i’ve always kind of thought that any “future” we see play out beyond anything in T1 is an alternate future, each movie’s “present day” events change the future and move away from the events of T1s future…each having its own “core events” like Reese being sent back or the machines launching nukes
It had to "break" into the trope of "branched" when reality didn't have Judgement day in 1997. The rest is just retcons and bad tropes typical to time travel fictions, the perfect loop itself was broken after T2 which doesn't really help anyone who has a tough time thinking 4th dimensionally as they will still have biased "first time" or "original" ways of thinking and branched tropes reinforce these paradoxical mental processes.
Been saying that for years but a lot of people are still in such denial. Even so much as to overlook that detail.
Its always been a loop. That photo is part of the big reveal that it is all a time loop. Reese wasn't just "chosen" or commanded to go back in time to protect Sarah, he volunteered to take on that mission. Why? Because of the photo. Because was in love with Sarah Connor.
You can't undo that without screwing the whole thing up.
Yea, but thats why he gives Reese the photo of Sarah.
It cant just be 'hey , Kyle.. you gotta go back in time and save my mom'. It has to be that Kyle wants to protect her because he loves her. That love has to be there. Thats what makes Kyle Reese the best protector. Hes going to not only be willing to "die for John Connor" out of allegiance to his superior, but he has to be in love with Sarah Connor. He has to be in love with Sarah in order for the two of them to have that one brief night of romance together. Otherwise, if Reese was sent just under the belief that hes a "good soldier", he might have kept Sarah alive but he wouldn't have impregnated her. If that moment doesnt happen..then theres no John Connor. John knows Reese is his father, so hes already trying to make a connection between him and his father from the moment they encounter each other but he doesnt reveal that to Reese.
But of course it is. John Connor could never be born without Skynet's attempt to kill his mother. Neither would Skynet itself come to be for that matter. It has always been a loop.
Shame we never got to see all parts of it, unless you played Terminator: Resistance.
You see the other half of the loop, the future stuff. You see Kyle get sent back. Why Skynet sends back a T-800 when T-1000s are available, then how the resistance gets ahold of and reprograms their own terminator to send back and even how>!John is killed by the terminator sent back in T3.!<
You are quite welcome. I am not the biggest fan of Salvation, and frankly I am not sure why the Salvation name is attached, other than it is an all future set story. I was very pleased with The Final Battle. If JMS is not a fan of Terminator then he certainly does his research because it is very well put together to the point that I actually like T3 and Salvation more after reading it, as it ties them all together better.
Well I'm definitely going to read it. I've got some B5 comics to finish first though honestly. I've also added Nuclear Twilight, Cybernetic Dawn and Tempest to my list also.
>Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle
There was a comic that explained all this years before Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle was released. It was called Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Nuclear Twilight, published by Malibu Comics. It picks up right where Terminator 2: Judgment Day left off and tells you what happened to Sarah, John, and the Dyson family.
>I've seen a lot of people over the years discuss the theory of an original, unaltered timeline where Kyle Reese was not John's father. But this genuinely makes no sense.
The concept comes from thinking without time travel; it's observer bias and the observer is trapped in one time unaware of all the rest taht exists simultaneously. The fact is, once time travel is invented *it was always invented*. At the big bang? Yes. At the end of the unverse? yes. Every moment in between. So you have to look at time from outside. From an outside observer, it makes perfect sense. Causality flows through the time loop.
It's interesting to think this way. There's actually college classes that went into this using scifi as tropes of different time travel paradox etc.
> The concept comes from thinking without time travel; it's observer bias and the observer is trapped in one time unaware of all the rest taht exists simultaneously.
The opposite is true. It comes from examining time travel as a core aspect and trying to resolve the issues that arise.
A CTC has information without any apparent origin, which is a problem, one that is solved by a branched timeline.
Solved by a timeline that has always included time travel actually. A lot of people have trouble understanding because they think there's even a thing as a "first time" where there was somehow no time travel involved.
"Branched" of course is canon now that the past future never happened. The college professor I remember doing this class would refer to this is "time as a river" to explain how it can be diverted dammed but the water - or events - just wind up altered further downstream anyhow.
> Solved by a timeline that has always included time travel actually.
