Time travel in the Terminator series

[Supreme_Warlord]

I need help. All the time travel shennanigans in the story are doing my head in. Specifically I can't get my head round the following:

NOTE: I will refer to the Arnold Scharzenegger characters as the Terminator, while the other Terminators will be referred to by their model numbers.

In T1, Kyle Reese is meant to be a friend of John Connor's who gets sent back in time to stop the Terminator from killing Sarah Connor. In the end he ends up being his father. My problem is: how does Kyle Reese exist in the future if he died in the past? I can understand if this was a one time thing (i.e. Kyle Reese exists in the future, gets sent back to the past and dies there). BUT, John Connor should not be born unless Kyle Reese gets sent back to the past, so Kyle Reese must exist in the future, but he died in the past.......aaaaaaahhh

In T2, the destruction of the company, the chip and arm from the first Terminator and the second Terminator itself should have ended Skynet there and then. But shouldn't the very fact that the T-1000 and the Terminator are battling it out prove that this was not the case and that Skynet still shows up on the scene? In other words, how can there be a Terminator present to help stop the rise of Skynet when its was the rise of Skynet which resulted in the manufacture of said Terminator....... Before there was ever any hint of T3, the only way me and my sister rationalized the existence of Skynet after all of the above was that it was a consequence of the second Terminator's upper arm being left behind (which happens during the fight with with the T-1000 when it gets crushed and stuck in a conveyor belt and the Terminator rips its arm off). So why all the bullshit about Skynet being a military research project, etc.?

And finally, what is up with the Kate Brewster story? I completely failed to get the part where John Connor mentioned the parallel between the second Terminator showing up after he first met her and the third Terminator showing up after he met her again. As far as I am concerned, the Kate Brewster character is a complete non-entity in terms of the overall story and is in there for no other reason than to be the love interest. There is no hint of her whatsoever in T2.

Perhaps the novelization, or the wider story (which I have not read and am not aware of respectively) can shed some light on this.

Finally, apologies if I am just being completely dense or complicating the story beyond all measure, but can somebody please explain all this to me.



Thanks.

[Ghost Rider]

Very quick and dry T1 and T2 are it's own universe.

T3 is seperate universe...literally.

In T1-T2 Skynet about to die decides to fuck with time...sends two Termies to insure Connor's demise. The side effects were that it in essence create itself.

Because of this Connor knows he has to send back two specific agents(he mentions this in the T2 novelization). So off go Reese and *Uncle Bob*.

In T3 this occured slightly different and apparently at different intervals(Connor encountered Uncle Bob at age 13 in this one instead of age 10). Also the Time Displacement was no longer sole property of Skynet as well Skynet was not defeated. So in another attempt or possible calcuation it sends off the T-X to further it's goals. Connor and Kate knowing what is to happen send off the T-850. They also program it to give a 'false' death for John so he doesn't think he's immortal or such not.

[Shroom Man 777]

Kyle would still be born even when he died in the incidents in T1. Why? He was a guy from the future, died. Big deal, isn't like he fucked his mom or something. He died, a few years later, Kyle Reese is born, ends up a friend of JC, goes back in time, gets killed.

[NecronLord]

Multiple timelines.

Key: letters=events numbers = timeline numbers

1------------------------------------------------------------x T-100 & Uncle bob sent back
2_______________x----------------------------------------------

As long as timeline 1 exists, the terminators will exist in timeline 2.

[MKSheppard]

Very quick and dry T1 and T2 are it's own universe.

No they're not. T3 solved the messy time travel paradoxes caused by T2....

"You cannot stop judgement day - only delay it..."

And besides, in the unshown alt ending of T2, John Connor is a US Senator
and he is fighting the Skynet Funding Bill So eventually, the
machines rise up....unless you want the universe to destroy itself in paradoxes

[Ghost Rider]

So Shep you're saying that the messy time slip of T2...John Connor is being only 10 years of age was fixed by T3 fuck up with him being 13.

Let alone the other implication brought by the novel...simply put T3 is a divergence just as T1-T2 are a divergence to what originally happened.

[MKSheppard]

So Shep you're saying that the messy time slip of T2...John Connor is being only 10 years of age was fixed by T3 fuck up with him being 13.

Yet T2 also fucked up the Continuity:

Continuity: The police computer indicates John was born in 1985 and is 10 years old, indicating the current year to be 1995 or 1996. The T800 mentions to Sarah that judgment day (29 August 1997), will be "in three years". However, John sends the T-800 back from 2029, which is said to be 35 years in the future, making the year 1994.

Continuity: When the T-1000 first arrives, he check's John's record via the computer in the police car. It lists his age as ten and his birth date as 2/28/1985, placing the movie's events after 2/28/1995. However, when they are leaving the gas station, the T-800 tells Sarah Connor that in three years Cyberdyne becomes the largest supplier of military computer systems. Due to their excellent record, the Skynet funding bill is passed and the system goes online on 8/4/1997. This seems to say the film takes place before 8/4/1994.

[MKSheppard]

Here's a vital point - If Judgement day was stopped - John Connor should
not exist - as there would never be a need to send Reese back in time,
yet John Connor existed after they supposedly stopped Cyberdyne,
showing that they merely pushed it back some years.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I've seen the unused ending, and Sarah just says that he's a senator. Nothing about a Skynet bill...

