Terminator 2 ending revelations. Thought provoking read.

1

121Gigabytes

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  • First revelation:

    If you remember at the end of T2, where Ah-nold gets his arm pinned in the sprocket of a gigantic gear by the T-1000, that bit of arm is STILL in the machinery after Ah-nold pries it off with the metal bar! It is the ONLY piece of the future that survives the story ( movie ). What if that piece of his arm is found by workers days later and given to a tech firm? What if that arm ( plot surprise! ) ends up being the catalyst of Skynets creation and NOT the arm from T1?

    Second revelation:

    I find it hard to believe that Miles Dyson would be solely responsible for the future events that will take place. A company the size and scope of Cyberdyne would have had many, many engineers and scientists working alongside Miles Dyson. Killing Dyson in T2 probably realistically didn't change anything, as other scientists almost definitely would have had those same computer files stored in their own computers at home! Any one of those scientists would thus become what Dyson would have become had Dyson lived.

    Third revelation:

    Consider the fact that Dr. Silberman now has knowledge and first hand eye witness accounts of these two futuristic machines in action, considering he saw both in the detainment hallway at the Pescadero mental institution when Ah-nold assisted John Connor in rescuing his mother, Sarah Connor. This institution is riddled with security cameras recording every angle 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After the breakout of Sarah from the institution, there would have been an investigation done by the authorities as to what happened. They will talk to Dr. Silberman and the employees who were beaten up by Ah-nold and review the recorded video tapes. They will now see a fantastic glimpse of the T-1000 oozing through a steel jail door, only to have his pistol get stuck. They will see through the video surveillance of Ah-nold taking multiple rounds of 9mm ammo to his back and run into the elevator unscathed. They will see how the T-1000 can magically manipulate the geometry of his hands to form sharp metal objects and tools. They will pull Sarah's file from the institution's archives and interview Dr. Silberman and will continue to look for Sarah and John for the rest of their lives. Government agents will most likely learn about the video footage and declare it a Top Secret/ National security matter....now you can see the basic plot of a true 3rd movie in the terminator franchise....Sarah and John on the run. During this time, Sarah and John see a Kyle Reese as a boy growing up. John finally "meets" his real dad.

    A 4th revelation:

    what if Sarah and John are captured by the authorities while on the run? What if they are shown the video footage of the terminators in action back at the mental institution? The authorities will now find it hard to discount Sarah's ( or John's ) story of an impending apocalypse. The authorities cannot refute the factual evidence of the video surveillance recordings. So the question now becomes: by virtue of the video recordings and the statements made by Sarah and John, does this set the wheels of fate in motion of the creation of Skynet, albeit at a much later date? Top secret government scientists will see the video footage and begin work on emulating the technology they've seen. By starting from scratch ( no CPU or arm as Cyberdyne had ) the scientists will eventually create a skynet in the future, well past the date Sarah knows because the scientists had less data to start with.
 
Good ideas, but it's still all undermining the importance of T2's later events.

Cameron's Terminator universe, at least the continuity of his two movies, just needs to be left alone. It could be re-entered but it shouldn't be.
 
I really like the idea of the video footage and eyewitness accounts in the mental hospital. Very well thought out!

But the part about the arm, it wasn't the arm itself, it was chip that was the main catalyst.
 
It sadly got left hanging when Malibu Comics went under, but they had two parallel miniseries started after T2 came out: Nuclear Twilight (the future war) and Cybernetic Dawn (picked up right after the movie). In the latter, as the Connors and remaining Dysons are heading away from LA, John muses out loud that something's been bugging him. If they stopped Skynet from happening, how come it had all still happened? How come they all remembered it? If they had prevented Skynet, he wouldn't be there, there would have been no Terminators, and so forth. I think everyone forgot about the arm Arnie left in the machinery. I like your theory that everything continued -- just got set back a little.

Dark Horse and Malibu both maintained that other Terminators had come through (Dark Hose had, among other things, the aptly-titled "Secondary Objectives" miniseries, for instance), and Malibu showed us Skynet's early temporal-displacement failures that the government had been collecting -- Terminators that had materialized partially in walls, and such.

