Terminator-222 "Born to Run" - Season Finale <SPO>

Have you been reading spoilers for Terminator Salvation?

Spoiler: What does he mean?

The original ending of Terminator: Salvation would have seen John Connor replaced by a Terminator.

 

Okay. here's my problem.

when john henry exits time to reenter 20 years later it is a timeline in which John Connor is there because JOhn Connor in the past has not left the past yet, he only has potentially left the past to come to the future which has no bareing on the future John henry encounters.

Which means that when john does leave the past to come to the future he will demolish or sidebar (god knows how permanent or elastic the atomization of time is?) the timeline arrived in which John henry to arrived making his adventures in the future to rescue Cameron completely irrelevant.

For John henry to ALSO be in the new Timeline which we saw in the end of the show too, that was inexorably altered by John leaving the past (which was intact potentially when John Henry left seconds earlier) also, then that would mean that they ALWAYS do travel forward into all futures directly branching from the point they exit time.

An infinite amount of Johns and John Henry's can return to the same singular present claiming it to be their home from many different futures thinking that they are the real John Connor and John Henry.

 

Where is Cam in that scene? If she didn't time travel, then she should be in the middle of the flaming circle in the floor. So did (a) Sarah move her or (b) Cameron never exist with the alteration in the timeline. If (b), then how could her chip be in John Henry?

 

I have a feeling that if the show does come back then they'll probably end up back in the present. It won't be a complete return to the status quo, but they'll probably come back to 2009 or so.

Speaking of which, the dates that Sarah's interrogator used make it sound like it's still 2007 since he refers to Cyberdyne as ten years ago and the bank job as being eight years ago. Of course Derek's grave marker said 2009 on it.

But I digress. The reason I think they'll end up back in the present is the same as what attracted me to the show in the first place: this show has always been pretty expensive, and therefore visually impressive. To do a show on par with that that took place almost entirely in the future war sounds like it would be cost-prohibitive. It's also why the show's been in trouble. At the very least I think it'll be FOX's decision whether the show remains in the future or returns to the present.

I think a possible solution might be to have an arc that lasts until November sweeps in the future war and then a return to 2009 (even if they left in "2007"), and then the gang catches up with Sarah's adventures a nifty cliffhanger before the hiatus at the end of December.

I like the way season two played out though. I liked some of the stand-alone episodes like "Self-Made Man" and even a lot of the Riley arc (I never thought she was as annoying as a lot of people thought she was). Also, in retrospect the cleaning house of the past few weeks makes sense now, given the way the finale went.

 

Something just occurred to me: if John doesn't exist anymore in the future (i.e. he skipped ahead thereby vanishing from 2009 & that's why Derek doesn't know him) then obviously Kyle never gets sent back to protect Sarah, doesn't become the father of John Conner... (which is all confusing enough) ...but how is he still alive? Should he not disappear?

Also, given that his existence appears to be a closed loop, can a time-line ever be created where he does not exist?

 

Presumably he, or someone else, can still send Kyle back in time to conceive with Sarah. Since John Connor is the product of a pre-destination paradox anyway, maybe this is how that loop gets started anyway, a John Connor from another timeline sends Kyle Reese back in time and gets things started. I don't know. What can be done with time travel is a little inconsistent in the Terminator universe anyway, sometimes there's destiny and fate at play, sometimes events are preventable.

 

This was discussed, briefly, in Complications. There are multiple timelines converging.

In the standard universe (lets call it Universe A) John Connor was born to Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He lived just as expected he would up until the events of Born to Run.

He then jumped to an alternate future where John Connor didn't become the leader of the Resistance (lets call it Universe B). While in Universe B John Connor does not exist, John Connor - since he is from Universe A - does. This is because the events leading up to his birth still happen in his universe.

 

I've always figured John Connor, Judgment Day and the defeat of Skynet were fixed events. The time travel shenanigans might change the details but they're all going to happen somehow.

 

Did John dissapear at the end of T2 in the timeline where he got to be a senator because there was no war?

I like to claim that leaving time creates a causal break in your personally continuity that edditing to the timline cannot follow, since obvious traveling into the past initself begets an immediately different past than the one you hail from if even slightly, and even of more slightly if you are not the first timetraveler to violate the past from any one of a number of formerly dominant future histories.

If skynet wasn't losing the war to John Connor it would not have sent back a terminator to kill Sarah Connor who did kill Sarah Connor and saved Skynet ensuring that time would play out that it never got so close to losing... But since it did still happen that means that alternate Kyle and t-800s showed up in the past that were not from a timeline where Sarah had to kick ass, or kick ass differently depending on the nature of the threat depending on the development of skynets technology becaue of the roving date of Judgment Day.

It's branch theory.

 

That's my personal theory as well but I was trying to understand it from an in-universe perspective.

 

This is pretty much how I see it. They have to be in different universes/timelines, otherwise he wouldn't exist. Of course it bugs me that we may never find out how things went without a John Connor in this new universe, if the show isn't renewed. Clearly there is still a resistance, but we don't know if they are effective or not. We also never saw John Henry in the future, so who knows what impact he has/has not had on the timeline either.

 

Why would Sarah say that to Cameron? That makes no sense at all.

 

^ I have no idea either. Just saying what some of the fans were saying.

A part of me still thinks thought that she's saying it to a returned John. If the series is cancelled that will be how I always probably interpret it. Though I'm somewhat worried because I read an interview with her where Lena said she was thinking about signing on to a comedy pilot.

 

If there's one thing Fred Flintstone proved to me over and over again, is that you can appear to be in two places at once for quite awhile before everything goes horribly wrong.

Lena could do two shows?

Although bitparts, it was weird seeing Charlie and Cromati both getting whacked on the stages of Life on Mars and Life respectively last week. It is the seaosn for double whacking!

 

^ If I recall correctly it was a comedy pilot in England.

 

I'd imagine Sarah's saying it to John as/after he jumped. In the lobby scene John tells his mom he loves her after discussing her mortality and she doesn't respond. In a way, I think it's both of them saying goodbye.

 

But a full season ("series") order is a far smaller number of episodes there than here. She could easily film a good chunk of it during hiatus from a US series.

Regarding the "clearing house," it also should lower the budget of the show for a proposed S3 (fewer actors' lilies to gild) and perhaps increase the chances of renewal. In the same vein, I think that in a proposed S3, we'd see John return to the present in the first few episodes. If the show does survive (even if for only a 9- or 13-episode season), the budget would likely be cut and so fewer expensive sets and visual effects would be possible.

 

There is a simple way around that, the timeline can only be changed by backward timejumps, because forward timejumps are equivalent to waiting very fast, and thus are already written into history the same way sitting on your ass and doing nothing for twenty years would be.

The last backward timejump was water deliveryman terminator. When he made his backward jump, the Connorless future timeline came into being, because his attack on Savanah was the catalyst for the forward timejumps.

 

Or, like FC Enterprise, close enough to John Henry's jump, means there's still temporal and quantum mechanical connections between that room and the future John Henry went to; allowing for them to be in the same future.

 

I don't think that Terminator ever made a back jump. From what I got, it's a terminator built in the present by Skynet - or rather the military. It seemed much more primitive and much less armored than the other Terminators we've seen.