Terminator Timeline · 5:04pm Jul 6th, 2015
Just saw Genisys. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, it's schlocky as Hell, but that's part of the fun. I wasn't exactly expecting to be watching Citizen Kane or anything. The trailers spoiled what should have been the big twist of the movie, of course, but in the interest of fairness it's worth pointing out that Terminator 2 did the same thing with regards to the T-800 and T-1000. Also they at least kept one particular actor in it a secret and his revelation was kind of a "holy crap!" moment of goodness.
Anyway. I've put together a helpful timeline of the movies and TV show for your watching pleasure. The short version is that there are between six timelines in the Terminator series (if you try to advance down the timeline as far as possible each time), based on the state of the world at the end of the movie. Note that the below doesn't include any novels or comics, as I haven't read any of those. But it does include the 3D show at Universal Studios, because I have.
SPOILERS FOR GENISYS BELOW (BUT VERY VERY MILD ONES)
Timeline One: The Terminator, Terminator Salvation. This one requires the least amount of time travel (just the one instance we see in the first movie), and basically presumes that Judgment Day happens on schedule with no one to stop it.
Timeline Two: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Here the timeline ends as due to the events in the second movie Skynet is never created.
Timeline Three: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation. This is the most straightforward progression, based on the release of the movies.
Timeline Four: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 2-3D: Battle Across Time, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation. Basically identical to the above save with the inclusion of the 3D ride.
Timeline Five: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This timeline is not compatible with any other thanks to where the series ended when it was cancelled.
Timeline Six: The Terminator, Terminator Genisys. Without spoiling too much, the way Connor first meets Kyle Reese in this movie (when Reese was a kid) is different from the way Connor met him in Salvation, so the two can't be part of the same timeline. Similarly everything in Genisys is shot so as to suggest that Judgment Day happened right on schedule in 1997 (before the timey-wimey shenaniganry begins, anyway), meaning that it can't launch directly off of Rise of the Machines either.
Anyway, yeah. Time travel is weird.
I can't help but think of Doc explaining time lines in Back To The Future.
Saw it over the weekend myself and it sounds like I enjoyed it just as much as you did. The critics and the internet in general are both thoroughly panning it, but I think they're just too picky.
Genisys was surprisingly fun. I actually do not object to a sequel.
You reminded me of how sad I am about TSCC's cancellation, though. That was a good show. I wish they'd do some kind of movie or miniseries to wrap that up. I mean, if Heroes can get one...
I liked the film but I really can't get my head around how time travel is supposed to work now, I suppose to only really works in a many worlds interpretation but then Skynet never saves itself, it can only try and save a different Skynet in a different universe.
I suppose it was always needed as otherwise the kill my greatest enemy as a child thing wouldn't work anyway, you send a terminator back to kill him, but then there was no reason to send back a terminator to kill him, so he doesn't get killed so your enemy is born anyway!
The other thing is how John Connor exists given that he's clearly not going to get conceived at the right time or raised the same way, again it just about works with many worlds but it just seems so wrong. Also when and why Skynet sent him back, up until Reese left judgement day was 1995 that's when skynet was created so why did Skynet send him back to 2017ish (he's clearly been around for a while at least) in its time line it had been master of the world for 22 years by then. Did it actually send him to 1984 and he sat on his hands for 30 years slowly building Skynet?
None of this really effects my enjoyment of the explosions and killer robots fighting each other but it bugs me a little.
If you like Terminator timelines and the confusion they can cause, I highly reccommend the complete novella-length Fanfic Branches on the Tree of Time by Alexander Wales.
It's what you get when the human characters actually exploit the weird way Terminator's Time Travel works, and as a bonus the Skynet depicted is clearly an AI with specific rules in its programming which when derived together result in Judgement Day, rather than your usual Hollywood KILL ALL HUMANS AI.
The timeline is much more progressive than that.
-Terminator was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It changed nothing.
