With Terminator: Salvation bearing down on us and discussion of a possible fifth Terminator re-introducing time travel, this seems like the best time to discuss how time and time travel works in the Terminator Universe and how “This is not the future my mother warned me about” might be the most obvious thing John Conner has ever said.

In order to discuss how this works, we’re going to be discussing a certain version of time travel that I will now try to explain in the simplest way possible: bullet’d assumptions:

ASSUMPTION ONE: There is no God. At least not one that controls Fate. When someone dies in the Terminator Universe, no one tries to console the living parties by telling them “God has a plan,” because if God had a plan, it involves a whole bunch of crazy time travel. There is no fatalist, Judeo-Christian God.

ASSUMPTION TWO: The past exists, but the future doesn’t. This is a complex point that ties into Assumption Three.

ASSUMPTION THREE: If time travel exists for multiple people/beings, it is impossible to jump into “the future.” You can only jump into “a future.”

ASSUMPTION FOUR: Timelines aren’t “erased” unless a time travel event in the past makes a particular future impossible. If, while you’re reading this post, someone goes back in time and blows up the Earth, you would not exist in this future, but the Traveller who blew up the Earth world exist in an Earthless universe even if he built his time machine on Earth in an alternate timeline.

For the purposes of understanding this theory of time travel, direct your attention to the following diagram:

Point 1 and point 3 are, chronologically the same, as are points 2 and 4. The red line represents a being travelling through time. As soon as the being reached point 3 from point 2, it’s impossible for that being to return directly to point 2, since minor affects of causailty down to the displacement of molecules affect Timeline B.

The bottom line here is once time travel to the past is introduced to a timeline, said timeline fractures to create an alternate timeline or alternate dimension.

Good? Good. Re-read that if you want. Or, think of time like a river that is flowing downhill. Now, thing about dropping a large boulder in that river. The river will re-direct itself and continue to flow downhill, but if other rocks and trees are in the way, it will split or change course AT LEAST ONCE.

Ok, now the Terminator stuff.

TERMINATOR:  In the first Terminator, we are introduced to Sarah Connor, who is the target of a murderous robot from the future, disguised as a Scandinavian body-builder. While attempting to stay alive, she runs across Kyle Reese, sent by her now unborn son from the future. Through a bizarre twist in time events, Reese fathers John Conner.

WHAT TIMELINE, NOW?: Although this is the first film in the series, by the time we join the events already in progress, we are actually on - at least - Timeline C.

Let me break it down for you from one possible Timeline A that needs to exist in order for the events in Terminator to transpire.

TIMELINE A: 

Timeline A is dependent on these 3 events:

• 1 ) Sarah Conner has a kid with any old schmuck. In the case of the graphic above, Jim Cameron. Said Schmuck could die after siring his son, live a long life, die in Judgement Day, you name it. We don’t know what happens to this guy. Sarah Conner is useless once she’s had the fabled kid, so who cares what happens to her? She’ll always be the loser we see at the beginning of Terminator.
• 2 ) Skynet is invented by a large conglomerate. In the graphic above, Google takes over the world when it becomes self aware.
• 3 ) Through circumstances unrelated to time travel, Sarah Connor’s kid (notice we don’t even know it’s a dude at this point, so I put non-canonical/sexually androgynous Thomas Dekker up there) ends up fighting against Skynet as a pivitol member of the Human Resistance. Skynet invents robots and time travel and sends a Terminator back through time to kill Sarah Connor and stop her offspring.

READING BETWEEN THE TIMELINES: Sarah Conner isn’t heroic at all, we have no idea what gives her son/daughter a “fighting spirit” and the technology to create Skynet comes organically without anyone having any knowledge from the future in order to further their research. Although Point 2 will be graphically represented later as being equal to other Skynet inventions, it probably took place significantly later, pushing back Judgement Day.

TIMELINE B:

Timeline B is dependent on three events:

• 4 ) Skynet, having not shared it’s plans with the Human Resistance and having not captured Sarah Conner’s offspring to interrogate him/her about the circumstances of his/her birth sends a Terminator back to a time period around the estimated birth date of the Conner kid. The system gets messed up, it takes longer to kill Sarah Conner than expected, regardless; somthing goes wrong. John Conner is born before Sarah Connor is killed.
• 5 ) The Terminator, unable to travel forward through time, powers off somewhere on Timeline B, where it is theoretically discovered and provides a working prototype for a company to design Skynet’s artificial intelligence. Interestingly enough, this is most likely NOT the same company that devised Skynet in Timeline A (Google is off the hook), because where ne compnay would have to devise all the components to workable artificial intelligence, this new company (keeping it CyberDyne for simplicity) is just reverse-engineering.
• 6 ) John Conner (I like to think he got named that because he was essentially a John Doe baby) still leads the Human Resistance against Skynet, which still means Skynet has the necessity to send a Terminator back in time to make yet another attempt on the past life of Sarah Conner, even though she was successfully executed in Timeline B. Skynet needs to stop John to win the future. John, on the other hand, who has grown up motherless (hence the pre-mature usage of Nick Stahl, the “My mother is dead” version of John Conner), has discovered enough about the circumstances of his mother’s death to develop or steal the time travel technology. He chooses one of his better soldiers to go back and protect his mom and his unborn self.

READING BETWEEN THE TIMELINES: Timeline B has to exist because without Sarah Conner dying, John has no reason to send back a human to protect her. But, he also has to exist because Reese establishes that John Conner, son, has sent him back to prevent Sarah’s death. Timeline B is also the only timeline that has John possibly raised by his father who is NOT Kyle Reese. Theoretically, Kyle Reese could have always been the time traveller if two Timelines preceded Timeline establishing why the time barrier was breached in the first place. Dealing just with the plot of the first movie, it’s more likely that the original John Conner was NOT sired by Reese.

