Time travel stories are often full of crazy variables, paradoxes, and plot holes,
which is especially true for The Terminator franchise.
From the origins of Skynet to the endless cybernetic showdowns,
this is the complicated Terminator franchise explained. Come with us if you want to understand.
In the world of The Terminator, humans create advanced supercomputers that eventually become
self-aware enough to realize that they're being threatened. When scientists realize this computer
network has become sentient, they attempt to shut their creation down. Seeing humans as an
existential threat, the ultra-smart machines set about systematically wiping them out.
In 1997, the computers take control of the United States' nuclear arsenal and use it to kill as
much of the human population as possible. The few surviving humans build an underground resistance,
hiding from weapons and robots built by the intelligent Skynet computer network
to hunt down and exterminate them. This resistance is led by one man - John Connor. In the year 2029,
he leads the most successful attack on the computers since their first strike,
effectively shutting down Skynet by destroying their defense systems in what was once Colorado.
Skynet recognizes that Connor will be the biggest threat to its continued existence post-2029.
Much in the same way that it launched the missiles on what came to be known as
"Judgment Day" back in '97, the computer network makes moves to ensure its own survival. It sends
a killer cyborg back in time with the mission to kill Connor's mother before John can be born.
"He'll find her! That's what he does! That's all he does!"
The first film in the Terminator series begins with the 2029 versions of John Connor and Skynet
each sending back representatives using a "time displacement device" to prevent
their own respective extinctions. Knowing that Skynet has sent a Terminator - specifically,
a musclebound T-800 - to kill his mother, Connor sends back one of his own soldiers,
Kyle Reese, in a military action called "Operation Chrono."
The two time-travelers arrive in Los Angeles in 1984 with nothing but the skin -- or
organic matter -- on their backs. The two quickly set about acquiring clothes and weapons, and
needless to say, the Terminator's shopping methods are a bit more murderous. Then, in their search
for John's mother, Sarah Connor, the two hit upon the same idea - consult the local phone book.
Weapon in hand, the T-800 begins systematically slaughtering every Sarah Connor in Los Angeles.
Fortunately, the mother of mankind's messiah is smart enough to realize she's on a hit list.
While working as a diner waitress, Sarah sees news reports that women with her name are being killed,
and she eventually winds up hiding in a nightclub called Tech Noir where she calls the cops.
But before the boys in blue can show up, both the T-800
and Kyle Reese stumble into the club, guns a-blazing. Reese rescues Sarah…
"Come with me if you want to live."
But as they try to escape the Terminator, they run afoul of the police,
ultimately getting themselves arrested.
Once the cops chase them down, Kyle Reese is grilled by both the police and psychologists
who question his story about being a time-traveler from the future, sent to save the last hope of
human resistance against militant machines. Unfortunately, while Reese is being detained,
the robotic serial killer tracks Sarah down to the police station, and after ramming his car
through the front desk, proceeds to take out every single police officer in the precinct.
Forced to go on the run again, Kyle and Sarah hide out in a hotel, and at that point,
Kyle shares that he's in love with Sarah. In fact,
he's been obsessing over her ever since John first showed him her picture
in the 2020s. Eventually, they carve some time out of the fight for their lives and hook up.
But the Terminator has no time for love, and after killing Sarah's mother and impersonating
her voice over the phone, he finds our heroes yet again, leading to a final fight.
In the big showdown, Sarah and Kyle battle the T-800 with pipe bombs,
exposing his true cybernetic skeleton. Eventually, the trio wind up in a factory where Kyle dies from
injuries sustained in the fight, and Sarah crushes the Terminator to death with a hydraulic press.
Even the tightest writing can't avoid hitting a few paradoxes when dealing with time travel,
but The Terminator franchise stakes its claim as the king of time-travel movies
by steering into the skid. The paradoxes are baked into the films from the very beginning,
and the movies make no effort to hide it. In short, the whole thing is built upon the
"predestination paradox" - the idea that someone could travel to the past and affect the future in
a way that necessitates them traveling to the past in the first place. The entire Terminator
universe spawns from this one impossibility, as laid out in the coda of the first film.
The Terminator ends with a pregnant Sarah Connor driving through Mexico. Via audio tapes that she's
recording for her unborn son, John, we learn that Kyle Reese is the father. When she stops for gas,
a child snaps her photo and sells the Polaroid to her... and it's the very same one that John
Connor gave to Reese in the future. In short, John knew that Reese was his father and sent him
back in time so that he could protect his mother. By sending him back, John created
the circumstances of his birth, which would eventually lead to him helming the resistance.
However, that fight against Skynet would lead to them sending back the Terminator and would produce
the need to send Reese back and save his mother's life. And so on and so forth for eternity.
To be a fan of James Cameron's time-travelling classic,
you have to try and not think about it too hard.
"I'll be back."
The humans aren't the only ones locked in an eternal loop.
The spare parts of the Terminator in the factory after Sarah Connor's brush with death are soon
found by researchers from Cyberdyne Systems who are working on advanced computers and robotics.
In other words, the building blocks of Skynet are created by unwitting scientists using
the technology left behind after Skynet sent a killer robot from the future to protect itself.