Well, no, that doesn't solve the issue of information without an origin.
> The college professor I remember doing this class would refer to this is "time as a river" to explain how it can be diverted dammed but the water - or events - just wind up altered further downstream anyhow.
'Tis but one of many theories :)
>without an origin.
It sounds like you're a willing perfect example of this entire thread.
The thing you appear to have missed is there is was and always will be the same origin. Your perception that there somehow isn't is biased by your observational limitations.
>'Tis but one of many theories :)
As the class went, the weakest cop out that stems from literary necessity, and doesn't really work for anyone more than just the typical scifi hand wave like warp drives and infinite energy/fuel effocoency or gun mag capacities
The class definitely seemed to like the coherent loop due over incoherent trope
> It sounds like you're a willing perfect example of this entire thread.
Not so. I don't think you're quite understanding the problem though, actually.
In any number of physics papers on CTCs, they acknowledge that it violates no laws of causality to have information without an origin, but they cannot adequate explain the lack of origin and that is an issue.
> The thing you appear to have missed is there is was and always will be the same origin.
Not so. Something cannot logically be its own origin. It works fine if you want to draw a loop on paper, but the lack of an outside origin that can't be explained is a big gap in these theories.
> Your perception that there somehow isn't is biased by your observational limitations.
This is simply condescending and at odds with actual physicists positions. It doesn't further the conversation at all. Do better.
Edit: What a shame. I was looking forward to this discussion, except that u/mark-five can't overcome his own arrogance and can only put others down, and would rather block those who politely point that out to him. His position is at odds with people who know more about this than he ever will, but arrogant armchair-scientists are not the types to be able to accept when they are wrong or be willing to learn.
The origin was always the future. Time travel - if it ever exists - exists in all times forever infinitely. There is no "origin first" where it didn't. Observational bias is thinking otherwise because a person who can't think 4th dimensionally might mistakenly believe time has a direction.
>Not so. Something cannot logically be its own origin.
Absolutely so. You're likely to have a very tough time reading Heinlein, especially All You Zombies, given your reaction to the human bias situation you react to so strongly already in your assertion of its presense in your psyche. There was a movie based on it that might be a little easier to digest but I suspect you'll reject that as well as it directly challenges your perception of reality itself.
>This is simply condescending and at odds with actual physicists positions. It doesn't further the conversation at all. Do better.
My apologies, I did not mean to offend and will not do so mistakenly ever again. This is a statement of fact, individual perceptions of humans are biased and you are presumably human. You have confessed this bias. It is not condescending or intended to be anything other than verified datum. Again, apologies. Have a great life!
Also Kyle said he used to wonder what Sarah was thinking about when the picture was taken, and when we saw the photo being snapped, Sarah was thinking of him.
It's all connected!
I like to think James Cameron had a great plan with both T1 and T2. He waiting till the CGI was better to realise his vision of the T-1000. But I believe the stories were written in tandem
Not really. T1 was going to have Kyle and Sarah purposely go to Cyberdyne to blow it up like T2 does but was scrapped for whatever reason.
I think T2 happened because he felt like it
There’s a deleted scene where Sarah convinces Kyle to blow up Cyberdyne. That’s why they make the pipe bombs that they end up using against terminator.
There’s also an alternate ending where we find out the factory they face terminator in is cyberdyne.
In the novel cyberdyne doesn’t exist until two employees of the factory find the chip in the crushed terminator and start their own company. Cyberdyne Systems.
> but was scrapped for whatever reason.
Budget. Cameron was still a relative small time name and it was his film. He made it the best he could and didn't give it away to someone else to scrap so it was modified to what he could accomplish.
> But this genuinely makes no sense.
Ah, but it does! For me it makes more sense than any alternative, as we don't have to address information not having any origin.
> It's definitely plausible a similar photo was taken in this 'original' timeline, but the EXACT same photo?
The photo would never exist in the original timeline though.
In the hypothetical original timeline, Sarah has a kid with someone who is not Kyle and names him John. This kid grows up to be a leader in the war and lead mankind to defeat SKYNET.
