Unraveling Skynet: Part I - The Timeline

    The quiet alleyway is suddenly ablaze with blue lightening. The frizzle sound of sparks and bolts startles a nearby homeless man. High above the street, what appears to be an orb materializes before the man's eyes. The lightening continues as the orb's size increases, its metallic outside reflecting the man below and dark sky above. Suddenly, the orb vanishes in a blinding light and where the sphere once was, a man, naked, now falls to the street.

     Kyle Reese has made it back to 1984, sent from the year 2029 when the war against machines has just ended. But the Skynet machines have been working on a plan. They invented time travel and decided to send back a Terminator cyborg to kill the man who will lead humans to victory. That man's name is John Connor, and he hasn't even been born yet. The cyborg is there to kill his mother, Sarah Connor whose only protection is Kyle Reese. For, when the humans learned of what the machines had done, they sent one of their own back to intercept the cyborg. The chase ensues, and Kyle falls in love with Sarah, impregnating her before he gives his life to save her. The future has been preserved, and John Connor will survive to destroy the machines in the future.
     The problem is, at the same time Skynet sent the T-800 to kill Sarah Connor, they sent a T-1000 to 1995 to kill John himself. This is a newer model, not just human flesh over machine skeleton, but a liquid metal that can take the form of anything it touches (but not complex machinery like a gun). Thankfully, the resistance of humans has learned the skill of reprogramming the cyborgs and has sent a T-800 model to protect John. The young John and the T-800 retrieve Sarah from a mental institute and attempt to flee the state. Sarah realizes that Skynet's plan is a brilliant one: stop the future by destroying the past. If she destroys the company that builds Skynet in the first place, Judgment day will never come.
     And that's just what happens. As a group, and with the help of Miles Dyson (the "inventor" of the cyborg chip), Cyberdyne (the company that eventually becomes Skynet, according to the T-800) is destroyed. See, the first Terminator sent back was only half destroyed: an arm and a microchip remained in tact. Cyberdyne systems used those materials to create new technology, which ultimately became the very thing that started it. This is what we call a time paradox. It is like asking the question, "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" If the Terminator chip gave the engineers the idea to create a chip like the terminator's, then the terminator chip never existed outside this time loop. It was never invented, because the chip came from the future where it was already invented in the past by finding the chip from the future!
     "The future is not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." Although these first two movies were based on the fact that the future timeline is alterable (that Judgment day can be stopped), we can find more time paradoxes that will prove otherwise. True, because the family trio (John, Sarah and the T-800) destroyed Cyberdyne and all the microchips that could lead to the future, Judgment day does not happen in 1997 like the T-800 said it would. BUT, if Skynet was stopped at the time Cyberdyne was destroyed, John Connor and the T-800 would immediately cease to exist, a Jumanji effect if you will (Alan and Sarah start the game, Judy and Peter finish twenty-six years later, and then are wiped off the face of the planet because they don't exist in a world where the game is finished, and Alan and Sarah are back in the Parrish home twenty-six years earlier). Because Kyle Reese was sent back in time to stop the first T-800 and impregnated Sarah with John in the first place, if the future does not exist then Reese can't be sent back in time to create John. AND, the T-800 would never have been sent back to kill Sarah Connor, therefore the chip that is used to create the machines would never be sent back to start the whole process. Immediately the world of the Connors would have changed: John would not exist and Sarah most certainly would not be where she was: in the middle of a steel factory having just escaped from a mental institute (because she wouldn't have gone crazy thinking and talking about the machines because they never attempted to kill her because they never existed).
     And so, we get to the year 2003, when the military has taken over Cyberdyne systems and created an artificial intelligence that they call Skynet. A TX is sent back in time to kill John Connor's lieutenants and associates, including his future wife Katherine Brewster. The TX can't find John because he has dropped off the radar since the destruction of Cyberdyne, and they don't care to kill him all that much anyway, since John Connor was dead in the year 2032 when the TX was sent back. Katherine Brewster reprogrammed the T-850 that killed John to go back in time and stop the TX from killing her and John. The TX succeeds in killing several of her targets before she finds Katherine and the man who is with her: John Connor.
     The TX, as the T-850 explains, is the machine that Skynet created having now anticipated the past: she is a Terminator capable of destroying other Terminators. Because the existence of the Terminators in the past is unknown until one is sent back, it is only after the second Terminator (the one sent to kill John in 1995) destroys the T-1000 that Skynet realizes that it needs to be able to stop other machines. See, when first future existed, there were no Terminators sent back to kill Sarah or John, otherwise Skynet would have anticipated the use of another T-800 as protection. So, once the two Terminators are sent back (one for Sarah, one for John), Skynet realizes that it needs to send something that can kill other Terminators as well the second time. So it sends the TX after Katherine and finds her with John. The TX attempts then to kill both, but cannot and proceeds to the Skynet headquarters where she kills Katherine Brewster's dad, but only after he has successfully initiated Skynet... See, the artificial intelligence that is Skynet created a virus that would take down all communications. Then, all it had to do was wait for Mr. Brewster to connect it to the system where it could send out the nuclear bombs and destroy all humans.  John and Katherine survive and head to Crystal Peak, an underground bunker where they simply wait for the nuclear fallout to be over.
     Just before this nuclear fallout occurs, Marcus Wright is approached by Dr. Serena Kogan. He is about to be put to death, and she wants him to donate his body to science. He complies. Fifteen years later John Connor, still alive and kicking, infiltrates a Machine compound and is the lone survivor, except for Marcus Wright, who emerges after dark, as naked as the T-800 when it first arrived in 1984, a clue that it is part machine. Unaware of the events of Judgment Day, or who John Connor is, or even that he is part machine, Wright finds himself in the hands of the resistance and tells them he wants to fight for them. As of now, this is the most advanced combination of machine and man, because the T-800 model is only now being built. The only thing roaming the desert plains of the post-nuclear world are the T-600s, a bulky, clunk machine that only resembles the figure of a human.

