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?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Otoh, the actual future scenes in the original Terminator are pretty grim and I think it's a reasonable interpretation, whether or not it was intended, to suggest that Kyle was lying to Sarah to stop her from collapsing into utter despair.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

It's fairly clear that most or all of the changes made in the movies and the show have made things worse. Of course, I can easily see the stray terminator parts from the end of the first film really giving Skynet a boost. From what we've seen in the early part of season 2, I'm fairly sure killing Andy Goode & letting the Turk into others hands was a terrible idea.

However, it's also very difficult to tell how successful Connor & the resistance were in the first film, since Skynet was still able to send a robot back into the past. My impression at the time was that Connor & Co. were winning, but not that they'd won.

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.

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 various discussions the characters had about the inevitability of AI (in season 1), and from the future scene in Dungeons & Dragons with Andy Goode, it's fairly clear that this is going to be the ultimate answer, and that is why I like this show considerably more than the movies - that and the fact that the movies were about a future was against Skynet, with occasional time travel, and a high level of predestination, and the show is about a full-on time-war, where the future is very obviously fluid - I love that aspect of the show.

I also think you could do a rocking cool tabletop RPG of post SCC, where J-Day was averted and humans and machines have an uneasy peace, but there is still the risk of robots and humans previously sent back to before the change-points that averted J-Day (and disaffected humans and machines in the "present" going back from the current timeline) messing things up and changing history into a less positive version. In short Terminator: The Time Patrol (naturally, with mixed human & cyborg time patrol teams (likely legally mandated) with all the tensions that this would produce.

[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.

[drcuriosity]

"I've been sent from the future to avert Judgement Day! Come with me if you want to live!"

"So you're here to save John and kill all the evil robots they keep sending after him?"

"No, actually. At the moment Skynet becomes self-aware, We're going to give it a hug..."

[daveon.livejournal.com]

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.

Hmmm... you haven't watched Season Two then :)

[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.

[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.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

"No, actually. At the moment Skynet becomes self-aware, We're going to give it a hug..."

In my old V&V campaign, I had a long scenario based on something very like this.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

What if it's actually a PKD universe, and all attempts to prevent Judgment Day are in fact creating the problem in the first place?

[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.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Obviously Skynet will learn the meaning of Twoo Wuv from the Summernator. I envision the scene as something like the ending of an episode of "Mork and Mindy", only with better effects.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

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

[avram]

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

[dsrtao]

I'm not sure that the various movies, shows, and/or books can be fit into a consistent time-travel theory. Even the movies seem to be paradoxical.

[avram]

Do Terminators dream of electric sheep?

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

The Terminator time loops are starting to remind me of re-playing a video game on harder and harder difficulty settings: you have a better idea of what to do, but your enemies are tougher and there is less room for error.

Cameron told Allison (the human it is impersonating) that there is a faction of terminators that want to make peace with humanity. I wonder if Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) is part of that faction and her work with John Henry (the Turk with the body of Cromartie) is part of an effort to build a kinder, gentler Skynet. Or if the original Cameron was lying and Weaver just wants to create a Skynet that knows its enemies better in order to be more efficient in killing them.

I would really like to know if the "Chronicles" producers and writers have some kind of overall plan or just try to make one up as they go along. And who knows what "Terminator Salvation" is going to bring to the mix.

[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

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I watched S1 of T:SCC, but S2 has been piling up on my Tivo waiting for me to have some spare time to do a marathon. So given that I haven't seen the second season yet, it did occur to me that it would be highly entertaining if the "present" were riddled with sent-back-in-time agents from multiple incompatible future timelines, all working at cross purposes to either prevent or ensure "their" particular future coming to pass.

[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.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

You know, trying to kill off Skynet before it is created has failed at least twice so far.

And trying to kill John Connor has an even worse track record.

[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.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this off-and-on for a while: the changes to the time stream propagate no faster than any effect in time usually does. Go back forty years or so, kill John/Sarah/whatever, and then return to the future from whence you came; nothing will have changed. However, wait it out the whole forty years, and the future you're living in will be different from the one you came from. No matter whether the original Terminators attack from forty years ahead, eighty years ahead etc, nothing will change for them.

This isn't alternate time tracks or the Men Who Murdered Mohamed but something in between. Not having seen the series, I don't know whether this version of time travel would fit the facts.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

I thought that it was clear that Cameron was lying in order to get Allison to talk, the better to impersonate her.