In one of the Starfox video games, Falco refers to someone as “Einstein” and everyone points out this should be impossible because they aren’t on Earth or anywhere near it.
Well… who’s to say that Einstein is a strictly Earth name?
In one of the Starfox video games, Falco refers to someone as “Einstein” and everyone points out this should be impossible because they aren’t on Earth or anywhere near it.
Well… who’s to say that Einstein is a strictly Earth name?
A couple more I thought of, all related to the Terminator franchise.
In Terminator Salvation, why is Kyle Reese Skynet’s Most Wanted if he’s just a teenage boy?
My fanwank is that Skynet accessed either the original police debriefings of Sarah Connor from 1984, or her psychiatric files from when she was in the mental hospital, and found mention of a “Kyle Reese” sent back in time to protect her.
That tells Skynet right there that Kyle Reese is an important operative of John Connor, and so trusted that he would be sent back to protect John’s mother. Skynet could then access birth records (Kyle would’ve been born about 2002, according to the Terminator timeline), and then keep monitoring for him.
Okay, so why doesn’t Skynet just kill Reese instead of using him to lure John Connor into its clutches?
Because Skynet doesn’t know Kyle is John’s father. If it knew, Skynet would’ve immediately killed Kyle Reese. Sarah left no official record that Kyle Reese had fathered her child (don’t believe me? Check the police computer in T2, when John’s juvie record is pulled up. Father is listed as unknown).
Since John Connor kills the T-800/101 that was sent back to kill Sarah, then there’s no reason for him to ever send Kyle back to 1984 to save her life.
Indeed, John Connor destroys a T-800/101 in the climax of Terminator Salvation. But note Reese’s dialogue from the first movie. He describes how Skynet had developed more sophisticated Terminators capable of infiltrating human communities. There’s no reason to suppose the T-800/101 destroyed in Terminator Salvation is the first and last one, ever.
Even IF it was the only one ever created, there’s nothing to stop John Connor from cranking up the ol’ time machine anyway, shaking Reese’s hand, and giving him a one-way ticket to 1984 and Sarah Connor.
Why doesn’t Skynet just send an army of Terminators to 1984 to kill Sarah?
There’s a couple of options.
The power and resources to open a chronoport was simply not worth it until Skynet was at death’s door thanks to Connor and co. Remember what Reese said in T1: “We won. It was over.” Sending the Terminators back was a desperate last-ditch effort. At that point it didn’t matter if sending an outdated T-800/101 and an untried, experimental T-1000 back in time used up the last of Skynet’s resources, it would die anyway, so why not try.
Skynet is a machine. It thinks like a machine: efficiently. If Skynet thought that one Terminator could take out Sarah Connor, it would send back one Terminator. If that one barely fails, it will send a more advanced model to finish the job.
Skynet doesn’t want to alter or erase its own existence. One T-800/101 on a rampage could be assumed to be a lone maniac by the authorities in 1984. An army of freakishly advanced robots would clue them in that something was MAJORLY wrong. All it would take is a tank blowing a Terminator apart and then the humans tracing the parts back to Cyberdyne tech to wipe Skynet from existence.
Perhaps Skynet did send back more Terminators, but due to time travel technology being so new and unwieldy, they ended up on the moon in 1395 or at the bottom of the ocean in 1856.
I believe in one of the Terminator films or the TV show someone mentioned that Skynet only used the time machine when all was lost because it was afraid of what might happen. Skynet had no way to know what time travel would do or what effect changing the past could have, it was scared shitless of making a mistake. So it waited until all was lost anyway, at that point well shit might as well roll the dice.
As for point 4 the TV show Sarah Conner Chronicles has just such a plot, one of Skynets efforts at time travel goes awry. The solution the wayward terminator devises is very…machine like. If you liked T1 and T2 check out the show, as long as you can make concessions that yes it is a weekly show it is good. The makers were obvious fans.
I don’t understand how this could even be thought of as a plothole/error. We’ve already seen three Terminators with that same face, two 800’s and an 850, what reason is there to think that the one John kills is anything but yet another with that same face?
No, the real Terminator series plot hole is why the police never questioned one Chief Master Sergeant William Candy regarding the events of the police station massacre in 84 or the shootout in the LA mall a decade later!
Worse still, it’s explicitly pointed out in T: Salvation that the Arnie John Connor is just the first off the production line. There’s plenty more where he came from. That was the whole point of T: Salvation, it was beginning of the real future war between the human resistance and the infiltration-style Terminators.
We don’t speak of Chief Master Sergeant William Candy. EVER.