#t:df

Dani closes her chapter of the story with a vow - not to save the world, or prevent the war or defeat the machines, or anything so grand as that. Her mission is something far more personal: she promises she will prevent Grace from dying for her again.

Everything else may be necessary for that, but it's secondary. Becoming Commander, forming a resistance, winning the war, all of that is incidental. She understands her cycle can be broken, and her aim, explicitly, is to do that. She means to break the cycle and so spare Grace from its next iteration.

When the smoke clears in 2020 though, Dani can come to Grace’s body to say a goodbye in person. She is not alone, because Sarah is with her. When we hear Grace’s name being called, it's not in unheard despair by either of these characters, or even by uncaring bystanders; but by Grace’s blood family, echoing through from the next scene.

Sarah didn't make the same vow for Kyle in 1984. And realistically, she couldn't have; she had no reason to think it was even possible. And for anybody else, that could well have been true. When the smoke cleared then, she was taken away from the scene calling Kyle’s name, and his body was removed by faceless strangers in uniforms - nobody seemed to hear, nor care to.

Unlike Sarah's nightmares of playgrounds, where she would scream and scream unheeded by the doomed before they burn, Dani must keep silent and remain a bystander for everyone's sake. And so for all these people, the only hope is as unknown to them as the danger itself. That hope is slim, but - we know - not zero.

There we see Grace at maybe 10 or 11 years old. She is in a playground, protectively hovering around a little boy who will die in the next 3 or 4 years, along with nearly everyone else. The boy is probably her little brother, and Grace won’t be able to save him, any more than she will be or was able to save Diego. Or to save Dani’s father; or her own, or their mothers, or any of the other people in this place, this city, this state, this country, this continent, or almost anyone else on the face of the Earth.

Dani and Sarah have presumably taken quite a risk and done quite a bit of detective work just to get this close, without even Grace's surname to track down, which speaks to quite a turnaround from Sarah's rejection of sentimentality earlier in the movie.

In fact, where is Kyle Reese now?

But it raises a question on her own behalf. While Sarah's taking Dani to visit the Harper family... why doesn't she visit Kyle?

The answer to that is wrapped up in some fairly heady stuff about Sarah's role in this timeline (and indeed, any other possible ones, from her point of view) and really, lies at the heart of these posts and their premise. But we'll get to that.

Canonically, the last time we saw Kyle was in a body bag in T1 - but for most people, the last time they actually saw him was in the extended cut of T2 (T2 is an oddity, in that the extended version has almost completely supplanted the theatrical cut in collective memory - if you've seen the scene with the learning chip, that's the extended version).

In this extended scene, Sarah has another one of her strangely prophetic dreams, imagining him coming to her in her Pescadero asylum cell. He prompts her renewed efforts towards an escape, for John's sake, and he reminds her of the message; the message, sent from the future for her with him - that there is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

It’s the most iconic line of these movies, the good guys' mantra, but it's a line with a really odd career. It's never actually said in T1 at all - though it’s in the script twice, and the "future's not set" wind up is intact. The closest we get to hearing it in T1 at all is having Sarah say it to Kyle in a deleted scene - and even then, she does so as if repeating something back to him that he’s never actually said to her, so it doesn't even make sense.

We might next hear it in the above dream sequence in T2 – technically also a deleted scene – when Sarah imagines Kyle saying it. But again, it's said as if he did before, as if it was part of their history together.

Later, young John Connor will tell the T800 about it – canonically, in all versions – as if all these prior scenes really did take place, by way of explaining how his mother thinks, what she's instilled in him, and what she is likely to try to do. He says the whole thing as if the audience is expected to be familiar with all its history and resonance, even though they can't be.

So it’s been Mandela-effected backwards into a key ideal of both the first two movies. But not only is the line itself something of a retcon, it’s actually not even true to both movies if we think about it.

T1, as we've already covered, is a sealed loop. General John Connor has sent Kyle back to ensure he is born and will be there to win the war in future, but he doesn’t intend to change the past – he means only to secure it, so he will still, ultimately, win the war. He is ensuring things play out the way they have before, the way they’re supposed to.

Even if we treat General John's cut “No fate” message though Kyle as canon then, he doesn’t seem to believe it - his entire strategy depends on "fate", it depends on his inevitable rise and victory. He not only keeps Kyle from understanding his real part in it, he actively steers him towards it, by supplying him with a photo of Sarah and mythologising her as a "legend" Kyle will take a suicide mission just to meet.

Kyle may believe he makes his own fate - but the guy who gave him that idea doesn't, or at least doesn't act like it, and ensures Kyle can't either.