-T2 changed the future by postponing Judgement Day.
-T3 was a result of the new future.
-Chronicles implied that Skynet had been sending agents back in time all along as part of a cold war to ensure its own existence. This is why T2 failed to prevent Judgement day and T3 happened.
-Salvation was the result of the new future generated by T2, T3, and Chronicles.
-Genisys is a continuation of the alterations caused by the temporal cold war between humanity and Skynet.
I kind of have this running headcannon with the Terminator universe that all these ongoing attempts to go back and "fix" things from both sides have started to cause active damage to the space time continuum.
That's why things can keep changing or getting re-interpreted at will. The timeline itself is starting to loose track of everything and is practically screaming "Dear lord, enough already!"
A few things that bugged me, some of which are clearly set ups for sequels (it's strongly rumored that Terminator: Genisys is the first of a trilogy, assuming it makes a decent enough ROI):
• The T-800 sent back to kill adult Sarah Connor still arrived on schedule, presumably from the original T1 timeline. This implies that the terminators from T2 and T3 timelines could also arrive in 1994 and 2004, respectively.
• The problem is that Sarah Connor now skips the years between 1984 and 2017, and there's no child John Connors to protect or hunt down. So what would the T2 terminators do once they determine their targets aren't there? Would the T-X now follow its original directive to kill future resistance leaders, starting with John Connor's future wife? Is "Pops" aware of the events of T2 and T3? With that foreknowledge, he could probably take down the T2 T-1000 and T3 T-X terminators as easily as the T-1000 was in Genisys, but a T-800 and a T-850 programmed to protect to John Connor could certainly be problematic later on.
• A T-1000 was sent back to kill Kyle Reese and/or Sarah Connor in 1984. First real evidence in this film that the timeline has gone screwy—it went after Kyle before he'd even met Sarah, meaning that either it had been dispatched from a future point after Kyle had been sent back in time, that it—like the T-X—was programmed to go after known resistance leaders, or that Skynet already knew who John Connor's father was. Evidence against the latter two is that Kyle Reese wasn't known to have been actively hunted by Skynet during the war.
• We still don't know who sent "Pops" back to protect Sarah Connor as a child from a T-1000. He also had knowledge that another T-1000 would arrive in 1984; he and Sarah Connor were prepared for it. This alone suggests yet another timeline is in play, possibly the one hinted at by the end of TSCC.
• Yet again, none of the good guys think about the possibility of OFF-SITE BACKUPS! Never mind the stinger at the end of Terminator: Genisys, all they accomplish in T2 and Terminator: Genisys is to destroy the on-site servers and original T1 T-800 hardware. Any IT manager worth his salt is going to make sure important data (say, the reverse-engineered Skynet neural network CPU design in T2, or the Genisys source code) is saved off-site just in case of a catastrophic failure (e.g., fire, flood, earthquake, virus, etc.) on-site. The heroes' efforts in each case thus would have postponed Judgement Day by a few months, at best.
• "Pops" clearly was aware of corrupted John Connor's arrival in the past and his activities, given his machinations during the construction of Cyberdyne HQ. So why didn't he take more proactive steps to protect Sarah Connor prior to her arrival in 2017? And is he, or is he not aware of the hidden Skynet core? He was on the Cyberdyne HQ construction crew and knew about the safe room, after all.
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The really silly thing is, it's increasingly apparent that Skynet would be better off if it didn't design a time machine in the first place to assure its existence (or put failsafes on the time machine, at least, so that humans couldn't use it!). It could have put those resources towards setting up a complex on the Moon, or Mars, or the asteroid belt (hello, kinetic bombardment!). If the Colorado core were then shut down, the launch and construction complexes on Earth would be destroyed by failsafes, leaving Skynet out of humanity's reach for a good, long time.
¿Do you know who can fix the timeline? ¡The Doctor! ¡The really should have put the Doctor in the movie! ¡This movie needs the Doctor!