As for Sarah, in between the first and second film, she travels through Latin
America with her young son. She befriends various guerrilla fighters and military men
in order to train her son to be a resistance fighter in the future war against the machines.
She explains this to John before going off to attack a factory building the computer
components that will become Skynet. When she's arrested, she reveals that the future attack by
the machines is imminent, and naturally, she's promptly locked away in a mental institution.
This leads a ten-year-old John to believe his mother is merely insane, although he uses the
skills he was taught to pull off minor scams and crimes under the noses of his foster parents.
After its first failed attempt to snuff out John Connor, Skynet is ready for round two,
sending back another, newer Terminator to 1995 to kill the preteen John.
Adult John knows this is going to happen, as he's already lived it, so he sends
back a reprogrammed version of the original Terminator model to protect his younger self.
"35 years from now, you'll reprogram me to be your protector here, this time."
"This is deep."
Terminator 2: Judgment Day largely consists of the duel between this newer,
shape-shifting Terminator and the older model.
After saving young John from being run down by the liquid metal T-1000,
the friendly T-800 helps break Sarah Connor out of her mental institution.
They come across Sarah in the midst of her own escape, helping her outrun both
the authorities and the robot sent back to wipe the Connor clan off the planet.
Sarah's first instinct is to head back to Mexico, where she stocks up on weaponry while hiding with
some sympathetic friends. When the T-800 reveals the name of a computer scientist who's credited
with starting Skynet - engineer Miles Bennett Dyson - Sarah sets off on her own to kill him.
Horrified that his mother would kill a man in cold blood, John Connor gives chase with the T-800,
and they find Sarah inside Dyson's home, unable to kill Dyson in front of his family.
Instead, the trio explain to the scientist that his work will lead to the end of the
world as we know it. Having seen the robot components of the T-800 firsthand,
Dyson believes their story and goes along to help them destroy his research.
With Dyson's help, our heroes break into the Cyberdyne labs and steal the original Terminator
components. They set a bomb to destroy the entire lab, but they're interrupted by the police.
The cops shoot and kill Dyson as the Terminator and his team escape,
but the engineer is able to detonate the bomb. Of course,
that doesn't mean the T-1000 is going to slow down, and he keeps on chasing after his prey.
After an epic chase with the new and improved Terminator,
Sarah, John, and the T-800 ultimately square off against their enemy in a foundry.
However, the older Terminator is bested by the next century's model, and the T-1000 impales
the old protector robot and leaves him for dead. After that, the T-1000 nearly traps and kills John
by impersonating his mother, but the Connors - with the help of their barely-holding-it-together
robo-buddy - are able to knock the killer Terminator into a vat of molten steel.
Happy ending, right? Well, not quite. In one of the saddest final moments in movie history,
the T-800 willingly dips into the boiling vat to destroy himself. This way,
any parts of him that might be used to build Skynet will be incinerated.
Unfortunately, the good times are no match for time's inelasticity. The events of the future
have to happen for the past to play out the way it has. Skynet will happen. Judgment Day will happen.
All that matters is that John Connor is there to rally mankind and fight the machines.
There are some signs of hope, but you won't find them in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Sure, the initial date of Judgment Day has come and gone without the world turning to a cinder.
But John Connor is living as a hermit, hiding from machines in an off-the-grid home after his mother
has died of cancer. In fact, John is steadily losing his mind by waiting for Judgment Day.
Worse still, Skynet sends back a more advanced Terminator, hoping to kill key members of the
human resistance so they won't become a thorn in Skynet's shiny, metal side. A T-X
model Terminator targets John, as well as his future wife, and of course, they're protected
by yet another reprogrammed Terminator. However, this friendly Terminator comes bearing bad news.
"We stopped Judgment Day."
"You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable."
He tells John that the end of the world is coming, and he's been sent back into the
past to carry Connor and his future partner, Kate, away from the blast.
After learning that Judgment Day is on the way,
John orders the Terminator to take them to Kate's father, a high-ranking Air Force official.
But the Terminator refuses, only obeying when Kate repeats the order.
"You have to save my father!"
"We can reach CRS in approximately one hour."
The Terminator then reveals that in the future, he killed John and then was captured, reprogrammed,
and sent to the past on Kate's orders.
Eventually, our heroes try to stop the military from working on the technology that will become
Skynet, but the computers begin to take over the weapons systems before John and Kate succeed.
Tragically, Kate's father is killed after the T-X activates the weapons systems in his lab,
but before he dies, he reveals the location of Skynet's core.
John and company then head toward Crystal Peak, Colorado,
in the hopes of destroying Skynet. As they make their way to the location, the Terminator
repeatedly throws himself between a pursuing T-X and the two would-be freedom fighters. But when
they finally reach Crystal Peak, they realize it was all for naught. Kate's father wasn't telling
them how to destroy Skynet. He knew Judgment Day was coming and wanted them to survive.
In the end, Skynet launches its attack on humanity,
unleashing nukes and murdering billions of people. John takes command of a radio
in the shelter and sets about becoming the resistance leader he was destined to be.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the first major deviation we see from the original
trilogy, setting the tone for a decade of alternate timelines and reimaginings.
