Look, you guys can fan retcon as much as you like. I’ve grown up having watched three Terminator films where endoskeleton based Terminators routinely stand up to everything from machineguns, shotguns, pistols, rifles, even grenade launchers and receive at worst a bad limp. Clearly the writers are nerfing them down a bit so they don’t have to constantly write ways to trick Terminators into presses, molten vats, or lathes.
They also made the Terminators a lot stronger than they used to be. At least I don’t ever recall Arnie knocking over a bus or forcing a moving vehicle to crash by just using his bare hands.
it does make sense on paper though. in non of the first three terminator movies did Arnold have to face armor piercing rounds to the head. a team with access to weapons, ammunition and their own “special” terminator should take out an obsolete model easily.
the problem is in how it’s depicted. after having Cromartie around for so long the pay off is simply not satisfying enough, even if he might resurrect as the Turk…
I could buy a fanwank that said Cromartie (it was his shotgun, out of the car, right?) knew he might be up against Cameron and so he spent some time creating some sort of special alloy armor piercing slugs for the shotgun, I guess. But that wasn’t supported anywhere within the show.
It was a suspension of disbelief breaking moment for me though anyway - instead of being caught up in the climax, I was thinking “what? That’s not right…”
If shotgun slugs can rip up a terminator it seems like the human resistance could just load up with big game rifles (with better range and accuracy similar kinetic capabilities) and heavy machine guns and not need fancy energy weapons.
It certainly takes a lot away from the terminator mystique.
can’t agree more. how many terminators have they killed just in the last few episodes? 4? 5?
Well, maybe the first Terminators were made with the really cool super metal, but as the war rages on, and Connor keeps messing with the future, Skynet is running low on metal, and is pretty soon going to be making Terminators out of recycled aluminum cans.
Anyway, RIP Cromartie. I’d developed a certain sort of affection for you. His death definitely had a Quentin Tarantino Robert Rodriguez/Desperado style to it. I’m disappointed. I wanted to see what, if any, relationship there could be between Cromartie and Weaver, and they’ve left unexplored Cromartie’s statement about having more faith in Ellison than Skynet does.
Do you think Ellison is going to tell Weaver where Cromartie’s body is, before Sarah gets back with dissolv-o cream?
Riley is a bit unbelievable. She keeps asking John questions, but John never once asks her why she can hop off to Mexico without telling her parents? Oh, that’s right. She has foster parents. You can always skip out on them. They don’t care.
I think it’s just the Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu in effect. If it’d only been one enemy Terminator in the entire show, he’d be completely unstoppable until the series finale. 
Anyway, you might rationalize that, not only was Cameron hitting him with slugs at close range, she was shooting at a weak point in his skull structure with humanly impossible (or merely unlikely) accuracy.
Ah, the AI almost got loose—they were able to close it out before it could escape (yeah, good luck transmitting what’s basically a person running on a neural net processor over Airport) or contact other Terminators, and they DID get useful information off of it.
Yeah, but if you were Sarah would you really want him to risk it again? especially on Cromartie given that he knows their aliases now and could easily just transmit them to a secure server for Skynet.
On the other hand TBH I have no idea why he even bothered trying to hack what he knows is a Neural Net that is hell bent on destroying the earth and him in particular on a system with network access.
Maybe if they actually unplugged the NICs and then built a baby faraday cage (it’s the only way to be sure) to hack it in they’d be safe.
Y’know, it’s probably not THAT hard to hack a chip using a computer without a network connection. I don’t think the chip itself could transmit anything.
Ah, I see you get into that in the rest of your post. Jolly good, then.
What valuable information would they gain by trying this?
That’s the point—we don’t know what else he had in his head. Secondary targets? Secondary PROTECTION assignments (i.e. “Whatever you do, DON’T kill so or so, or Skynet ceases to exist”)? Information on Skynet’s creation? Other Terminators working, or in tangental contact with Cromartie? Weapon and money caches?
'Could be anything, or nothing useful at all. But there’s no need to throw away a potentially valulable source of intelligence that they’ve shown they can access, and can still destroy later, anyway.
This attitude bugs me. The shows and the movies are different for one reason: Arnold.
Arnold was a big star and there’s no way he’s going down with some pussy shotgun blast to the head. There’s got to be molten steel or a nuclear explosion to stop an Arnold Terminator.
But in T1, when Arnold was not a big star, that’s not what it took. It took a few blasts from Reese’s shotgun at close range to put him down for a few minutes and it was only a homemade grenade to severely fuck up his internal circuits and mobility. If Reese wasn’t hurt they could have outrun him on foot and safely raised baby John together until Judgement Day.
That’s what the makers of The Sarah Connor Chronicles are using as a baseline and complaining it’s not true to the movies is just ignoring the first movie.
I agree. “If they could kill them that easy everyone would do it!”. Yes, if you know your standard-issue human-killing guns aren’t going to work you will try something else. If you know they guy is armored like a tank, you can even try firing an RPG at him.
How many SWAT teams carry RPGs on a standard ‘busting the fake FBI agent’ mission? Oh, they should carry them as standard issue in case they come up against “An armored robotic killer from the future”? That’s interesting. Please don’t struggle when they tie your sleeves behind your neck, it’s undignified. You’ll be bunking next to a woman named Sarah.
Obviously, when they’re prepared they can kill a Terminator. That’s probably why Skynet made more than one.
Anything can be dealt with if you’re prepared. Don’t like it? Tell it to the vampires.
-Joe
This is an excellent point.
yes, otherwise there wouldn’t be a need to go get the magic cream in the first place.
Crap. I miss one episode and it had to be when they offed Cromartie?
That was my first thought too. I don’t know about terminators but I’ve seen a 12 gauge slug tear a huge hole through a section of “bulletproof” glass.
Forgive me for the cheesiness, but when John fired the final shot into Cromartie, did anyone else half expect him to say, “Hasta la vista, Baby?”
You say that like bullet-resistant glass is some kind of gold standard when it comes to protection. If it doesn’t need to be transparent, there are better materials to use than that. And I don’t know why it would be any surprise that a thickness of bullet-resistant glass intended to protect against small arms might not be sufficient against a more powerful weapon.
If terminators have uncanny accuracy because they are basically a calibrated weapon system, why couldn’t Cromartie shoot someone through an open window? Why would he even waste a bullet if he didn’t think he had a 99+% chance of hitting his target? He doesn’t need to count on a lucky shot. What, you mean someone has mentioned this before?