TIMELINE C (TERMINATOR):

• 7 ) All the events that take place on screen in Terminator happen at point 7. Reese and Terminator come back, Reese fathers John, Reese dies, Sarah smashes the Terminator.
• 8 ) CyberDyne recovers the Terminator arm and other crushed evidence from the future and reverse-engineer Skynet AI in a much similar fashion to Timeline B.
• 9 ) Judgement Day still happens and John Conner (shaved head Ed Furlong at this point, suggesting an “alternate” Furlong) is still leading the Resistance. Skynet sends back a T-800 to kill Sarah Conner, unaware as to the plot’s previous failure. John, having heard of his destiny from his mother sends Kyle Reese back to sire himself. Skynet develops the T-1000.

READING BETWEEN THE TIMELINES: Whatever happens in Timeline C after the movie ends is just conjecture, but it significantly speeds up Judgment Day AND changes the technology curve with the advent of T-1000s.

Okay, do you kind of get how there needs to be one timeline where the Terminator sent back in time partially succeeds in order to motivate a member of the Resistance to be sent back to stop it? How each of those situations has it’s own future?

‘Cuz I’m about to do the same thing with Terminator 2: Judgement Day. On Timelines D and E, it’s assumed that neither Skynet nor the Resistance sends any Terminators back to the early 80s. Below, points 10 and 12 are NOT chonologically the same as points 1, 4 and 7. Since alternate futures are only created from the moment time travel occurs (see the first illustration), Kyle Reese sires John Connor, the first Terminator is destroyed, and parts of that Terminator are left behind. These events are now PAST and aren’t altered by further time travel to points before them.

TERMINATOR 2 JUDGMENT DAY: Sarah’s in the loony bin, John doesn’t really believe he’s the leader of the Human Resistance. When a liquid-metal Terminator shows up to kill John and a familiar bodybuilder model comes back to protect him, the trio ends up destroying all evidence of either Terminator (and the previous one from Timelines B&C) in an attempt to stop Judgement Day and teh development of Skynet all-together.

TIMELINE D:

• 10 ) The T-100 comes back in time and successfully kills Sarah Conner, but John manages to destroy the T-100 through some act of bravery. Sarah never gets obsessed about stopping Cyberdyne because she isn’t given the information from the second T-800 sent back, so the company still uses the Terminator parts from Timeline C to construct Skynet.
• 11 ) We actually get to see John Conner from Timeline C at the beginning of T2. You might remember that he has a huge scar across his face that isn’t explained. Having lived through the death of his mother by a technologically advanced Terminator, the Resistance develops the technology to re-program T-800s.

READING BETWEEN THE TIMELINES: It’s been my theory that however John Connor in the future got that scar has something to do with the way he managed to take down the first T-1000 in the past. It took molten metal in the film, so I imagine it was a long, relentless battle that ended with the T-1000 being fully or partially destroyed. It’s just a more complete view, plot-wise. It also means that very early on in the Resistance movement, John hijacks a T-800 knowing that if young him was able to finish off the T-1000 but unable to prevent the death of his mother, an additional Terminator might be enough for both to survive.

TIMELINE E (TERMINATOR 2/T3):

• 12) These are the plot events seen in Terminator 2. Also, somewhere around here, Sarah Conner dies of natural causes.
• 13) Destroying CyberDyne did not avert Judgment Day. The United States Air Force continues to develop Skynet which manages to go viral on multiple computers around the world before initiating an even sooner Judgement Day. Skynet and Connor both end up on the same sides of the same war in the future.

READING BETWEEN THE TIMELINES: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines would technically spawn another timeline where the T-101 (what they call Arnold in this one, though the canonical name would be T-850) kills John Connor and is sent back in time by his wife Kate to ensure the T-X doesn’t kill him. Though this implies a third T3 Timeline where the T-X is sent back and manages to kill some of the “lieutenants” of the resistance. The whole thing is just such a mess, I tend to pretend the two Terminators happened to show up at the same time, because it’s just as convenient. The interesting idea here is that the whole “stopping Cyberdyne” was always futile because the technology for Skynet had to be created using modern day computer sciences, otherwise there would have been no Terminators to kick off Timeline A. If anyone accurately watched the first film, the “suspense” of stopping Judgement Day would have been non-existent. Even in a world WITHOUT JOHN CONNOR, Skynet would have been invented.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FUTURE BEGINNING:
“This is not the future my mother warned me about,” growls Christian Bale. My response: No fuckin’ duh. If you treat time travel from a place of space-time and dimensional physics - as in treat it like reality - the Terminator film series is only a small snapshot of two-or-three dramatic stories. The entire Terminator Universe is much broader, once you realize the implications of sending entities back in time to change the past.

Of course, Skynet isn’t going to tell the original Conner that they’re going to send an assassin back in time to kill his Mom. He has to send Kyle Reese back so he can even have a chance of a childhood with his mother.

Of course Kyle Reese wasn’t the first person have a kid with Sarah Connor, he just ended up siring John Connor, and since John and Sarah obviously don’t understand the full scope of time travel, Sarah probably grew up telling the kid: “make sure you send your father back in time when that technology exists,” so he did. If he didn’t would he still be born? Yeah. He just wouldn’t be Kyle Reese’s kid.

The future obviously changes because Kate Connor, John’s wife isn’t mentioned in the first two films. Most likely because she doesn’t exist until Skynet gets developed by her father with the Air Force.

If this is all too much, there is a detailed (though more complex and possibly narratively flawed) explanation of this theory HERE at MJYoung.net.