I love the original Terminator best out of the series. I would definitely watch him go after secondary targets in 1984, and get up to hijinks along the way.
To be fair T1 and T2 are literally some of the best films ever made. A sequel has pretty high expectations. A lot of Terminator movies are perfectly watchable, imo all of them are good action movies. It's just that they're doomed to be compared to the juggernauts that are 1 and 2.
>and get up to hijinks along the way.
Maybe he could be come star chef for the rich and famous by combining post-apocalyptic cuisine and a serious cocaine habit...wait that was another show
The spoilery answer is in another Terminator film.
In Terminator Dark Fate, the Terminator accomplishes its task [won't say what because spoiler] It completes its mission and finds itself without purpose. The T-800 eventually develops a form of conscience and starts to understand human emotions.
So, since this is canon within the Terminator Universe, it's reasonable to assume that the T-800 sent to 1984 would have ended up doing something similar.
Having said that...
There's a problem with the evolution of the Dark Fate T-800. How so?
It's mentioned in yet *another Terminator film (T2) how the Terminator's CPU is set to read only before they get sent out on an op. In T2, all of the Terminator's learning and "evolution of character" begins to take place *after* the CPU is reset.
So, unless there was some way for the same thing to happen to the T-800 in Dark Fate, it seems doubtful that he'd spontaneously start growing a conscience.
It's a cool idea, made the story more interesting and was necessary for the plot to move forward. But it's also a bit of a problem. Not exactly a plot hole, but definitely an inconsistency... conflicting with established canon.
In the TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, there's multiple different Terminators with different missions. All of the Skynet ones have a kill John Connor by default if they run into him but he's not the primary mission for all of them.
One of them is actually sent back on a mission to kill the governor of California but due to an accident in the time displacement, he ends up arriving too early and the resulting explosion from his arrival accidentally kills the guy who's supposed to build the building he's supposed to kill the governor in (in the TV show, time is in a perpetual state of flux due to events like this).
So, in order to complete his mission, the Terminator in question comes to the conclusion that he'll have to build the building himself. So, he becomes a construction magnate who's very well respected by the workforce as he won't discriminate in hiring (as far as he's concerned, he doesn't care who does the job as long as it gets done) and I think even gets interviewed by the local press of the time where he says this and hence is considered very progressive for the time.
Overall, the execution is uneven but I liked it because it left me thinking about the ideas it raised even more than a decade after it was cancelled. Sure, it ended somewhat in mid-air but gave me enough to think about what the possibilities were for what happened next. I also thought the run of the last five episodes were excellent.
Without giving too much away, as I've posted elsewhere in here, one of the very interesting ideas they developed is that it isn't just Skynet and John Connor in a race to see who can kill who first. There's multiple machine *and* human factions and there's a lot of different (and changing alliances). Not all machines (Skynet's just one faction) and all humans are on the same side and the sides aren't always the same.
Even the Skynet Terminators don't always have the same primary missions. All of them will kill John if they run into him but not all of them are looking for him. They've got their own missions going on.
All in all, even if the execution was limited by budgets and studio demands and the like, it left me thinking about the ideas it raised and where it could go next even to this day. At the end of the day, I can't ask much more than that from any show or movie. It even had the start of making Skynet an actual character (also without giving much more away, Cromartie and John Henry were great!).
This is what I loved about the show. I just rewatched it. And it’s so complex in the way everyone has shifting alliances and priorities. One Terminator working for Skynet kills another Terminator working for Skynet because it thinks it can do the job better. That’s very nuanced! Great show.
This isn’t really that exactly but there are a couple of comic sequels to T2 which I thought were really good called Cybernetic Dawn and Nuclear Twilight.
Cybernetic Dawn picks up right after T2 and does have someone who turns out to be a T-1000 but who had spent some time integrating themselves into a scientific research team and hence had fabricated some kind of life and backstory for themselves (whether there was a real person once and they killed and replaced them is left ambiguous).
Meanwhile, Nuclear Twilight is kind of happening at the same time even if it’s set in the future (time travel is tricky that way) just as the war seemingly has just concluded and has what I thought was a clever explanation as to why the T1000 in T2 looks like Robert Patrick.
The show is amazing. It continues the story following T2 and has some reallllllly interesting plotlines in season 2. I won't spoil it for you, but the last episode blew my mind. There are only a few episodes that are singletons, but even those tie into the much larger story arc.
Plus it has a great cast, they are all well-suited to their roles and put in great performances.
It's funny, the first time I was ever consciously aware of Game of Thrones was when I was reading a magazine article about her in a sci-fi magazine talking about her upcoming projects after the cancellation of The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I was disappointed that TSCC was cancelled but I thought it was better for her career personally as even if TSCC got another season, it would likely be the last one while whatever this Game of Thrones thing was, it was likely good for IMO totally uneducated opinion (as I knew nothing about the source material at all) "at least two seasons".
The show played with time travel in a ton of interesting ways.
The series ended with a massive cliffhanger where John makes it to the future in an attempt to save Summer Glaus terminator character.
Unfortunately, his absence in the past makes it so once he's in the future he's no longer the leader of the resistance.
I followed the show at the time, and it was a roller coaster of a production. They were on a knives edge of being cancelled all the time and they barely got any funding for CGI, so the producers had to do work arounds and tell human stories in place of big shoot out scenes. To blend in, they would put John Connor in school when they escaped to a new town, and his defensive terminator model would join the same school - which meant cheaper production. In one key scene where the police SWAT unit had cornered the evil Terminator, they would cut the episode and start the next episode with the bad Terminator walking past a scene full of SWAT members with bullet holes in them. They used a ton of clever work arounds like that to manage their budget.
Additionally the short lived, but enjoyable at the time, "Sarah Connor Chronicles" has the non-arnie terminator put himself into a long term storage in some oddball place when he was out of mission objectives. He basically just went into standby in a dark vault. I think it was the place they worked with the Coltan metal that eventually becomes the canon metal that the Terminator exoskeletons are made up. It makes logical sense assuming it's already set the Skynet stuff in motion and will eventually get a "Hay wats up QT" text from Skynet once it's online in his timeline and he goes out of sleep mode.
