Terminator is All Kyle Reese's fault

What follows are my random ideas pointing to Kyle Reese being the true, albeit unintentional, villain of the Terminator series. I’m sure that most of you have some familiarity with the series, but I will give a brief introduction for those who have somehow missed this example of prime Arnold greatness.

The basic plot of the Terminator series is that sometime in the future a malevolent AI takes over the world and does its best to wipe out humanity. This AI, called Skynet, comes up against a brick wall of a man known as John Connor. Unable to defeat John, Skynet resorts to time travel. A cybernetic assassin known as a Terminator (played by Arnold schwarzenegger) travels back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before John is conceived. Aware of this impending preconception assassination, John sends his own warrior, by the name of Kyle Reese, to stop the Terminator. This is the basic premise behind the first movie in the franchise.

So now we come to one of the biggest plot points in the series time travel. With the exception of Terminator Salvation, every movie and TV show includes a time travel element. As such a grasp of time travel is handy for following the series. When it comes to time travel there are two major theories. Theory 1 is that no matter what you do, you cannot change the past. Theory 2 is that you can change the past. There are variations within these theories, but they are the major concepts.

Let’s start with theory 1 you can’t change the past. There is a fun little thought experiment based on this theory and involving billiard balls. You start with a portal that can send objects back in time, something like a doorway where any object passing through the front of the portal will exit the front of the portal earlier in time. Tuning things just right, you set up a way of hitting a billiard ball at the portal so that the ball exiting the portal would actually ricochet off the earlier ball, causing the earlier ball to never enter the portal. Let the paradox ensue. In this experiment the billiard ball heads toward the portal at a 90 degree angle. Before impact, the future ball leaves the portal at a different angle and collides with the past ball enough to change it’s trajectory, but not enough to prevent it from entering the portal. By entering at the new angle, the past ball exits the portal at a different angle changing the trajectory of the ball heading toward the portal. The point of this experiment is to show that even if you set up time travel in such a way as to undo the original travel, changes you don’t expect will make sure that time happens the way it is supposed to.

At first glance, the original Terminator movie seems to follow theory 1. Skynet sends a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor because she is the only one of John Connor’s parents on record. John in turn sends Kyle Reese back to stop the terminator. In the process of completing his mission Kyle forms a relationship with Sarah. We find out that Kyle is in fact John’s father. By sending Kyle back to save his mother, John makes sure that he is born, so that he can send Kyle back, and so on and so forth. It seems to be a nice closed loop. On Skynet’s end, pieces of the terminator are discovered in the past. These pieces kickstart the development of the program that becomes Skynet in the future. So by sending agents to the past both Skynet and John ensure that they will exist in the future. This ties everything up with a nice little bow and is one of the best cinematic examples of a contained time travel plot.

The one loose thread is what is known as the bootstrap paradox. For a quick and dirty explanation, the bootstrap paradox happens when information in the future is known because it existed in the past, but the information only exists in the past because someone brought it back from the future. In such a scenario we are left questioning where the information originally came from. In the case of Terminator John and Skynet only exist because they sent the pieces back in time that allowed them to exist, but those pieces were only sent back because they did exist. This paradox isn’t present in the billiard ball experiment because a past action causes the situation before the point that the ball is sent back to. I will touch more on this paradox later.

Then the second movie comes along and starts poking holes in the time travel perfection of the first. I'm not saying anything negative about the movie itself. The second movie in the series sees a young John Connor targeted by a more advanced Terminator than the one from the first movie. John has a protector in the form of a reprogrammed terminator identical to the one that targeted his mother. Both Terminators end up destroyed, as well as any research that would lead to the creation of Skynet. We have now entered the realm of theory 2 that you can in fact change the past. This leads to the third movie where the supposed apocalypse should have been averted, but begins happening anyway. However, the events from the second movie have changed the time line so that the future John expects happens in a different way. The apocalypse still happens despite these differences.

This brings us to Terminator Salvation, the only movie that doesn’t include time travel. For this part of my rambling it isn’t important but there is the interesting twist where the future portrayed in Salvation doesn’t quite match the future portrayed in the earlier movies. This is likely the result of timeline changes from the earlier movies.

Then we get to Terminator Genisys. This ones goes back to the time travel story, but with a twist not seen in the other movies. The first twist is what I will refer to as Temporal Echoes. In this movie Kyle Reese goes back in time as normal, but on the way memories flood into his mind form his younger self. These memories are different than the past Kyle remembers. He is in fact seeing memories from a different timeline than the one he grew up in. It seems that time is malleable and making changes causes these Temporal Echoes. Since these memories exist in the new time, and belong to Kyle Reese, they find purchase in the mind of the future Reese as he jumps into the new timeline.

The second big shift in this movie is that someone sends a Terminator back to when his mother was much younger. In effect Sarah is raise by a Terminator for a good portion of her life. Future John gets corrupted by Skynet and turned into a human Terminator. He goes back to ensure the construction of Skynet. There is an interesting line in the movie where Kyle, Sarah, and John are referred to as orphans of time.

In the end Skynet appears defeated, again, but survives in hiding. Kyle Reese is actually alive this time. John has not been conceived yet, but the movie leaves that part open. There is also a terminator with them in the new timeline. Kyle and Sarah make sure to warn the younger Kyle and have him repeat a phrase to himself while looking in a mirror. This phrase is one of the temporal echo memories that Kyle experienced when he jumped back.

