LogFAQs > #929407090

ParanoidObsessive posted...

GEKGanon posted...

There aren't separate timelines, there is no John A, B, or C; it is one jacked up loop. That's what it means to be a paradox. John only exists to send Kyle back because Kyle went back to father him in the first place. The entire reason Kyle has the photo of Sarah and is the one chosen by John to be sent back in time is because John already knows from Sarah that Kyle is his father, there is no unknown father.

Which, again, asks the question, how did the loop begin in the first place? How can John Connor send Kyle Reese back to become his father before he exists in the first place to send Kyle Reese back?

And if it IS an ontologically stable time loop with no beginning and no end, then how could they alter events at all in T2, when literally everything they did should have been part of a preexisting stable time loop that couldn't be broken, because that's how ontological paradoxes work?

And like it or not, Cameron's explicitly said that multiple timelines exist in the Terminator films, which gives rise to this sort of thinking in the first place.

Because it is a loop. That's the point.

When Kyle is in the future, swooning over a photo of Sarah, about to be sent back in time by John, that is the exact same timeline in which Kyle already intervened in the past.

The problem with time travel in movies and books is that there are different ways time travel can be depicted, and the people writing it don't necessarily stick to just one. The Terminator franchise seems to deviate wildly between different types. In the first film, it appears there is one looping timeline, in which the future that Kyle comes from is the future that directly stems from his intervention in the past. Skynet thinks it can score a victory against John by preventing him from being born, but why would it even think this is a viable strategy if John's birth is only prevented in a DIFFERENT timeline, one in which the Skynet that sends back the assassin DOESN'T BENEFIT?

The second film introduces the idea that the loop can be broken, which creates all sorts of other paradoxes. By the time T3 rolls around, they've basically just thrown out all time travel logic (Judgment Day still happens, just a different way, at a different time, duhr!). Then there is Genisys, which is even jankier.

I haven't seen the new film yet, so I can't speak to the logic there, but my understanding is this film renders T3, Salvation, and Genisys as non-canon.
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Steam Name: gekganon