My big thing is in this, in Star Trek, in Babylon 5, in Back to the Future, etc., the "recursion paradox". *sigh* I get so tired of it. It's not a logic puzzle or a simple engineering challenge. Paradox means reality is not so arranged as to allow that thing to happen. You can't have the situation in Terminator: John Connor, son of Sarah Connor, is rallying humanity against the machines and turning the tide of the war, so Skynet sends a Terminator back to kill Sarah before John is even conceived. (As a computer, Skynet should know this is impossible). John sends his father back to stop the Terminator and make sure he himself is conceived in the first place. But then you start running into all the temporal problems. The "first time through", there was no Terminator to donate an arm and CPU to make Skynet happen in the first place. Sarah had an uneventful job as a waitress and a roommate with an annoying boyfriend. None of the catalysts are present.

Unless we treat this as a nexus point. By whatever mechanism, Skynet has to happen, a John Connor has to be born, temporal-displacement technology has to be invented. Then the series becomes more about fiddling the variables. Maybe first time through Sarah met someone some time later than the first film's timeframe and had a son by him who she named John, and Skynet happened way later. And what we saw in the first movie was just one of a near-infinite number of instances, Groundhog Day style -- Skynet attempted to prevent humanity from bouncing back to gain advantage in the war, and that kicked everything off. Every attempt has consequences that propagate. Now Skynet happens earlier, but John Connor has a different father and is also born earlier. What if there's one or two more iterations between the first and second film, so that by that point John is born even earlier (1981 instead of 1985) so the math works. And since each attempt alters things for Skynet, too, it has no memory that it made an attempt, so each time is that version of Skynet's first try to swing things in its favor.

Grist for the mill... :)

--Jonah
 
Guys, I was wrong! I said that Arnold's severed metal arm in that sprocket was the only piece of the future that survived the story/movie, when in fact Arnold's fleshy skin that he cut and ripped off to show Miles Dyson in his home also survived ! He just tears it off and throws it on the floor. What sorts of advanced technology could have been gleaned from that sample? Possibly how the skin was able to attach and grow over a metal sub-structure ( endoskeleton ). Thus, we now have major clues to the puzzle that were left behind in T2 on which new scientists or engineers can start building a Cybernetic organism!!
 
121Gigabytes said:
Guys, I was wrong! I said that Arnold's severed metal arm in that sprocket was the only piece of the future that survived the story/movie, when in fact Arnold's fleshy skin that he cut and ripped off to show Miles Dyson in his home also survived ! He just tears it off and throws it on the floor. What sorts of advanced technology could have been gleaned from that sample? Possibly how the skin was able to attach and grow over a metal sub-structure ( endoskeleton ). Thus, we now have major clues to the puzzle that were left behind in T2 on which new scientists or engineers can start building a Cybernetic organism!!
Click to expand...

Arnie's endoarm is just a piece of advanced metal alloy, you can't derive a super advanced A.I. platform from that.

We have for a long time been able to grow skin/flesh on top of "metal sub-structures"...

Finding something hard to believe does not make it untrue or even any less likely.

Also consider the fact that eye witness testimony is at best unreliable.
121Gigabytes said:
This institution is riddled with security cameras recording every angle 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After the breakout of Sarah from the institution, there would have been an investigation done by the authorities as to what happened. They will talk to Dr. Silberman and the employees who were beaten up by Ah-nold and review the recorded video tapes. They will now see a fantastic glimpse of the T-1000 oozing through a steel jail door, only to have his pistol get stuck. They will see through the video surveillance of Ah-nold taking multiple rounds of 9mm ammo to his back and run into the elevator unscathed.
Click to expand...
Sources??? :confused There are no visible camera's in the hallway where they meet up with the T-1000, even if there were any there, so what? Like the two police officers in the first film mentioned: body armor, high on drugs. Far more likely than "killer robots from the future". Had Dr. Silberman claimed such a thing then he would just have ended a a patient himself.
 
The Terminator, the endoarm could quite possibly contain advanced micro servos to control fine motor movement, like human ganglia. There are many possible aspects of that arm that could be learned, not just it's alloy.

As for the security cameras, we know they are there at the institution. We see Sarah and Dr. Silberman walking up to the control room on a camera screen with a syringe of draino stuck in Silberman's neck. It is just a good educated guess that these cameras would be installed everywhere in the institution. And no man high on drugs or wearing body armor can ooze through a steel detention door like the T-1000 did. No investigator would be able to explain what they saw on the security camera footage. They will not discredit or disbelieve Dr. Silberman's story because the video shows the terminators running past him in the hallway to the elevators!
 
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121Gigabytes said:
@The Terminator, the endoarm could quite possibly contain advanced micro servos to control fine motor movement, like human ganglia. There are many possible aspects of that arm that could be learned, not just it's alloy.
Click to expand...