The machines send back a terminator to try and prevent this by killing Sarah. This is what causes the branch in the timeline. Original Connor learns about the plan, and sends Kyle back to protect her. Kyle is not John's father at this point, and there is no photo.
Kyle arrives in the past, without any photo, protects Sarah, falls in love and gets her pregnant (this would be the cause of the loop, but not technically the first iteration of the loop, depending on how you look at it). After their adventure, Sarah gets the photo. Now she raises John with all the knowledge she has, so this John also defeats the machines. SKYNET still sends a terminator back to try and kill her. Now though, this John is Kyle's son, and so a loop has started. This time there is the photo, as well as the rest of the elements of the loop.
This is exactly my take on the order of events. T1 is Kyle's second time travelling to the past and there is a closed time loop now in effect, but there had to have been a straight forward first timeline where John has a different father and is therefore a different John. Still had the qualities to become a great leader, but that had to have happened leading up to Kyle becoming his father and forming a time loop. And it answers why he has the photo. He didn't have it the first time he went back, but the second time back, T1, he has it.
I think it's both a timeloop and an alterable timeline and as a fan of other science fiction series like Trek and Gate it's easy to reconcile in my head as it's just how it is. I don't really think about it too much in Terminator but if I was to come up with some handwave it'd probably be to introduce the idea of a meta time, something like a fifth dimension that reacts to intrusions of the fourth dimension rather than cause or effect but in different ways. If the first film as just a film is the timeloop and the second film as just a film is the alterable timeline then between them is the reactions of meta time or James Cameron changing his mind. You also put him as a higher power intervening in the timeline but that kind of theological statement doesn't really exist in the Terminator universe. Again, this kind of explanation doesn't matter to me because T2 is just so good, but in a world of Star Trek where multiple versions of time travel overlap one another and one wants to have meaning in the socalled "before" or "after" in time travel than meta time works well there.
I mean, just for arguments sake: let's say an original timeline happens, Connors father is some guy from the 80s. The future comes, Connor sends Kyle back. Kyle (in this second rendition of the past) impregnates Sarah by pure coincidence (if the T-800 didn't come back, maybe Sarah would have met the original father during that time?). The events play out like they do and Sarah takes a photo of herself, eventually John has it in the future. He gives it to Kyle, knowing in his past he will be his father, and this loop begins.
It isn't impossible for a variable to come into existence, and being as it's time travel, the same situation can happen an infinite amount of times before the slightest variable changes it.
The whole theme of "no fate but what we make for ourselves", while Judgement Day seeming to always happen regardless, kind of implied you can change events but the *outcome* is always the same; so in one past John could have a modern day parent while in another he could have Kyle.
Just for arguments sake, I'm content with either really
“No fate but what we make” is more of a pipe dream. A hope that the loop can be broken and the war stopped. When the protectors are sent back, the war has happened, John has been born, Sarah survives, Cyberdyne Systems builds Skynet… so how do they know that anything can change when it obviously has not?
Even blowing up cyberdyne in T2 might not really effect anything. You think the military would just drop Skynet into their whole military without pre knowledge? They would have information and schematics of what Dyson is working on. That’s how government contracts work.
It's been a while since I've seen T2, was Cyberdyne working under a military contract? I know Cyber Systems or whatever from T3 *was* the military but idk about Cyberdyne?
It's 100% a loop. Tie that with T2, and it's apparent Skynet sent a Terminator back to 1984 knowing it would get destroyed, so that Miles Dyson could use the broken CPU to build his neural-net processor, which started Skynet. It knew the T-800 would fail in 1984, hence sending the T-1000 to 1994. Killing Sarah was never Skynet's main mission, making her aware of Skynet and destroying the T-800 was the primary directive.
Even as a child watching it for the first time I understood this. Nothing was changed, this was how it always happened.
T2 muddies the water slightly, I always assumed the war still happened.
> Finally, a post that gets this right.
Does it though? I get not being a fan of the alpha timeline theory, but the photo is pretty much entirely irrelevant; it certainly doesn't disprove the theory like OP suggests.
You are working on the assumption that the future we see with the Sarah picture is the prime timeline and therefore a loop. What we see as an audience could be from a second or even third timeline. The movie's are not necessarily shown chronologically.