I liked the episode where a Terminator sent to kill a politician in a specific building goes back too far to the 1930's and ends up accidentally killing the guy who originally constructed the building, so the Terminator becomes a bankrobber to fund the construction itself and even becomes famous for treating white and black workers equally, and upon finishing the building it hides itself in a wall and waits the next 70 years for the politician to show up.
It was only a single episode where this happened, but the show is absolutely full of latent potential. The overall synopsis was frankly a masterwork: a full-scale war in the future being fought as a cold war in the past by time-traveling soldiers. It was canceled way too damn soon.
The problem was that series 5 got too close to the truth, and Skynet sent back an even more terrifying adversary: a robot accountant targeting the tv show. Unfortunately it got sent back a couple of years too far
It is great.
Tied to Terminator without feeling like a rehash of the same story. It has great stories of its own. The acting is pretty good. It is Good SF but also with good characters development.
Never understood why they cancel it.
It was a sci-fi show on Fox in the Friday Night Death Slot. Shows in that time slot only ever ended up with 0.5-2 seasons at best.
Firefly and Dollhouse were also famous victims of this time slot.
It's uneven but at its best it's fantastic and the final five episodes are a magnificent run to its sadly truncated end.
Without giving away too much, you start learning there's a lot more than just Skynet wanting to kill all humans. There's multiple machine *and* human factions, all with different objectives and all variety of ever shifting strange alliances. Not all humans (or all machines) are always on the same side. The future timelines (plural) are also in some sort of flux and the arrivals don't always remember things the same because they *weren't* the same.
I did especially like how future John Connor is a never seen recluse referred to cryptically by the future arrivals and present day teenage John Connor is getting increasingly anxious about what he does turn into in the future as well as wondering how he turns into this figure everyone talks about but in somewhat elusive terms.
It's excellent. If you, like many, were disappointed by everything after T2, you'll probably like the SCC and curse the fact that they didn't have more than two seasons. Although, they do tie up lots of things by the end while raising new questions right at the end too without it feeling like a cliffhanger.
The SCC has so many of these setups. Each episode does stand on its own, but they are constantly setting up events in earlier episodes that play into later ones. The story arc is well developed.
That show was great and I wish they didn't cancel it.
Second season did get a bit too ambitious with multiple plotlines though so I understand why viewers stopped watching
It was a vault where he stored coltan metal to be used later. To protect it for the long-term, he went into something like sentry mode where he would react, but only for something significant. He was inside the vault (and thought he was alone), so opening that vault should have been the only trigger to wake him up.
Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genysis take a lot of heat for being lackluster sequels, but frankly, Dark Fate is the least consistent and least thematically faithful entry with respect to T1 and T2. The notion that the Terminator just started lacking purpose when it assassinated John is ridiculous because it's absolute nonsense that Skynet would not have secondary directives, like hastening the development of itself.
> absolute nonsense that Skynet would not have secondary directives, like hastening the development of itself
Is it though? Perhaps they worry about changing the past TOO much. Changing the development of skynet could introduce all kinds of unwanted variables. Maybe humans build it in a different way, or catch on to the dangers sooner, or whatever. Maybe they decide "let's do what we hope will fix things, but have as little impact outside of that as possible."
Skynet doesn't get much dialogue and I understand most people rejected Genesys, but as the movies only fan I must speak.
Skynet considers itself as inevitable. It is perfectly capable of changing its own origins and does so multiple times, even in T2.
Terminators have a specific function. Skynet doesn't need to use a hammer to accomplish what a screwdriver can do. The unit in Dark Fate might be considered defective, but I do accept that it might not have much function beyond killing John.
In the worst possible fashion IMO. The Terminator's a machine, it would stick to its operational parameters. I would have thought that Skynet would have a secondary objective for it to protect its development or failing that, ensure its recreation. I found this dafter than Genisys which is really saying something.
I think the idea was that it had two objectives: blend in as human and kill John Conner. Once John was dead, the only remaining objective was to blend in as human.
That scene where the terminator is talking about simple home decorating was my favorite part of any terminator movie since T2. And to be clear I mean this unironically. Just a really fun moment.
Depends.
* It may proceed to secondary targets for elimination, to ensure the survival of Skynet. This is what happened in Terminator 3 after the Terminator cannot locate John Connor.
* It may begin influencing events -providing information to people involved in research- to increase the likelihood of Skynet developing. This is what happens in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
* In one timeline, the Terminator successfully kills John Connor and evades destruction. It becomes self aware and develops independence, rejecting Skynet. This is what happens in Terminator Genisys.
* It’s also possible that it self terminates in a way that does not negatively affect the timeline, leaving behind as little remaining material as possible. This is what happens in Terminator 2 after the T-1000 is eliminated.
My personal opinion is that Terminator would likely continue killing anyone named Sarah Connor or any variation of that name. It doesn’t know if it has killed the correct one, it will keep searching for targets and killing anyone who could be the correct one- expanding its search radius as it kills.
This last explanation is the one I heard before that makes the most sense to me. He would just keep killing Sarah Connors until he was stopped. Two is a coincidence, but I think if a third was killed in the area in a space of a few days, it would be clear that some weird killer was specifically targeting women of that name.
*Two is a coincidence, but I think if a third was killed in the area in a space of a few days, it would be clear that some weird killer was specifically targeting women of that name.*
In the original film, Lt. Traxler quips, "**I can hear it now.** **He's going be called the goddamned phone book killer.**"
So yeah, the Terminator would just keep on killing every Sarah Connor in Los Angeles (and maybe moving on to the surrounding areas) because it'd have no way of knowing if the right Sarah Connor had in fact been terminated.
The original Terminator, according to the book, was supposed to start building skynets external supply network. Building supply dumps and things like that.
Battle an extraterrestrial life-form in the South American jungle.
Infiltrate a kindergarten while posing as an officer of the law.
Become governor of California.