It's actually only the next movie, T2, which establishes the motto as more than a piece of rhetoric, as a true and meaningful idea.

More specifically, it's Sarah - personally - who makes it meaningful.

Midway through the movie, in the wake of another prophetic doomsday dream, Sarah comes to a radical decision - having decided she’s unwilling to simply surrender to fate, to let things play out the way they’re meant to - at the cost nearly six billion lives and her son’s chance at some kind of normal future - she will go on the offensive.

She sets out for this assault with one final declaration of intent.

Instead of simply protecting her son from this threat or the next, like she's been told she's fated to do, Sarah resolves to brute force the loop open instead - to break the timeline and change the future. It's not enough to win. She’s going to prevent the war in in the first place, by preventing the enemy being born - a poetic reversal of Skynet's attack on her in '84.

Whereas young John Connor could recite "the whole thing" like a prayer, and Kyle relayed it as a message learned by rote, Sarah has whittled it down further, into something far more like a battle cry. Just as she's honed herself and her body down to its keenest edge, she's reduced this idea to two words, and altered its meaning - subtly but significantly - in the process. She's no longer promising to reject the fate set out for another of her own making - now, she's declaring she'll reject fate itself.

Her plan is to destroy every germ and seed of what will some day be Skynet, and so prevent it from ever even existing to be fought. She attacks the military contractor who will one day build it, she destroys the artifacts, data and facility key to the research, and - in something I do wish Dark Fate had addressed directly - she attempts to assassinate the genius leading the development, the brilliant and tragic Miles Dyson.

Ultimately, with no small sacrifice (not least of the heroic Dyson himself) she does. She successfully scrubs the foundation of Skynet from the present, and stops Skynet from ever coming to be, aborting the future it ruled over. Having derailed the preordained future, Sarah closes the movie uncertain where they will go from there - sure only that she prefers an unknown future to one as dark as that mapped out otherwise.

The result of this is that Cycle 1 is now broken, irreversibly. Like a freight train missing a fork in the track, there is no route back to the future we've seen in Kyle's dreams and Sarah's nightmares.

T2 is such an iconic story by now it’s hard to stress how radical a shift that was from everything T1 laid down six years before – Sarah pulls off something that, as far as we knew until then, was completely impossible within the “rules” of the Terminator universe.

T1 has already established that time travel works in Bootstrap Loops – in other words, that you can’t really change the past, because anything you can possibly do has already been absorbed into your present. In a sense, your actions have already taken place and been accounted for.

T2 – or rather Sarah – says fuck that. She kicks that Bootstrap Loop out the fucking window. She does something which didn’t happen in any previous loops, something completely unprecedented and new even to any previous version of herself, and in so doing hijacks the whole course of reality. The idea of doing anything like this was proposed in T1 only so Kyle could explicitly dismiss it - but she goes ahead and does it anyway.

In breaking the loop, she creates a Grandfather Paradox - an impossible contradiction, where a time traveller can set in motion events which mean they’d never be sent back in time to set them in motion.

The name comes from a thought exercise – what would happen if you went back in time to kill your own Grandpa? Well, you could never be born, obviously, so you could never go back to kill your Grandpa. So that couldn't have happened... although it did.

Where a Bootstrap Loop is self-sustaining, a Grandfather Paradox makes itself impossible.

Source

In any theory of time travel, Bootstrap Loops and Grandfather Paradoxes should be mutually exclusive, so there's no way Sarah can know a Grandfather Paradox is even really "allowed" by reality at the point she makes the decision to trigger one. The great General John Connor may have preached there was no fate, but even his imagination doesn't seem to have stretched this far.

And why would it? The fact Sarah pulls it off just about a miracle, but even attempting it in the first place is irrational. It's an all or nothing bet to make based on nothing. She has only ever experienced the effects of a Bootstrap Loop, in T1, and as far as she knows that’s all that can happen. Even Skynet, a world-conquering warfighting AI, was entirely unable to anticipate her pre emptive attack, as if it was so irrational as to be beyond conceptualising, again inviting the question that maybe Sarah really is a little crazy now.

And just crazy enough to see outside the edges of the moviescreen a little bit, perhaps. Again we're presented with the prospect Sarah has a range of vision beyond what she really should from within the story - Sarah gambles everything on this, the possibility that she might be able to break the rules of her own movie. It’s hard to even think of another fair comparison, where the whole underlying logical device of the first movie is deliberately defeated by a character in the second.

Her narration over T2 and the other Cameron movies makes this prospect even more complicated. Sometimes she narrates in First Person, as the Sarah Connor we’re seeing onscreen. Other times, her narration is actually a recording she’s making within the movie, for John’s benefit later.

