Summary
- Fans of the Terminator franchise lament new entries in the franchise because T2 was a perfect ending.
- Thanks to time travel, there are many ways to interpret events so that The Terminator and T2 are both the beginning and end of the saga.
- This requires a little suspension of disbelief and imagination, but it can allow fans to enjoy new installments without judging them against T2.
Some will always be disgruntled with how modern films, television series and other media evolve a fictional universe they loved as a child. When this happens, they'll often declare one of the past entries as when the story "really ended." In the case of the Terminator film series, many fans believe the first sequel, James Cameron's T2, is the perfect end to the series. The good news is, even with all the successive films, comics and games, it still can be, while not dismissing the newer stories in the universe.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 first promised he'd be back in 1984's The Terminator, fans didn't expect that meant he meant "forever." A Hollywood legend that may be apocryphal says that when Cameron pitched the studio the Aliens sequel, he wrote the word on a whiteboard and then drew a line through the "S" to make the dollar sign. Based on that, fans can't really be blamed for seeing the continuation of the franchise as more of the same from a director more concerned with his blue aliens in the Avatar world. However, unlike with Star Trek or Star Wars, Cameron was heavily involved with Dark Fate. Before the film ultimately lost more than $100 million at the box office, he spoke of continuing the story that the film began. He's also not given up, as a report claims that Cameron is working on a new Terminator story. Whether the universe's creator disagrees or not, no new story he tells can prevent T2 from being the true "end" of the saga because of time travel.
How Time Travel Allows the Terminator Saga to Do Literally Anything
To understand how fans can enjoy new Terminator movies without them "undoing" the perfect one-two punch of The Terminator, they need to turn to a different "franchise" folks said shouldn't continue. 12 Monkeys is a fantastic film, so when SyFy announced a reboot series, fans (and even Terry Gilliam) asked, "Why?" Unlike the Terminator sequels, 12 Monkeys, co-created by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett, was wholly disconnected from the film. While not unique to the series, it remains the best use of recursive time loops to visualize a never-ending cycle of events. Think Groundhog's Day, but slightly less funny and on a scale of millennia.
Without giving away the impressive twists in the show, the solution ultimately involves ending the cycle at the beginning. So, while The Terminator and T2 are the beginning of this ever-evolving djinn, that also means it's the story's ending, too. When Dark Fate opened with the death of John Connor, a digitally de-aged Edward Furlong, Cameron and the filmmakers were being "cute." Technically, T2 remained intact (but not the rest of the sequels) because Skynet never emerged.
Instead, a new, deadlier Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) called Legion did. Instead of John Connor, the nemesis of this new murder computer was Dani Ramos, played by Natalia Reyes. That film ends with Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor effectively adopting Dani to shape her into the leader she never got to shape John into. Until such time as that storyline is picked up, it's safe for fans to assume she was a success. Perhaps Legion was defeated or never emerged at all. Either way, it finishes the loop until everything starts again.
Why T2 Represents Both the Beginning and End of the Terminator Saga
There are two ways to look at the time loops at play in the Terminator saga. The first is that destiny or fate forces the emergence of an ASI that humans must defeat. The second is that once time travel is in the mix, someone from the future will always try to change the past. Unless Cameron's next attempt at a Terminator story addresses the prevention of not just the evil ASI but time-travel technology itself, it's safe to assume the loops continue throughout infinity.
Terminator: Genisys introduced the idea of alternate timelines, which Dark Fate built upon. If the loops continue throughout infinity, fans can also assume the default state of those loops is no alternate timelines, meaning the saga can begin and end with The Terminator and T2. For those who enjoy the other sequels, such as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, those can fit into the loop however they see fit. The characters from the successive installments all endeavor to prevent the horrific, decimated future that started this mess.
Perhaps the best they can ever do is prevent the specific events of their individual stories. Kyle Reese, the two T-800s and the T-1000 from T2 will always return to the past and live those events. If the idea of a never-ending loop is a bit too depressing, all one has to do is watch The Terminator and T2 after any successive sequel and just imagine that time it worked. Sarah and John Connor get to grow old in a world where no evil ASI destroys anyone. Since it presumably created time travel, finally destroying Skynet in T2 changes the future for good.
Suspension of Disbelief Allows Terminator Fans to Enjoy the Sequels and Never 'Lose' T2
Again, without giving away the meticulously written series finale, 12 Monkeys' characters are able to break the never-ending cycle of time loops that drive the series. If any future story in the Terminator saga does specifically address preventing time travel, that does throw a wrench into T2 rationally being the "end" of this nearly 40-year-old fictional universe. Yet, even if it does, with a little suspension of disbelief and "headcanon," fans can file away the sequels to alternate timelines or parallel worlds in a Terminator multiverse.
The idea of infinite time loops is itself somewhere between head-canon and fan theory. The Terminator saga suffers from the same affliction most long-running sagas face. It's difficult to keep the universe growing and fresh while still adhering to the "canon" of the earlier, most beloved iterations. Star Trek struggles with this, as does Star Wars, especially since the universe's creators are no longer involved with the storytelling. Even with Cameron carrying on the saga, once a film, show or story gets in the hands of the audience, it's theirs.
With just a little imagination, fans can still enjoy each swing at bat for continued storytelling without having their earlier, favorite iteration "ruined" by it. Thankfully, Terminator comes with time travel baked in, which allows a kind of multiversal freedom stories that don't have it lack. Still, for now, The Terminator and T2 work equally well as both the beginning of a larger saga and its last two chapters.