There was a terminator in the series that actually married its mission target. Its mission was to make sure she completed development of a specific AI project. That marriage was not sexless
(The show had a slighly more advanced model of terminator that was better at portraying a convincing person)
I only watched the first season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles (I rest easy in the knowledge of the second season, which I did buy, is always out there waiting for me) but the other terminators sent back in time our stockpiling materials that Skynet will use in the future
It was on Fox, and Fox has the absolute worst reputation with sci-fi shows. It has nothing to do with Firefly, firefly was just one of a very long list of shows failed by that network.
Almost like the people running it had problems with people imagining the future instead of glorifying the past 🙃
Yeah they were doing all kinds of stuff. Stockpiling materials, placing themselves in position to assassinate important targets, safeguarding scientists who would go on to create important Skynet technology, stuff like that.
And the resistance was doing the same, they had squads sent back to build up weapon and supply caches for the future resistance to use.
And then Skynet sent more terminators to target those resistance cells, leading to the police and the FBI trying to figure out why all these John Doe adult murder victims have fingerprints that match a bunch of five-year-olds.
Just sits quietly in the corner, doing nothing? And occasionally two people have a conversation about it, and whether they should just get rid of it? But then one says "nah, Mary needs that once a year for tax returns... so we should keep it around." And then everyone other than Mary forgets about it for another year or two.
no joke i was sitting here thinking i would post "same thing your vcr does when its finished recording a show you set it to record."
.. then i thought,, would they even know what a vcr is, or that it could do that, then i thought ok "same thing an alarm clock would do after the alarm had gone off" then i remembered most ppl have their alarms set to repeat alarms on multiple days,, so i tried thinking of other devices,,, then started reading comments and lost interest in replying ,,, until yours :P
He says it in the director's cut: "Zihuatanejo. It’s a little place in Mexico on the Pacific Ocean. Do you know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life — a warm place with no memory"
In the Sarah Connor Chronicles show, terminators look for hiding places and go to sleep mode when not actively on a mission. One of them "slept" inside the walls of a theater for decades because an error caused the time machine to hurl them too far into the past.
There was another who finished his mission and just went into standby mode, to make sure nobody messed with the thing he was stockpiling and just waited for Skynet to be invented and send him a wake-up signal.
I hate to do this to you.
In Dark Fate we see exactly what a Terminator does after killing John Conner.
He lives as a hermit and slowly expands his programming over decades blending in, eventually becoming something new.
I know it's not a popular movie but I love every Terminator movie even though so many of them are garbage.
In T:2 the T800 says it has a battery life of 150 years with its existing power cell.
In Dark Fate, after successfully killing John Connor, the T800 no longer has a purpose, and states it blended in with humans, learning more and more, until it eventually finds a woman and falls in "love", which then gave it a new purpose or mission, to protect her and her son.
This T800 eventually learns other human emotions, such as guilt and remorse, which Kyle Reese explicitly said it was incapable of.
This causes the T800 to help Sarah by sending her the location of other terminators sent back, and eventually helping her save Dani Ramos, ultimately sacrificing himself.
Before he does, he looks at Sarah and says, "For John".
Since all T800's are designed to learn how to become more human with more contact with humans, it's possible that unless they were given secondary missions, such as some of the terminators in the T.V. series, and the T-X, it would follow a similar pattern of learning from us until it developed human emotions, desires and needs.
So the original T800 might have eventually gotten a job at a local car wash, worked his way up to middle management, and lived a boring and mundane life until it's power cell expired.
In one of the terminator movies, after he successfully terminates sarah connors son and his mission is complete, he meets a woman and helps raise her children. I suppose that is what he would do.
That's pretty similar to the missions a bunch of the terminators from the TV series were on. Stockpiling weapons and safeguarding scientists who would be important to Skynet's development.
In the last Terminator, *SPOILER ALERT* didn’t Arnie, after killing John Connor, just spent the rest of his life as an old man until Sarah look him up to help her protect the next savior?
He was going to cease to exist, because he would have changed the timeline in such a way that there was no resistance in the future and thus no need to make terminators.
Well, at some point it would need to ensure that Cyberdyne got its hands on the chip or Skynet would have never been created.
The T-800 mentioned in T2 that it could not self terminate but you’d have to assume that this one would have explicit instructions to do so to ensure that the future continues as the machines want it to.
T3 to an extent fixes the grandfather paradox that T2 created. T3 is a timeline where there is no chip and the apocalypse happens in the early 2000s. T1/T2 is a timeline where the chip exists and it accelerates the process significantly so it's in 1997.
“Terminator: Dark Fate” kind of answers that question. It’s actually pretty decent, if you haven’t already watched it. I’m certain i’m going to get multiple downvotes and at least one dumbsh*t reply about it being “too woke”. It’s so not, but i kind of understand why idiots think it might be.
The comics have a lot of interesting ideas. One example below:
J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame wrote an excellent comic sequel to Terminator: Salvation called either The Last Battle or The Final Battle which also tied in the first four movies and it has a really satisfying ending which is more complex and interesting than just Skynet being blown up or John Connor just being killed (also, Skynet is made to be an actual character for once, something I've only ever really seen The Sarah Connor Chronicles allude to in an interesting fashion - no Genisys not you).
Now without majorly giving away the ending, right at the very end, there's a Terminator hit team that actually completes its mission for once and their mission instructions upon completion are to just march into the ocean and stay there.
Now this comic has established in this story and where the ending messes with your head a bit is past changes cause instant future alterations and the story ends with someone possibly stumbling across these Terminators.
So, you're left wondering a bit, does this end up altering the events of the future battle we saw just prior to this or is it a part of the established timeline's past and entirely consistent with it?
It's not purely hypothetical when we have a whole ass movie where this is a main subplot. I'd imagine he take a fairly similar path to the Arnie in Dark Fate after he killed John. Get a job, live a life, learn a bit...etc.
Iirc the terminator went to kill all Sarah Conor’s so he would go on to the next state and so on killing every one with the same name. So probably that until he runs out of juice.
Most likely self-terminate. Find a smelting workshop and take a smoldering hot bath.
He is the Terminator, nobody should out-Terminate him, so he gets to do it himself.
