Dark Fate takes the Terminator franchise back to basics, resetting the timeline back to
the end of Terminator 2.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video we're diving deep into Terminator:
Dark Fate to analyse the ending, the new timeline and what it really means for the future of
the franchise.
Plus I'll explain the intriguing way Arnold Schwarzenegger's Carl connects to the T-800
from Terminator 2, and my predictions on how the new Skynet, Legion, will be defeated in
possible sequels.
There will, of course, be spoilers for Dark Fate and other movies in the franchise.
Although it's the sixth Terminator movie, Dark Fate is a direct sequel to Terminator
2.
The events of T2 mean that Skynet no longer exists in the new film.
However, the unstoppable march of artificial intelligence means a new AI system called
Legion goes bad instead.
Legion then sends a Rev-9 terminator back in time from the future to assassinate Dani,
the future leader of the resistance in this new timeline.
The Rev-9 racks up a brutal body count and is relentless in its pursuit because it can
recover from virtually any physical damage including being sent through a turbine in
the final showdown.
As a final resort, augmented human Grace tells Dani she must use her power source to fry
the machine's neural net processor.
Removing the power source from Grace kills her, but Dani is able to jam it into the Rev-9's
skull, short circuiting many of its functions.
To finish the killer cyborg off, an injured Carl reactivates and holds the killer cyborg
down while the power source burns them up shutting both of them down, effectively killing
them.
This ending combines the finale of Terminator 2 when the T-800 came back to life after its
secondary power source activated to rescue John Connor from the T-1000 and the ending
of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines where, like Dani, the T-850 jammed its own power
source into the skull of the T-X terminator, killing them both:
"You are terminated."
With the Rev-9 defeated, the future resistance leader Dani has been saved.
But a future apocalypse where the A.I. system Legion turns against its human creators still
hasn't been avoided, so it's similar to the first Terminator movie where John Connor's
future is saved but the apocalypse isn't prevented.
In the very final scene of Dark Fate, Dani watches a young Grace who's still alive in
the present day and she vows to Sarah that she won't let Grace die for her again.
In other words Dani wants to break the time loop that in the future forces her to send
adult Grace back in time to die for her.
This final playground scene is also a cool homage to the iconic scene from Judgment Day
where Sarah had an apocalyptic vision of the future and foresaw the nuclear catastrophe
that Skynet would inflict on the world.
Dark Fate links that moment from T2 which was what drove Sarah to prevent the rise of
Skynet with Dani's own decision to change the future and stop the rise of Legion.
So Dark Fate leaves the future open to change making this new sequel to Terminator 2 a lot
more hopeful and optimistic than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the original sequel
which took a fatalistic view that despite everything Sarah Connor did to stop Judgment
Day in T2, Armageddon at the hands of Skynet was unavoidable.
"We stopped Judgment Day."
"You only postponed it.
Judgment Day is inevitable."
That third film killed off Sarah Connor and finished with the nuclear apocalypse that
had been averted in T2.
"Our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day.
It was merely to survive it..."
Dark Fate, by contrast, actually reveals that there's a glimmer of hope and the future of
artificial intelligence may not be as catastrophic as seen in previous sequels after T2.
Dark Fate's Carl is the perfect example of how a destructive A.I. machine can actually
become a friend to humans and actively work to do good.
Carl was a T-800 that was sent back by Skynet together with other terminators to make sure
that one of them completed the mission to assassinate John Connor.
Before Carl got to John, the events of Terminator 2 destroyed Cyberdyne and the existence of
Skynet was erased from the future.
Despite this, as a machine, Carl had to follow the mission he'd been programmed to perform.
But after he kills John, he has no further instructions from Skynet, so he follows his
other programmed directive which is to blend in with human society so he can carry out
any missions covertly.
And with over 20 years of continuous machine learning about human society under his belt,
Carl has transformed into something almost human.
In fact, Carl's evolution can be seen as what would have happened to the T-800 from Terminator
2 if it hadn't sacrificed itself at the end of that movie.
In T2, Uncle Bob, as John Connor nicknamed him, learned over the course of just a few
days how to become more human, even picking up slang:
"No problemo."
"Hasta la vista, baby."
Another interesting parallel between Carl and Bob is how they both became benevolent
father figures.
Carl helped rescue a woman and her child from an abusive husband and, when he talks about
how reliable he is, it echoes what Sarah thought of the T-800 from Terminator 2.
"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear.
The Terminator would never stop.
It would always be there.
Of all the would-be fathers who came and went, this thing, this machine, was the only one
who measured up."
And as a measure of how human Carl has become, notice how in Dark Fate we see the machine
sitting comfortably next to the family's dog.
