her.\\
'''Sarah:''' Oh, yeah? How’s that working out for you? Clearly, you don’t know everything about this time. How anyone with phones is a walking sensor platform. How every intersection, or a gas station and 7-Eleven has cameras. Nobody walks in this world without leaving a digital trail a mile wide. And my guess is that Terminator, hunting her, can access that data anytime. You two won’t last ten hours.
-->-- A brutal reality check that proves Sarah still remembers [[Film/TheTerminator Kyle Reese's warnings about Terminators]].

** There's also how it acts when it starts attacking. Compared to other Terminators, particularly Carl, who moved with an UnflinchingWalk like he had all the time in the world... the Rev-9 goes from an unsettlingly human impersonator into a feral, animalistic ''demon'' that leaps and bounds and shreds everything in his path. It may be a machine whose sole purpose is to murder Dani, but such behavior makes it clear that it will obliterate everything that dares to obstruct his mission, and ''ferociously'' as well.