I was thinking this the other night. You'd think Skynet would decide to change it's stratagey by now, it failed to kill Connor in the Future and in the Past. Try something new. Send Terminators into the Future after Connor died. Start a new War.
No point in trying to rationalize it, the entire premise makes ZERO sense, and gets more muddled with every sequel or additional tv episode. Like in any bad movie, where the bad guys attack the good guy one at a time; wouldn't it make more sense, if all these terminators are around in the timeline, if they all attack at once? John and Sarah can barely handle ONE, so 5 of them ought to pretty much take care of it. Hell, can get even easier: Pick an event in the very near past that was a big win for the resistance, one John was at. Send someone back and rig the facility they capture to explode, blow the entire leadership to hell. For a supercomputer, Skynet is a fucking retard. My cat is smarter and has better strategic sense...
Maybe Skynet didn't want to kill all humans, just those it saw as a threat. Humans could be used as valuable resources. Skynet would be stupid to have such black and white programming with a directive like killing all humans. Well, they were able to at least make the T-800's get through, and somehow managed the T-1000, probably without too much trouble. I always thought that perhaps humans helped build the time machine, and perhaps as a measure of sabotage it included the need for the field created by biological entities. But that doesn't make sense when you consider that the T-800's were able to get through. I think this is the problem with just creating more time travel. The more there is, the less it makes sense. In the context of strictly T1, it made a fair amount of sense. They were supposedly only allowed to send one before they lost. T2 retconned this by making Kyle be mistaken, and that they were able to send another terminator back. This kind of retcon isn't that bad, but paved the way for ridiculous amounts of time travel like in SCC. Had T3 or SCC not tried to send more back, it still could've been somewhat reasonable. I also have another idea. Let's say the future is not set in stone. Perhaps in the future of T3, John never sent back Kyle or Uncle Bob (maybe even T2 is separate from T1). But the war goes differently, and they were only able to send one back again (the T-X). The only reason it happened six or seven years later instead of one is because from that point of reference, that was the only future. With a theory of alternate universes, the case could be that this particular timeline only had three incursions (not counting SCC). There could be other timelines where they sent more terminators or even where Skynet was successful. We're just being shown one possible timeline.
Are you sure he wasn't joking? It doesn't seem likely that a NNPU such as Skynet would use a Von Neumann architecture based program as its OS. Especially one written by Microsoft.
Skynet should just spray poisonous gas all over if it wants to terminate mankind. People are so fragile. Skynet can use weapons that don't even hurt machines, but kill people easily. Nerve gas, chlorine gas, plagues, fungi, and radioactive materials. Skynet just doesn't seem to want to win or rather if Skynet was smart, it would all be over.
Skynet is like the political party that refuses to let a program die and throws money at it year after year.
Actually John Connor was killed. Skynet was still active following Connor's death also. It did happen in the Terminator Expanded Universe. Spoiler: What happened? Two terminators were used to try to destroy humanity by releasing the ultimate virus onto the galaxy: the Xenomorph. They were stopped by Ripley 8 and a Predator Clan. That is not a joke. It's a real comic book.
nx1701g, Okay I understand about records being destroyed, but what is stopping skynet from sending a terminator back far enough before his mother is born. It wouldnt be too hard to figure out she was born in the sixties. All they would have to do is send a terminator back to 1960 and have it research Sarah Connors family. So when she is born the terminator would terminate her or he/she could kill Sarah's mom whiel she is pregnant with Sarah. It aint hard to kill a person if you got time traveling capabilities and the other person has no clue who you are yet.
^ Good question. I suppose that it's possible, but there are a lot of unknowns about the character that would have to be answered. All Skynet had related to Sarah Connor in the first film was her name and the city where she lived in T1. On TSCC they've established now that she hadn't always lived in LA (deleted scenes though). The novels had said that all along that Sarah had moved to LA not long before the beginning of the film. It'd make it more difficult due to the lack of information about Sarah Connor for a Terminator to try to find her in another time period. Essentially she was 'off the grid'.
Another thought came into my mind (and maybe our Terminator-Boss nx1701g can explain it ) - IF Skynet has broken the secrets of quantum mechanics of frigging time travel, why not of most other physics laws as well? Why is it still creating machines like the Hunter-Killers with jet engines rather than trek-style anti-gravity systems? Or create invisible Terminators? If Skynet can time travel, surely bending light wouldn't be a big deal!
^ Skynet does have antigravity systems, but no cloaking devices. The Temporal Transporter could be used to transport Terminators to other locations though.
With regards to sending Terminators further and further back in time - this approach could deviate the timeline a LOT due to the butterfly effect maybe so much that Skynet wouldn't be created; the further back it sends a Terminator, the less chance it will be around to do anything.
As I was catching up with TSCC this weekend I kept thinking something similar. Fact is, if you try to think too hard, your brain will go into overdrive with "But why not-?" scenarios and all of a sudden the show just seems retarded. It's definitely a "suspension of belief" thing that you need to set your brain into, otherwise the stories make no sense whatsoever.
The reason that wouldn't work is the same reason why the plan didn't work in the original movie; the Resistance found out what Skynet was doing (somehow) and sent their own agent back to intercept. If they could apparently interogate whoever the fuck they interogated to learn the original plan -- and apparently every other time they send someone back -- they should be able to do it again and again. The original Terminator certainly wasn't stopped because "the other person has no clue who [he was] yet" but because the Resistance sent back Reese. Sarah Connor was just a timid college-age chick then, afterall. For the record, there must be some serious time wrinkle / delay stuff going on with this temporal technology. Unless we're to believe the Resistance found out about Skynet's plan and countered it at exactly the same time, that is. Because as soon as the Terminator was sent back, the future should have changed just like that <snap>.
SkyNet only becomes stupid after the first movie as a result of trying to rehash the successful formula of The Terminator. Had Cameron employed even the slightest bit of imagination, he could have developed a rousing action/ adventure SF movie that actually advanced the story instead of creating these endless questions as to why, if SkyNet could send back more than one Terminator (a direct contradication of a major plot point in the first movie by the way), it didn't send 5, or 500, back to 1984 in the first place. The reason it didn't is what Reese says - the machines had already lost to the humans, the Terminator going through the time machine was a last ditch effort of total desperation. Last ditch meaning, they had NO other options, and they certainly didn't send single Terminators back to various points in time to continue trying the same stupid stategy over and over again. It undermines the whole suspension of disbelief for the entire story, which is why I personally ignore that any sequels exist.