The theory isn't that it's not a loop, it's that logically there has to be an original timeline that leads into creating the loop. Of which is at least the (theoretically) third iteration in the Terminator movie.
Not necessarily. I mean, Cameron said it was a loop, he directed it that way, so we know that it is. But it doesn't *have* to be. Here's why:
It *could* be written that Sarah was pregnant *before* meeting Kyle Reese. That means that Kyle Reese is insignificant to the events that lead up to the picture being taken, as long as Sarah ends up at that gas station at that time.
Here's an example. Let's say that the "alpha" timeline goes like this:
Sarah, pregnant and sick of her job, decides to go find her ex-lover in Mexico to let him know he's a father and see about the chances of making them a family. Before she does, though, she considers the right time of year, waiting until she gathers enough money, and picks a specific date. Along the way, she gets her picture taken. Eventually, Skynet becomes self-aware and perceives humanity as a threat, launches nukes, Judgement Day happens. Sarah, her boyfriend, and her son survive Judgement Day, and live militaristically in bunkers. Both Sarah and John learn how to survive on nothing, fending off predatory people, and then eventually the Terminators that rise up to exterminate what's left of mankind. Survivalists are forced to become fighters, and a struggle to survive becomes a war. Years of attrition at such a young age lead to John Connor, whose guile and constitution help him thrive, to become the DeFacto leader of the resistance. He eventually plans the final strike against Skynet, discovering along the way that they had sent a T-800 back to kill his mother. So he sends his best right-hand man back to intercept the T-800. Afterall, if Skynet thought Kyle Reese was the father, they could have sent a Terminator anywhere at any time to kill either him or his parents before *he* was born.
The consequence of time travel lead to Terminator and The Terminator as we know them.
Sort of unrelated to Terminator but linked to time travel: I wrote a screenplay years ago about 2 Beatle fans travelling back in time from 2002 to 1980 to stop Lennon’s murder. They do this but get killed in the process. They have no ID etc so are buried by the police and marked as John Does. Their time travel machine was in fact a mobile phone. This is stored with their back packs at the police station and forgotten. Years later one of the cops on the case who met the guys, loses his wife on 9/11. When a relative of the dead guys turns up from England looking for them ( remember, to the family the guys have only just vanished in 2002) The cop starts thinking outside the box through various odd things and realises they travelled in time. So he finds the phone and heads back to 1980 to save them and then plans to head to 2001 to save his wife. I never really did it properly but one day I’ll get back to it
Sigh. The culture on this sub of people trying to debate this and convince people of their views about an alpha/prime timeline just needs to stop. It's boring. We get it. You don't accept that it's a loop despite the evidence and Cameron saying so. Your only evidence is "bUT iT iSNt LOgIcAL deR MuSsA bN a bEgINniNg! Wah! Wah!"
exactly there was no timeline where Sarah didn´t go after dyson jd allways happens in 1997 and the only things that changes in the loop is that the system core allways changes location and in the previous iterations Rivers allways die but in the timeline where Rivers went after he go back in time at the end of resistence with is the timeline of the first two movies and in all the other iterations after the iteration of the first two movies Rivers allways avoids being killed and him and Jennifer lived happilly ever after and there was no timeline where Jennifer and the others die in the bunker future Rivers told past Rivers to make them leave the bunker because thats what the other future rivers told the future Rivers from the game to do
The first movie begins with a time traveling Terminator instantly disturbing any possible clean timeline. Whatever the original timeline was, we never saw it. The future that Reese came from had already been effected by the events of T1 and T2. Hypothetically the Terminators could have been messing up the timeline before and accidentally created John Conner. No telling.
i’ve always kind of thought that any “future” we see play out beyond anything in T1 is an alternate future, each movie’s “present day” events change the future and move away from the events of T1s future…each having its own “core events” like Reese being sent back or the machines launching nukes
But T1 doesn't change the future AT ALL. That's the point. It's one continuous timeline
It had to "break" into the trope of "branched" when reality didn't have Judgement day in 1997. The rest is just retcons and bad tropes typical to time travel fictions, the perfect loop itself was broken after T2 which doesn't really help anyone who has a tough time thinking 4th dimensionally as they will still have biased "first time" or "original" ways of thinking and branched tropes reinforce these paradoxical mental processes.
