There’s real commentary at the bottom, I promise.

Okay, so maybe this “reading” of Terminator 2: Judgement Day is flawed because I never saw the first one and missed the nuances of time travel worldbuilding according to the first movie in the franchise, but I have two major questions (spoilers ahead, mateys).

One, why didn’t Arnold just go back to his own time? The molten steel pit was epic, but…is there no reverse button? In that case I understand sending a machine back, which is probably really freakin’ expensive but expendable, but why send back a human (Kyle )in the first place? Wouldn’t he want to come back home? If they already knew he’d die back then, why would he go?

Two, as soon as Miles died and every vestige of the technology from the future was destroyed, leaving no chance for Skynet to develop…Wouldn’t John just disappear? No company = no apocalypse = no resistance leader = no sending his father back in time to conceive him = no John. Right? Right?! 

Bonus question: why is it when you actually want to track down fan conspiracy theories on the internet (and aren’t reading them because you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of procrastination) that they all go into hiding?

Rant over.

In my desperate search for answers and as a result of my near obsession with the goofs section on IMDB, I came across another question regarding the humanity of Evil Liquid Terminator (hereafter dubbed ELT). When Sara runs out of ammunition on the platform (yikes) and just when the blasts were going to make him fall, ELT does the sadistic headshake/fingerwave. Someone pointed out that if the machines are supposed to be machines, that’s an exhibition of human behavior that ought not to be there. But we also find out that the machines are capable of learning. Arnold learns some of the nuances of humanity over the course of the film, but he doesn’t appear to get it–he absorbs the information and then recycles it into the dialogue. It reminded me of a little kid who hears a big grown up word like “procrastinate” and uses it every. where. forever. There’s the thing where Arnie seems to understand that weird leaking eye thing we do though, so I’ll give him a pass of John being a good influence. That being said…WHO TAUGHT ELT HOW TO BE A SADISTIC CREEP? In most of his interactions with humans he’s either playing good cop and schmoozing arcade rats or terminating people with limbs that give “finger guns” a new meaning. So where did he pick up a cheesy villain move? Were a bunch of old movies uploaded into his brain before his trip (I’m picturing it being like downloading every episode of Game of Thrones before getting on a plane, just in case the internet doesn’t exist where you’re headed)?

Okay, so maybe the rant wasn’t over.

On a more serious, more academic note…that molten pit again. The Thinking Putty effect was more dynamic than I expected given the plasma ball arrival, and I had to play the scene where ELT reverses his body after a body slam frame by frame to process it. But what struck me as the most artistic moment in the film was when ELT was absorbed over the course of 61 seconds. Apart from that weirdly lizard-like keening and the attempts to reform, I was fascinated by the hydra-like attempts to pull heads from the reforming shoulders. It gave the film a mythic tilt I wasn’t expecting, and made me wonder about the significance of the ELT as a foil to humanity/Arnold and the multitudes we contain that are drawn out of us by our environments. It made me think: what if John’s foster parents had him longer than Sarah did? What if Sarah had been placed in a facility where orderlies don’t beat up patients for doing pullups and lick their supine faces? This “what if” question can apply to any character or person, but I think it’s particularly apt for a piece of time-travel SF. I wondered at a more subtle approach (maybe less action movie worthy, but still valuable)…what if instead of sending back assasins and protectors, someone sent back a robot designed to instruct on parenting techniques?