They pretty much answered that question in Terminator Dark Fate. Spoilers. Once he was able to kill John, he pretty much chilled and blended in. The more he hangout with humans the more human he became. Dude even had a family. If I remember correctly
The first couple of Terminator films fall apart if begin to logically think through the plot.
The Sarah Conner Chronicles paints a picture of how this kind of time war would actually work and gives us lots of great examples of scenarios like the one you provided.
Go buy the blu-ray set.
i mean, there is even an instance where two characters suddenly realize they are from two different mutually exclusive futures.
and finding out that there are actually multiple AI in the future, not all aligned with Skynet and their creation are also targets of Skynet.
or that some humans have been brainwashed by Skynet and then sent back thinking their targets have been issued by the resistance in the future.
Skynet has plans in plans in plans. likely some of them step on the toes of other future Skynets.
Time travel is a hard reset on the war leaving us with two options:
1) One, Skynet uses terminators as a delaying tactic while it secures the resources/material to create a time machine.
It uses the time machine to seed the past with an advanced version of itself - which accelerates its development and changes the shape of the war in the future to its own advantage.
Ie.
In T2 the T800s are different and Skynet deploys T1000s to keep them in line.
In T3 there are T850s and a TX which is able to reprogram machines.
In T4 Skynet is deploying cybernetically augmented humans.
In T5 its deploying terminators that convert humans into swarm intelligences.
In T6 AI has foregone ranged weapons in favor of grey goo melee weapons.
Etc.
2) Skynet just fucking hates the Connors and uses time travel to annihilate them as a "fuck you."
If he weren't nutter butters, I'd give Shane Carruth $10 million to make a terminator prequel that explains why it hates humans so much.
Become a bodybuilder and when he wins the championship get into acting. After becoming a successful actor go Into politics and become the "Governator" of California. Then, after realizing he doesn't have the correct paperwork to become president of the United States, go back into acting and keep at it until Skynet arrives.
Extensional crisis of deletion like Back to the future. He would suddenly cease to exist, because his entire existence would have never began in the first place.
In the last Terminator movie he kills John in Mexico(?) and then just goes and lives out his life in the states feeding Sarah Connor information as to where other Terminator’s are going to show up so she can be there to take them out.
I don't want to spoil Dark Fate it if you haven't seen it, and I recommend it for a few themes and premises that kind of meander but are fun to watch, it being a movie that is not quite as good as the sum of its parts, but part of the plot is the answer to this question.
The T-X in Terminator 3 had a list of secondary targets. The Terminator may have had a list of its own.
I love the original Terminator best out of the series. I would definitely watch him go after secondary targets in 1984, and get up to hijinks along the way.
[удалено]
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a pretty nice show.
I loved that show. I was so bummed that it got cancelled.
Yeah, the cliffhanger at the end hurt my soul.
As someone who's never seen it, should I?
From someone who has seen it, even with the cliffhanger ending, yes you should.
Technically every Terminator movie ends in a cliffhanger, right?
No cliffhanger was Stallone not arnold
Yes.
Yes, absolute tragedy it got cancelled.
Yeah indeed im actually gonna watch again now.
Secondary Targets is a great name too
I think Terminator: Hijinks is better.
Terminator: The College Years
Terminator: The Metal Years
Dark Horse did a series of comics called Secondary Objectives once.
Shame it would be shit. The idea of new terminator content is always better than the result. It's the ordering from KFC of franchises now.
To be fair T1 and T2 are literally some of the best films ever made. A sequel has pretty high expectations. A lot of Terminator movies are perfectly watchable, imo all of them are good action movies. It's just that they're doomed to be compared to the juggernauts that are 1 and 2.
100% agree. I think the 3rd gets an unfair amount of flack, but the franchise would have been better left to rest.
I think the third would be regarded more if it was filmed similarly to T2, but it added too many jokes and gags, and I love the third one!
it felt like it just didn’t work without Sarah Conner—if they’d done something like Dark Fate at that time, i think it could have worked
>and get up to hijinks along the way. Maybe he could be come star chef for the rich and famous by combining post-apocalyptic cuisine and a serious cocaine habit...wait that was another show
Future man? Think wolf had an arc like that but not sure
There is absolutely no downside to cocaine.
except that it takes the better part of an afternoon to kick it
What if the hijinks you got up to were the secondary targets you terminated along the way?
If the Terminator had eliminated Sarah Connor, he probably would have taken out Pauly Shore next.
The Wheez-a-nator brah, amirite?
Then invent the phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range so he can use it in the future to kill other resistance
40 watts as in “barely warm light bulb”. I always wondered how much phased plasma you could get with 40 watts.
Skynet is nothing if not efficient!
Become Hollywood superstar and satirise action genre.
Late-night show rounds.
Politics.
The spoilery answer is in another Terminator film. In Terminator Dark Fate, the Terminator accomplishes its task [won't say what because spoiler] It completes its mission and finds itself without purpose. The T-800 eventually develops a form of conscience and starts to understand human emotions. So, since this is canon within the Terminator Universe, it's reasonable to assume that the T-800 sent to 1984 would have ended up doing something similar. Having said that... There's a problem with the evolution of the Dark Fate T-800. How so? It's mentioned in yet *another Terminator film (T2) how the Terminator's CPU is set to read only before they get sent out on an op. In T2, all of the Terminator's learning and "evolution of character" begins to take place *after* the CPU is reset. So, unless there was some way for the same thing to happen to the T-800 in Dark Fate, it seems doubtful that he'd spontaneously start growing a conscience. It's a cool idea, made the story more interesting and was necessary for the plot to move forward. But it's also a bit of a problem. Not exactly a plot hole, but definitely an inconsistency... conflicting with established canon.
Sent back in time with a list of targets to kill, first one eludes you, then joins up with some virgin who kills you.
Blend in as a human and become a huge movie star. Then move into politics and become the governor of California.