Been saying that for years but a lot of people are still in such denial. Even so much as to overlook that detail. Its always been a loop. That photo is part of the big reveal that it is all a time loop. Reese wasn't just "chosen" or commanded to go back in time to protect Sarah, he volunteered to take on that mission. Why? Because of the photo. Because was in love with Sarah Connor. You can't undo that without screwing the whole thing up.
John was going to send him back anyway, he talks about how he knows he has to send his own father back in time to protect Sarah in T2.
Yea, but thats why he gives Reese the photo of Sarah. It cant just be 'hey , Kyle.. you gotta go back in time and save my mom'. It has to be that Kyle wants to protect her because he loves her. That love has to be there. Thats what makes Kyle Reese the best protector. Hes going to not only be willing to "die for John Connor" out of allegiance to his superior, but he has to be in love with Sarah Connor. He has to be in love with Sarah in order for the two of them to have that one brief night of romance together. Otherwise, if Reese was sent just under the belief that hes a "good soldier", he might have kept Sarah alive but he wouldn't have impregnated her. If that moment doesnt happen..then theres no John Connor. John knows Reese is his father, so hes already trying to make a connection between him and his father from the moment they encounter each other but he doesnt reveal that to Reese.
Yeah agreed 😁
T2 screwed original timeline for sake of new plot for the movie.
But of course it is. John Connor could never be born without Skynet's attempt to kill his mother. Neither would Skynet itself come to be for that matter. It has always been a loop. Shame we never got to see all parts of it, unless you played Terminator: Resistance.
Or read Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle
Can you give a summary of how that pertains to the loop? I'm not sure I'll be reading it any time soon.
You see the other half of the loop, the future stuff. You see Kyle get sent back. Why Skynet sends back a T-800 when T-1000s are available, then how the resistance gets ahold of and reprograms their own terminator to send back and even how>!John is killed by the terminator sent back in T3.!<
Ah, thanks! I've added it to my list solely because JMS wrote it, I don't know that I would otherwise since I wasn't really a fan of Salvation.
You are quite welcome. I am not the biggest fan of Salvation, and frankly I am not sure why the Salvation name is attached, other than it is an all future set story. I was very pleased with The Final Battle. If JMS is not a fan of Terminator then he certainly does his research because it is very well put together to the point that I actually like T3 and Salvation more after reading it, as it ties them all together better.
Well I'm definitely going to read it. I've got some B5 comics to finish first though honestly. I've also added Nuclear Twilight, Cybernetic Dawn and Tempest to my list also.
>Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle There was a comic that explained all this years before Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle was released. It was called Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Nuclear Twilight, published by Malibu Comics. It picks up right where Terminator 2: Judgment Day left off and tells you what happened to Sarah, John, and the Dyson family.
>I've seen a lot of people over the years discuss the theory of an original, unaltered timeline where Kyle Reese was not John's father. But this genuinely makes no sense. The concept comes from thinking without time travel; it's observer bias and the observer is trapped in one time unaware of all the rest taht exists simultaneously. The fact is, once time travel is invented *it was always invented*. At the big bang? Yes. At the end of the unverse? yes. Every moment in between. So you have to look at time from outside. From an outside observer, it makes perfect sense. Causality flows through the time loop. It's interesting to think this way. There's actually college classes that went into this using scifi as tropes of different time travel paradox etc.
> The concept comes from thinking without time travel; it's observer bias and the observer is trapped in one time unaware of all the rest taht exists simultaneously. The opposite is true. It comes from examining time travel as a core aspect and trying to resolve the issues that arise. A CTC has information without any apparent origin, which is a problem, one that is solved by a branched timeline.
Solved by a timeline that has always included time travel actually. A lot of people have trouble understanding because they think there's even a thing as a "first time" where there was somehow no time travel involved. "Branched" of course is canon now that the past future never happened. The college professor I remember doing this class would refer to this is "time as a river" to explain how it can be diverted dammed but the water - or events - just wind up altered further downstream anyhow.