This 2008 series jettisons the events of T3 and follows John and Sarah Connor as they
attempt to hide from dueling antagonists in the immediate wake of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
As John and Sarah are believed to be responsible for the death of engineer Miles Dyson,
they live in fear of the FBI capturing them. At the same time, they're fully aware that
more Terminators could be sent back by Skynet to finish the job they failed in the first two films.
In fact, one of those villainous robots does eventually show up.
At this point, a protective Terminator named Cameron appears at John's school
to ward off any attacks, and eventually, our heroes learn they must travel through time,
from 1999 to 2007, if they want to stop Judgment Day.
"What have you done?"
"You wanna find Skynet? You wanna stop Skynet? This is the way."
The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the first Terminator offering to deviate heavily
from its ideas of predestination and causality loops. When Sarah and John do
eventually travel through time in the series, they don't find older versions of themselves.
In the years between their origin and their destination, they didn't exist.
When John Connor closes the series by jumping far in the future to stay alive,
he finds that the war with the machines is ongoing and the human resistance has formed without him.
The original Terminator trilogy is grim, but it's a nearly perfect closed loop.
Everything had to happen because it's already happened in the future.
Even if it all leads to the apocalypse and a bleak future of tooth-and-nail battles
against superpowered killing machines, it all had to happen to create John Connor.
Still, the idea of John Connor's war years was too good for Hollywood to pass up,
and we returned to the Terminator universe with Terminator Salvation.
"We are not machines. And if we behave like them, then what is the point in winning?"
In this particular tale, we meet a war-hardened John Connor as he leads
an ultimately successful raid against Skynet.
While the main point of the film is to show guerrilla soldiers pulling off something cool
against the big bad machines, Salvation does give us a glimpse of the creation of the T-800.
In fact, John throws down against the hulking monster during his attack on Skynet headquarters,
and he nearly dies in the process, as the machines have intentionally guided him to the
base in the hopes of finally killing him. They're almost successful, but an android named Marcus,
who was initially a pawn in Skynet's schemes, sacrifices himself to keep John alive.
The Terminator timeline really goes off the rails after Salvation, courtesy of 2015's
Terminator Genisys, with its bold departure from both franchise chronology and accepted English
spellings. The reboot reboots the original series by playing with the events of the very first film.
In Genisys, Kyle Reese is still sent back from the future by his commander, John Connor.
But when he shows up in 1984, he finds it's been deeply altered from the '84 that fans all know.
In this new timeline, Sarah Connor has been raised from childhood by a reprogrammed Terminator.
"Come with me if you wanna live."
The old Terminator, nicknamed "Pops," has protected Sarah from attacks by Terminators
after her parents were killed by an even earlier Terminator. Sarah and Pops have built a time
machine, and Sarah wants to travel to the original era of Judgement Day to stop Skynet. Kyle,
however, convinces them to head to 2017 to avert a disaster he saw in visions from his childhood.
The movie jumps through causality hoops, with a Terminator version of John traveling to 2017
in an attempt to stop their plot to destroy Skynet -- or,
uh, Genisys. The Terminator John was created after Skynet fused the real John with machine matter,
and they used him to insure Skynet's survival throughout time. While the trio of Kyle, Pops,
and Sarah are successful in their attack on the Genisys system, a post-credits scene reveals
that the core of Genisys was unaffected, setting the stage for more sequels that never happened.
Given how jumbled the timeline was, the team behind Terminator: Dark Fate decided
to jettison the baggage of any movie not made by James Cameron. Their answer to the franchise's
Gordian knot of timelines was to chop the parts they didn't need and to keep things moving.
However, rather than having John lead the resistance, Dark Fate posited that John
was killed by yet another Terminator while living with his mother in Latin America in the year 1998.
The movie focuses on Sarah's attempts to protect the new human savior, Dani Ramos. Together, Sarah
and a cyborg super soldier named Grace protect Dani from an advanced Terminator called Rev-9.
On top of all that, the trio find themselves on a sci-fi side quest.
See, Sarah knew about Dani because an unknown source was sending her messages
detailing the mission of each Terminator sent into the past.
Hoping to find the source of the messages, the heroes set out on their journey, all while keeping
Dani alive through constant attacks from Rev-9. Oh, and just to make things even more complicated,
Skynet doesn't exist in Grace's future, but an analog called Legion is following the same path.
"Legion?"
"An AI built for cyber warfare."
When the heroes track down the messages' origin point, Sarah is shocked to find the same T-800
that killed her son. As it turns out, he was stranded in the past when his alteration of
time led to Skynet no longer existing. Without a mission or superiors, he worked to assimilate
into human society and ultimately came to feel guilt over his actions against humanity.
Those aforementioned messages were his way to clean his conscience.
Eventually, our band of misfits hatch a plan to destroy Rev-9,
but it falls apart catastrophically in their final confrontation.
Grace is killed in the fight, and the guilt-ridden T-800 drags the Rev-9 into an exploding machine,
destroying both robots. Dark Fate ends with Dani and Sarah watching a
young Grace play on a playground, hoping to avoid the situation that led to her death.
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