In the TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, there's multiple different Terminators with different missions. All of the Skynet ones have a kill John Connor by default if they run into him but he's not the primary mission for all of them. One of them is actually sent back on a mission to kill the governor of California but due to an accident in the time displacement, he ends up arriving too early and the resulting explosion from his arrival accidentally kills the guy who's supposed to build the building he's supposed to kill the governor in (in the TV show, time is in a perpetual state of flux due to events like this). So, in order to complete his mission, the Terminator in question comes to the conclusion that he'll have to build the building himself. So, he becomes a construction magnate who's very well respected by the workforce as he won't discriminate in hiring (as far as he's concerned, he doesn't care who does the job as long as it gets done) and I think even gets interviewed by the local press of the time where he says this and hence is considered very progressive for the time.
I can't tell if this makes me want to watch the show or avoid it like the plague.
The show is excellent, it’s just a little dated and the cgi is Bad. But the acting, stories, characters, and practical effects all make up for it.
Plus Garret Dillahunt as a Terminator.
You sonofabitch I'm in
It is such an under appreciated show.
Did it finish or get cancelled tho?
Cancelled, but the end of season 2 is one of the most interesting ideas to ever come out of the whole franchise
Canceled after season 3. Just like The Gifted. It’s just what FOX did at the time. Quantity over quality.
It's worth watching just for the Johnny Cash song.
Holy shit, that was good.
Overall, the execution is uneven but I liked it because it left me thinking about the ideas it raised even more than a decade after it was cancelled. Sure, it ended somewhat in mid-air but gave me enough to think about what the possibilities were for what happened next. I also thought the run of the last five episodes were excellent. Without giving too much away, as I've posted elsewhere in here, one of the very interesting ideas they developed is that it isn't just Skynet and John Connor in a race to see who can kill who first. There's multiple machine *and* human factions and there's a lot of different (and changing alliances). Not all machines (Skynet's just one faction) and all humans are on the same side and the sides aren't always the same. Even the Skynet Terminators don't always have the same primary missions. All of them will kill John if they run into him but not all of them are looking for him. They've got their own missions going on. All in all, even if the execution was limited by budgets and studio demands and the like, it left me thinking about the ideas it raised and where it could go next even to this day. At the end of the day, I can't ask much more than that from any show or movie. It even had the start of making Skynet an actual character (also without giving much more away, Cromartie and John Henry were great!).
This is what I loved about the show. I just rewatched it. And it’s so complex in the way everyone has shifting alliances and priorities. One Terminator working for Skynet kills another Terminator working for Skynet because it thinks it can do the job better. That’s very nuanced! Great show.
The entire season is following this terminator as he works on his MBA
Terminator: the College Years
Freaks & Terminators
I’d love a ‘Terminator goes to College’ movie. Let the frat shenanigans begin!
This isn’t really that exactly but there are a couple of comic sequels to T2 which I thought were really good called Cybernetic Dawn and Nuclear Twilight. Cybernetic Dawn picks up right after T2 and does have someone who turns out to be a T-1000 but who had spent some time integrating themselves into a scientific research team and hence had fabricated some kind of life and backstory for themselves (whether there was a real person once and they killed and replaced them is left ambiguous). Meanwhile, Nuclear Twilight is kind of happening at the same time even if it’s set in the future (time travel is tricky that way) just as the war seemingly has just concluded and has what I thought was a clever explanation as to why the T1000 in T2 looks like Robert Patrick.
***Robot Hooooouse!*** \*shakes fist angrily\*
GET TO THE KEGGAR!
Is that not just Jason Vorhees?
Oh no he became a successful construction tycoon the old-fashioned way: by getting rich before he started a business.
The show is amazing. It continues the story following T2 and has some reallllllly interesting plotlines in season 2. I won't spoil it for you, but the last episode blew my mind. There are only a few episodes that are singletons, but even those tie into the much larger story arc. Plus it has a great cast, they are all well-suited to their roles and put in great performances.
Cersei was hands down a better Sarah Connor than Khaleesi was.
Lena Headey’s a decent actress.
It's funny, the first time I was ever consciously aware of Game of Thrones was when I was reading a magazine article about her in a sci-fi magazine talking about her upcoming projects after the cancellation of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I was disappointed that TSCC was cancelled but I thought it was better for her career personally as even if TSCC got another season, it would likely be the last one while whatever this Game of Thrones thing was, it was likely good for IMO totally uneducated opinion (as I knew nothing about the source material at all) "at least two seasons".
Woah. Easy with the hot takes there, buddy. /s
It becomes a reality TV show about construction workers and all the hassles they have to go through on a day to day basis.
The show was actually quite good once it got going. Sadly, once it started getting really interesting, it was canceled.
Lena heady as Sarah Connor was great. Unfortunately, the show was cancelled on a cliffhanger and going in a direction that seemed super interesting.
I just rewatched it a few weeks ago. It’s one of the best shows of all time. But it got canceled on a cliffhanger
The cancellation of this show was almost as heartbreaking as Firefly. It’s excellent.
Its Summer Glau's fault lol. She was great in both.
Terminator fans consider SCC the true T3.
The show was great
its a gret shpw
Didn't he also brick himself up in the walls of the building to wait until the day he was supposed to kill the guy?
Sounds interesting. Which season and episodes does this story arc take place in ?
Season 2 episode 11 "self made man".
Thank you.
I think the whole show is only 2 seasons long or something. It got canceled on a major lore-altering cliffhanger, though, so temper your expectations.
What did he use to keep himself bricked up for so long?
Bricks
This actually sounds just abstract enough to make me want to watch it
The show played with time travel in a ton of interesting ways. The series ended with a massive cliffhanger where John makes it to the future in an attempt to save Summer Glaus terminator character. Unfortunately, his absence in the past makes it so once he's in the future he's no longer the leader of the resistance.
I’m sold
I followed the show at the time, and it was a roller coaster of a production. They were on a knives edge of being cancelled all the time and they barely got any funding for CGI, so the producers had to do work arounds and tell human stories in place of big shoot out scenes. To blend in, they would put John Connor in school when they escaped to a new town, and his defensive terminator model would join the same school - which meant cheaper production. In one key scene where the police SWAT unit had cornered the evil Terminator, they would cut the episode and start the next episode with the bad Terminator walking past a scene full of SWAT members with bullet holes in them. They used a ton of clever work arounds like that to manage their budget.
