[QUOTE=Lobohan]
I know this isn’t great debates… but could I get an example?<snip> I don’t think they have. I’m as much of a sci-fi snob as you’re ever likely to find. What in particular makes you think they didn’t obey the rules as we know them. Also note, just because you assume something doesn’t mean is cannon.<snip>
Have you *seen *any of the other movies in the series? Time travel was used to get them into the present day. A necessity for the series. You don’t expect them to write a period piece set in 96 do you? And it was done is a pretty consistent manner. They sent back agents to build the time machine with contemporary parts. Why is that deus ex machina? It doesn’t in the least conflict with what we’ve seen before. If you mean the head, it was covered with living flesh when it got hit by that blaster. Maybe it kept the energy field as it burned off.<snip>
[/QUOTE]
Well, the first and foremost issue that bugs me, and bugs many a Terminator fan, is that the second and third movies and this series all throw what was established in the first movie in the trash. It was a beautifully self-contained time-travel story - the past happened because the future happened, and the future happened because the past happened.
I also don’t buy the head coming through the time warp - it was well-established and one of the ground rules of the show that metal doesn’t go through - period. The flesh burning off as it went just isn’t good enough for me. At the point where the flesh was burned off, it should have stopped going through - like the guns they were holding when they stepped into the time warp, and their clothes. If they’d kept the flesh on, that would have been okay. It was also completely irrelevant to the plot - a cyborg could have just waited seven years.
I don’t think there was any reason to move it to present day, anyway. Most shows only last seven years - the big finale could have been Sarah dying of cancer. Ta-da! How did the agents build a time machine, anyway? They couldn’t take any plans back to the past with them (paper didn’t go through) - maybe they had them tattooed on their backs. And build it with 1950’s (60’s?) parts. Not buying it.
Also, why draw the line at the second movie and not the first or the third? Why accept as canon the first and second movies and dismiss the third? They took some of the ideas from the third movie (Sarah dying of cancer, for example), but are ignoring the rest of it. Sloppy writing. Lazy plot development. It seems like some kind of cafeteria Terminator writing - they just pick and choose the stuff they decide to keep in the universe. I think if you want to play in that universe, you have to play by its rules and follow the established story, not just ignore them.
I don’t like the idea of continuing to monkey with the past and the future - with clever, diligent writers, I think I could suspend my disbelief long enough to get on board with them, but they have to earn it. They can’t just start throwing different pasts and futures around willy-nilly and expect us to just swallow them. Their idea that Sarah and John changed their present which changed the future is an interesting one, but it has to fit the constraints of the show, and they have to keep that consistent for themselves, too. What it looks like to me is that their current actions have changed the future enough that more terminators and time machines have been built and sent back, but changing their present wasn’t able to stop Judgment Day - do their actions affect the future or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on what the plot needs? That smacks of sloppy, lazy writing to me. If you’re staying consistent, you don’t need your audience to come onto message boards and fanwank themselves into figuring what’s going on - it should be in the writing and plot development. And I’m pretty sure Isaac Asimov would agree with me. 
