I remember that, though its been like ten years since I read the novel. Though, I could swear the plan was to terminate Sarah Conner, then bury himself in upstate California somewhere that he could survive the nuclear war, then dig himself out, and rejoin Skynet for a new assignment. I rather liked that part, that after this important a mission, he would just rejoin the ground troopers and move on to the next objective.
I tend to prefer the logic of folks who say he’d just go on killing Sarah Conners though. It makes sense, considering his behavior in the film, though I guess the burying himself thing could happen after all Sarah’s in the phonebook for LA were cleared out.
But there’s no way it could know that the Sarah Connor was actually listed in the phone book (or any other given database).
And, Scupper, that is the wankiest fanwank I’ve ever read. It, however, fails to account for the fact that the T-1000 and TX are obviously more advanced technology, and there is no reason for Skynet to send back obsolete tech for what is the most important mission of the war.
Reese talks about the 600 series having rubber skin. The 800 is newer and better. So good, that Reese can’t even tell: “I had to wait until he moved on you so I could zero him.” So, in recent history, the best that Skynet has been able to come up with is robots with rubber on them. Yet, all of a sudden, they not only make mechanical robots with artificially grown skin, but also have crazy liquid metal things, and also have crazy liquid metal around robots, with embedded weapons and nanites. And rather than send, you know, the best one back against the weakest opponent (or all of them simultaneously), they choose to order the attacks so that each one is slightly more powerful than the last, thus allowing our heroes to prepare and better evade future attacks. :rolleyes:
I had kinda gotten the impression that the T-X was sent from an altered timeline—one that may never have even produced a T-1000.
Though, like Skald says, the “rules” of time travel seem to change between movies. The events of the first Terminator movie seem “fated” to happen (the future shown couldn’t exist without the exact events of the past, and the exact events of the past were spurred by actions from time-travelers from the future.), while the second (and even the third—you could argue that it was a different war that happened, just with many of the same players.) movies show changing history as being possible, with no apparent temporal paradoxes destroying reality or even making time-travelers fade from existence.
Perhaps there’s a fanwank explaination—the initial “predestined” act of time travel to 1984 “broke in” spacetime, allowing more flexible alteration of the timeline thereafter.
Yeah, Scupper, like I said: you can fanwank it away.
Yes, that was precisely my point. And even Scupper’s explanation fails to account for the third T-800’s claim that Judgment Day is inevitable, only delayable. How can that even be possible? How could the Terminator know, anyway? If it’s lying, why?
I thought we covered this already. Skynet is bootstrapping itself. The first Terminator leaves behind a chip and an arm, advancing Dyson’s research considerably. The second T-101 destroys Cyberdyne’s office building but that only puts Skynet in the hands of the military, who have a duty to weaponize this revolutionary technology. Although Judgement Day is pushed back further, the result is much deadlier and the Terminators are way more advanced than they ever used to be. Skynet loses a Terminator every 10 years or so and gains advances in technology that allow them to pummel the humans in the future. Not a bad trade if you ask me. Skynet is winning and doing so in a way that makes the humans think they’re the ones winning. As of Terminator 2, John’s fate hadn’t been sealed. In T3, we find out John gets overconfident in his old age (because he thinks he winning) and gets assassinated because he thinks every T-101 is like Uncle Bob. The heroes weren’t prepared, they were just lucky.
As for the T-101 versus T-800 debate, I thought 101 referred to the skin (so the Arnie model) while the 800 was the skeleton. The 850 was a more advanced skeleton with fuel cell batteries.
Thanks … I think. I like to think that when I fanwank, I give it my all.
Unless, of course, Skynet doesn’t have as much faith in them as it does in its tried-and-true T-800 series Terminators, which the novelization of T2 clearly states is exactly the case with regard to the T-1000. Skynet isn’t even sure if the T-1000 works correctly when it sends it–it’s that new.
I haven’t read any real in-depth info on T3 (all kidding aside, it’s a pretty weak chapter), but the designation T-X sounds like that model, too, is experimental. It may be unique. It may be, as Ranchoth says, from an entirely different timeline than that never produced a T-1000. We don’t know why Skynet doesn’t send a T-X to kill Sarah Connor or the young John Connor, all we know is that it doesn’t. That’s not a plot hole, it’s just an unanswered question.
The manner in which the T-X goes about its mission of killing off Connor’s lieutenants is so incredibly sloppy and unsubtle that we can only assume the T-X’s programming is somewhat rudimentary. For example, it makes virtually no attempt to disguise its actions or avoid police attention. Personally, I see the T-X as an even less reliable terminator than the T-1000–possibly a proof-of-concept experiment on the road to building the T-1000. Skynet didn’t create some brand-new superterminator in the T-X, it basically repurposed a test model for a desperation shot mission.