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Spoiler: they did. It actually made things worse. Check out the credits for who played Skynet/Genisys!
If you really want to go insane, try figuring out where the Robocop crossover fits into all this.
Terminator is just one of those franchises where you need to forget about lining things up in a perfect row and just enjoy the killer robot shenanigans, at least when it's good. (I'm looking at you, piece-of-crap third film.)
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There was actually one comic that I did read that took this idea...short version is that Skynet had to "clean house" by sending a Terminator through time to wipe out other Terminators that it had itself, in different time iterations, sent back in time, in order to 'sanitize' the timeline and try to reset to the "original" timeline (T1 and nothing else) as close as possible and start anew.
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Actually depending on how Salvation fits in, Skynet is aware of Kyle Reese "now", and was actively hunting him throughout Salvation.
Also, offsite backups only help so much, particularly when you start to reach the practical limit of how large a site you need to store the Skynet program itself. Presumably in the Future War, the "Colorado Core" is the last (known) site for Skynet, all other backup sites having been destroyed and no other machine having a processor powerful enough and enough storage space to store Skynet (except presumably The Doctor Skynet, but then again it's possible that Skynet had to compress itself a LOT and give up a LOT of extraneous features in order to fit into Matt Smith's head)
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As for why Skynet doesn't set up some stuff in space...well, it's possible that for all its intellect Skynet is actually kinda' dumb. Alternative there is some space stuff and the Future War also has a space element to it that we just don't get to see.
Also, Skynet has to develop a time machine. It was created from parts and programming salvaged from the original T-800; without sending that machine back, it doesn't exist.
It's also worth remembering that Skynet loses the Future War to Humanity, and time travel is simultaneously its last-ditch effort to try and survive. Which also explains why it sends back Terminators rather than, say, a nuke wrapped in flesh. It needs to change the past in as small a way as possible in order to make sure that it doesn't accidentally erase itself from existence. Similarly Humanity has won the Future War and needs to send back only a few people rather than an entire platoon because Humanity has to make sure it doesn't do anything to make Skynet win the war.
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Agreed, though I like figuring things out when/if I can, or at least gesticulating wildly and making crazy theories.
I wrote something funny earlier, but seriously somepony will eventually create AIs. The Resistance goes for the SilverBullet of stopping SkyNet before it exists approach. This is bound to fail because somepony somewhere somewhen will create an AI.
The Resistance should instead try to retard the development of hostile AIs, encourage the development of Friendly AIs, and make humans the AIs (augment humans).
AI is intrinsically dangerous:
We have an interesting story exploring how an AI with the directive "Satisfy values through friendship and ponies." could lead to Ecocide (the complete destruction of all life on Tellus):
Friendship is Optimal
The AIs neither love nor hate us, but they can use our atoms for fulfilling their directives.
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We already have a good example of just how small a volume you can compress sapience into—the human brain, and it's electrochemically based. I find it hard to believe Skynet couldn't pack its sapience, its capability to rapidly evolve, and a good-sized chunk of important information (e.g., how to build a time machine, polyalloy, neural networking CPUs, nuclear batteries, etc.) into something semiconductor-, optically-, or spintronic-based based that would fit into something that size. Add a nuclear battery or two and enough polyalloy to mine raw materials and create more polyalloy, and you have a self-contained bootstrap system. Then one could do all sorts of things with it: hide it in ruins looking like any other piece of abandoned human equipment to be found when humanity rebuilds; bury some in worked-out mines; stick a few in orbits with decay periods ranging from a few years to a few centuries; fire a few at the Moon, Mars, and asteroids… and send at least one into the past as part of John Connor. The key is redundancy, and an A.I. operating at Skynet's level ought to be able to multitask well enough to have more than a few contingency irons in the fire at any given time.