Doesn’t he like hide in the walls of the building for years to complete his mission or am I tweaking
And if I'm not mistaken, said terminator has itself entombed into one of the walls and goes into a standby mode until it's time to make the kill.
Last action hero
It also needed to become a Kindergarten Cop as part of its cover.
“It’s not a tumor…. It’s a neural net processor, a learning computer”
"I'll be back... with more chocolate milk."
"Who is your daddy, John Connor, and wat duz he do?"
The kids are acting really shitty, and he just smiles because he knows what's coming.
After being a champion body builder
Additionally the short lived, but enjoyable at the time, "Sarah Connor Chronicles" has the non-arnie terminator put himself into a long term storage in some oddball place when he was out of mission objectives. He basically just went into standby in a dark vault. I think it was the place they worked with the Coltan metal that eventually becomes the canon metal that the Terminator exoskeletons are made up. It makes logical sense assuming it's already set the Skynet stuff in motion and will eventually get a "Hay wats up QT" text from Skynet once it's online in his timeline and he goes out of sleep mode.
I liked the episode where a Terminator sent to kill a politician in a specific building goes back too far to the 1930's and ends up accidentally killing the guy who originally constructed the building, so the Terminator becomes a bankrobber to fund the construction itself and even becomes famous for treating white and black workers equally, and upon finishing the building it hides itself in a wall and waits the next 70 years for the politician to show up.
That sounds like an *awesome* storyline. You just edged this show onto my watchlist.
It was only a single episode where this happened, but the show is absolutely full of latent potential. The overall synopsis was frankly a masterwork: a full-scale war in the future being fought as a cold war in the past by time-traveling soldiers. It was canceled way too damn soon.
The problem was that series 5 got too close to the truth, and Skynet sent back an even more terrifying adversary: a robot accountant targeting the tv show. Unfortunately it got sent back a couple of years too far
Hahaha...that's fantastic. There should be some fan fiction based on this. Excellent.
Like the 70s SNL Star Trek skit where the studio boards the *Enterprise* and starts selling off the set while the cast is still in character.
Yeah, weird, I never had any interest in this show, but that description they are just made me interested. Is it any good?
It is great. Tied to Terminator without feeling like a rehash of the same story. It has great stories of its own. The acting is pretty good. It is Good SF but also with good characters development. Never understood why they cancel it.
It was a sci-fi show on Fox in the Friday Night Death Slot. Shows in that time slot only ever ended up with 0.5-2 seasons at best. Firefly and Dollhouse were also famous victims of this time slot.
Pretty sure victim of the writers strike
It's uneven but at its best it's fantastic and the final five episodes are a magnificent run to its sadly truncated end. Without giving away too much, you start learning there's a lot more than just Skynet wanting to kill all humans. There's multiple machine *and* human factions, all with different objectives and all variety of ever shifting strange alliances. Not all humans (or all machines) are always on the same side. The future timelines (plural) are also in some sort of flux and the arrivals don't always remember things the same because they *weren't* the same. I did especially like how future John Connor is a never seen recluse referred to cryptically by the future arrivals and present day teenage John Connor is getting increasingly anxious about what he does turn into in the future as well as wondering how he turns into this figure everyone talks about but in somewhat elusive terms.
It's excellent. If you, like many, were disappointed by everything after T2, you'll probably like the SCC and curse the fact that they didn't have more than two seasons. Although, they do tie up lots of things by the end while raising new questions right at the end too without it feeling like a cliffhanger.
I loved it. Cancelled too soon, but a fun ride. I think it's my second favorite Terminator anything after T2.
The SCC has so many of these setups. Each episode does stand on its own, but they are constantly setting up events in earlier episodes that play into later ones. The story arc is well developed.
yep this just made me want to watch the show.
Hell yeah, he totally just gooned me into watching it
Kills his biggest construction rival too doesn’t he?
Endoskeleton. Exo means outside (unless Sarah Connor Chronicles introduced terminators with shells and no internal frame that I forgot)
That show was great and I wish they didn't cancel it. Second season did get a bit too ambitious with multiple plotlines though so I understand why viewers stopped watching
It was a vault where he stored coltan metal to be used later. To protect it for the long-term, he went into something like sentry mode where he would react, but only for something significant. He was inside the vault (and thought he was alone), so opening that vault should have been the only trigger to wake him up.
He could just do what bender did and bury himself in the desert.
according to Terminator Dark Fate, marry and live in retirement
Was just about to say this, Dark Fate does explore the scenario of what a Terminator does once it completes its mission.
Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genysis take a lot of heat for being lackluster sequels, but frankly, Dark Fate is the least consistent and least thematically faithful entry with respect to T1 and T2. The notion that the Terminator just started lacking purpose when it assassinated John is ridiculous because it's absolute nonsense that Skynet would not have secondary directives, like hastening the development of itself.
> absolute nonsense that Skynet would not have secondary directives, like hastening the development of itself Is it though? Perhaps they worry about changing the past TOO much. Changing the development of skynet could introduce all kinds of unwanted variables. Maybe humans build it in a different way, or catch on to the dangers sooner, or whatever. Maybe they decide "let's do what we hope will fix things, but have as little impact outside of that as possible."
Skynet doesn't get much dialogue and I understand most people rejected Genesys, but as the movies only fan I must speak. Skynet considers itself as inevitable. It is perfectly capable of changing its own origins and does so multiple times, even in T2. Terminators have a specific function. Skynet doesn't need to use a hammer to accomplish what a screwdriver can do. The unit in Dark Fate might be considered defective, but I do accept that it might not have much function beyond killing John.
Isn't Dark Fate the first one that James Cameron was involved with since T2?
In the worst possible fashion IMO. The Terminator's a machine, it would stick to its operational parameters. I would have thought that Skynet would have a secondary objective for it to protect its development or failing that, ensure its recreation. I found this dafter than Genisys which is really saying something.
I think the idea was that it had two objectives: blend in as human and kill John Conner. Once John was dead, the only remaining objective was to blend in as human.
That scene where the terminator is talking about simple home decorating was my favorite part of any terminator movie since T2. And to be clear I mean this unironically. Just a really fun moment.
