Plot synopsis
In the year 2029, the human resistance led by John Connor had just won a war against an army of self-aware machines. Freedom fighter, Kyle Reese, finds that Skynet, the machine’s computerised defence system, has just sent a Terminator robot back in time to kill John’s mother before John is conceived.
John then sends Kyle back in time to stop the Terminator. They both travel naked and unarmed. It’s “something about the field generated by a living organism, nothing dead will go.”
The time machine is destroyed, so neither one of them can get back, nor can anyone else can follow them through. Kyle finds Sarah Connor first and saves her from the Terminator.
He gives her a message that John made him memorise: “Thank you Sarah for your courage through the dark years. I cannot help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist.”
Kyle finally defeats the Terminator and ends up getting Sarah pregnant, thus becoming the father of John.
The movie ends with Sarah recording an audiotape for her unborn son. She says, “Should I tell you about your father? That’s a tough one. Will it affect your decision to send him here, knowing that he is your father? If you do not send Kyle, you can never be … God a person can go crazy thinking about this.”
My comments
A Terminator is a type of cybernetic organism: living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
If Kyle had not gone back in time, then he would never have got Sarah pregnant and John would not have been born. This sets up a closed causal loop in time causing a predestination paradox.
Sarah may well have got pregnant to another guy later, but would not have given birth to John, the son of freedom fighter, Kyle.
John states the future is not set. As they can send people back in time, the past is not set either – unless of course they were meant to come back in time. That would mean that the causal loop was part of the original timeline.
So, the paradox is that Skynet caused its own downfall by creating the time displacement equipment. That allowed Kyle to pass through and impregnate Sarah. Also, the Skynet project starts because of the components found belonging to the original Terminator, which the machines send back through time.
This causes another paradox: without Skynet sending the Terminator back through time, the humans would probably never have got the components they needed to invent Skynet.
Summary of time travel
The Terminator and Kyle go back in time and the changes that they appear to make were what caused destiny to unfold. They therefore had to come back in time and be part of what appeared to be a fixed past.
However, Kyle passes on a message from John to Sarah saying that the future is not set. Maybe John sent this message to encourage her, rather than as a factual statement.
The model of time is taken as being what the characters believe. And it seems they all believe the future and past to be open with a diverging timeline, even though there are causal loops.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: time-travel transporter.
Model of time
Open past, open future with a diverging timeline and a causal loop.