But Narrator-Sarah can also speak with apparently impossible omniscience. At the beginning of Dark Fate, she’s even able to present and describe to us two contradictory versions of the same moment, and we are shown both in full colour.

One of those is a version which never happened, will never happen; that she’s even aware it might have otherwise in makes her unique. She is its last remembrancer. With the deaths of Kyle, John and Dyson (and later Carl), with her destruction of all the physical relics of that timeline, the last trace of that future is Sarah’s memory, her experiences, her subjective understanding of reality.

But Sarah Connor's perspective, in Terminator, is all.

By preventing Skynet coming about, Sarah should in theory also be retroactively deleting her son, since Kyle Reese will now never be sent back to meet her. Never mind the future - she should be retrospectively changing her own past.

But that doesn’t happen – John dies, but he has inarguably existed. Even if T2 means he will never become the guy Kyle knew, he has not been unravelled out of reality simply because his father could never have fathered him - just as Carl doesn’t stop existing simply because the future won’t ever build him. John did exist, and somewhere in Guatemala there is an occupied grave to prove it.

When Kyle Reese comes back from 2029 to protect Sarah in 1984, he’s about 25. The nuclear apocalypse he tells Sarah about was supposed to take place in 1997. Unlike Grace, he has no memories of a world before the war, because he himself was born in 2004; his parents would have met in what was meant to be the post Judgment Day world.

Which brings us all the way back to our first question. What of John's father? Where is Kyle Reese?

And in a world where Judgment Day didn’t happen? They won’t meet at all.

The chances of the same two people meeting in our 2004 as would meet in that one are remote, as are the chances of any couple already together both making it through J-Day are slim to none.

In other words - Kyle isn't anywhere.

By thwarting Judgment Day, Sarah isn’t just living into a future where Kyle will be sent back to die in 1984, she’s prevented Kyle from existing at all. By averting Judgment Day she didn't just save her son, she's changed the course of reality for everyone else, forever.

Tim Miller confirms this here about 3 minutes in - https://collider.com/tim-miller-terminator-dark-fate-interview/

As we see with John and Carl, artefacts from the aborted future can continue to exist - but only so long as they’ve made it into her version of the world before she changes something, does something new.

Perhaps those other aborted timelines continue to exist off in some limbo somewhere outside “our” Sarah’s access - but they’re irrelevant to her now.

They’re irrelevant to us, too - Sarah’s “subjective experience” is also apparently our experience of the Terminator universe. The three movies now considered canon are distinguished by the fact they’re Sarah’s – and this Sarah’s, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah – subjective experience.

From this it seems we can take it that what has happened will always have happened if it happened to this iteration of this woman.

We can sense that, as audience members – we have seen events in memory and flashback that not only won’t happen in her world, the “canon” world, they haven’t happened when they “should” have. But they only count when they're experienced by Sarah, "our" Sarah.

Throughout the course of the franchise we see multiple futures, multiple alternates, multiple memories from things that won’t come to pass – but it’s always made clear that the thing that matters is here, now, it’s what “present day” is for Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor.

The course of reality within the Terminatorverse then, and “canon” from outside of it, is defined entirely by Sarah’s subjective experience and the decisions she can make.

Her memories are real even if they're impossible, even if everyone else in the world tells her she's wrong to remember them. Her understanding of the future is more informed than theirs, even when it's not going to happen.

What she has done will always have been done. What she chooses to do from here is unbounded by the same rules that seemingly apply to everyone else.

In Dani and Grace’s cycle, as we've seen, Dani’s accounted for. Grace is accounted for. They have predefined roles, with predefined histories and futures. Commander Ramos and Grace both seem to understand that, and Ramos has tried, we’re told, everything to make it otherwise, to no avail. They are, in a sense, trapped, locked into a cycle of death and creation that’s beyond their own power – as far as we know – to change.

Dani needs Grace to save her to become Commander Ramos; Grace needs the Commander to save her, and drive her to become person who can travel back. Both women are essentially made who they are by the other. It’s a self-sustaining bootstrap loop that cannot, logically be broken.

Except, of course, it can. We know for a fact that such a thing can be done, because Sarah's done it, Sarah has demonstrably rewritten the course of reality. And understanding T1, T2 and DF as “canon”, she is apparently the only human being in history who has ever done it. John didn’t even try it. The world’s most advanced intelligence of 2029 couldn’t anticipate it, even to save itself from a half crazy luddite armed with 1995 industrial equipment.