That’s the movies, now let’s get to the TV series. The Sarah Connor Chronicles takes place between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, at least on a straight timeline. It is likely that these are different timelines, something the series deals with quite a bit. The series starts after the events of Terminator 2. Sarah and John are on the run and end up being helped by another terminator sent back in time to protect them. This time instead of fighting where they are, they jump to the year 2007 to try and track down Skynet before it is created.

In effect this creates a new timeline where John and Sarah do not exist from the late 90’s until 2007. So the timeline that they jump to is not the same one they are expecting. The show introduces at least two more timelines when different characters come back from different futures but all converge at the same point. In one timeline the future plays out like expected. In another John grows up with a terminator by his side. In the third timeline John jumps all the way to the future after judgement day, and finds that he does not exist there. This makes sense because as far as that timeline goes he disappeared in 2008.

There are a lot of rabbit trails I can chase, but for now I will focus on the different timelines. This is where the Terminator series gets complicated. Terminator 1 shows us one timeline (I will argue two in a moment). Everything seems to happen in a closed loop. Terminator 2 shows us that it is not a closed loop. So is Terminator 1 only one timeline then? I would say no. It shows us two very similar timelines. The changes from one to the next are so subtle that for the most part they aren’t noticeable, but somehow these events lead us into Terminator 2 which is vastly different from the Judgment Day expected.

This means that there are different types of timelines in the terminator universe. There are those that follow basically the same course of events, with only minor changes, and there are those that diverge drastically from the previous timeline. It seems that there is a sort of progression threshold. Several timelines make minor progression until they have reached this threshold where any further progression causes a drastic shift.

We can consider that the movies and the series are consecutive timelines each diverging from the last or from progressive timelines in between that we are not shown. Some go back and repeat most of the events from earlier timelines, but all have their own changes. You can find great discussions on the differing timelines presented in the movies and the series, but that’s not my focus.

Where did it all begin? By the time the first movie starts we are already in the middle of a timeline where Skynet and John Connor exist. As seen in the bootstrap paradox, they have no true beginning if the timeline is a closed loop. If we see the timelines as progressive however, we have a way to work around this problem. One of the earlier timelines, one that diverges quite a bit from the ones after it, holds the answer. This is where I get to my main point. The entire Terminator series takes place because of Kyle Reese.

Let’s start with what I will call the prime timeline. In this timeline Sarah Connor never meets Kyle, never gives birth to John, and Skynet never causes its own creation by sending a terminator back in time. This seems like a nice timeline, so what goes wrong? As with the rest of the series the answer is time travel. The terminator series establishes that only organic material can travel through time, terminators and the like only count because they are encased in skin that protects their mechanical components. Side note this gets weird with the T-1000 and other models.

Starting with the prime timeline, we have the first time traveler. That traveler happens to be Kyle Reese. This is not the Kyle Reese we know. He is not a soldier, because there is no Skynet to fight. He is most likely a computer programmer or other scientist involved in developing the original time travel project. Kyle brings with him one important thing from the future, his knowledge. Unless of course he has a cybernetic implant, which could be a possibility as well. By going back into the past Kyle has left the prime timeline, and created what I will call alternate timeline 1 (AT1).

So Kyle meets Sarah, and decides that changing the past isn’t that big of a deal. They have a son and name him John. John takes Sarah’s last name for whatever reason. Let’s assume that Kyle takes Sarah’s last name as well to avoid any confusion with his younger self when this timeline’s Kyle is born later.

John is known as a computer hacker, programmer, and all around tech genius throughout most of the series. He didn’t get that from his mother. Sarah is a badass, but not a techie. But in AT1 John grows up with Kyle as a father, and learns from Kyle’s future knowledge. In AT1 Skynet comes about because of Kyle. Either Kyle creates an AI that becomes Skynet, or a possible cybernetic implant that he had leads to the creation of Skynet.

In AT1 Kyle and John are both around to fight Skynet. As the younger and stronger of the two, John becomes the leader of the resistance with Kyle as an adviser. At some point Kyle decides that ,since time travel led to the creation of Skynet, time travel is the way to defeat Skynet. He recreates the original time travel program, but Skynet becomes aware of it. Skynet has no accurate records of Kyle, since Kyle’s history starts in 1984 when he came back in time. With no way to target Kyle, Skynet targets John by going after Sarah. Kyle convinces John to send back the younger Kyle Reese, reasoning that should the mission fail the future will need John again.

This creates AT2. In this timeline Skynet's creation is a result of the Terminator sent back from AT1. This terminator contains all the relevant knowledge from AT1, which ends up in the new Skynet. In AT2 Kyle might survive, he might not. At some point in a successive timeline we get to the events of Terminator 1 (ATx) where no one remembers the original Kyle’s role in beginning this whole mess due to successive timeline changes and the death of Kyle before he can instruct John.

From that point we get into the twisted mess of timelines in the movies and show. I would love to untangle these, but others have tried and I won’t worry about it now. I would suggest checking this entertainment weekly post for one such explanation.

So what do you think? Is it all Kyle’s fault? Did the cycle start some other way? Feel free to let me know.

#geekery #Terminator #TimeTravel

About the Author:

Stephen Mayo lives in Montana with his wife, daughter, corgi, and three cats.

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