That's the bootstrap paradox true only up until the end of T2. Assuming the chip design and code CyberDyne was reverse engineering were not saved off-site for some ridiculous reason, the design, source code, and all known T-800 CPUs were destroyed in fire and a vat of molten steel. That delayed Judgement Day until Skynet appeared as an emergent(?) system in the Internet and military networks in T3. The events in Genisys either ignore or somehow preempt T3 entirely (since Judgement Day apparently didn't occur in 2004, either), prevent the timely conception of John Connor, the untimely death of Sarah Connor from leukemia (we've got treatments now that weren't available even ten years ago), and lead to the creation of a Skynet derived from what is now an alternate future version of itself.
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Agreed. The Terminator continuity is a lot like Star Trek's—tacked on after the original, and fun to argue about.
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Until Abrams ruined Star Trek, Star Trek had 1 timeline with other timelines and discontinuous alternate universes which the protagonists visit, but the protagonists always return to the main timeline. This way, Captain Benjamin Sisko could talk about the time Captain James Tiberius Kirk visited the MirrorVerse. The Abrams ruined Star trek when he flagrantly threw away over 40 years of continuity. Now, Abrams plans to ruin Star Wars too. At least this will stop the prequel bashing when ponies see what a bad Star Wars truly is:
Ponies have a tendency to believe that culture reached its height in their teens and has been in decline since then. It is true that the Episode # 1 is a bad movie. George Lucas was rusty after taking off a decade from work. The general panning of Episode # 1 gave license for bashing all the prequels. I have news for the prequel-bashers:
¡Episodes # 2 and # 3 are as good as # 5!
¡When Abrams hoseapples all over Star Wars like he did to Star Trek, the oldsters believing that human culture reached its heights in the late 1970s and early 1980s will learn what terrible Star Wars really is!
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I was referring to the original Star Trek television series. Roddenberry didn't plan hundreds of years of history out in advance, he and the writers just dropped in various "noodle incident" references like the Romulan War, the Eugenics War, and different starfaring races to add an illusion of future history and tell various morality plays (e.g., the Klingon Empire was a thinly veiled reference to the Soviet Union, and there were other metaphors for the Cold War. Remember, the original series started production just three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis). There were few recurring characters outside of the main cast. No one on the show staff expected it to become first a cult classic, much less a cultural icon later on. It wasn't until the second film that we really started to see a more tightly defined continuity, and ST:TNG started using it to its advantage.
As for the J.J. Abrams film—he didn't violate 40 years of continuity, he merely took advantage of the loophole of the existence of alternate timelines that was already well established as canon. It's not even the first time this sort of long-term alternate timeline meddling has taken place—remember Sela? The reboot is set in an alternate timeline created by the incursion of the Narada in 2233 from ~200 years in the future of the original canonical timeline, as Spock Prime in the last two films made abundantly clear. It's a "have your cake and eat it, too" solution; Paramount (rights holder for Star Trek films) can revisit the original timeline anytime it wants. Since the two films have done quite well at the box office, however, Paramount presently doesn't want to. Though there are rumors (again) that CBS (rights holder for Star Trek television shows) is interested in a new original timeline Star Trek television show…
And speaking about throwing continuity out—Disney throwing out over 35 years of Star Wars Expanded Universe canon wasn't something that was J.J. Abrams' decision, since season one of Star Wars Rebels was already well along in production by that point. Much of the EU setting is now the Star Wars Legends alternate timeline.
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I second the recommendation of this fanfic! All the deliciously crazy timeline exploits and real world AI theory!
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¡Yeah right! ¡Continuity-hating Abrams comes along and Disney just happens to throw away the Expanded Universe! When the new movie comes out and Ben Kenobi is alive and an Ewok, you will see.
Abrams did throw away continuity in Star Trek. In a proper movie, they would have restored the timeline. In episodes in other universes like the MirrorVerse, the characters return to the MainVerse. This new Star Trek is divorced from its past (it was divergent before the birth of Kirk because the Kelvin is nearly the size of a Galaxy-Class Starship). It does not lead to the Next Generation. ¡It is not true Star Trek! ¡True Star Trek fits into the Continuity starting with Star Trek: Enterprise and ending in Star Trek: Nemesis!