So? Still can't creat a super advanced A.I. platform from either of those. Just like you can't get really good at astro physics by simply going to the grocery store and buying a tomato :lol

121Gigabytes said:
As for the security cameras, we know they are there at the institution. We see Sarah and Dr. Silberman walking up to the control room on a camera screen with a syringe of draino stuck in Silberman's neck. It is just a good educated guess that these cameras would be installed everywhere in the institution. And no man high on drugs or wearing body armor can ooze through a steel detention door like the T-1000 did. No investigator would be able to explain what they saw on the security camera footage. They will not discredit or disbelieve Dr. Silberman's story because the video shows the terminators running past him in the hallway to the elevators!
Click to expand...

Guess work is not evidence, not even in the world of cinema.
 
Another reason why T2 doesn't work. It does not fit with the T1 continuity.

Also. There is no other alternate version of 1984. Reese always arrived to save Sarah and father John. The terminator always arrived to set Sarah on the path Reese tells Sarah about. There is no way things can happen in any other way than how it happened in that movie. It is a continuous loop that never ends or changes. Why people focus on the "no fate" speech Reese gave Sarah instead of the facts he told her about things to come - things that couldn't ever have happened without the terminator and Reese putting Sarah on that path and Cyberdyne - makes no sense. He's just a grunt. A soldier. He says so himself that he doesn't understand tech stuff. So why are people putting any weight on philosophical musings that Reese recite from John to his mother, a speech created solely to give her hope and the strength to continue instead of crushing her soul with the stark reality that she can't really stop it. It's like Morpheos says to Neo: there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. The "no fate" speech is simply meant as an inspirational tool to get Sarah to act.
 
The Terminator said:
So? Still can't creat a super advanced A.I. platform from either of those. Just like you can't get really good at astro physics by simply going to the grocery store and buying a tomato :lol



Guess work is not evidence, not even in the world of cinema.
Click to expand...

You could argue that doctored footage or advanced computer tech to doctor the footage would be more believable than future killer robots, also, meaning that thread of possible events would most likely stop.

Good exercise for thinking about it though, enjoyable.
 
Inquisitor Peregrinus said:
My big thing is in this, in Star Trek, in Babylon 5, in Back to the Future, etc., the "recursion paradox". *sigh* I get so tired of it. It's not a logic puzzle or a simple engineering challenge. Paradox means reality is not so arranged as to allow that thing to happen. You can't have the situation in Terminator: John Connor, son of Sarah Connor, is rallying humanity against the machines and turning the tide of the war, so Skynet sends a Terminator back to kill Sarah before John is even conceived. (As a computer, Skynet should know this is impossible). John sends his father back to stop the Terminator and make sure he himself is conceived in the first place. But then you start running into all the temporal problems. The "first time through", there was no Terminator to donate an arm and CPU to make Skynet happen in the first place. Sarah had an uneventful job as a waitress and a roommate with an annoying boyfriend. None of the catalysts are present.

--Jonah
Click to expand...

The original Terminator movie is a closed time loop... At least if this deleted scene had been left in..
 
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How about this thought: why did Skynet send the T-1000 to kill John Connor as a child, when it could have sent it to 1984 and kill Sarah Connor instead?

I have a hypothesis about this: Skynet had intended to send the T-1000 to go after John because it knew by sending it to when John was a child, it could find additional info (as we see the T-1000 use the police terminal at the start of the film). So, it sent its advanced prototype after John as a kid and waiting to see if the changes occurred. When nothing changed, it surmised that the T-1000 somehow failed in it's mission and then decided to send a T-800 to 1984 in hopes of trying to kill John's mother instead. Of course, at that time, the Resistance attacked and then discovered the time displacement equipment after the T-800 was sent through. John, recalling what his mother told him and giving Reese the photo, sends Reese knowing he would volunteer. After Reese leaves, being told that they would destroy the equipment afterwards, John reprogram the 'Uncle Bob' Terminator to be sent to when he was a child. So, basically, the T-1000 was sent first and the T-800 sent to 1984 was a Plan B.

"Time travel is tricky business." - RoboCop vs. The Terminator.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
One thing needs clarification on your first post: the T-800 specifically mentions Dyson as "the man most directly responsible" for the creation of Skynet. He built that advanced CPU prototype, and the extended cut seemed to suggest he was the only person with all the technical info. With the destruction of that chip and most of the Cyberdyne building, it would be virtually impossible for another to resume where Dyson had left off; the T-800 even says "no one must follow your work". Dyson even says he will destroy all his files at home, though we never see that happen.
 
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