Temporal Anomalies in Terminator Salvation

With the release of Terminator Salvation, commenters suggested that the entire Terminator series should be presented afresh to incorporate the new data. Thus all of Terminator, the first two films having the honor of being the subject of the first page published on this site and the third also analyzed a while back, is re-examined.

Having successfully resolved all the outstanding issues in its Terminator series, the franchise apparently decided to risk another film, and so entered the waters again. They did not include time travel in the film. However, they did flirt with several time travel issues, which are in themselves quite fascinating.

This was originally presented in a seventeen-part series on Terminator Salvation, plus one extra article answering a question about the changing involvement of Kate Brewster. It happens that about half of that covered the events of the previous films, and the other half focused specifically on the problems arising in the one that involved no time travel but managed to implicate temporal issues without it. This it seemed reasonable to turn the long series into two articles, the first providing all the background leading up to the beginning of the fourth film, the second covering that one.

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We have here a considerably older John Conner and a considerably younger Kyle Reese. Former veterinary assistant Kate Brewster is chief medic of Conner's unit, and also apparently pregnant, so she is present but not in the fighting. Cyberdyne awkwardly re-enters the picture as a weapons developer.

It might be said that the key element in this film is the question of predestination. That is, SkyNet is trying to find and kill Kyle Reese before he travels to the past, and is still trying to find and kill John Conner by luring him into a trap to face a T-800 unprepared. If Skynet kills Kyle Reese, he won't be able to travel back to become John Conner's father; if it kills John Conner, he won't be able to send Reese back to become his father.

Meanwhile, the other side of the program plays as well: if the resistance manages to destroy SkyNet before SkyNet sends a T-800 back to the past, the events that lead to John's birth are undone just as surely as they would be by the death of Kyle Reese. Yet the film flirts with the possibilities of all of these events occurring, of the war ending before anyone was sent to the past, of Kyle being captured and killed, of John losing his life to the fight. We are given to feel that something that cannot happen might happen anyway, and when it does not happen, we feel the relief that things have gone as necessary.

Before we begin looking at the issues involved, we should recognize that this is not the original history of the world. You are already aware that John Conner is not Sarah Conner's original child, but the child of the man that her child sent back to protect her. In addition to the fact that John Conner exists, he acts based on the recognition that Kyle is his father, and this means that Kyle must already (from a sequential perspective) have altered the past. Fixed time theorists will argue that this is a simple predestination paradox, that Kyle is destined to leave for the past because he has already arrived there; however, the events of Terminator 2 cannot be reconciled with a fixed time scenario (where would the idea that Cyberdyne brought Skynet on line in 1997 have originated if it had not happened in some undone version of history?). Thus we are looking at the modified timeline in which all the events of the previous movies have happened and been resolved.

This film also is the first to have been set in the future. We had murky glimpses of that war-torn future in previous films, but the three previous films were all set in the year they were released. This shift, though, is necessary, because the third film ended with a history-crushing spectacular, and it would not be possible for the world of this film to be like our world in the year it was released.

It might also be necessary to mention The Sarah Conner Chronicles. When this series was launched, its creators stated specifically that it was diverging from the universe of the movies, and that the events of Terminator 3 never happened in the world they were presenting. It thus follows that those stories are not part of the world of this film, either.

With that foundation laid, we can look at the temporal issues the film raises.