The implications of that are far reaching. If the future is decided by Sarah’s experiences and decisions then, as far as we know, she is the only person in the entire Terminator universe we can be sure has true free will. Decisions she can make can warp or delete whole timelines, people, versions of the world. Things from other futures can arrive into her life and continue to have existed, even if the future they come from is aborted, even if it’s not the one she heads into, because they existed in the timeline she's on.

She can make new choices. She can switch lanes to different outcomes, even when that should be logically impossible. Sarah can create paradoxes. Sarah can use historic future knowledge of events which won’t happen to prevent them happening.

Maybe Dani or someone else can too - now - but we only know for sure that Sarah can, and in Dani's case, she's able to make her vow at the playground exactly because Sarah's gone before her. She doesn't need to wonder if such a Paradox is possible, because Sarah is proof.

So even then, if she does pull it off and manages to rewrite Grace's future, it's because of her contact with Sarah. She is armed with knowledge General Connor never had, and never could have had - that the future can be changed from the past. Her access, via Sarah, to the knowledge of the events of T1 and T2 has a direct bearing on the decisions she is able to make. Sarah may be an agent of chaos so potent she's contagious.

In a deleted earlier scene, Dani tells Sarah she hopes not to turn out like her – Sarah agrees. Forearmed with Sarah’s wealth of knowledge and perhaps untouched by some of her worst experiences, and under the influence of her chaotic sphere, she may not have to.

Moreover, having repeatedly interrupted or distorted Dani's cycle thanks to the foreknowledge granted by her own, Sarah remains the wild card in a loop that seems otherwise inviolable. Skynet barely knew who she was, and Legion doesn't seem to at all - but both have proven unable to predict or defend themselves from her decisions.

Grace doesn't know who she is - but neither does the Rev 9, as far as we can tell, and who can blame them. Even Skynet had to try killing every "Sarah Connor" in LA for lack of information on her movements. Sarah has rejected every fate set out for her - whether that's waiting tables or raising General Connor - and is simply unknowable beyond her own here and now.

Sarah's influence then, inside and outside the movies, is unique. Not only can she decide which futures to rule out, she may also be able to prompt others to do so, and her ideology and memory has echoed down regardless of which course results.

If any version of Grace is to survive 2021 or 2042, or however you want to reckon that, it will ultimately be because of the domino effect Sarah started in 1984, expressed explosively in 1991, and rode all the way to a highway in Mexico City. The last version of Commander Ramos failed to save Grace – but this version, the nascent one we see at the end of Dark Fate, is rolling with this Sarah, our Sarah, the one we’ve been rolling with for nearly 40 years. And this Sarah is the one who defines canon, reality, the future.

Having broken one cycle, Sarah would seem to be Dani's key to breaking the other, and so will be involved in redefining all known reality, for at least the second time.

(And in fact, we do have an idea of how that might work out)

In a particularly lovely meta moment, DF has Grace recite her own version of the No Fate mantra back to Dani in the cockpit - apparently unaware it's an inheritance passed down to her by Dani, from Sarah, tying all three women together in a single evolutionary strand. Though she didn't recognise Sarah the day before, what Grace believes in, faithfully and absolutely, is an ideal Sarah alone has managed to make real and pass on.

It's a tribute not just to the woman in the story, but to the impact of Sarah as an icon; whether she knows it or not, Grace is Sarah's descendant just as directly within the storyline as she is more abstractly as an action movie heroine. Characters like Grace (and Dani) simply wouldn't exist now as they do without the character Sarah Connor going before, and - in its own way - steering the future to come.

In the end, Sarah's legacy is not one guy or bloodline or battle doctrine or even catchphrase. She isn't just John Connor's mother or Dani's mentor or Grace's spiritual ancestor, though she's been all those things. Sarah is the Mother of the Future - every future we've seen so far. Whatever course she sets, her influence remains a constant.

It is, and always will be, Sarah Connor's world. The rest of us just get to live in it.

Mackenzie Davis hints strongly in this interview -

https://www.joblo.com/movie-news/terminator-mackenzie-davis-says-alternate-timeline-was-coming-in-next-film?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

- that if a sequel took place, there would have been an alternate version of Grace involved.

The only thing that could generate an alternate-Grace is an alternate-immediate-future.

As in... something's going to happen after DF's credits which didn't happen in the last iteration of the loop, the one that produced the Grace who died in DF. Something is going to change that produces a different adult version of Grace.

2020

Flanked on both sides by the Revs-9, Grace has assessed the situation, double checked the maths, and astutely concluded she's fucked.

She even takes a second to check the drop behind her first; but while she knows she would survive that fall, she can't be sure Dani would, so it's out of the question. That makes the calculation simple - she would die before she puts Dani at that risk. And she will.

