This may have been covered before here, but here goes.
I have seen all the movies, but never the TV show.
I’m having trouble with Skynet. In particular, I can’t make a connection with the Skynet of the 1990’s and the Skynet of the future. There is a missing middle, a mechanism, that destroys the logic of the timeline for me.
So Skynet is placed in charge of the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. It becomes self-aware, starts a global nuclear war that almost wipes out human civilization. All that makes sense, especially in a sci-fi context.
Now decades later, Skynet is in control of armies of extremely sophisticated machines. Where and how were these machines developed and manufactured? Skynet was given control of the U.S. nuclear department, so fine, it could launch those weapons. But was it also hooked up to Honda, and KUKA, and Sun Microsystems, and the Ford Motor Company? Even if it were wouldn’t all those resources have been destroyed in the nuclear war? Let’s say Skynet did have some sort of remote control over at least one factory. Was it entirely automated? Were the forklifts and presses and cutters all on some sort of remote setup? And all hooked up to some Defense Dept. computer program?
You see what I mean? The development and manufacture of machines like a simple automated welder are the net product of thousands of humans working across the globe to gather, ship, refine, test, re-ship, and manufacture materials to make a finished product. That doesn’t even take into account the entire R&D process. We use a lot of mechanized and automated labor in the manufacturing process these days, but take the human element out of the process for even a minute and the whole thing comes to a screeching and permanent halt.
Remember the scene in T2, where Dyson enters the super-secure area and pensively looks at the robotic arm from T1? I’m guessing that Cyberdine started building robots as well as AIs. So when Skynet took over, it was already in control of all Cyberdine manufacturing facilities, and kept them running , but just changed from auto manufacturing robots to Hunter Killer robots.
I haven’t seen the films recently, but wasn’t the technology recovered from the T-800 a revolutionary chip? From that point on, it’s not hard to imagine Cyberdyne Systems became the major (or even the only) chip manufacturer for everything from weapons to robotics to PCs. Skynet is their biggest and most complex system, but their chips are running everything else as well.
Yes - they recovered the chip and the arm from the T-800. In the novel, they go into how the owner of the machine shop at the end of T1 scooped up everything he could find (coincidentally hiding evidence that could have kept Sarah Connor out of the looney bin later) and founded Cyberdine Industries.
This doesn’t really answer the question though - what were the “remaining resources” it used to enslave the survivors?
It’s hard to picture a handful of HKs Mark I’s coaxing a bunch of people into assembling the robot army. It’s not like Skynet had warehouses of food and supplies to bribe the survivors.
The T-X’s nanomachines that were left behind could have also played a part in the creation of Skynet.
And while its not officially canon, but the Terminator TV show establishes that Skynet sent T-800s back in time for the specific reason to create more T-800s after the bombs drop. Of course, that fucks up the T-600 “rubber skin” idea.
You’ve still got the problem of the Bootstrap Paradox: the timeline might have eventually formed a stable time loop where Skynet’s successful creation of humanoid robots causes Skynet’s successful creation of humanoid robots, but the first time around, something else must have been responsible.
But that’s the nature of Terminator’s shifting timeline. At the end of T1, all we know is that the remnants of the Terminator have been left behind and that sometime in the next 40 years the robots rise. As Sarah changes the timeline and we see more of the timeline in T2 and T3, the robots rising starts looking less and less possible.
But as they keep making more sequels where the robots rise, obviously something had to happen. And that’s the important thing.
That’s a start to a good explanation. If Cyberdyne became a major smart weapons manufacturer before the holocaust then there could have been an army of remote control weapons for Skynet to use afterwords.
But were there human-like robots beforehand? If that is the case then it makes more sense. Drones, jets, tanks, and other instruments of battle could wage war on the remnants of humanity, but a remote controlled jet can’t develop and manufacture an army of cyborgs. You’d have to have built another army of machines that are capable of handling all the challenges and intricacies of industry before the nukes fall or else the machines would be stuck without the physical means to advance in spite of whatever theoretical advances they have made.
Even then the timeline is a bit unbelievable. Assuming a stable time-loop, it was only 13 years from the day Cyberdyne found the chip to Judgment Day. I can imagine that sort of exponential advancement in AI tech considering Skynet was reverse-engineered. But the physical construction of a vast robotic workforce capable of operating efficiently without human input in that time frame doesn’t seem probable.
A bigger problem I have is the Wile E. Coyote-complexity of the plan to get John Connor in the fourth film. At that stage (a decade or so after Judgement Day), Skynet shouldn’t give a fuck about John Connor, except possibly to make a note of the name attached to the Resistance broadcasts - it’s only decades later when he leads humans to their final victory that the remnants of Skynet should take notice and try to pre-emptively take him out by sending terminators into the past.
While unsaid, it’s more or less implied that these Terminators are working with knowledge somehow saved by the original Terminators. Otherwise, how else would they know who Kyle Reese even was?
In the deleted scenes on the DVD, you can actually see this scene, as well as the name Cyberdyne on the building. In the commentary of, I think it was the T2 Extreme Edition DVD, Cameron says the only reason he deleted that scene from the first movie was he thought the acting was bad.
There’s also another deleted scene in the first movie where Sarah tries to talk Reese into going to take down Cyberdyne, much like she winds up doing in the 2nd movie.
There were more than just HK’s. You’ve also got the T-1’s running around, and I forget if it was just in the “Sgt. Candy” deleted scene or in the movie itself, but there were some early humanoid endoskeletons in production as well. Add to that Skynet using a virus to get into pretty much every networked system on the planet, it’s not that big a stretch to think it got control of some automated factories and had enough resources and firepower to force humans to maintain them.
