How can John Connor send his protector back in time to protect his mother, when his protector is his dad?
Does anyone have the logic for all three movies worked out based on that information?
pre destination. John Connor knows from his mother who to send back to become his father.
If you listen to Sarah at the end of the first movie, she’s making tapes for John, and she tells him on one of them that Reese is his father
What I never got about T2 was who told Sarah what date Judgement Day takes place on… ??
Reese most likely did in a converstation off-screen (bear with me here). I’m sure Reese told her everything she needed to know, as the adult Connor would have had him memorize everything to tell her, in order for her to pass it to the young John Connor. Connor prepared Reese to prepare Sarah to prepare Connor.
Yeah, it’s a logical leap, but that’s the whole point of the story.
Besides, she could have read the date on the bottom of the screen in T-1. 
Tripler
What? It works in some commercials I’ve seen. . . :smack:
If memory serves, Reese said something about not knowing the exact date the nukes started flying. So it can’t be him, and there’s not really anyone else that could have told her. I guess it could have come to her in a vision or something, though.
Seeing as the terminator films can’t even get the normal flow of time right*, its a bit much to expect them to get the future right as well.
*In T1, John Connor was conceived. This was set in 1984. T2 was released in 1991, by which time John Connor could have been a maximum of seven years old. In T2 he must be at least 13.
While T2 was released in 1991, I believe it was supposed to take place in 1995. I also believe that John Connor was supposed to be 10 or 11 in the film.
Important points:
The first movie doesn’t have any true paradoxes in it – it’s a perfect example of a causality loop, or the “Ouroboros Paradox”, which involves an event causing itself.
The second and third movies are logically self-contradictory. It’s not possible for time to interfere with itself – hence the “victory” at the end of the second movie is impossible, and the third is completely nonsensical. No one can change time.
It’s probably not a good idea to analyze any time travel film too closely or you’re bound to find something that doesn’t add up.
TVAA’s point about the “victory” is what I’ve always considered the big one (The machine destroys the technology that makes itself possible. Hence, it couldn’t exist to prevent itself from existing).
That, or the fact that the machines have to realize that their continued attempts to kill John Connor are doomed to fail. They can’t succeed because they didn’t.
Positing “parallel universes” sidesteps most of the paradoxes.
The “artist” paradox remains, if the machines invented themselves. This could only be sidestepped if the machines were invented by someone else in an entirely different universe.
Of course, with parallel universes, they needn’t have bothered!
Yes. The first movie makes sense – having come across time travel, the machines decide to give temporal alteration a try. After all, what do they have to lose? If somehow it is possible to alter the past, they’ll gain a huge advantage.
And of course the machines had to attempt it, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have existed. Therefore circumstances will conspire to cause them to think it’s possible even if it isn’t, because it happened. (God, I love causality loops.)
The second and third attempts make much less sense.
Parallel universes doesn’t solve anything, SentientMeat – because then we should be inundated by an infinite number of time travelers from an infinite number of alternate realities. “Time” itself couldn’t exist in the sense that we know it. Which is why it hasn’t happened.
Not neccessarily - I’m not sure that physics demands that time cannot interfere with itself. It may be that one could affect it, although it would surely shoot history to hell and back.
Sure, around here, it probably cannot be done, but in thoery there’s no reason that it couldn’t in Terminator-verse.
TVAA did you not see the end of T3? That’s the whole point. The “victory” in T2 was not a victory, not like we thought anyway. That’s why it WAS possible.
I have always liked the 12 Monkeys theory of time travel. You can’t change history because everything that you’re going to go back into time to do has already happened.
Bill & Ted worked like this too. “I know, after this whole mess is over let’s come back here and leave a key so we that we can get out of here.” “Dude, it worked, here’s the key!” “Now, we can’t forget to go back and do all this stuff after this is over.” “We won’t forget dude, if we would have forgotten, this stuff wouldn’t be done!”
I guess it could be argued that Terminator follows these rules too, but I’m not sure if it’s consistent.
You remember in T2 where the T101 gets his arm caught between a chain and sprocket, and he rips it off to continue his fight with the T1000? Unless I do not recall correctly, that arm was never retrieved and destroyed, and so when the T101 self-terminated in the molten steel, there was still a logical sequence of events that could lead to his future existence.