[RedImperator]

My take on it:

Original timeline: Sarah Connor has a son by some unknown father--maybe a customer at the restaurant, maybe some guy she was supposed to meet after the events of T1. She names him John. Neural net processors are invented sometime in the mid-1990s. Skynet is built. Skynet starts a nuclear war, John Connor survives. Kyle Reese is born sometime immediately before or after the war, grows up eating rats and dodging HKs. John Connor organizes the human resistance, drives Skynet's army back, Skynet sends the first T-800 back to 1984. John sends his friend and trusted subordinate Kyle Reece to protect his mother.

First divergent timeline: The events of T1 cause a massive divergence. Los Angeles is rocked by a horrific murder spree that kills dozens of people, involving a waitress named Sarah Connor and two unidentified men, one of whom was found dead in a Cyberdine systems factory, the other vanishing without a trace. Also in the factory was the wounded but alive Sarah Connor, and unidentified metal debris that was later removed.

We know, of course, that the dead man in the factory was Kyle Reese, and the killer responsible for the murders IS the unidentified metal debris. Sarah is impregnated by Kyle and leaves Los Angeles. She now has a son (who she plans to name John) from a different father, and knowledge of the coming catastrophe. Cyberdyne has a sample of a wildly advanced alloy and an even more wildly advanced processor. Cyberdyne quietly begins researching its finds, and eventually develops its own neural net processor. Sarah, in the meantime, has raised John to be a guerilla fighter. She's thrown in a mental hospital for attempting to bomb Cyberdyne, and John ends up in a series of foster homes. As history plays out, John eventually realizes all his mother's crazy stories are true, and gets down to Mexico before Judgement Day. Presumably, Sarah dies in Pescadaro State Hospital.

Both Skynet and the resistance have been given a head start in this timeline. Skynet has access to its own future designs, and Cyberdyne's development of neural net processors was undoubtedly sped up and improved by having the first Terminator chip. Skynet, however, does not know about John Connor, while John Connor knows about Skynet. The resistance wins again. Before it does, however, Skynet again invents the time machine. It again plans to send a T-800 back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, but it puts two-and-two together about the odd circumstances about its own creation and realizes it failed in this timeline. So it sends the T-1000 to kill John in 1994 (perhaps, also, it told the T-800 about its counterpart's failure on the other timeline, raising the possibility that there's another, unseen divergent timeline where the T-800 succeded in 1984). The resistance responds by sending Reese back to 1984 and a hastily reprogrammed T-800 to 1994.

Note that I'm ignoring the continunity error regarding the police computer. It's easier to say the police records are wrong (John may have been born "off the grid" anyway) than it is to try to rationalize it with the rest of the timeline.

Second divergent timeline: The events of T2 take place. There's another spree of murders and a breakout at Pescadero State mental hospital. An unidentified man strongly resembling the vanished 1984 killer, Sarah Connor, John Connor, and Miles Dyson assault and destroy Cyberdine Systems main labs and Dyson's own records. Dyson is killed. The neural net chip and hydraulic forearm disappear. Later that same night, a hijacked truck full of liquid nitrogen crashes into a steel mill. The mill is evacuated, so nobody witnesses the battle there. By the time the authorities arrive, all that's left is spent shell casings, two wrecked trucks, some superficial damage to the mill's equipment, and perhaps some unidentified residue in a molten steel vat (the crushed left arm of Uncle Bob, according to the novelization, is retrieved by John and thrown into the steel).

At this point, since I didn't see T3, I don't know how the timeline progresses. Presumably, Skynet is still built, but Judgement Day is delayed. The war against the machines goes very differently, because because John has time to organize the resistance before the war. Skynet again develops time travel and sends the T-X back, creating a third divergent timeline I'm not qualified to describe.

[Ghost Rider]

Concievably also it can get worse by the reckoning that through these events Skynet becomes aware of multiple timeline(I believe this is the material of the books)

So honestly it all started because Skynet got nervous and decided to whack Connor before he was born.

[Stravo]

Two points:

About Reese. He's just a sargeant, John Connor is the supreme commander. A buck sargeant in our army will have zero to no chance of becoming buddy buddy with the Army Chief of Staff.
Alot of folks here have mentioned Reese as a freind and trusted subordinate, Reese was a buck sargeant recently tranferred to Connor's command (as soon as Connor could find out where he was) and the novelization has two inportant scenes, one that Reese only met Connor a handful of times and once Connor gives him the picture knowing full well that Reese will fall in love with his mom. Reese was obviously manuvered by Connor to BECOME his father, in the novelization of T1 when Kyle goes through Connor briefly considers not letting him go as he feels like he just met him and wants to know his father better and knows he is sending his father to die, also he breifly considers telling him before he goes and does not. Reese was not a friend or trusted confidant. At least if we look at the novelizations, and there is no evidence in the movie otherwise.


About the timelines: We assume that the timelines are linear. Who's to say that time is already laid out simultaneoulsy and that we as humans preceive it linear?? So in this case Kyle being Connor's father is only a paradox if one preceives things in a linear fashion, if time has unfolded on a simulatenous plane, then it is not as weird. There is no chicken and teh egg problem in essence.