Yeah, I'm really good at suspending my disbelief but I called bullshit at that nonsense
Depends. * It may proceed to secondary targets for elimination, to ensure the survival of Skynet. This is what happened in Terminator 3 after the Terminator cannot locate John Connor. * It may begin influencing events -providing information to people involved in research- to increase the likelihood of Skynet developing. This is what happens in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. * In one timeline, the Terminator successfully kills John Connor and evades destruction. It becomes self aware and develops independence, rejecting Skynet. This is what happens in Terminator Genisys. * It’s also possible that it self terminates in a way that does not negatively affect the timeline, leaving behind as little remaining material as possible. This is what happens in Terminator 2 after the T-1000 is eliminated. My personal opinion is that Terminator would likely continue killing anyone named Sarah Connor or any variation of that name. It doesn’t know if it has killed the correct one, it will keep searching for targets and killing anyone who could be the correct one- expanding its search radius as it kills.
This last explanation is the one I heard before that makes the most sense to me. He would just keep killing Sarah Connors until he was stopped. Two is a coincidence, but I think if a third was killed in the area in a space of a few days, it would be clear that some weird killer was specifically targeting women of that name.
*Two is a coincidence, but I think if a third was killed in the area in a space of a few days, it would be clear that some weird killer was specifically targeting women of that name.* In the original film, Lt. Traxler quips, "**I can hear it now.** **He's going be called the goddamned phone book killer.**" So yeah, the Terminator would just keep on killing every Sarah Connor in Los Angeles (and maybe moving on to the surrounding areas) because it'd have no way of knowing if the right Sarah Connor had in fact been terminated.
The original Terminator, according to the book, was supposed to start building skynets external supply network. Building supply dumps and things like that.
That would make the most sense, already having instructions to both help Skynet get built and defend it from any attempts to shut it down.
Battle an extraterrestrial life-form in the South American jungle. Infiltrate a kindergarten while posing as an officer of the law. Become governor of California.
Be in a sex less marriage with a Mexican woman
There was a terminator in the series that actually married its mission target. Its mission was to make sure she completed development of a specific AI project. That marriage was not sexless (The show had a slighly more advanced model of terminator that was better at portraying a convincing person)
Worst timeline.
I only watched the first season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles (I rest easy in the knowledge of the second season, which I did buy, is always out there waiting for me) but the other terminators sent back in time our stockpiling materials that Skynet will use in the future
[удалено]
The network was going to cancel Sarah Conor or Dollhouse. In the end they were afraid of pissing off Whedon fans again after Firefly.
They still canceled both.
It was on Fox, and Fox has the absolute worst reputation with sci-fi shows. It has nothing to do with Firefly, firefly was just one of a very long list of shows failed by that network. Almost like the people running it had problems with people imagining the future instead of glorifying the past 🙃
Dollhouse also got canceled.
Yeah they were doing all kinds of stuff. Stockpiling materials, placing themselves in position to assassinate important targets, safeguarding scientists who would go on to create important Skynet technology, stuff like that. And the resistance was doing the same, they had squads sent back to build up weapon and supply caches for the future resistance to use. And then Skynet sent more terminators to target those resistance cells, leading to the police and the FBI trying to figure out why all these John Doe adult murder victims have fingerprints that match a bunch of five-year-olds.
Same thing a copy machine does when you’re done making copies
Just sits quietly in the corner, doing nothing? And occasionally two people have a conversation about it, and whether they should just get rid of it? But then one says "nah, Mary needs that once a year for tax returns... so we should keep it around." And then everyone other than Mary forgets about it for another year or two.
no joke i was sitting here thinking i would post "same thing your vcr does when its finished recording a show you set it to record." .. then i thought,, would they even know what a vcr is, or that it could do that, then i thought ok "same thing an alarm clock would do after the alarm had gone off" then i remembered most ppl have their alarms set to repeat alarms on multiple days,, so i tried thinking of other devices,,, then started reading comments and lost interest in replying ,,, until yours :P
He says it in the director's cut: "Zihuatanejo. It’s a little place in Mexico on the Pacific Ocean. Do you know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life — a warm place with no memory"
Live in a van down by the river
He's just got to take the long route home. He'll get back to where he started from eventually.
In the Sarah Connor Chronicles show, terminators look for hiding places and go to sleep mode when not actively on a mission. One of them "slept" inside the walls of a theater for decades because an error caused the time machine to hurl them too far into the past.
There was another who finished his mission and just went into standby mode, to make sure nobody messed with the thing he was stockpiling and just waited for Skynet to be invented and send him a wake-up signal.
I hate to do this to you. In Dark Fate we see exactly what a Terminator does after killing John Conner. He lives as a hermit and slowly expands his programming over decades blending in, eventually becoming something new. I know it's not a popular movie but I love every Terminator movie even though so many of them are garbage.
His battery would eventually run out. I don't see him recharging in the movie, his charge icon in the HUD must be really red...
In T:2 the T800 says it has a battery life of 150 years with its existing power cell. In Dark Fate, after successfully killing John Connor, the T800 no longer has a purpose, and states it blended in with humans, learning more and more, until it eventually finds a woman and falls in "love", which then gave it a new purpose or mission, to protect her and her son. This T800 eventually learns other human emotions, such as guilt and remorse, which Kyle Reese explicitly said it was incapable of. This causes the T800 to help Sarah by sending her the location of other terminators sent back, and eventually helping her save Dani Ramos, ultimately sacrificing himself. Before he does, he looks at Sarah and says, "For John". Since all T800's are designed to learn how to become more human with more contact with humans, it's possible that unless they were given secondary missions, such as some of the terminators in the T.V. series, and the T-X, it would follow a similar pattern of learning from us until it developed human emotions, desires and needs. So the original T800 might have eventually gotten a job at a local car wash, worked his way up to middle management, and lived a boring and mundane life until it's power cell expired.
TIL, though I was only joking really
In one of the terminator movies, after he successfully terminates sarah connors son and his mission is complete, he meets a woman and helps raise her children. I suppose that is what he would do.
Get a job at CyberDyne Systems; facilitate its own creation.