I’d agree that, if Skynet knew for a fact that the T-1000 was reliable, then it would be a better choice to send against young Sarah with or without a T-800 assistant. However, as I said, Skynet doesn’t have that kind of confidence. It also only has a few opportunities in which to send minions back in time. If it sends them all back to the same time, the odds of a single unfortunate event or series of events wiping out all of the dispatched terminators is greatly increased. Skynet basically uses the T-1000, which it is less confident will actually do what it is supposed to do, as a lower-priority backup.
What about the T-X? Remember that the T-X’s primary mission wasn’t even to kill John Connor. It was to kill his lieutenants. This would seem to indicate that Skynet was pretty confident that one of the first two missions would probably have killed off Connor one way or another, or that if they hadn’t, that Connor’s destruction was a temporal impossibility. If the first case was true, the T-X would simply be removing people likely to have taken Connor’s place as saviors of humanity.
Skynet would likely understand the possibility that the failure of the first two missions might endanger its own existence (as it was essentially revealing itself to dangerous people in a time before it had an army of robots to defend it.) At that point, then, the T-X’s unrelated mission (to implement Skynet in software as a distributed viral system) becomes a vital tertiary backup plan. And, of course, the T-X’s software mission required a certain level of technological infrastructure to be in place (cell phones, sufficiently advanced microprocessors, etc.), meaning that Skynet had to send it to a time in which that infrastructure would exist–a time that, hopefully, would never even happen unless there was a catastrophic failure a la T2’s destruction of Cyberdyne Systems.
So Skynet is, in effect, sending the T-X to repair the timeline in the event that its own existence was threatened in the same way that it wished to eliminate John Connor. The T-X is the only terminator that actually succeeds in its mission.
I don’t remember the creation/spread of the Skynet virus having anything to do with the T-X. IIRC, Brewster’s dad and the other scientist characters are discussing problems arising with the Skynet AI before T-X even appears on the scene. Did I miss something in the movie, or is this from the novels or what?
IIRC there are already problems with the cell network before the T-X arrives in the past. It’s to root out that virus that Brewster is pressured to bring Skynet online early. I don’t remember the T-X making any cell phone calls.
Great, now I have to watch part of the movie again.
This has been confusing me in this discussion, too. I just watched all three Terminator movies in succession a couple of weeks ago, so it’s pretty fresh in my mind.
What I remember happening is that the TX kills the woman, steals her car, and uses her cell phone to get the locations of the other kids. I assumed that at the same time she released the virus that the military becomes so concerned with later on in the movie. To combat the virus, which is crippling communications networks or whatever, the military activates the Skynet software, giving it control of everything. This is the point at which it takes over, but they already had the software written, just hadn’t made it live until the TX’s virus was loose. Is that not what happened?
It’s not that I don’t buy the idea that Skynet would send back terminators at different times and with different missions, partly to bootstrap. I just don’t see why it’s so necessary that they do so all at the same time. The only reason we have to believe that’s the case is that Reese claims that they blew up the time machine after sending him through. But Skynet could have had another.
It makes much more sense to me that each successive terminator is sent at some later time in the war, after technology has progressed.
Yeah, that’s right. I was conflating the cell network virus and the Skynet AI program (got to go back and watch the movie again!).
I still don’t recall the T-X having any role in the cell network virus plot thread. Maybe Skynet (the present day Skynet, not the one that sent back T-X) itself somehow released the virus in order to trick the humans into enabling its full capability/access.
My theory: the evolution of computer technology (chosen in the 60’s, and cemented by the late 70’s/early 80’s) made SkyNet ultimately inevitable.
The first Terminator, by failing to achieve it’s mission and therefore alerting Sarah Connor to the danger, changed the future only inasmuch as it postponed the inevitable (SkyNet, Judgement Day).
So by the time SkyNet (timeline 2) was ready to take direct action, killing Sarah Connor was no longer a solution; killing John was. Since that failed, SkyNet was again postponed, but not forever.
By the time of Terminator 3, we were dealing with SkyNet@timeline.3. Since each successive version of SkyNet occured later-and-later, it’s starting techbase was successively more sophisticated, which is why successive Terminator models were more advanced; not because of any evolution in the techbase from the original Judgement Day war as would have occured from the POV of the original movie.
When we see the T-X talking modem-talk into the cell phone, she’s hacking into the school system’s records to find her targets (we see a browser-type view of school records through her “eyes” as she’s “talking”), not releasing the virus. Both the virus and the Skynet software purported to combat it preexist the T-X’s arrival, and the implication is that Skynet released the virus itself to prepare the way for its full implementation (though how Skynet was able to release the virus, but still needed human authorization to let its main programming lose, is not explained).
A side question: since the point of the 800 series flesh-shell terminators was to evade detection by dogs, what was the point of the T-1000? If the dogs are trained to spot anything that looks like a human being but doesn’t smell like one, the T-1000s would be quickly detected.
That reminds me of another inconsistency in the series… The other reason for the living shell, exposited in the first film, was to be able to send it back in time, as the time machine only accepted organic matter. Do the sequels ever explain how the T-1000 and T-X are able to make the trip?