Just then though, as she's squaring up to go out fighting, her last would-be killer appears and intervenes.

Sarah Connor effectively gatecrashes - and also robot-crashes - their cycle from playing out as expected. In doing so she derails the natural order of things, the order we're primed to expect, and saves both Grace and her Commander-to-Be. Because she's Sarah fucking Connor, right? She does what she wants.

Her opening attack is so ferocious though that you'd be forgiven for thinking saving anyone is incidental. She gives the impression, here and later, that she's showed up to destroy machines at least as much as she's here to preserve anyone or anything human. This woman is a long way from the funny girl who used to cruise a moped about town and kick back with her pet lizard before a night on the tiles.

Still - there's no doubt she is Sarah Connor, one and only. She shows up in Mexico as if she's driven here right from a previous movie, as if she's been driving T2's rolling asphalt for the thirty years we've not been seeing her, all the way to Guatemala and back.

She comes armed with what she learned in the meantime, too. She arrives in a modern upgrade to her signature T1 jeep, and her weapons continue along that theme. She's not relying on home-made pipe bombs that must be delivered within striking distance anymore - now Sarah comes packing her own rocket launcher and her own grenades. Instead of the generic cop-issue revolver she used to keep hidden in the passenger seat - just in case - she's openly strolling around with a banned-in-California Chiappa Rhino, chest holstered where it's ready to draw. She no longer bothers pretending to be harmless.

Even the iconic shotgun has traded up. Gone is the scruffy sawn-off double barrel; in place of Kyle's famously jury-rigged hobo cannon, she's got a Fostech Origin 12 auto shotgun so heavily upgraded it probably wouldn't be legal anywhere in the hemisphere. And an *extra* shotgun, too, while she's at it, the one that killed her son.

In other words, her experience of T1’s loop has equipped her – pretty much literally – to impose herself on someone else’s, on Dani’s, and that’s exactly what she does do.

If she doesn’t appear at this exact moment, Dani *might* conceivably get away, maybe, and figure out how to survive a little longer – but we can assume, from the cues we're given, Grace will have to sacrifice herself first. Sarah forces things to play out differently in a way she can only do because of what happened her in 1984, and how she has honed and armed herself since. She isn't appearing on the highway simply as a dramatically timed Deus Ex Machina - rather, she's a conscious intruder on another narrative, another loop, interrupting the script.

There is no analogue for Sarah’s role here in T1 or T2 - her appearance is probably the first part of Dani's cycle that doesn't map onto anything else. She doesn't fit all that neatly in either, and there's a sense from the start she's invited herself into a picture where she's not quite meant to belong.

Grace doesn’t even know who she is when she meets her, and based on what she (and we) know about the future she comes from, Dani may have survived this attack and found her way to becoming Commander without Sarah’s involvement at all, in some or all previous iterations of this loop. Even the Texas co-ordinates are already on Grace's stomach - she wouldn't need to live to pass them on, and Sarah’s matching ones only really serve to secure her buy-in like a matching decoder ring. Carl would presumably still be sitting pretty on the other end of them either way.

This means that while we'll later learn what Grace and Dani’s futures are ordained to look like, we know nothing of Sarah’s at all. She's an interloper with no natural home here, and no pre-cut niche ready to receive her.

All the same, the fact these events are playing out in a narrative mimicking her own early life is obvious to Sarah, just as immediately as it to the audience.

It does need to be stated outright to Grace - who, to be fair, still has no real idea who this crackpot with a inexplicably starchy cellphone is - but Sarah recognises the territory instantly, whether she likes it or not.

She seems to understand also that this is another cycle, another loop trying to assert itself, and although she’s wide of the mark on some of the details of the course it will take, she’s not wrong.

Again though, there’s no parallel to her particular role here in the previous movies - she doesn’t have a pre-assigned part to play in this current cycle. She doesn't have a corresponding destiny to meet the way the others do, there's no seat with her name on it anywhere.

In a sense then, and in a way neither Dani or Grace really are, Sarah is a free agent in this story.

And not only is she unbound by the loop Dani and Grace are trapped in, and able to recognise the rough structure of it – she seems to be able to recognise that outsider relationship to it.

1984

2020

In this odd little moment (shown in the trailer and trimmed down in the final cut) we can see Sarah playing uneasy spectator to a re-enactment of one of her own memories.

She watches this play out from pretty much the same seat we do - she's an external observer who's able to recognise it for the callback it is, even though for her it was a private experience rather than a movie scene, at least the first time. She looks almost unnerved to be able to do so, as if she's catching a glimpse from beyond the fourth wall for a second, in a way that leaves her uneasy.