     So, anyway, Skynet has created a radio signal that they leak to the humans. The signal tells machines to shut off. Unfortunately, it was created by the machines to fool the humans into thinking they have the answer to the end of the war. Wright finds this out a tad too late, as an arsenal of humans attempts to attack Skynet central in California. Skynet has also captured young Kyle Reese, an attempt to once again stop the future, this time by killing John's father before he is even sent back in time to Sarah Connor yada yada yada. John Connor eventually saves Kyle Reese by giving his life after fighting the brand new T-800 model, but Marcus then gives his bio-enhanced heart to save John who lives to see another day.

     So ultimately, the timeline is rather screwy, messes with your head, and comes down to this: John Connor is the key to winning the war, and the key to starting the war. If he hadn't won the war in the future, the machines wouldn't have sent a Terminator back in time to kill him which would mean the machines would never have been created in the first place. But, the future is inevitable, and therefore, no matter how many machines were sent back to kill John, he can't die, because there is such a thing as fate. Despite the fact that John destroyed Cyberdyne, he was still called to war unwillingly. He still had to destroy the machines once and for all. Terminator Salvation, the story of Marcus Wright, is the future before the TX was sent back to kill Katherine Brewster, which means that if and when the 5th and 6th movies are made, the future really isn't set. The future that the T-850 told them of isn't the future that now exists, because 1. The TX killed several of the people involved in the winning of the war, and 2. John and Katherine now know that a T-850 will try to kill him in the year 2032.
     So, no future that existed in the original trilogy exists now for the filmmakers to tell. They will be giving us a whole new future, but one that must somehow allow for: 3 terminators to be sent back in time to kill the leaders of the resistance, Kyle Reese to impregnate Sarah Connor, and John Connor to win the war, forcing the Terminators to use time travel to solve their problems.
     Now, I could get into the time between T2 and T3 which were covered by the Sarah Connor Chronicles television show, but since that messes with time even more, I don't want to get into it.