The second Terminator movie* assumes that time has passed in both the future and the past. In the future, the resistance has managed to capture and reprogram at least one of the old T-800 machines that had been so formiddable, and SkyNet has developed a more sophisticated machine and apparently also improved time travel a bit (the T-1000 does not have to be encased in living flesh). In the past, John Conner has become a rebellious teen and his mother Sarah is a patient in a psych ward. Still the future John Conner is a problem for SkyNet, so a T-1000 is dispatched to the past to kill him.
The problem in the first film is compounded in this one: whether the T-1000 succeeds or fails, there is no reason to send anyone back to protect John Conner. If John Conner is known to the resistance, then he survived and there is no need to protect him; if he was killed in the past, then the resistance has no knowledge of him and no reason to save him. Yet the resistance does send someone back, a captured and reprogrammed T-800. That means that the T-1000 did not kill John Conner, but that the resistance still had a reason to send something back to protect him.
The solution again lies in Sarah. As improbable as it seems, John Conner must have escaped alive from the T-1000 long enough for it to turn to its backup plan. We know that backup plan because it attempts it in the film: it kills Sarah Conner. John vanishes and so survives to find Kate Brewster in the future and to send back first Kyle Reese and then the T-800.
The objection might be raised that John did not send the T-800 back to protect Sarah, but to protect himself. John, though, is smart enough to know his own limitations. The easiest way for the T-800 to save Sarah is to deliver John to the T-1000. Primary mission objective accomplished, the T-1000 would end its mission. John cannot risk the possibility that saving his mother will cost his own life, even though he knows his younger self would be willing to do so. Thus he programs the T-800 to protect himself, but to do what he commands, hoping that with this combination his younger self will use the powerful terminator to save Sarah and himself.
The interaction of the two anomalies is simpler this time. The greater complication is that Sarah gets the information she needs to take the war one step further: she destroys Cyberdyne. The company that put SkyNet online by 1997 has lost everything it had developed. The hardware solution for SkyNet is gone. This means that everything drops back to the original date and the original creation, which we know from the third movie is the Air Force program of 2004. However, there is a more serious problem, as Sarah Conner has just used information from the future to change the future in a way that will eliminate the information--a grandfather paradox. She should create an infinity loop.
Normally that would be the end of the story; the film fails. However, there is a solution to the problem in this case, which will be presented next time.
There is a hopefully temporary problem with the MJYoung.Net domain. All pages there are presently mirrored at Multiverser.org, and thus the reference above can be found here. RETURN
Comments
I looked at your previous works and never saw a time travel entry for the Beastmaster sequel. Will you be covering that one?
Harpo, you are the very first person ever to mention to me a Beastmaster film in connection with time travel. I shall have to look for a DVD of it so I can view it. I see it listed on IMDB, and wonder if I've actually seen part of it (I've seen the first, and part of the third, and I enjoyed the TV series). There are hundreds of time travel movies out there, so the best way to get an analysis is to ask. I will try to find it.
--M. J. Young
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