This is in stark contrast to what was established in the first Terminator movie, that dogs instinctively
bark and get nervous when a terminator is nearby as they have an ability to detect Infiltrator
units.
"I was dreaming about dogs."
"We use 'em to spot Terminators."
Carl even seems to have acquired a form of his own free will.
When he meets Sarah, he tells her that because she chose to change the future, Skynet now
no longer exists, meaning that he's been set free because he has no further orders to follow.
And now he's choosing to make his own autonomous decision to protect Dani.
"I'm going to help you protect the girl because I choose to."
Carl's freedom and ability to make his own decisions also fits well the phrase "no fate
but what we make" that first appeared in T2: "The future is not set.
There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
This is echoed again in Dark Fate's flash-forward scenes from the future where Dani rescues
Grace from attackers who are after her food.
Dani tells the other humans that they shouldn't be fighting amongst themselves but joining
together to fight the machines instead.
When one of them says there's no point as they can't win, Dani urges them to resist
fate, a belief that rallies people to her cause and builds an army that is fighting
to take the world back from the machines.
So, given the terrifying future we see in Dark Fate's flash-forward scenes, what chance
do Dani and Sarah have of defeating Legion in future sequels?
Well, the movie sets up several interesting possibilities.
The first thing to consider is that in Dark Fate the catastrophe happens over several
days, when Legion, an A.I. designed for cyber warfare, becomes self-aware and begins its
attack on humanity by turning off the power grid.
The next day, humans attempt an EMP attack on Legion that fails, which leads to a full
world war by the third day.
That was eventually followed by famine which wiped out the majority of humanity, with Legion
then hunting down any remaining human survivors.
As terrible as that scenario is, it's a slower wipe-out than nuclear annihilation, and it
allows for a window of time where Dani and Sarah could attempt to prevent the catastrophe
from playing out in its entirety.
Something I've already mentioned on is how Carl is a great example of how a machine can
learn and become something almost human with the ability to make its own decisions rather
than follow a hard-coded set of rules.
This is something that Sarah and Dani both witnessed and might investigate further.
For example, they could find a way to change how Legion's machines operate so they live
together with humans rather than kill them.
In fact, there's a deleted scene from Terminator 2 that's in the Extended Cut where the T-800
explains to John that his machine learning mode is something that has to be switched
on.
"Can you learn stuff you haven't been programmed with?
So you can be... you know, more human?"
"My CPU is a neural-net processor, a learning computer.
But Skynet presets the switch to 'read only' when we are sent out alone."
"Doesn't want you to do too much thinking, huh?"
"No."
"Can we reset the switch?"
Someone who might come in useful for this is Sarah Connor's contact Major Dean, the
military officer who has an alliance with Sarah.
Major Dean was only in Dark Fate briefly, handing over the EMP device to Sarah.
But in an interview with IGN, director Tim Miller explained that "Dean was originally
in more scenes and that he's a military intelligence officer who is wary of AI and had turned to
Sarah Connor to help him out on a few missions."
By the way, if you're at all confused by the circular nature of time travel in the Terminator
franchises and the time paradoxes it creates, well, it's basically different to the recent
very popular time travel movie Avengers: Endgame in which time travel creates new [branching]
timelines and alternate realities.
In Dark Fate and the Terminator franchise, time travel is a closed loop in which changing
the past rewrites the future.
"That's not how it works."
"Well, that's what I heard."
"Wait, but who?
Who told you that?"
"Star Trek, Terminator.."
"Time doesn't work that way.
Changing the past doesn't change the future."
Even if logically this seems to be impossible, Dark Fate director Tim Miller has said he
prefers this type of time travel, despite the plot holes and paradoxes it creates, because
it means higher stakes for the characters.
Even though Carl was damaged beyond any likely repair in Dark Fate, it's still possible for
Schwarzenegger to return in a sequel as a brand new character, perhaps even a human
next time around.
James Cameron has said it's unlikely Legion would attempt to "build an Arnold T-800 in
the Legion version of the future because that's a different technological developmental pathway."
However, there could still be more Arnold T-800s kicking around that Skynet sent back,
but what could be more interesting is if we met the human being that Skynet based its
T-800 designs on.
In a Q&A in 2007, Cameron said: "It has flashed through my mind that there
has to have been a prototype.
There has to have been a guy... that they grew the Terminator from...
and that presumably was a real person at some point.
And did that person have some sort of meaning to Skynet on why they chose that one?"
Now, what do you think of Terminator: Dark Fate?
And do you have any theories or things you'd like to see in potential sequels?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below and if you enjoyed this, then embrace your
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!