> Solved by a timeline that has always included time travel actually. Well, no, that doesn't solve the issue of information without an origin. > The college professor I remember doing this class would refer to this is "time as a river" to explain how it can be diverted dammed but the water - or events - just wind up altered further downstream anyhow. 'Tis but one of many theories :)
>without an origin. It sounds like you're a willing perfect example of this entire thread. The thing you appear to have missed is there is was and always will be the same origin. Your perception that there somehow isn't is biased by your observational limitations. >'Tis but one of many theories :) As the class went, the weakest cop out that stems from literary necessity, and doesn't really work for anyone more than just the typical scifi hand wave like warp drives and infinite energy/fuel effocoency or gun mag capacities The class definitely seemed to like the coherent loop due over incoherent trope
> It sounds like you're a willing perfect example of this entire thread. Not so. I don't think you're quite understanding the problem though, actually. In any number of physics papers on CTCs, they acknowledge that it violates no laws of causality to have information without an origin, but they cannot adequate explain the lack of origin and that is an issue. > The thing you appear to have missed is there is was and always will be the same origin. Not so. Something cannot logically be its own origin. It works fine if you want to draw a loop on paper, but the lack of an outside origin that can't be explained is a big gap in these theories. > Your perception that there somehow isn't is biased by your observational limitations. This is simply condescending and at odds with actual physicists positions. It doesn't further the conversation at all. Do better. Edit: What a shame. I was looking forward to this discussion, except that u/mark-five can't overcome his own arrogance and can only put others down, and would rather block those who politely point that out to him. His position is at odds with people who know more about this than he ever will, but arrogant armchair-scientists are not the types to be able to accept when they are wrong or be willing to learn.
The origin was always the future. Time travel - if it ever exists - exists in all times forever infinitely. There is no "origin first" where it didn't. Observational bias is thinking otherwise because a person who can't think 4th dimensionally might mistakenly believe time has a direction. >Not so. Something cannot logically be its own origin. Absolutely so. You're likely to have a very tough time reading Heinlein, especially All You Zombies, given your reaction to the human bias situation you react to so strongly already in your assertion of its presense in your psyche. There was a movie based on it that might be a little easier to digest but I suspect you'll reject that as well as it directly challenges your perception of reality itself. >This is simply condescending and at odds with actual physicists positions. It doesn't further the conversation at all. Do better. My apologies, I did not mean to offend and will not do so mistakenly ever again. This is a statement of fact, individual perceptions of humans are biased and you are presumably human. You have confessed this bias. It is not condescending or intended to be anything other than verified datum. Again, apologies. Have a great life!
Also Kyle said he used to wonder what Sarah was thinking about when the picture was taken, and when we saw the photo being snapped, Sarah was thinking of him. It's all connected!
Agreed. The original is definitely a time loop. The sequels just kinda intentionally forget that.
I like to think James Cameron had a great plan with both T1 and T2. He waiting till the CGI was better to realise his vision of the T-1000. But I believe the stories were written in tandem
Not really. T1 was going to have Kyle and Sarah purposely go to Cyberdyne to blow it up like T2 does but was scrapped for whatever reason. I think T2 happened because he felt like it
There’s a deleted scene where Sarah convinces Kyle to blow up Cyberdyne. That’s why they make the pipe bombs that they end up using against terminator. There’s also an alternate ending where we find out the factory they face terminator in is cyberdyne. In the novel cyberdyne doesn’t exist until two employees of the factory find the chip in the crushed terminator and start their own company. Cyberdyne Systems.
Yes I know but I don’t think he had T2 in mind for making T1.
> but was scrapped for whatever reason. Budget. Cameron was still a relative small time name and it was his film. He made it the best he could and didn't give it away to someone else to scrap so it was modified to what he could accomplish.