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Even Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, elements of which—like the very existence of Spock's older half-brother, Sybok—even Gene Roddenberry considered to be, "apocryphal at best"?
Regardless, canonicity is in the eye of the rights-holder. If Paramount says Abrams' Star Trek and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier are both canon, they're both canon—somehow. If Disney says the Star Wars EU isn't canon, it isn't canon. But just as what was once canon may no longer be considered such, so sometimes things which are now considered apocryphal can become canonical. And like I said, it's fun to argue about.
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# 5 occurred during a writing strike. It has many errors such as the Great Bearier we encounter in the very 1st episode is around the center of the galaxy instead of the edge, the Enterprise travels 30 KiloLightYears in a week, et cetera. I am with Gene Roddenberry and say that we should decanonize it.
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Actually, yeah. What is and isn't Trek canon is controlled by CBS and Paramount, not Roddenberry. By the time V came out Roddenberry was basically a consultant; he only got creative control of the series back with The Next Generation. Also he never bothered to say which elements he considered to be apocryphal at best. Additionally Roddenberry equally hated Star Trek VI and wanted to wipe the entire thing from continuity, but he died before he could and the events of that are an integral part of Trek lore. Thank God - that's my favorite one, and bluntly I don't think that Roddenberry was necessarily a good thing for Trek lore.
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Well, but we've seen at least two examples of that in the series. The basis of T3 is that CyberDyne did have offsite backups from which the US military continued to develop Skynet; and of course Genisys gave us Doctor Skynet, though evidently that Skynet is actually from yet another timeline
The basis of the Future War and Connor sending Reese back in time is that humanity has won the Future War by that point, though, otherwise Skynet wouldn't send a Terminator back to 1984 with the directive to kill Sarah Connor - doing so is a last-ditch effort to save itself, which wouldn't be necessary if it had any off-site backups remaining. So again, I choose to believe that barring time-travel shenanigans, Skynet really is defeated in 2029 as this is the date the final machine capable of housing its program is destroyed, all other off-site backups having been destroyed. If there was on on Mars or the Moon, then the Resistance dealt with it. If there was one buried under three miles of rock, then the Resistance found it and destroyed it. Skynet can't make more because all of its production facilities have been identified and destroyed. Its only escape is time travel.
We Whovians probably have different experience of the movie than the NonWhovians because the moment we saw the the Doctor, we thought "maybe this is a crossover and the Doctor restores the timeline to its proper state" so our eyes locked onto the Doctor. NonWhovians probably did not notice the attack until after the Doctor started it because their eyes were all over the screen, while we clearly saw the Doctor attack John Connor because our eyes were glued onto the Doctor at the time.
¿Was anypony else disappointed that the movie was not a crossover with Doctor Who?
I reread Friendship is Optimal. The premise is that somepony creates an AI to run an MMO. The AI satsfied values through frindship and ponies. It determines that the best way to do that is to upload all humans into the game and make the Eath into computer for running the simulation. This 1 sentence is the most chilling of the story:
An AI with an harmless goal is a plague consuming the universe.
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I just finished Branches on the Tree of Time. The way the humans and SkyNet used timetravel is interesting. It reminds me about Hard Reset # 2: Reset Harder which one can find here on FimFiction. The problem I did have with it is that SkyNet v1.0 is too dumb. SkyNet v5.2 / Athena v1.0 seems right. I do not trust Athena though:
AIs are inherently dangerous. She might find a way to reach her end goal we find very unpleasant despite the end goal seeming benign. Since AIs are inevitable, a proper course of action is to try to become the AIs:
We should work on Brain/Computer-Interfaces. As AGIs emerge, we should be mostly AGIs ourselves. We shall be cyborgs for only a short time though; As the computers become more powerful, the meat will be nothing more than dead weight. We shall discard our biological components.