# So ... about The Terminator (1984)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Tags:** movies
**Created:** [December 23, 2022, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017 "2022-12-23T19:59:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 5
### Author:  [@Tatterdemalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tatterdemalion)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2023, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/81 "2023-05-27T22:06:51Z")
Eh, California’s had worse.
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### Author:  [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)
#### Post date: [May 27, 2023, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/82 "2023-05-27T23:33:18Z")
> [@RickJay](#):
>
> The T-800 wasn’t “just saying” it, it was engaging in a ruse.
Yes, I know. Like I’d said, it echoes the bit in the previous movie where it engages in — what else? — another ruse: _“Oh, but, honey, I need to know where I can reach you. You tell me to hide out up here at the cabin like some fugitive, and you won’t tell me what’s going on? I am worried sick, dear.”_
AFAICT, the fact that the Terminator says something doesn’t mean it’s so.
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/83 "2023-05-28T02:15:12Z")
A Terminator will say or do _anything_ to complete its mission.
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### Author:  [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/84 "2023-05-28T02:23:52Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#):
>
> anything
But it won’t do that.
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/85 "2023-05-28T02:29:01Z")
Meatloaf was not a Terminator. I _think_….
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### Author:  [@Galactus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galactus)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/86 "2023-05-28T03:19:40Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> Why wouldn’t it still exist?
What do you mean by “still exist”?
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/87 "2023-05-28T04:33:02Z")
> [@SunUp](#):
>
> _PoA_ and _Terminator_ (1984) are both examples of closed time loops where causality works retroactively and free will is (by the omniscient reader/viewer) an illusion. Things that happen in the time loops have always happened and will always happen - they are fixed, as it were, in time, and anything that looks like it was an attempt to break out of the loop ends up keeping the loop in place. It’s kinda like a classical Greek tragedy, in a way.
My impression of Terminator/T2 was never that the timeline was set. Older John Connor explicitly says that it is not to Reese, and passes it on to his younger self.
Now, that could just be that he was hopeful but it could also be that he knew something.
Say, for example, that Connor 1 grew up in a peaceful world of well-made, properly domesticated robots and, in his thirties, someone invented time travel. Kyle Reese ends up being the “timenaut” who is chosen to go back into time, he travels to 1984, accidentally leaves some robot parts around, gets a lady pregnant, and tells her about the future - a future with no robot uprising. (Kyle Reese was a bad choice of timenaut.)
The timenaut’s mission creates the new timeline with Connor 2 - original Reese’s son / Older John Conner in T1/T2. Conner 2 lives in a world where futuristic technology is suddenly introduced, when he’s a child, the technology is poorly understood and gets out of control, destroying most of humanity, and he rises to become a leader in the fight against the robots. He knows from his mom what the original future was and that it wasn’t this, “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves”. Ergo, he knows that the past can be changed. He also knows that neither himself nor his mom was targeted for assassination. He was born just fine and never encountered any evil robots until Skynet went crazy, later in his life.
Conner 2 knows who his dad is, knows that he was a timenaut, and that his own existence depends on the that same DNA going back in time. He sends Reese 2 into the past, to protect himself, when he finds out about the assassination mission.
Outside of the few flashes into timeline 2, the two original Terminator movies tell the story of the third timeline - with the third Sarah Connor and the third John Connor.
One could argue that the true message of the Terminator series is that, even though Kyle Reese’s original fuckups were so catastrophic as to wreck the world, John Connor views himself as so important, that rather than trying to set things back to timeline 1, he decides to send the same fuckup back into time, so that at least John Connor exists, even though you know Kyle’s just gonna fuck it up again.
John Connor is the true villain of the series.
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### Author:  [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 6:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/88 "2023-05-28T06:22:53Z")
> [@GESancMan](#):
>
> I don’t recall Arnie stating Judgement day occurs in 1997, but maybe I’m not remembering it. Regardless, the only place Sarah could have gotten this information was from Kyle. So there’s no reason to think the original date of Judgement Day **isn’t** 8/29/97.
Checking the script of the first movie, the date 1997 is never mentioned, but Kyle mentions that the war is going to take place “a few years from now” and that he was born afterward (later established as 2003 in tie-in media).
Based on this, I’m going to propose a new headcanon where, in the ur-timeline, Judgment Day happened earlier than it did in the prime timeline, possibly sometime in the late '80s. The remnants of the Model 101 that Cyberdyne acquires in the prime timeline sends them down a different line of research that eventually leads them to creating Skynet, but it takes them longer than it would’ve if they’d continued the existing research without the future tech.
The T-800 does eventually give the date of August 29, 1997 in T2, but not until after Sarah’s already been quoting it to the doctors. So where does Sarah get the 1997 date come from? _It came to her in a dream_. There was a deleted scene shot for T2, and expanded on in the novelization, where Sarah has a dream where Kyle Reese speaks to her and warns her that another killer from the future is coming for John (and mentions that the future is not set). Perhaps he mentions the 1997 date in that same dream. Whether it’s actually Kyle speaking to her in her sleep through some sort of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, or just her PTSD-stricken brain giving her nightmares, I leave as an exercise for your imagination.
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### Author:  [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 6:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/89 "2023-05-28T06:49:19Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#):
>
> Meatloaf was not a Terminator. I _think_….
I’m just saying, I’ve never seen anyone I _know_ to be human open a concert with a 10-minute Jim Steinman power anthem and then go on to do three encores.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/90 "2023-05-28T11:53:11Z")
> [@Galactus](#):
>
> What do you mean by “still exist”?