And there’s an extra dimension of strangeness echoing in both scenes beyond that, too.

In the original scene, as Sarah sleeps, Kyle has a war flashback from his future, where he recalls how barking dogs revealed an infiltrating Terminator before an attack. We know it's Kyle's flashback for sure, rather than Sarah's dream or fantasy, because it prominently features a photo of her that hasn't been taken yet.

But when Sarah eventually wakes up, disturbed, the first thing she tells him is what she was dreaming about – dogs, she says simply, as if she's been privy to the flashback we just saw.

Kyle doesn't question how odd this is, and Sarah never finds out - it passes by unremarked, but not in isolation.

She has plenty of other moments like that in the franchise, of an impossible awareness. She repeatedly shows us she can see more than she ought to be able to, as a character. She doesn’t necessarily know she’s in a movie, maybe, but all the same she might have overheard some spoilers in the lobby. Whether this has a relationship to her often-questioned sanity, who can say.

She demonstrates something like that extra sense again in the closing battle of Dark Fate - and if her intervention in the cycle back on the bridge was incidental on some level, this is much more intentional.

Let's go back for a moment, back to the moment right after the pickup truck flipped, and how Sarah's cycle began to close.

1984

Sarah has dragged Kyle out of the flipped pickup. The T800 has chased them to the factory, tried charging them in its hijacked tanker, and failed, getting itself blown up and apparently destroyed in the process.

2020

The Rev-9 has chased them to a hydroelectric dam. He has speared Grace in the stomach - she will spend the rest of the movie suffering from this injury. He is forced into the turbine and blown up, apparently destroyed in the process.

1984

After the blast, Sarah immediately looks for Kyle, staggering around the blast wreckage in a half-daze.

She finds him. She's ecstatic that he's alive, and her tormentor has finally been destroyed.

They did it! They won. It's dead. It’s over. They can both live happily ever after together, boning in any number of awful motels, in unexpectedly explicit love scenes you will persistently forget are there until you're watching with family.

But, of course, it isn't. It's not dead. It's not over. They were naive to lower their guard, and it costs them dearly.

It's from here they scramble into the factory, where poor doomed Kyle will stage his last stand and wind up getting killed.

Maybe he'd have made it otherwise, or maybe not. No way to know. But in a pursuit where seconds and inches were the difference between life and death...

2020

In 2021, after the blast, Dani immediately looks for Grace.

But Sarah looks for the fucking Terminator.

She knows better this time. She knows the thing isn’t dead, because that’s not how this goes (and whatever Grace’s chances of survival are, they’re all dead anyway if Rev 9 remains a threat)

So instead, while Grace and Dani are having their last exchange, she goes stalking through the wreckage, very purposefully, hunting the Terminator before she really knows its there. She anticipates and intercepts the next step in the sequence she can sense is playing out again.

She's right. The Rev-9 attacks, and Sarah is injured. Grace will die - but Dani will ultimately survive. In a battle where seconds and inches are the difference between life and death...

1984

Sarah has a final knock-down, drag out, crawling battle with what remains of the endo before she can destroy it at last by luring it into a huge steel press.

Sarah is shown devastated as Kyle’s body is taken away, and she's taken in the other direction, alone in understanding who he really was, and who he was to her. She's wheeled away, calling his name.

She can't stay in LA after that, and he has nobody else. When she goes on to tell Dani about learning to live without funerals or goodbyes, she can only mean this. She will carry this grief entirely alone - by the time she meets Dani and Grace, she may be the last person alive who even knows he existed or remembers that name at all.

In the next and final scene of the movie, she’s seen narrating a message to her yet unborn son via tape recorder, before driving off in her jeep - hopeful for the future, yes, but still alone.

From there, between movies, she goes on to become a nomad, befriend some kind of Guatemalan survivalist arms dealer, stages several terrorist attacks, loses custody of her son, is almost certainly sexually abused, and winds up gaslit, sedated and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane – and all of that, too, is done alone.

Something which has a lot to do with sending our fresh faced moped riding 1984 waitress into the woman you see raving about doomsday in the grainy footage before TDF’s opening credits.

2020

Dani has her final knock-down, drag out, crawling battle with the remains of the Rev 9 Endo. She jams Grace's power source in its skull and kills it.

As soon as she can, she comes back to Grace's body to say her goodbyes.

She's not even aware she's quoting Sarah here, though Sarah herself surely is -

But the big difference now is that she’s not alone, not the way Sarah was when Kyle died – Sarah understands this moment, she’s lived it, and she is there to comfort her.

