Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Season One

[james_davis_nicoll]

Spoilers


Am I right in thinking that in the original Terminator, Connor was said to have defeated Skynet by the time the Terminator was sent back in time? So if the war is still ongoing after Reese is sent back (as Dungeons and Dragons indicates), delaying Judgment Day just made worse for the humans. I guess giving the malevolent AI an extra decade-plus of hardware and software development before creating it will do that.

You know, trying to kill off Skynet before it is created has failed at least twice so far. Maybe it would be better to try to create a Skynet that isn't inclined to exterminate humans.

In the original timeline, Kyle Reese would have been born well after Judgment Day.

Comments

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Right, Skynet was all but defeated when it sent back Arnie.

How time travel works in the Terminator movies and TV series has always been unclear. Are the rebels just unlucky, or does time tend to repair itself, or what? Why does Skynet keep coming back?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

At a guess, they can't use time travel to change the past so much that the need to have sent people back to the past (where they inadvertently create the future they were fleeing or one like it) is eliminated.

I wonder if in the Terminator world, every time the world came close to nuclear war but avoided it through some surprisingly sensible decision by a human, that was a Terminator making sure humans lasted long enough to create Skynet.

Here's something the humans may not want to think about: why are all the time travellers from the same short period in the 2020s? Why aren't there legions of agents from after whoever wins wins?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Here's something the humans may not want to think about: why are all the time travellers from the same short period in the 2020s? Why aren't there legions of agents from after whoever wins wins?

There are several answers, ranging from they are coming back, they are just better at being quiet & hidden, to total MAD (and thus no one is coming back from 2030+), to the result being fragile enough that the future winners don't want to muck up a bare victory.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

In S2 they do establish that time is fluid enough that there are upstream changes that don't affect the people who've already gone back.

[chriswatkins.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I was pleased to see two characters in season 2 discuss the fact that they obviously come from different versions of the future.

Some things we've seen happen to Derek in the future will happen differently, or not at all. Given the way time travel seems to work in the Terminator series, I don't think they even have to send Kyle back anymore: the Kyle Reese in the first movie came from a future that no longer happens. Presumably if Future John sends a Kyle back again, Kyle 2 would find Kyle 1 already present in 1984.

The absence of visitors from post-2030 is ominous.

[avram]

So maybe we'll eventually get the story about the Terminator that's sent back to 1962 help guide JFK through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and sticks around to kill him off the next year before he can start WW3 in his second term.

Later he meets up with Gary Seven's predecessors. They're allies in the War On Nuke Wars, but they'll want to prevent SkyNet, which is why he arranges the car accident that kills them.

[cheshyre]

The blogger at ironicsans.com once proposed a steampunk Terminator story - attempts to kill Sarah and John Connor have failed, so let's wipe our her grandparents...

http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/10/idea_reboot_the_terminator.html

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

My guess would be that it uses more power to send things further back in time and there's a limit to the amount of power that can be generated or concentrated. This would also explain why Skynet hasn't reached further back than the 1980s.

[avram]

I once had a lovely idea for a Terminator-Highlander crossover that lasted until I remembered that "Connor" was Connor MacLeod'sfirst name.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Well, we DO have evidence that terminators were sent back to earlier time periods to do nefarious acts. As so:

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

I give up -- what's the source of that clip?

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

...why are all the time travellers from the same short period in the 2020s?

Poul Anderson fudged it gracefully with his Danellians in the Time Patrol stories. IIRC there's ambiguity about whether their far-future era is an end, or a horizon of our comprehension.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Leiber's Change War covered billions of years of time and humans were just one of the many species that had to choose between the Spiders and the Snakes.