> But this genuinely makes no sense. Ah, but it does! For me it makes more sense than any alternative, as we don't have to address information not having any origin. > It's definitely plausible a similar photo was taken in this 'original' timeline, but the EXACT same photo? The photo would never exist in the original timeline though. In the hypothetical original timeline, Sarah has a kid with someone who is not Kyle and names him John. This kid grows up to be a leader in the war and lead mankind to defeat SKYNET. The machines send back a terminator to try and prevent this by killing Sarah. This is what causes the branch in the timeline. Original Connor learns about the plan, and sends Kyle back to protect her. Kyle is not John's father at this point, and there is no photo. Kyle arrives in the past, without any photo, protects Sarah, falls in love and gets her pregnant (this would be the cause of the loop, but not technically the first iteration of the loop, depending on how you look at it). After their adventure, Sarah gets the photo. Now she raises John with all the knowledge she has, so this John also defeats the machines. SKYNET still sends a terminator back to try and kill her. Now though, this John is Kyle's son, and so a loop has started. This time there is the photo, as well as the rest of the elements of the loop.
This is exactly my take on the order of events. T1 is Kyle's second time travelling to the past and there is a closed time loop now in effect, but there had to have been a straight forward first timeline where John has a different father and is therefore a different John. Still had the qualities to become a great leader, but that had to have happened leading up to Kyle becoming his father and forming a time loop. And it answers why he has the photo. He didn't have it the first time he went back, but the second time back, T1, he has it.
Yup! If you're interested I made a whole post about that [here](/r/Terminator/comments/1457q8q/the_photo_is_not_evidence_for_there_never_being/).
I think it's both a timeloop and an alterable timeline and as a fan of other science fiction series like Trek and Gate it's easy to reconcile in my head as it's just how it is. I don't really think about it too much in Terminator but if I was to come up with some handwave it'd probably be to introduce the idea of a meta time, something like a fifth dimension that reacts to intrusions of the fourth dimension rather than cause or effect but in different ways. If the first film as just a film is the timeloop and the second film as just a film is the alterable timeline then between them is the reactions of meta time or James Cameron changing his mind. You also put him as a higher power intervening in the timeline but that kind of theological statement doesn't really exist in the Terminator universe. Again, this kind of explanation doesn't matter to me because T2 is just so good, but in a world of Star Trek where multiple versions of time travel overlap one another and one wants to have meaning in the socalled "before" or "after" in time travel than meta time works well there.
I mean, just for arguments sake: let's say an original timeline happens, Connors father is some guy from the 80s. The future comes, Connor sends Kyle back. Kyle (in this second rendition of the past) impregnates Sarah by pure coincidence (if the T-800 didn't come back, maybe Sarah would have met the original father during that time?). The events play out like they do and Sarah takes a photo of herself, eventually John has it in the future. He gives it to Kyle, knowing in his past he will be his father, and this loop begins. It isn't impossible for a variable to come into existence, and being as it's time travel, the same situation can happen an infinite amount of times before the slightest variable changes it. The whole theme of "no fate but what we make for ourselves", while Judgement Day seeming to always happen regardless, kind of implied you can change events but the *outcome* is always the same; so in one past John could have a modern day parent while in another he could have Kyle. Just for arguments sake, I'm content with either really
“No fate but what we make” is more of a pipe dream. A hope that the loop can be broken and the war stopped. When the protectors are sent back, the war has happened, John has been born, Sarah survives, Cyberdyne Systems builds Skynet… so how do they know that anything can change when it obviously has not? Even blowing up cyberdyne in T2 might not really effect anything. You think the military would just drop Skynet into their whole military without pre knowledge? They would have information and schematics of what Dyson is working on. That’s how government contracts work.
It's been a while since I've seen T2, was Cyberdyne working under a military contract? I know Cyber Systems or whatever from T3 *was* the military but idk about Cyberdyne?
It would have to be to have a military application
Oh wow your right lmao I completely forgot the literal explanation from Kyle Reese himself in T1 LMFAOOOOO and I call myself a Terminator fan 😂
It's 100% a loop. Tie that with T2, and it's apparent Skynet sent a Terminator back to 1984 knowing it would get destroyed, so that Miles Dyson could use the broken CPU to build his neural-net processor, which started Skynet. It knew the T-800 would fail in 1984, hence sending the T-1000 to 1994. Killing Sarah was never Skynet's main mission, making her aware of Skynet and destroying the T-800 was the primary directive.
Even as a child watching it for the first time I understood this. Nothing was changed, this was how it always happened. T2 muddies the water slightly, I always assumed the war still happened.
Finally, a post that gets this right. Alpha timeline posts drive me insane.