In the end, despite everything she said before, Sarah clearly understands the humane, she appreciates the value of time and space for grief. She always did, and has suffered for being robbed of it herself. She won't have that for Dani; she intervenes in the cycle again here in a markedly different way to her original entrance, making a moment for Dani to mourn that she never got, and offering some condolence, even as her survival instincts are surely screaming at her to get out of Dodge as soon as possible.

In a deleted exchange from the border crossing, Dani tells Sarah she hopes not to turn out like her, and Sarah can only agree. But Sarah can mean that now in a kinder way - she wants something better for Dani not simply because she loathes herself, but because she has come to terms with the unfairness of the pain she's experienced. She's offering Dani what she knows she needed in 1984 and didn't get, and from here, wherever she goes, Dani won't have to go through all the things she did either; not if she can help it, and certainly not alone.

Sarah's experience of Cycle 1 informs her choices from the outer edge of Cycle 2, and the effect she has on players inside it, in gentler ways now than before. Dani's experience will be different to hers because she will make sure it is different. Cycle 1's effect on Sarah in turn affects how Sarah will affect Cycle 2, and how it will proceed to play out from there.

That's great for Dani on a personal level. She will have advantages Sarah did not, things that Sarah will know are important for her own lack of them.

But what difference does it really make in the end? Grace is just as dead now as if she had been killed on the highway. How much difference can we say Sarah's experience and intervention really made after all?

I think it makes all the difference in the world, and I'll talk about why in Part 3, the last part of this accidental trilogy, where we'll get to looking at T2 after all.

Thanks for reading so far - I hope I've made it worth sticking around for the end.

Big spoilers for two thirty and nearly forty year old movies will follow, but if you haven't seen both the first two Terminator movies, they really are worth the hype, and they've aged like fine gold. The Terminator - T1 for the sake of brevity - is intermittently available in full on Youtube for free, and I believe T2 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day - is on Netflix now in most territories, so go check 'em out if you haven't already.

T1 and T2 are two radically different movies, even in terms of Genre. T1 is, famously, a horror movie, while T2 singlehandedly defined the Summer action blockbuster as we've come to think of it.

Dark Fate does owe plenty to the structure of T2, but that in turn owes more to the structure of The Terminator than is generally granted, so let’s start out thinking about that, and about the internal - and overarching - cycles involved in all three movies.

In T1, a Terminator is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor and thus prevent her son being born. Kyle Reese is also sent back, to protect her from it. A desperate seat-of-the-paints chase ensues as this machine pursues her across a grimy, nightmarish vision of 1984 LA that's almost as cold and desolate as the nuclear wasteland it's destined to become.

Only at the end of T1 is it revealed that in fact, all of what we’ve just seen has actually taken place within a Bootstrap Loop.

That is, it's all already happened before, last time, because Kyle was the father of Sarah's son all along. The present and future is an impossible, self-sustaining cycle, where the actions of a time traveller from the future, come to the past, will result in the future that produced them in the first place.

Kyle's intervention could only ever hope to protect that cycle - just as it always does. The future and past are all part of a grand wheel, without a beginning or an end. Even if the participants are aware of the loop, or actively trying to disrupt it, their actions can only amount to a clockwork gear that sets the next movement in motion.

Of course, the characters involved don't experience it as a cycle. Kyle is dead, and his life had a clear beginning, middle and end from his point of view. It’s left ambiguous whether Kyle ever really understood his role in the loop, or that he was and will always be John’s father.

Sarah Connor – “our” Sarah Connor, the one we see in T1, follow through T2, and meet again in DF - experiences it linearly too. She has lived through part of one iteration of the cycle in 1984, and the rest of it will complete after her death.

So although her experience was linear - beginning, middle and end - she ends the movie understanding there's a grander repeating cycle in motion. In effect, she can now predict the future, and she sets out to make use of this knowledge as best she can.

Now let's call this loop Cycle 1.

The full cycle plays out like this:

Kyle Reese is sent back in time to save Sarah by his CO. She falls in love with him. He dies saving her. She has their son John. She goes on to raise John to become a leader, *the* leader, of the human race, in the war to come.

As CO, he then sends Kyle Reese back, closing the loop.

In Dark Fate, Dani has a cycle of her own.

We’ll call it Cycle 2.

It plays out like this:

Grace is sent back in time to save her by her Commander. She and Dani become just the bestest, most platonic pals of all, by golly. Grace dies saving her. Dani is inspired to do whatever it takes to save Grace from having to die again, and for that reason, it’s implied, becomes a leader; *the* leader for the human race, in the war to come.