Well, the obvious answer is that it’s possible to travel to that time.
But seriously, this notion that the past “doesn’t exist any more” is like building a skyscraper, except every time you finish building a floor, you disassemble the floor below it (girders and all). Of course 1984 still exists; we’re sitting on top of it.
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### Author:  [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/91 "2023-05-28T12:43:17Z")
My 2c is that in the original timeline, before any time travel happened, Kyle Reese appeared out of nowhere in 1984 and impregnated Sarah Connor. That’s the whole point; he went back in time. John Connor never had any other father other than Kyle Reese.
If there were an original “clean” timeline, where John Connor’s father was originally somebody else, then that’s not time travel, that’s hopping around to different universes in the multiverse. Which I personally find much less interesting. (I have never been a proponent of the many worlds interpretation.)
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### Author:  [@Love\_Rhombus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Love_Rhombus)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/92 "2023-05-28T14:07:19Z")
> [@Smapti](#):
>
> it takes them longer than it would’ve if they’d continued the existing research without the future tech.
That sounds odd. Why would the future tech push back their research? Shouldn’t that speed up their work?
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### Author:  [@Galactus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galactus)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/93 "2023-05-28T14:27:33Z")
1984 might be a physical place for someone named Chronos, but for us mere mortals it’s just a memory. The past and the future do not exist, they are memories on one side and possibilities on the other. There is only the Now. The only way to travel to the past would be to dial back the entire Universe, like a clock. And that would probably take more energy than the universe contains.
Time travel is a fun concept for fiction. I like @Sage_Rat’s explanation of escalating fuck ups by John and Kyle getting the Terminator universe to its current place.
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/94 "2023-05-28T15:26:17Z")
I realized I goofed in one place. There’s no “Connor 1”. He wouldn’t exist in the original timeline. The first John Connor would come into being in the second timeline.
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### Author:  [@CoolHandCox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CoolHandCox)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/95 "2023-05-28T15:34:55Z")
Love the thread and discussion.
I’m confused, and it has more to do with time travel than the movie. Trying to follow the discussion between Chronos and Galactus. Before this thread, I would have felt the same as Galactus. There was an original “clean”\*\* timeline with no terminators/Reese in 1984. Chronos says no, obviously not, because Reese _was in 1984_ and is John’s Dad (paraphrasing). So, in the only timeline, Reese appeared out of thin air in 1984 as an adult. Dies in 1984. And then is born later, and grows up and meets John and gets sent back in time to 1984. That’s the timeline and the only timeline because that’s what happened. It can never change. Right?
Maybe there is no answer. But everything has to already be determined for all time then, right? You can’t change it. For example, in my mind right now, Hitler did his horrible thing. So it’s not possible to ever go back and kill Hitler to stop Hitler from doing his horrible thing. The reason it’s not possible is because _I know right now in 2023_ what Hitler did in say 1944. If someone 20 years ago, a million years from now, tomorrow, or whenever, decided to go back and kill Hitler in 1920, then today it wouldn’t be possible for me to know he was alive in 1944. If it’s ever possible for me to know he was alive in 1944, then there must be a “clean”/horrible timeline, and a different timeline where Hitler is an unknown who died early. There couldn’t just be one timeline. There is where I have trouble not thinking you can go back in time to change it.
Is this basically what that discussion was or am I butchering what was being argued?
\*\*Clean is certainly from my perspective. It’s possible someone from the year 3244 went back in time to the year 1920 and subtly saved Hitler which allowed him to stay alive, etc. My point is, right now, whatever happened in the past, and more importantly, in the future is done and locked, there is no changing it. So that leads to the paradox I guess, or at least whether there is free will.
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### Author:  [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/96 "2023-05-28T15:39:31Z")
Y’all are overthinking a plot point the writers put no thought in to in the first place!
I just spent more time checking the difference between _in to_ and _into_ than the writers did on the implications of time travel.
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### Author:  [@Galactus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galactus)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/97 "2023-05-28T15:53:56Z")
> [@CoolHandCox](#):
>
> because Reese _was in 1984_ and is John’s Dad
Unless, as I said up-thread, Sarah was already pregnant when she met Kyle. But, in the “original” timeline Kyle was just the guy who John sent back, not because he thought he was his father. This only works if it’s like @Sage_Rat said and the second time around the loop details are changed like Sarah thinking Kyle is the father and the picture that he has.
“Overthinking” this topic doesn’t ruin my enjoyment of the Terminator movies. It adds to my enjoyment. I find this discussion fun.
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### Author:  [@CoolHandCox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CoolHandCox)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/98 "2023-05-28T16:08:18Z")
Yea, up until today, I’ve always thought how you did. I still do. Just confused as I never thought this much about it.
And yes, I’m way overthinking it. But that’s the fun part!
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/99 "2023-05-28T16:10:50Z")
> [@Galactus](#):
>
> This only works if it’s like @Sage_Rat said and the second time around the loop details are changed like Sarah thinking Kyle is the father and the picture that he has.
Technically, we could be in loop 28 in the movie, but I think loop 3 would be the most compact variant.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 28, 2023, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-about-the-terminator-1984/977017/100 "2023-05-28T16:13:26Z")
> [@Galactus](#):
>
> The only way to travel to the past would be to dial back the entire Universe, like a clock.
What? No, that wouldn’t achieve time travel. It’d achieve nothing at all. “Rewind”, as a concept, only makes sense when you’re comparing one set of times to another set of times. What other set of times are you comparing the entire Universe to?
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