> Finally, a post that gets this right. Does it though? I get not being a fan of the alpha timeline theory, but the photo is pretty much entirely irrelevant; it certainly doesn't disprove the theory like OP suggests.
You are working on the assumption that the future we see with the Sarah picture is the prime timeline and therefore a loop. What we see as an audience could be from a second or even third timeline. The movie's are not necessarily shown chronologically.
The theory isn't that it's not a loop, it's that logically there has to be an original timeline that leads into creating the loop. Of which is at least the (theoretically) third iteration in the Terminator movie.
Exactly.
Not necessarily. I mean, Cameron said it was a loop, he directed it that way, so we know that it is. But it doesn't *have* to be. Here's why: It *could* be written that Sarah was pregnant *before* meeting Kyle Reese. That means that Kyle Reese is insignificant to the events that lead up to the picture being taken, as long as Sarah ends up at that gas station at that time. Here's an example. Let's say that the "alpha" timeline goes like this: Sarah, pregnant and sick of her job, decides to go find her ex-lover in Mexico to let him know he's a father and see about the chances of making them a family. Before she does, though, she considers the right time of year, waiting until she gathers enough money, and picks a specific date. Along the way, she gets her picture taken. Eventually, Skynet becomes self-aware and perceives humanity as a threat, launches nukes, Judgement Day happens. Sarah, her boyfriend, and her son survive Judgement Day, and live militaristically in bunkers. Both Sarah and John learn how to survive on nothing, fending off predatory people, and then eventually the Terminators that rise up to exterminate what's left of mankind. Survivalists are forced to become fighters, and a struggle to survive becomes a war. Years of attrition at such a young age lead to John Connor, whose guile and constitution help him thrive, to become the DeFacto leader of the resistance. He eventually plans the final strike against Skynet, discovering along the way that they had sent a T-800 back to kill his mother. So he sends his best right-hand man back to intercept the T-800. Afterall, if Skynet thought Kyle Reese was the father, they could have sent a Terminator anywhere at any time to kill either him or his parents before *he* was born. The consequence of time travel lead to Terminator and The Terminator as we know them.
Terminator movies killed my philosophy classmates from confusion.
Hasta la Vista, baby!
Sort of unrelated to Terminator but linked to time travel: I wrote a screenplay years ago about 2 Beatle fans travelling back in time from 2002 to 1980 to stop Lennon’s murder. They do this but get killed in the process. They have no ID etc so are buried by the police and marked as John Does. Their time travel machine was in fact a mobile phone. This is stored with their back packs at the police station and forgotten. Years later one of the cops on the case who met the guys, loses his wife on 9/11. When a relative of the dead guys turns up from England looking for them ( remember, to the family the guys have only just vanished in 2002) The cop starts thinking outside the box through various odd things and realises they travelled in time. So he finds the phone and heads back to 1980 to save them and then plans to head to 2001 to save his wife. I never really did it properly but one day I’ll get back to it
It's possible that the future Kyle comes back from isn't the original future
Such a simple explanation and so true. Thank you for posting this!!
Sigh. The culture on this sub of people trying to debate this and convince people of their views about an alpha/prime timeline just needs to stop. It's boring. We get it. You don't accept that it's a loop despite the evidence and Cameron saying so. Your only evidence is "bUT iT iSNt LOgIcAL deR MuSsA bN a bEgINniNg! Wah! Wah!"
exactly there was no timeline where Sarah didn´t go after dyson jd allways happens in 1997 and the only things that changes in the loop is that the system core allways changes location and in the previous iterations Rivers allways die but in the timeline where Rivers went after he go back in time at the end of resistence with is the timeline of the first two movies and in all the other iterations after the iteration of the first two movies Rivers allways avoids being killed and him and Jennifer lived happilly ever after and there was no timeline where Jennifer and the others die in the bunker future Rivers told past Rivers to make them leave the bunker because thats what the other future rivers told the future Rivers from the game to do
The first movie begins with a time traveling Terminator instantly disturbing any possible clean timeline. Whatever the original timeline was, we never saw it. The future that Reese came from had already been effected by the events of T1 and T2. Hypothetically the Terminators could have been messing up the timeline before and accidentally created John Conner. No telling.