We see her off at the end of DF knowing she *may* have to send Grace back again, and thus close the bootstrap loop around herself.

Now it’s easy to look at the second cycle here as just a simple repeat of the first, with new players slotted in.

I mean to illustrate though, not only how deliberate and intentional that apparent repetition is, but how Cycle 1 interacts with Cycle 2 – how the movie exploits our knowledge of it, how much of a difference that knowledge makes to Sarah, and how much of a difference her experience of Cycle 1 makes to her involvement in Cycle 2. And, indeed, the effect it might have on where the characters go from there.

So let’s get our bearings in both movies, and how they first collide.

2020

Dark Fate kicks into the main story in 2020, in Mexico. And already, before Grace has even appeared, Sarah is on her way to kill her.

Having logically assumed both sets of co-ordinates she has just received represented Terminators, Sarah is motoring to the first set to blow up the newcomer, as is her wont.

Grace’s time bubble happens to throws her off game though – it appears bang in the middle of the road and KO’s her jeep temporarily, apparently leaving her reeling just enough to prevent her from following through.

A dropped scene would have had them discuss this explicitly - as it is, it’s more or less an Easter Egg you might maybe notice, Sarah only alluding in passing to the fact she was aware of Grace’s arrival rather than outright admitting she meant to kill her. But, okay, cool.

In the meantime, Grace links up with Dani in the factory. In a way, her cycle starts in the venue where Sarah’s ended, and we’ll get into more of that in a bit, but for now I’m going to skip to the truck chase and explain myself then.

This whole first chase is a very direct nod to the final T1 chase, where the T800 pursues Sarah and Kyle in a beat up pickup truck.

Again then, Dani has skipped through a lot of the narrative time Sarah had in T1 and jumped pretty much feet first into the shitstorm.

There’s a practical reason for this, in that DF doesn't need to explain what a Terminator is - and the mystery of whether Grace is human or not was blown by the trailers - but it has a few pointed story implications too.

1984

As they race for their lives, Kyle starts out driving, but the T800 gets far too close for comfort and he has to change tactics. He gets Sarah to drive so he can fling pipe bombs at the pursuing T800, trying to buy some distance.

Sarah - unlike Dani - lives in LA. So she’s got pretty much no choice but to know how to drive, and she does so pretty capably.

2020

Grace, unlike Kyle, hasn’t had time to build pipe bombs, so she has to improvise.

But here’s where the intentional Déjà Vu plays a role, because if you’ve seen T1, you already know how this play ends for Kyle - not well.

Not well at all.

1984

This is one of the ways the movie exploits your familiarity with what’s come before, because this scene is actually the beginning of the end for poor Kyle.

While he's tossing out pipe bombs, the T800 manages to land a hit, shooting him in the stomach.

Kyle spends the rest of the movie dying of this injury, casualty more than combatant, while Sarah desperately fights to keep him alive for another few seconds or footsteps at a time. It's an ironic reversal of their superficial roles.

He does manage to land one last pipe bomb on target though, just as Grace managed to cripple the truck before they lose control and she’s sent flying.

The T800 gets wrekt in the pipebomb blast and the pickup truck flips, leaving Kyle and Sarah dazed.

T800 gets its shit together first, and hijacks a tanker to ram them and get the job done before they can come to their senses. Sarah *just* manages to drag the half-dead Kyle out of the pickup in time.

2020

No such luck for Diego, and RIP about it, buddy, you were a real one.

1984

Sarah goes on to drag the badly failing Kyle on into a factory, for the final showdown. He collapses of his injuries, and pleads with her to leave him, forgetting she’s Sarah Connor – or maybe more accurately, becoming Sarah Connor - and she doesn’t want to hear that shit. She drags him to his feet and manhandles him forward.

The T800 keeps fucking coming. Kyle puts himself in front of Sarah one last time and grabs a pipe as an improvised weapon, to make a last stand.

He screams at Sarah to run, as the T800 starts to kill him.

Kyle sacrifices himself to do the last bit of damage he can, delivering one last pipe bomb by hand in the bargain. RIP Kyle.

2020

Grace puts herself in front of Dani, and warns her to run when the Terminator starts to kill her.

This invocation of T1's penultimate face off isn’t just a cute nod or a coincidence, it’s very deliberate.

If you’ve seen T1, you recognise it, so you know how this is supposed to go - the Rev 9 (Rev 9s?) will kill Grace just as surely as the original T800 killed Kyle, and you and her both know it.

Dani might make it somehow, but it's the end of the road for Grace in more ways than one, and she accepts it with a kind of "Ah, of course" resignation.

Or at least, it would be, if everyone had just behaved themselves...