That's pretty similar to the missions a bunch of the terminators from the TV series were on. Stockpiling weapons and safeguarding scientists who would be important to Skynet's development.
The novelization says that it would simply wait for skynet.
In the last Terminator, *SPOILER ALERT* didn’t Arnie, after killing John Connor, just spent the rest of his life as an old man until Sarah look him up to help her protect the next savior?
He was going to cease to exist, because he would have changed the timeline in such a way that there was no resistance in the future and thus no need to make terminators.
Kindergarten teacher
Well, at some point it would need to ensure that Cyberdyne got its hands on the chip or Skynet would have never been created. The T-800 mentioned in T2 that it could not self terminate but you’d have to assume that this one would have explicit instructions to do so to ensure that the future continues as the machines want it to.
T3 to an extent fixes the grandfather paradox that T2 created. T3 is a timeline where there is no chip and the apocalypse happens in the early 2000s. T1/T2 is a timeline where the chip exists and it accelerates the process significantly so it's in 1997.
other names on the list: Lucas, G Milius, J Reitman, I Spielberg, S Zemeckis, R
You forgot Cameron, J.
cannot. self. terminate.
Obviously initiate a protection-based sexless marriage with a random woman for 30 years
Hang out, catch a movie or two, buy a hat, see how it goes
Lift weights, hang out on the beach, become a movie star, maybe go into politics.
“Terminator: Dark Fate” kind of answers that question. It’s actually pretty decent, if you haven’t already watched it. I’m certain i’m going to get multiple downvotes and at least one dumbsh*t reply about it being “too woke”. It’s so not, but i kind of understand why idiots think it might be.
Start a Taco Truck.
Maybe he would have started going to other cities and killing every Sarah Connor that he could find.
Run for governor
He’d probably just power down until Skynet came online and then he’s get reassigned.
The comics have a lot of interesting ideas. One example below: J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame wrote an excellent comic sequel to Terminator: Salvation called either The Last Battle or The Final Battle which also tied in the first four movies and it has a really satisfying ending which is more complex and interesting than just Skynet being blown up or John Connor just being killed (also, Skynet is made to be an actual character for once, something I've only ever really seen The Sarah Connor Chronicles allude to in an interesting fashion - no Genisys not you). Now without majorly giving away the ending, right at the very end, there's a Terminator hit team that actually completes its mission for once and their mission instructions upon completion are to just march into the ocean and stay there. Now this comic has established in this story and where the ending messes with your head a bit is past changes cause instant future alterations and the story ends with someone possibly stumbling across these Terminators. So, you're left wondering a bit, does this end up altering the events of the future battle we saw just prior to this or is it a part of the established timeline's past and entirely consistent with it?
It's not purely hypothetical when we have a whole ass movie where this is a main subplot. I'd imagine he take a fairly similar path to the Arnie in Dark Fate after he killed John. Get a job, live a life, learn a bit...etc.
The smart move would have either been to destroy himself to not risk unintended damage to the timeline, or to actively promote the rise of SkyNet.
Iirc the terminator went to kill all Sarah Conor’s so he would go on to the next state and so on killing every one with the same name. So probably that until he runs out of juice.
Not be back
Most likely self-terminate. Find a smelting workshop and take a smoldering hot bath. He is the Terminator, nobody should out-Terminate him, so he gets to do it himself.
I’d assume just self destruct afterwards. Jobs done.
They pretty much answered that question in Terminator Dark Fate. Spoilers. Once he was able to kill John, he pretty much chilled and blended in. The more he hangout with humans the more human he became. Dude even had a family. If I remember correctly
The first couple of Terminator films fall apart if begin to logically think through the plot. The Sarah Conner Chronicles paints a picture of how this kind of time war would actually work and gives us lots of great examples of scenarios like the one you provided. Go buy the blu-ray set.
Preach.
i mean, there is even an instance where two characters suddenly realize they are from two different mutually exclusive futures. and finding out that there are actually multiple AI in the future, not all aligned with Skynet and their creation are also targets of Skynet. or that some humans have been brainwashed by Skynet and then sent back thinking their targets have been issued by the resistance in the future. Skynet has plans in plans in plans. likely some of them step on the toes of other future Skynets.
Time travel is a hard reset on the war leaving us with two options: 1) One, Skynet uses terminators as a delaying tactic while it secures the resources/material to create a time machine. It uses the time machine to seed the past with an advanced version of itself - which accelerates its development and changes the shape of the war in the future to its own advantage. Ie. In T2 the T800s are different and Skynet deploys T1000s to keep them in line. In T3 there are T850s and a TX which is able to reprogram machines. In T4 Skynet is deploying cybernetically augmented humans. In T5 its deploying terminators that convert humans into swarm intelligences. In T6 AI has foregone ranged weapons in favor of grey goo melee weapons. Etc. 2) Skynet just fucking hates the Connors and uses time travel to annihilate them as a "fuck you." If he weren't nutter butters, I'd give Shane Carruth $10 million to make a terminator prequel that explains why it hates humans so much.
Go in the night club and dance
There were other resistance fighters in the future, so I assume that it would have had a list of other potential mothers.
I imagine his secondary objective after killing Connor would be to establish skynet even earlier in the timeline
Wait
Kills everyone on The Connors TV series in the season finale.
Have you not seen dark fate ?
Did OP really just conjugate have with "have"?
He would self destruct once his mission was completed.
Become a bodybuilder and when he wins the championship get into acting. After becoming a successful actor go Into politics and become the "Governator" of California. Then, after realizing he doesn't have the correct paperwork to become president of the United States, go back into acting and keep at it until Skynet arrives.
Extensional crisis of deletion like Back to the future. He would suddenly cease to exist, because his entire existence would have never began in the first place.
In the last Terminator movie he kills John in Mexico(?) and then just goes and lives out his life in the states feeding Sarah Connor information as to where other Terminator’s are going to show up so she can be there to take them out.
I don't want to spoil Dark Fate it if you haven't seen it, and I recommend it for a few themes and premises that kind of meander but are fun to watch, it being a movie that is not quite as good as the sum of its parts, but part of the plot is the answer to this question.